Inspiriting a Disembodying of the "Dream of a Single Logic": A Response to Elizabeth Mowat and Brent Davis

Abstract

First paragraph: In his book, Trying to Teach in a Season of Great Untruth, David Geoffrey Smith (2006) exhorts us to consider the violence embodied in the dream of the universality of a single logic. It is in the discursive acts of willing a single logic such as those found behind the motivations of various social and political activities exemplified in the newest globalizing iterations of empire that such a totalizing violence occurs. Such a colonizing gaze constructs a natural/naturalizing Truth in its own terms within which "the normal" is constituted as a stable, unified/unifying entity that tolerates no threat of "deviance". Set against this disturbing and warlike dream of singularity is the recognition of a pluralistic and complex world that (re)generates a vast network of associations, relationships, and interconnections that are far from simple, bounded or unified. More important, it is a world that is complicated and cannot be reduced to narrow singularities or neatly coherent and stable universals. It is this sense of a richly complex world that a complexivist approach endorses and legitimizes. It marks a shift in emphasis away from discrete objects of observation toward their fluid interconnections and the complex patterns of such relationships. This shift is not only a shift in what is being seen, but is a promise of the possibility of a shift in ways of seeing.