Escaping Flatland: A Book Review Essay Inspired by Gunnar Olsson's Lines of Power/Limits of Language

Author:
Publisher website
Google Scholar
Abstract
In this paper I offer reflections on Gunnar Olsson's 1991 text, Lines of Power/Limits of Language, concentrating particularly on its attempt to ‘write’ a new geometry of social thought which will enable the expression of a critique—itself almost impossible to formulate in human language—directed at the interweaving of taboos (boundaries to the unspoken) in Enlightenment Reason with operations of power in sociocultural life. The suggestion is that Olsson is striving to escape from what he regards as the ‘flatland’ in which much current social thought is entrenched, and is thereby seeking an altogether less-constraining ‘spaccland’ which will allow him to understand quite ‘other’ truths about the connections between the abstract (the immaterial) and the concrete (the material), I outline something of what Olsson's new conceptual geometry entails, but at the same time question the extent to which this geometry carries with it problems not so different from those that bedevilled ‘spatial science’. Furthermore, I argue that Olsson's will to think ever more abstractly—and in so doing to take his geometry into abstracted realms strangely removed from the contexts of everyday human life—separates him from precisely those everyday contexts in which people cannot help but be ‘philosophers’ dealing with the imponderables of taboos, power, truth, and morality in order simply to ‘get by’.

This publication has 15 references indexed in Scilit: