THE CANON

It is not so much a matter of identifying a history, though, as much as it is of generating one.  The orphan's guide to ancestor worship.  There are names:  Xenakis, Scelsi, Empedocles, Gauss, Bizzy Bone, Underground Resistance, Francis Bacon, Plotinus.   These names can mean whatever we want them to.  What I mean to say is that there is a utopianism implicit in every impactful statement - whether it is a work of art, a political gesture, or a scientific discovery.   Beyond the narcissism of the genius, the usefulness to humans of the result: there is a utopianism.  And there is a global legacy to be sustained, remembered, punctured, celebrated, vandalized, revised.  This is by no means a matter of multiculturalism.  The bizarre polarity of the christian/scientific liberating destruction has to be privileged over and above other cultural productions, because it carries with it such a strange urgency.   But its context will be progressively globalized.  Certainly, for example, when it comes to the history of philosophy.  It is no longer possible to start with the pre-socratics.  Philosophy begins with the Vedas, no matter how you want to define it.   Medieval philosophy and mathematics was perhaps at its most profound in the world of Islam - that kind of thing.  But the important thing is the yearning, the thirst, the implicit utopianism, and the power to create a narrative that is able to account for and provide a consolation for the gap between the absolute and itself.