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Introduction: A Ping-Pong for Justice

 

 

What is justice? This is a theme which is pursued across all these essays. The recurring idea is that justice occurs across a natural doubling up of the individual to form an ‘another’ within any individual. On the one hand the another is an element which tumbles into the mind from… It is the vivacity of a perception, the grip of an event, that makes a mind utterly different from how it was, and when or why I was, that is the another that in a sense makes us ourselves. On the other hand there is that another to myself which occurs when in the grip of some emotion, things start to matter to me over-much or weirdly. I carry therefore significance to the set of experiences and memories of warmth and roof, an significance which allows it to be a home. This carries over and anothers my perceptions and in so doing changes or warp the world. The world becomes a place of textures and ownership. It becomes forced to account for a me (or at least my perception of it is forced to account for a me). Justice is then the reaching out of a warp into the weft of the world, and the world’s response to this warp: it is the node where the world matters and where I matter to the world.

  To do justice to something is therefore always to be caught up in this doubling axis. It is therefore very peculiarly pitched in a domain beyond any one individual and yet before the world itself. It is a domain of a secret exchange. However this domain is pockmarked by the simple asymmetry between its varying partners or elements.

  In a very rough and ready way, one might say there were three main denizens of this domain. There are the events which gather up the outside and force it into the in side. Events that then take over the jangle of emotions as their own, as a mere consequence of the differences which they make. But in the space there are also ideas, which dissolve individuality and force us anew to confront points which one not only shares with others, but also and far more critically, which one feels in spaces that actively pre-exist individuality. Feelings predate individualities, the feelings it is then, that create the space in which the individual then creates motivations, conscience and individuality. Finally there are the series of times, that is the track of history, of a series of events at differing scales, which force minds to accept changes and challenges them.

  Justice is the art then, of arranging these three denizens in lose and evolving conjunctions (not synthetics). They become then caught up in a switch where one looks at one but in looking becomes the other. Events, that is things that happen, produce passions, and passions, ideas; while ideas become one and the same in events. Or again the passage of generations becomes caught up with ideals and the changing elements of thinking, elements whose changes inhabits in differing ways the space of events. Or finally, an idea resonates in the world, it scoops up little guilty events and big coordinating ones, it drives them sideways or onwards, it makes them different, and forces them to be otherwise.

  In such hooks up or compositions of thought, there is of course no one way to do it. However this does not mean that all ways are the same in their difference. Events do linger in their effect in ideas across history in a manner different from the effect which thievery old ideas have in the fashioning of events (res publica was an idea that never quite went away).

  What it is to linger is therefore always complex and tricky.

But of course justice is rather more difficult than this. Justice includes in its series not merely the three stanzas of the past but also their mirror in the present. Events therefore are essentially always doubled up; The events of history and the events in the present. The former infuse the latter, the latter personify the former, and yet in such a way that has them remain themselves.  

  In these essays therefore, a doubling up of events is natural. The past is made to do justice to the present, and the present is seen as the effect of past injustice (or is allowed to rethrow the past’s justice). Events therefore are always caught up in themselves, always folded across every vivid now, and every shadowy past.

  In a different sense (and yet a parallel one) history is doubled. To think a history, on the level of the past, to write it or to trace it, takes time in one’s mind (eg; Tristram Shandy). Every history is an idea inhabiting a personal life history or a series of events in the world of the writer. The past and the present or the local and the deep histories, are therefore caught up and blended one with the other. This doubling in history is gloriously asymmetrical. The deep history of the past is never experienced, it merely exists in abstraction and words - a feeling of change without ever really grappling with the fact that the time is passing. One sees it in opinions, in letters, in styles in painting, and yet one cannot directly feel it. It is therefore gathered together in great flows of feeling or deep abstractions of change. The local history by contrast lacks all such perspectives. It is merely the passage of the events of the day to day. And yet in that passage every individual is caught and changed, and their world is caught and changed. This time, the one that is lived in, then becomes critical in thinking of that another time the abstract one. It is the space in which that other is born and thought; it is the space in which it is allowed. It is the domain also in which the abstract tracks of the past are given reality, or are embodied by odd journeys of the present. In this series of stanzas or essays, this doubling of time is deliberately arranged in parallel lines. The series of the abstract past, is therefore set spinning forward, while the stanzas were written week on week. The exact examples which one uses therefore, where themselves allowed to change over the course of a year, and were quite unknown at the start of the series of stanzas (as Plato could not have guessed Foucault, although the latter is present in the former’s works). The aim being then to really let times matter. To let events matter, it is critical to the day to day time that one does not quite know where it is going; while of course it is critical to abstract times or history that one does (as a thinker) but the individuals in the past did not. To align the two series is to create strange links or hoops of thought between the unknowns and known here. That is, the fact that events tumble into the present (and are not known exactly) is made to reflect into the knowing present of the individuals in the past; while the accords of abstract time, replete with its hindsight, is echoed in the present in a series where each essay is made to appeal to the next, and therefore it and whatever events are caught up in it in the next week present will seems as echoes of that past. An accord between the different elements of history was therefore mapped out and a conjunction given.

  Or again, ideas are the slipperiest of things. When one thinks or reads, one confronts the legacy of past ideas everywhere. More than this, one is caught up in the fact that other thinkers have gone over and over the same territory. Machiavelli is therefore present in Plato, even if Plato does not want him there, and Nietzsche and Foucault are listening in on that reading too. Ideas simply do not work in logical (or even strictly temporal) orders. The past changes or challenges the present; That is ideas which seemed known can in the face other ideas or new thoughts become themselves radical again: one talks of going back to Marx or of understanding Spinoza. The textures and folds of thought are therefore the weirdest of fabrics, which have little or no respect for that which they are folding, or the rhymes and reasons of the world. They just do it. To really do justice to thinking is therefore to allow ideas their own ability to fold in onto each other, and to arrange neat little ‘machines’ or hoops which bugger up any form or meaning to time.

  Each of the denizens of justice is therefore in itself complex. It oscillates across the others, it changes what it is, in their grip, or conjoins rather quickly with other aspects of other denizens. To do justice to justice is therefore also to allow this difference and its effects. An event in the past is therefore allowed to speak in the present, but the idea of that speaking is also allowed to matter, as an idea works in many different orbits and can be a part of many different debates and kinds other thought. A history in the past, a series of events characterizing an epoch (the revolutionary periods say) is allowed its events, but also its effects on ideas, and its warping into the now.  But then this warping into ideas, comes itself at a cost. The revolutionary periods are always allowed their own space, their own lessons that need to be endlessly learned, which is their own power.

All of which sounds no doubt rather abstract and complex. It is not really meant to be. It is merely after all, just an imperfect description of what it is to think in the first place. Thought is this confusion. Justice is merely a direction in that confusion. That is, it is a direction which installs in a mind, an echo or rim of otherness and the presence of another (which might be only your own shadow) with one’s one thought. To do justice to justice then, in a sense is merely to say what one is doing when one is thinking; namely confronting and negotiating a relationship with another. Or perhaps, it is the simply being honest about the fact that this relationship exists and that it matters. Perhaps this is a little more than simple honesty. Perhaps it includes also, the idea that to be thinking also is to be following an ethic whose power lies in respecting that other. After all, it is all too easy when thinking, to require thought to be a solitary vice. It becomes only about the thinker. Justice is the nag of conscience which says not. Thought always, if it is any good, included others and gives them their power. That is, the ethic which justice instills within thinking, is actually the ethic of thought itself. It is what thought needs to allow itself to be. To free up justice or to think about it, is therefore to free up thought itself. Each of these essays or stanzas work therefore as stand alone pieces, as movements in an ethic of freedom, whose aim is to free up a little piece of thought and send them spinning elsewhere.

  Plato's power lay in his deep realization that justice was not independent from thought, but rather was intimately caught up with it, and lived through it. It is this project, that these essays hope to take up, and so create new ways to be free in difficult and entrapping times.