Henry Kaiser: The Long Take

An eerie long take filmed by Henry Kaiser on the supercool sea-floor of McMurdo Sound and set to his own music. I find it most unheimlich and despite having watched it a few times over now, it never seems anymore familiar. The diversity of the subtidal fauna is astonishing. Something distinctly unexpected happens around the six-minute mark which is worth waiting for (clues as to what is happening can be found here).

Thanks to my friend Dave A. for showing me this.

Kaiser’s Anarctartic journal can be found here: Henry Kaiser Family Foundation

The Cathedral of the Sublime and the View from Nowhere

So how does Meillassoux and Brassier’s non-correlative realism return us to Werner Herzog and his film Encounters at the End of the World? Throughout Herzog’s films he charts the phenomenal dreaming of his subjects, whose visions cannot be made commensurate to the vast extensity of nature, the super-immensity of which exceeds their imagination. This is certainly noted by Deleuze in Cinema 1 in the chapter ‘The Figures of Large and Small in Herzog’. In each of Herzog’s films we encounter ‘a man who is larger than life who frequents a milieu which is itself larger than life, and dreams up an action as great as the milieu’ [C1, p.184] These figures, who are often marked by madness, enact super-feats in an attempt to inflate their hallucinatory dreams to match the expanse of boundless reality; Aguirre in the virgin Amazon; the jungle which serves as Fitzcarraldo’s opera-house; Stroszek’s America; the prophet Mühlhiasl’s mountain; the small-brained Kaspar Hauser’s inquiry into God in the garden; the rapturous ecstasy of the ski-flyer Steiner; Treadwell’s wilderness and so forth. In each case Herzog’s ‘small’ characters –– literally small in Even Dwarves Start Small –– inflate their hallucinations, so that ‘the Large is realized as a pure Idea, in the double nature of landscapes and actions’ [C1, p. 184]. Here visions are synonymous with the caesura of the apocalyptic Idea. Through this characterization Deleuze recognizes Herzog as a filmmaker of the Kantian sublime, his films being an account of how the ‘small enters into a relationship with the Large’ [C1, p.185]. Subsequently, Herzog is rightly identified as the ‘most metaphysical filmmaker’ –– he himself claims to be a filmaker of the ecstactic truth. Herzog’s subjects are dwarfed by this sublime, it enfeebles them, despite their attempts to adequate their visions with the cosmic limits of reality. More often than not, the subject’s idealist thought-world cannot match unbounded nature, resulting in madness, death or a heroic action that sublimates this relationship –– in many cases affirmation is insufficient. For Kant, the sublime is the ‘wide blue yonder’, the substrate of supersensible reality foreclosed to our faculties and beyond experience: a glimpse of the land of silence and darkness. This is the numinous feeling of the sublime experienced by Herzog’s visionaries, the ‘Cathedral’[1] that the McMurdo ice-divers refer to when they swim beneath the polar ice of the Antarctic. As the visionary William Blake describes it in Auguries of Innocence:

To see the world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour. [‘To See a World…’, fragment from Auguries of Innocence 1803]

This unbounded infinity encountered in nature dwarves us, making us feel physically frail, since it is incommensurate with our powers of imagination. This is especially pronounced since, in a Darwinian sense, we are not equipped by evolution to track the essential nature of things. Under such an understanding representation must necessarily return for the subject, in order to cope with the incongruence of the mind and reality, in order to ascribe formlessness a cognizable form. As a result, we could say that the conditions of representation are secreted by the world and reality generates representation in a degenerate form (i.e. metaphor, recognition, identification, equivalence, etc). However, the sublime does allow us to intuit that there is more to reality than the sensorial and the imaginative, beyond our phenomenal ideality. Yet whereas Kant had an inadequate mathematical understanding of infinity, the paradox of infinity has been completed in Cantor’s set theory and made coherent by Meillassoux, making the unthinkable immensity of chaotic reality intelligible to us as the transfinite. Spinoza would have it that the secret of joy is to love something infinite, much like Nietzsche’s affirmation of the eternal return, but joy’s transcendence should not be privileged over woe, since joy is merely the mask for the meaningless and painful condition of the world. Kant correctly realizes that whilst our relation to the sublime can effectuate joy, more often than not it is accompanied by horror[2]. Here we detect a contradictory double economy of the sublime; the differend as Lyotard names it. [3] This negative pleasure, the dissonant tension that we feel in the thrall of the thunderstorm, is experienced by even the most rational scientists in Encounters at the End of the World, who doubly understand the consequences of our relationship to the annihilatory power of the real, both through subjection and in scientifically objective terms. This is precisely the treatment that the theme of the sublime receives in German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Polar Sea (The Destroyed Hope) (1824) in which double-power of beauty and terror are at odds. It is this thrilling dread that Herzog seems to feel lies beneath even the most positivist gloss, which fills him with the suspicion that motivates his enquiry and informs his aesthetic. Despite this, Herzog is vocal in his affinity for the anecdote about Martin Luther, wherein the theologian was asked what he would do if he knew the world was ending tomorrow, to which he replied: ‘I would plant an apple tree today’. However, is this not merely a pragmatic acceptance that the decontraction of death establishes the possibility of being; a ‘purposelessness, which compels all purposefulness’?

Herzog is rightfully suspicious of the idealism and positive vitalism that Stefan Pashov subscribes to at the beginning of Encounters at the End of the World, since such totalizing thought-worlds subordinate the mindless ‘distinct objects’ of reality to the human consciousness. Such exorbitant claims are tantamount to an anthropocentric imperialism that skews man’s position in relation to alien nature; a result of mankind’s misplaced confidence in the consonance of its own thought. In this regard, Herzog is keen to deride the folly of the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton and those dreamers who gaze upon the glacially indifferent real and believe we can ultimately master such a superior force. Amusingly, Herzog dramatizes this folly with the depiction of a ‘deranged’ penguin that cannot be persuaded from heading into the interior of the continent and towards certain death. It is here we find an analogy for the delusional character of strong correlationism, exemplified by Hegel’s totalitarianism of the Idea –– the suspicion of which led Marx to his materialist inversion. As Marx observes with regard to Hegel’s methodology in Grundrisse:

[…] Hegel fell into the illusion of conceiving the real as the product of thought concentrating itself, probing its own depths, and unfolding itself out of itself, by itself, whereas the rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way by which thought appropriates the concrete [and] reproduces it as concrete in the mind. [GR, p.101]

Accordingly, we can say that idealism is the vice of post-Kantian thought, which suffers from a pathological and delusional obsession with the concretization of the correlation –– the ‘philosopher’s syndrome’. Yet whilst Marx and Engels’ dialectical materialism might be assumed to be ‘scientifically’ insufficient to truly overthrow Hegelian absolutism, they and the other philosophers of suspicion, including Nietzsche and Freud, were right to view such philosophical solipsism skeptically. Meillassoux deems these thinkers philosophical secessionists:

Schopenhauer said that solipsism was a fortress impossible to penetrate, but also pointless to attack, since it is empty. Solipsism is a philosophy that no one can refute, but also one that no one can believe. So let’s leave the fortress as it is, and let’s explore the world in all its vastness! [CVIII, p. 423]

Consequently, suspicion of Hegelian idealism only permitted philosophy to step out of the circle of correlation and into the circle of reflection, abstaining from a proper engagement with idealism completely. However, reflection still remained shadowed by enobling idealism. This is why Meillassoux seeks to destroy correlative philosophy from within through the necessity of contingency and why Brassier seeks to annihilate it through a scientific determination-in-the-last-instance. So how might the aggrandizing visions of Herzog’s principle characters be better described by neuroscience, supplemented by the ‘speculative armature’ of metaphysics in a manner that is commensurate with realism proper?

In his book Being No One philosopher of the mind Thomas Metzinger draws heavily on representationalist and functionalist analysis, arguing that no such things as selves exist: ‘nobody has ever had or was a self’. We merely experience a phenomenal self-model (PSM), or variety of selves as they appear in conscious experience; not an entity or essential being, but a process that Metzinger states is the content of a ‘transparent self-model’. This clearly finds harmony with the Badiou’s ontology of subtraction, which we are now able to ratify transcendentally through Laruelle. Metzinger states that neuroscience is approaching a stage at which it can provide specific answers regarding the self-presentational model, or ‘user illusion’ of first-person reality as we experience it, which has consequences for intentionality: ‘The content of the PSM is the content of the conscious self: your current bodily sensations, your present emotional situation, plus all the contents of your phenomenally experienced cognitive processing.’ [BNO, p. 299] Accordingly, the content of the PSM constitutes a metaphorical self that you intuitively experience as you, a system of representation that allows goal-directed deliberate actions. The PSM is valuable delusion that grants us conscious action, yet is absent in unconscious automatic responses to motor-sensory stimuli (e.g. catching a ball thrown in our direction or the ‘telepathic’ group movement of a flock of starlings). This engenders formidable confusion for the folk-psychological phenomenal subject, or self we experience as a unitary whole:

It endows our mental space with two highly interesting structural characteristics: centeredness and perspectivalness. As long as there is a phenomenal self our conscious model of the world is a functionally centred model and usually tied to what in philosophy of the mind is called the “first-person” perspective. [BNO, p. 303]

This is precisely the notion that forms the kernel of most epistemological and metaphysical difficulties in philosophy. Metzinger goes on to say that this centering generates an ‘epistemic asymmetry’ between the recognition of conscious states from the first-person to third-person perspective. This appears to be highly reminiscent of Heidegger’s inability to find being in general coextensive with the specific mineness of Dasein. For Metzinger, the mineness of selfhood that the PSM experiences –– notably in the act of introspective thought –– cannot conclusively be said to belong to one entity. Moreover, the distribution of this property in space can vary considerably and in heightened mental states this phenomenal quality of mineness can exceed the bounds of the physical body, leading to deviant and disembodied self-models.

The florid schizophrenic experiences many extreme and disorientating states of mind, including radical depersonalization in which consciously experienced thoughts are no longer their own; just as Woyzeck experiences when he feels the Earth rise up by touching the wood he is chopping. The schizoid self-model becomes dissociated from the user of the PSM, just as people experience with phantom limbs, alien-hand syndrome or unilateral hemi-neglect (‘my leg is not my own’). Literally, their mind no longer belongs to them and they might even say: ‘My mind is no longer mine’; as if it were an alien appendage. They lose the subjective embodiment or mineness that they are accustomed to. A sense of ownership of mind is essential to the subject’s orderly function and if the subject cannot integrate his/her own self-model with their own cognitive processes they will experience serious depersonalization. Here the entire system of representation may in fact be lost. [4] The result is an altered state of consciousness not of their volition. They might say to a doctor, ‘I am a robot’ or, ‘my volitional acts are not my own’; in short, they feel remote controlled, a zombiefied self-model in which intentionality is diminished. Conversely, through this depersonalization they can also experience an inability to delimit the PSM from the world. They might to say, ‘I am the whole world’. Consequently, the schizophrenic subject might stand at the window all day, staring at the sun, controlling its movement with his/her mind. Or they might look down at the traffic in the street and control the movement of each tiny car; making the puppets walk; turning the traffic lights on and off. In such cases, the self-model expands to the boundaries and every miniscule change in the world is perceived to be self-caused. This is clearly where thought oversteps the threshold of what can be known, such as when the subject is in the thrall of sublime and inflates his/her visionary ideas to match its immensity. This is a mania, a pathology that Aguirre assumes when he declares that he is The Wrath of God, or much like Captain Ahab’s monomaniacal pursuit of the leviathan, whose monstrous corpus he manages to successfully integrate himself with; a successful binding of organism’s finite being with the infinitude of boundless ocean.

Then can we not say that idealism‘s totalizing thought-world bears a conspicuous similarity to this pathology? More acutely, the reality of the matter is far closer to that which Darwin intuits when he gazes upon the bucolic English countryside, which appears immutable and congenial, and whilst in appearance happy nature is representationally offered as an ordered harmony with man at its centre: ‘One may say there is force like a hundred thousand wedges trying [to] force every kind of adapted structure into the gaps in the economy of nature, or rather forming gaps by forcing out the weaker ones’ [OS, p, 67]. It is scientific objectivity that confirms this by providing a perspectival vantage point on the real –– a view from nowhere –– and on the contrary, it is mankind’s delusional self-hood that renders reality opaque by believing itself to be naturalized. This presumption of naturalized consciousness is grounded by evolution in our biomorphic architecture and grants us agency within our own milieu:

Human beings may –– and do –– differ in what they can imagine, in what classes of worlds they can consciously simulate, and in what they find intuitively plausible. We cannot imagine a thirteenth-dimensional shadow of a fourteen dimensional cube or the continuum of space-time, because the visual cortex of our ancestors was never confronted with this type of object and because the brain’s global model of reality is based on three spatial dimensions and one distinct, unidirectional temporal dimension sufficed for surviving in what was our biological environment. [BNO, p.595]

In Metzinger’s view we resemble Plato’s neurophenomenogical caveman; the neural cave being determined by our internal central nervous system. The shadows on the wall are as close as we get to access reality from our subterranean location, the shadows being a ‘low-dimensional projection of a higher-dimensional object’ [BNO, p. 548]. Yet whereas Plato claimed that all we could know was ourselves in the cave, Metzinger departs from the metaphor here to state that there is not even anyone in the cave at all. [5] Or rather, the interior surface of the cave is the ‘physical organism as a whole, including all of its brain, its cognitive activity, and its social relationships, that is projecting inward, from all directions at the same time’ [BNO, p. 550]. There is no homonuculus situated in the neural cave, just a shadow cast from the fire and projected onto the wall. A shadow we identify as us, yet the cave is empty. This excessively selective projection is defined by the contingencies of biological evolution. As such, neuroscience provides an injunction to abandon outmoded conceptions of our access to reality and highlights the timeliness of a metaphysics that seeks to continue to disenchant the world and allow us to think the ‘great-outdoors’. As we witness in Encounters at the End of the World, even the most objective and rational are prone to the mistaking to the flickering of the shadows on the wall of the cave as being meaningful. The decentering of the manifest image has presently become an important task, since it this very egocentric self-delusion that is endangering the future of mankind’s biological environment at a rate faster than we can evolve.

Footnotes:

[1] Herzog enhances the tension of sublimity in Encounters at the End of the World with the use of Russian Orthodox music composed for the lowest humanly possible vocal range, the Basso Profundo or ‘Voice of God’.

[2] Kant uses an example from the Bremen Magazine, Vol. IV entitled ‘Carazan’s Dream’ to express the horror of the sublime, in which the author relates a mind-state in which he encounters the Angel of Death who transports him to the outer limits of the cosmos: ‘I soon left countless worlds behind me. As I neared the outermost end of nature I saw the shadows of the boundless void sink down into the abyss before me. A fearful kingdom of silence, loneliness and darkness! Unutterable horror overtook me at this sight. I gradually lost sight of the last star, and finally the last glimmering ray of hope was extinguished in the outer darkness! Mortal terrors of despair increased with every moment, just as every moment I increased my distance from the last inhabited world. I reflected with unbearable anguish that if ten thousand times a thousand years more should have carried me along beyond the bounds of all the universe I would still be looking ahead into the infinite abyss of darkness, without help or any hope of return…’ [OFBS, p. 49]

[3] In Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime Lyotard conceives of the sublime as just such a crisis between reason and imagination, the differend of conflictual anxiety and pleasure, caused by the mind straining at the edges of itself and conceptuality: ‘The admixture of fear and exaltation that constitutes sublime feeling is insoluble, irreducible to moral feeling’ [LAS, p131]

[4] There is a moment in Aguirre when the remaining conquistadores on the raft see a ship in a tree, but are completely uncertain whether it is real or hallucinated and have no way of validating the experience by means of sense-data alone.

[5] Metzinger goes on to replace the limited metaphor of the cave with a further model, the technological metaphor of a total flight simulator, or vehicle consciousness, in which external reality is modelled internally in high-resolution in real-time, yet this phenomenal apparatus us invisible to us [BNO, p. 555].

One-Dimensional Man: The Possibility of Triumph Over the Disaster of Capitalism.

Here’s the text I’ve just written for an art show starting in the International Project Space at Birmingham’s Bournville School of Art tomorrow and based around the theme of Herbert Marcuse’s 1964 book. The show includes the varied works of artist’s Edwin Budris, Anthony Green and Barry MacGregor Johnston. I’m looking foward to going up to see it. I had great feedback from the artists on the article. I was also helped greatly by reading Alberto Toscano’s paper Liberation Technology: Marcuse’s Communist Individualism and Graham Harman’s article on Technology, Objects and Things in Heidegger, which was very useful in getting to the heart of Marcuse’s understanding of the instrumentalisation of science.

One-Dimensional Man: The Possibility of Triumph Over the Disaster of Capitalism.

Having been asked to refamiliarize with Herbert Marcuse’s famous mid-sixties polemic, One-Dimensional Man (1964), I’ve been pleasantly surprised as to what a productive book it is. Much of this surprise was derived from becoming reacquainted with the unusual texture and generosity of Marcuse’s philosophy. And whilst this acclaimed book is the product of its location in time, it charts a seemingly eccentric course between various poles of thought that make it an altogether fascinating and unconventional work. In retrospect, he seems to stand at some distance to the other Frankfurt School social theorists and it is easy to determine why he engendered a cross-generational appeal to his students, including the radical Angela Davis, on the Columbia campus in San Diego where he taught during the turbulent Sixties – a campus that was heavily involved in scientific research for the military industrial complex during the abhorrent Vietnam War.

The seeming novelty of One-Dimensional Man is that its sociological import is based on a curious understanding of technological rationality and instrumentalization within affluent Western societies, which Marcuse contrasts with the bureaucratic rationality of the Soviet mega-machine. Here he offers a dual-critique of the ever-increasing totalization of the capitalist space and the faltering teleology of Soviet communism (which we can now better characterise as state capitalism/war communism). Shortly after One-Dimensional Man was published this bi-polar stasis was made manifest on either side of the Iron Curtain in the student/worker uprisings of both Paris and Prague in 1968.

The curious complexion of Marcuse’s thought comes to the fore in this 1964 work: a thought-world composed of Hegelian Reason, a profound understanding of Heidegger’s conception of technology and tool-being, which is then put to work alongside Marx’s ‘Fragments on Machines’ from Grundrisse. Broadly, Marcuse fits into the unusual category of being a ‘communist individualist’ and whilst he is concerned with labour, social alienation, technology and their relations, he has an idiosyncratic reading of Marxian theory that is both radically individualist and humanist. Althusser admonished Marcuse for this ‘radical individualism’, which in Marxist terms is putative paradox, due to the transindividual/collective emphasis of Marxist thought. However, Marcuse’s social entity appears to be closer to Hegel and Feuerbach’s, a curious admixture of subjective empiricism and sensuous idealist human essence.

Marcuse also draws heavily on Gilbert Simondon’s understanding of technical objects, an insight that gets to the heart of where social alienation emanates; that is to say from the ‘invisible’ hidden abode of production. This conception of the technical ensemble is veridical to Marx’s identification of the factory as the source of the mystification of production. Marcuse borrows Simondon’s description of social alienation to support his idea of totalitarian rationality, a variety of technofascism or ‘autocratic philosophy of technics’ and it is Simondon who is also a crucial influence on the machinic-hyletic constructivism of Deleuze and Guattari. Accordingly, Marcuse foreshadows Anti-Oedipus, alongside Wilhelm Reich, as perhaps one of the first thinkers of ‘libidinal economy’, merging Freudianism and Marxism in Eros and Civilization, by connecting libido to labour-power.

The most exciting moment of One-Dimensional Man comes in the analysis of the composition of technological rationality towards the end of the book, where Marcuse demonstrates an admirable grasp of Heidegger’s writing on technology – in which technical objects are simultaneously present-at-hand (Vorhandenheit) or ready-to-hand (Zuhandenheit) – as well as alluding to the liberatory paradigm of scientific enlightenment. Here he clearly delimits the pure reason of science from the technological instrumentalization of science via the ‘applied’ sciences, which create an irrational horizon for the positivist philosophy of science of his time. It is this circumscribed horizon that subordinates the reason of science to the irrationality of the capitalist mode of production (an irrational rationale, so to speak). This very instrumentalization of science – present in the capitalist implementation of machinery and all too evident in the US military industrial complex – transforms the web of reason into the web of domination. This vector of domination has miserable consequences for the subject, even within the most affluent societies, rendering reason opaque and mysterious. Marcuse then seeks to use the possibility of technological liberation against those self-same processes of domination, just as we are witnessing currently with the mobilisation of new technologies in the upheaval in Iran.

On a minor, but nonetheless elucidating biographical note, Marcuse was a keen collector of hippopotamus figurines, which apparently lined his office at Columbia. In this we can detect a certain creative playfulness in his identification with what for him was ‘an impossible animal’, an interspecies anomaly that traverses both land and water. Isn’t the best that we can say of Marcuse’s thought is that it is a curiously uncategorizable amphibian that fascinates us nonetheless? Unsurprisingly, Marcuse turned to aesthetics to find a trace of negativity capable of dislodging the positivist capitalist paradigm of his day, an urgent task, as capitalism is so adept at endlessly integrating its opposition. In aesthetics, particularly those of the avant-garde, Marcuse finds the possibility of an emerging Lebenswelt; a new mode of meta-political power and subjective experience. For him, aesthetics is a potentially liberating techne when incorporated into everyday sensation.

All of which dovetails neatly with the artistic presentations of the show ‘One-Dimensional Man’ featuring the varied works of Edwin Burdis, Anthony Green and Barry McGregor Johnston. In all three artists we can detect some of the themes that arise in Marcuse’s book. If we take art to be a form of techne of the self, the development of an artistic subjectivity, it is then it is easy identify art’s important political dimension and usefulness as an emancipatory paradigm.

In Edwin Burdiss’ performance, an almost Tati-esque entanglement, we encounter a dramatization of Heidegger’s tool analysis. In his restaging of an earlier performance the very technical objects designed to facilitate him end up ensnaring him. The liberatory and novel potential of the mechanical is transformed into a comedic blockage or obstacle; something that instills pathos in all of us, a performance of the problematic relationship we have with technical objects. Burdis can only possibly use the microphone when it recedes from his attention, highlighting how ‘…the object is torn asunder from itself in two directions’. Put more simply, when he attempts to use the microphone, the microphone withdraws from visibility; as soon he concentrates on the objective microphone as a microphone, it is made visible again, and losing its functionality. The two dimensions of the tool are then implicitly opposed – one face is present whilst the other withdraws from us. This philosophical conundrum in which the instrument becomes an obstructive object is an unlikely, yet remarkably productive riddle for Burdis – a problematic from which he derives an inventive physical comedy.

Anthony Green has adopted an energetic and processual mode of production, to engender an art that overflows to ordinary conceptual and discursive values. Here it is as if the diagram has become an auto-generational machine that manifests itself as material excess. We are not merely presented with the informational art-object, but the procedural act of construction is implicitly visible to us. As a result, the work teeters improbably like an array of impossible configurations, fragments and patterns of unthinkable blocks of affect and sensation. It is manifested not as a finite act of artistic production that ends with a mere commodity, but the infinite constructivism of a novel artistic subjectivity, which becomes inseparable from the work itself. The work is then articulated through the liberation of previously unimaginable of potentialities, in which all the vectors of sensation collide to overwhelm us, rupturing our hic et nunc. Within Green’s work we see the very mode of production revealed, no longer mystified as it is within the opaque web of instrumental technology of Marcuse’s critique, but laid-bare so that we can see the inner workings and excrescences of his non-alienating artistic abstract-machine.

In an almost contradictory manner to this productive techne Barry McGregor Johnston wishes to exploit and exhalt the redundancy of objects and subordinate them to his artistic will; in his words he wants to ‘fire’ them. This maneuver liberates the object, stripped of its instrumentality, allowing him to reemploy them for his own deviant purposes. By destroying their worldly function and assigning them a new rationale objects become present-at-hand and visible to us – in the manner of broken tools, which become obtrusive to us once their functionality is destroyed, veritable corrupted junk-piles that strangely become for-us again. This is a radical reconfiguration and weaponization our object-worlds that Marcuse might approve of, the establishment of a ‘horizonal fringe’ that might point to a liberatory reordering of the world of banal instrumental usage under the auspices of art; an act of affirmative, destructive creation.

And does this not confirm to Marcuse’s idea of aesthetics as a ‘lightning-flash’, an unavoidable facet of being itself and para-technology that remakes the world in a communist sense, in order to rip it up and start over? It is an injunction our break our materialist fetters, through performative acts of material, poetic and improvisational enquiry and begin to build an existing utopia in the present, beyond the system that produces merely for the sake of production. Why should we wait? We can do it better.

- Andrew Osborne, June 2009

Ancestrality and The Problem of the Arche-fossil

This week I delivered this text in the symposium to outline the introduction to my MA dissertation. It is in need of detailing and whipping into shape, but it allowed me to discuss the main themes of my inquiry. Of course, my quicktime clips  failed to play, but I still managed to explain how Herzog’s film dramatizes the example of the arche-fossil in my allotted 20 minutes:

Stefan Pashov: It’s a long story…I’ve explored many different lands of the mind and many worlds of ideas. I started before I even knew how to read and write; my grandmother was reading the Odyssey and The Illiad to me. So I started a journey in my fantasy, before I even knew the means of accomplishing it, but my mind and my psyche was ready for it…I was already traveling with Odysseus and the Argonauts to those strange and amazing lands, always taking with me that fascination of the world and I fell in love with the world. It is very powerful and has been with me this whole time.

Herzog: And how does it happen that we are encountering each other here…at the end of the world?

Pashov: (laughs) I think that it is a logical place to find each other as this place works almost as a natural selection for people that have this intention to almost jump of the margin of the map. And we all meet here, where all the lines of the map converge! There is no point that is south of the South Pole. And I think that there is a fair amount of the population that is here are full time travelers and part-time workers. So yes, those are the professional dreamers. They dream all the time.  And I think through them the great cosmic dreams come into fruition because the universe dreams through our dreams. And I think that there is many different ways for reality to bring itself forward, and dreaming is definitely one of those ways.

Pashov continues: There is a beautiful saying by an American philosopher, Alan Watts, who says that: ‘…through our eyes the universe is perceiving itself and through our ears the universe is listening to its cosmic harmonies. And we are the witness through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory…of its magnificence’.

Werner Herzog, in his most recent documentary, Encounters at the End of the World, meets this unlikely forklift-driving philosopher working at McMurdo Antarctic research station. Our friend here seems to be eloquently luxuriating in is an anthropocentric and vitalist cosmological view. He is apparently beholden to a form of folk-psychology or narrative practice that makes cozy sense of the subject’s relation to the world, the in-itself, which for him requires a sentient witness. And whilst Herzog enjoys the pantheist forklift driver’s conception of a spiritualized reality – a reality through which the universe intentionally creates subjects in order to perceive itself – as the film unfolds, we have to draw the conclusion that Herzog doesn’t share in this outlook whatsoever. The counter-impression we derive from the film is that we are ‘from nothing and for nothing’ and as complex organisms we are in fact both purposeless and meaningless,

The documentary’s human encounters, whilst affirming, only constitute one half of a more profound collision – that between man and nature. The Antarctic scientists at the base labour to apprehend material reality through the sensors, cameras and cascades of data in order construct a mathematizable empirical image of the in-itself. Accordingly, scientific understanding could be described as a vector of annihilation that cleaves into what we think we know, teaching us uncomfortable (and inconvenient) truths about the world and our relation to it. Moreover it hints at a fundamental incongruence between the mind and the world, a world that is glacially indifferent to mankind. At the limit-experience of the South Pole we witness a radical encounter between man and nature made intelligible by the auspices of science. In that respect, Antarctica itself represents the radically inhuman, inhospitable and alien power of nature, which is embodied by the beautiful yet annihilatory volcano, Mount Erebus.

[Erebus, by the way translates as blackness, darkness or shadow and was the son of Khaos, i.e. the primordial condition of conditions or the void from which the Gods emerged. Erebus therefore represents the personification of darkness and shadow, which fills the corners of the world. There is some pertinence to this observation, which will become apparent later]

So consequently, in Herzog’s view, there is something unknowable about this extensity, except when made intelligible by scientific study. That’s possibly why Herzog is explicit in his disinterest in making an anthropomorphic documentary about penguins. And whilst Herzog is fascinated by the geist or spirit that animates mankind in all his endeavours – man’s manifest image – he is equally concerned with the consensus of scientific discourse. And this consensus is derived from the intersubjectivity of scientific objectivism. And the consensus of the majority of the scientist’s at McMurdo seem convinced that mankind will undoubtedly encounter its own extermination, and perhaps sooner than we anticipate.

So what is the problematic nature of our charming forklift-driver’s Weltanschauung? We could say that whilst his outlook is common to Gaian mysticism or the Buddhist philosophy of Alan Watts, it shares a religiosity that is rampant within the heavy lifting of post-Kantian philosophy and critical theory. Here, with the assistance of Quinten Meillassoux, we can detect what Meillassoux nominates in his book After Finitude as correlationism at work.

In short, correlationism maintains: We cannot conceive of a mind-independent reality without a mind to conceive that mind-independent reality. Correlationism consists of disqualifying the claim that it is possible to consider the realms of subjectivity and objectivity independently of one another. This forms part of what Meillassoux calls the ‘correlationist circle’, in effect, the primacy of relation over related terms of subject and object and ‘a belief in the constituted power of the reciprocal relation’ [AF, p5]. Meillassoux states that the correlate is a ‘transparent cage’ that post-Kantian philosophy is imprisoned within. For the correlationist the only exteriority we can know is merely the pole of the correlate that faces us, like the unsurpassable character of a coin of which we can only know one side. Accordingly, Meillassoux states that contemporary philosophy has ‘lost the great outdoors, the absolute outside of pre-critical thinkers’.

The correlationist maintains that in the duality between subject and object, the correlation is all we can know and this understanding has the effect of dissolving epistemology. Subject and object (i.e. the mind and reality) are then hypostasized as poles of the correlation, of which we can only grasp one half, and this relation is then treated as actually existing. Therefore the correlation absolutizes the very subject/object dualism that it claims to overcome in metaphysical dogmatism. Metaphysical dogmatism is the often derided naïve realism of Locke, of which primary and secondary quality distinction was already implicitly present in Descartes. Correlationism begins with Bishop Berkley in his attempt to overthrow naïve realism by maintaining that ideas are created by sensations and sensations are all that we can know about the world. Bishop Berkley states:

…[the mind] is deluded to think it can and does conceive of bodies existing unthought of, or without the mind, though at the same time they are apprehended by, or exist in, itself.

This is indicative of the absolutization of the correlate, that cannot envisage a world without a mind to conceive it, thus enthroning thought over matter. This is a subjective idealist position based on a tautology. For Berkley, mind-independence requires concept independence and oxymoronically smuggles its conclusion into its own premise. This is what is known as Stove’s Gem, coined by intellectual gadfly David Stove in his critique of Berkley’s idealism, nominating it as the ‘world’s worst argument’.

Cartesian metaphysical dogmatism would have it that there are no rational grounds for an experience independent of substantial objects. In turn, correlationism assaults metaphysical reason – a reason typified by Descartes’ doubt/skepticism with regard to divine or natural ends to explain phenomena, the fallibility of sense data and thinking or extended substance. Awoken from his dogmatist slumber by Hume, Kant searches for thinking/being’s instantiation through experience and his principles of experience (experience’s transcendental condition). According to Kant: we can only have objective knowledge of reality (the noumenal) confined to the experiential realm of phenomena and bounded by the necessary structure of sensation. This represents the destitution of intuition as intuition is then tethered to sensation.

We can frame this historically by saying that up until Kant one of the principal problems of philosophy was how to think the substrate of substantial matter. Post-Kant the question becomes: how do we think the correlate? Interestingly, Kant does not use the Stove’s Gem ‘worst argument’ and Meillassoux states that Kant is merely guilty of a weak correlationism. For Kant objective reality is circumscribed within phenomenal bounds and consequently, he universalizes reality through the structure of the correlate. The idealist and phenomenologist heirs of Kant lop off this universal structure (solutus ab means to sever or set apart from), further absolutizing the correlate and creating the illusory dichotomy between thought and being that is emblematic of Nietzsche and Heidegger. The correlate can then not be grounded due to this absolutization, arriving at the bounded finitude of reason. Knowing then supervenes on a set of conditions that cannot be exhaustively known (i.e. Dasein’s ontological horizon). The ultimate consequence of the contingency of the correlation (facticity or Faktizität in Heidegger) is that we cannot ground the necessary conditions of the correlation, in turn producing a plurality of correlations. Therefore the undermining of dogmatism subsequently lets in fideism and superstition via the proliferation of post-Kantian absolutes, as exemplified in Hegel, Fichte,  Husserl, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and eventually Deleuze. In correlationism the conditions of conception re-inscribe the concept by the substitution of ‘X’ for any verb whether it stands for sensation, embodiment (e.g. Husserlian ‘flesh’), consciousness or language — as it is in the case of early-Wittgenstein and Heidegger — or Life, which is the detectable correlate in Deleuze. Every post-Kantian philosophy, however ingenious in its disavowal of naïve realism is a variant of the correlation.

Conversely, Meillassoux seeks to rehabilitate Descartes’ primary and secondary quality distinction in which: the primary properties of objects exist independent of an observer (e.g. density, spatial extension, temperature, etc) and their secondary qualities that are only subjectively perceived (e.g heat, colour, taste, etc).  Therefore the mathematizable properties of the object remain in itself, exempt from any relation we might have with that object. Yet this is not merely a regression back into the pre-critical position of dogmatic metaphysics, which becomes impossible after Berkley and Kant. Such distinctions require the universalization of the intersubjectivity of consensus and a community of scientific discourse, in order to prevent such mathematization from falling into mere subjective representation. As Meillassoux states: ‘Scientific truth is no longer what conforms to an in-itself supposedly indifferent to the way in which it is given to the subject, but rather what is susceptible of being given as shared by a scientific community’. Here he privileges the discourse of science over mere mathematics, which we should be keen to remind ourselves mathematics makes up only a miniscule proportion of actual existing reality.

Meillassoux attacks correlationism from inside out, that is to say, he destroys the fortress of correlationism from within by working through the correlation itself and the philosophical resources it provides us with.  In order to perform this he introduces the concept of the arche-fossil, an ancestral statement or geological fossil that is anterior to the emergence of biological organic life. Science, which has long perfected these dating techniques, produces many such statements that contradict correlationism’s inability to account for a mind-independent reality. Moreover, post-Kantian philosophy seems oblivious to such statements, to the extent that Meillassoux claims that Kant’s Copernican revolution of thought was nothing of the sort. For the correlationist, a world-in-itself subsisting independently of any observer is unthinkable, and each correlationist in turn claims that his absolute is the true outside of thought. However, the arche-fossil’s ancestral realm repudiates the even the most sophisticated correlationist doxa:

…it is as if the distinction between transcendental idealism – the idealism that is (so to speak) urbane, civilized, and reasonable – and speculative or even subjective idealism – the idealism that is wild, uncouth and rather extravagant – it is as if this distinction which we had been taught to draw – and which separates Kant from Berkeley – became blurred and dissolved in light of the fossil-matter. Confronted with the arche-fossil, every variety of idealism converges and becomes equally extraordinary – every variety of correlationism is exposed as extreme idealism, one that is incapable of admitting that [which] science tells us about these occurrences…And our correlationist then finds himself dangerously close to contemporary creationists: those quaint believers who assert today, in accordance with a ‘literal’ reading of the Bible, that the earth is no more than 6000 years old, and who, when confronted with the much older dates arrived at by science, reply…[that these radioactive compounds were placed there by God]…in order to test the physicist’s faith. Similarly, might not the meaning of the arche-fossil be to test the philosopher’s faith in correlation, even when confronted with data which seems to point to an abyssal divide between what exists and what appears? [AF, pp16-17]

It perhaps is worth pointing out here that Ray Brassier, in his footnotes to the chapter ‘The Enigma of Realism’ in Nihil Unbound, curiously alludes to striking similarities between the ‘critique of critique’ deployed in After Finitude and V.I. Lenin’s lambasting of clericist idealism in Materialism and Emprico-ciritcism. And although, Lenin’s 1908 excoriation of ‘correlativist’ subject/object theory may be the inspiration for Meillassoux’s thesis it doesn’t share the latter’s profound and original scope. However, for Brassier it is indicative of the lamentable state of 20th century academia’s idealism, which has been remained blissfully unperturbed for a century since Lenin’s criticism.

So, let us return to the chronological fact of the arche-fossil. Meillassoux resourcefully anticipates two criticisms of the arche-fossil argument:

The first correlationist rejoinder maintains that the ancestral argument privileges the temporal seniority of the arche-fossil, with regards to manifestation’s emergence of being, whereas a similar spatial distance (i.e. an unperceivable event occurring at a galactic distance, beyond the reach of the most far-seeing gravitational telescopes) would provide a spatial analogy for the ancestral statement. Such an analogue would also be devoid of any validating witness. Therefore even the most banal example of a synchronic unobserved event (such as a tree falling in a forest) could be claimed to be merely lacunary and subsequently any correlationist could argue that had there been a witness, then it could have been perceived. Such a comparison reduces the ancestral statement to a threadbare argument that has been presented time and time again.

However, Meillassoux counters this by saying that the temporal arche-fossil is in no way equivalent to the spatial example, as it doesn’t evoke distance in time, but rather anteriority in time. It is an event that is not merely ancient, but anterior to giveness itself. So ancestrality is not an event that lacunary awareness can’t apprehend, but an event that is not co-existant with any giveness whatsoever, lacunary or otherwise. It is a situation of the complete absence of giveness (i.e. consciousness, perception, experience, cogito etc.). Here we notice that Meillassoux explicitly uses the terms given and giveness, which allows us to infer that it is in fact Husserl’s concept of epoché with its distinctions of noesis and noema (the processes of thought and the external object of that thought) that he is attacking. And we know that the late-Husserl sought to exclude any hypothesis on the existence of external objects, to the extent he introduced the method of phenomenological reduction to eliminate them (a kind of counter-elimitavism).

So, to summarize, the problem constituted by the fact of the arche-fossil consists not of how science is able think the manifestation of consciousness, but how it thinks the passage from the non-being of giveness to its instantiation in being(s). This time that science thinks is not only anterior to giveness, but ‘allows the latter to arise at a determinate point in its own flux’; a radical index of diachroncity.  This ensures the triviality of the first correlationist rejoinder with regards to the lacuna of manifestation, which Meillassoux demonstrates is in fact a lacuna in the correlation itself (‘from which it emerged and will ultimately return’). Here we first glimpse Meillassoux building an argument for the diachroncity of time as a true absolute (or absolute of absolutes) with which he seeks to destroy the correlationist fortress.

The second correlationist rejoinder to the example of the arche-fossil continues from the first, but is argued from a transcendental standpoint and is consequently more substantial. Here the correlationist attempts to depict non-correlational reality as a cognitive illusion that whilst intelligible, is produced in the human present and ‘retroactively’ imprinted into the pre-human past. The correlationist proceeds by saying that the example of the ancestral statement confuses the empirical and transcendental regimes of sense. These two regimes of sense are distinct in the following manner:

-    The empirical or ontic regime, within the purview of science.
-    The transcendental or ontological regime, which is the privilege of philosophy.

Meillassoux counters the first correlationist rejoinder with an empirical answer as to how science thinks the manifestation of organic beings in the physical environment. But here the correlationist accuses him of collapsing the distinctions between the transcendental subject of science – of how this physical emergence of consciousness (i.e. individuation) is possible – into the empirical question. The correlationist maintains that the two regimes of sense are inseparable, but should never intersect. And by these lights, the ontic temporality of physical-cosmological time originates in ontological time and is therefore entirely dependent on it. This subordinates the conceptual autonomy of the empirical regime’s ‘time of science’ to the transcendental.  Meillassoux’s polemic is then relegated as an amphiboly, a conflation of the objective physical being of bodies with the objective ontological knowledge of the being of bodies.  More clearly, to inscribe ontology within scientific time is to turn those bodies into objects, i.e. to speak of them anthropologically rather than philosophically. Moreover, it is requirement of the transcendental to keep the discourse of objects that are born and die separate from the conditions of objective knowledge of those objects. The transcendentalist therefore abjures the potential paradox of confusing an object and its discourse. The transcendental is therefore not endangered by the diachronicity of the time of science, as it is effectively outside both time and space. And by disregarding this, Meillassoux is open to the accusation that the arche-fossil is ineffectually empirical and only ever part of a discourse about objects.

The inclusion of this second rejoinder addresses a Kantian idealist response to the novel problem of the arche-fossil. The Kantian transcendentalist here seeks to immunize transcendent non-objects from scientific objects. Meillassoux’s counter-argument however is that whilst there can be no such thing as a transcendental object, there is still a subject (for instance Husserl’s explicitly transcendental subject or Heidegger’s ‘worldless’ subject). That is to say, it is a subject that is instantiated and ‘takes place’ in an existing body, and therefore cannot be legitimately divorced from a physically existing in space and time. Accordingly, the time of science still determines the instantiation of a transcendental subject; being must necessarily have a body. As Ray Brassier puts it, the ancestral time of the arche-fossil is better understood as ‘an objectivity which provides a determinant-of-the-very-last-instance for every variety of transcendental temporality’ and when the conditions of the instantiation of being are absent, so is the correlation.

Ray Brassier makes an important further point on the manner in which Meillassoux tackles the two correlationist rejoinders to the fact of the arche-fossil. He usefully reminds us that Meillassoux in his appeal to chronology is deploying an argument within the field of logic in order to attack the correlate, yet in doing so is danger of ceding too much ground to correlationism. Brassier claims there is a fundamental asymmetry between the scale cosmological and anthropomorphic time and under our current scientific understanding of spatiotemporal relations, time and space are deemed indissociable. This doesn’t negate the weight of Meillassoux’s critical observations on the correlation, but Brassier would prefer to unyoke the argument from its chronological basis, by creating another sort of suspension (principally via the ‘transcendental hiatus’ that Laurelle provides with the discovery of the descisional basis of all of philosophy).  And for Brassier, ancestrality not the only manner in which to challenge the presumption of correlationism, he maintains that modern natural science provides numerous examples of contemporaneous processes that occur autonomously of any relationship we have them. For instance: the unicellular organisms that survive for centuries within the Siberian permafrost or endolithic microorganisms that grow within the very sandstone rocks of the McMurdo valley, in Antarctica. And if we overemphasize the ontological rupture of the ancestral statement, we do so at the expense of other co-existant processes that are patently not for us and clearly belong to the glacially indifferent in-itself.

Meillassoux continues his speculative argument by searching for a non-contradictory replacement for God, the God by which Descartes guarantees the existence of extended substance and derives the absolute reach of mathematics. This absolute is intrinsically tied to the principle of sufficient reason, which although identified by Leibniz was already at work in Descartes. Instead, Meillassoux opts for a principle of unreason and supplants Descartes absolute with the chaos-god of absolute time. He names this contingency-based absolute time hyper-Chaos, which he describes as ‘not just a time whose capacity for destroying everything is a function of laws, but a time which is capable of the lawless destruction of every physical law’ [AF, p62]. And it is this I which opens a further problematic front regarding access to the in-itself, one which demands Meillassoux reinvestigate Hume’s problem of induction, for which he offers his own speculative solution to counter Kant’s frequentialist completion of Hume. That said, Brassier, through his Laurellean operations doesn’t require a rehabilitation of Descartes to overcome the correlate of thought, pointing to a ‘more rigourous way to root out the philosophy of correlationism’.  And as far as I know Meillassoux and Brassier part company on this somewhat.

To be added:

•    To describe the import of Laurelle in providing a transcendental hiatus for philosophy, in order to overcome the correlation. Here we need to indentify how Laurelle turns the resources of transcendentalism against idealism, which avoids the choice that faces Brassier between Badiou’s peculiar critique and a return to a Cartesian metaphysics, as proposed by Meillassoux.

•    To examine the ontologies of Heidegger and Deleuze, particularly how they move the question of being in relation to time forward. Each in turn orientates being toward death, yet in Heidegger death is appropriated by the subject, whereas in death is impersonal and no one’s in Deleuze. Here I’ll also identify the correlation in each ontology and how this pertains the apex of Brassier’s argument in his final chapter ‘The Truth of Extinction’.

•    To explain the conclusions drawn from Brassier’s reexamination of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which I’ll provide a comparison with Deleuze’s account of trauma in Difference and Repetition. And demonstrate how Brassier’s radical nihilism goes far beyond Deleuze’s Nietzschean affirmation of the essential nature of things and how he foresees a new role for philosophy in order to make it more commensurate with scientific understanding.

•    A discussion as to whether there are any aesthetic consequences derived from speculative materialism, so I will work through Herzog’s treatment of man’s encounter with nature in Encounters at the End of the World. It would also be useful to examine the manner in which representation might necessarily return in the light of speculative philosophy’s discoveries.

Speculative Realism/Materialism Workshop UWE 2009

Ray Brassier/Iain Grant-Hamilton/Graham Harman/Alberto Toscano

Update: Some more impressions of the conference at Speculative Heresy and some photos here.

Ray Brassier began with a general overview of the scope of speculative philosophy — which I noticed that Badiou in his introduction to Meillassoux’s After Finitude simply nominates as ‘philosophy’. Speculative philosophy encompasses realism in relation to materialism and is more generally defined as an antipathy to the rampant correlationsim that exists in post-Kantian philosophy.

Brassier, in the absence of Meillassoux, outlined correlationism as making the claim that: you cannot conceive of the world independently of human beings or vice-versa. This effectively dissolves epistemology. Subject and object are then hypostasized as poles of the correlation, which is then treated as a substance or actually existing. The correlation absolutises the very subject/object dualism that it claims to overcome in metaphysical dogmatism. Meillassoux attacks correlationism from inside out, that is to say, he destroys the fortress of correlationism from within by working through the correlation itself and the philosophical resources it provides us with.

Brassier elaborated here on Stove’s Gem which identifies that idealism rests on the ‘worst argument in the world’. Stove attacks Bishop Berkley who in short claimed we cannot conceive of a mind-independent reality without a mind to conceive that mind-independent reality.

….[the mind] is deluded to think it can and does conceive of bodies existing unthought of, or without the mind, though at the same time they are apprehended by, or exist in, itself. [Berkley]

This is a subjective idealist position based on a tautology. Here David Stove shares a critique of idealism with Russell and Nietzsche. As an aside, Brassier was keen to point out that Stove was a minor philosophical gadfly, who wrote numerous racist and sexist texts (The Intellectual Capacity of Women, anyone?), yet the simplicity of his critique on Berkley’s idealism was nonetheless appealing.

In correlationism the conditions of conception re-inscribe the concept by the substitution of ‘X’ for any verb whether it stands for sensation, embodiment (Husserlian ‘flesh’) or language — as it is in the case of Wittgenstein and Heidegger. In some way then, mind-independence requires concept independence and oxymoronically smuggles its own conclusion into its premise.

Consequently, experience is exhaustively prescribed in perception creating an ‘unsurpassable horizon of contemporary philosophy’. This is the destination that Berkely reaches via Locke in tackling Descartes primary/secondary quality distinction, in order to overcome the problem of metaphysical dogmatism that correlationism addresses. Berkley maintains that ideas are created by sensations and sensations are all that people can know about the world. Which is the basis of subjective idealism, which enthrones thought over reality.

Cartesian metaphysical dogmatism would have it that there are no rational grounds for an experience independent of substantial objects. In turn, correlationism assaults metaphysical reason which is typified by Descartes doubt/skepticism with regard to divine or natural ends to explain phenomena, the fallibility of sense data and thinking and extended substance. Kant searches for thinking/being’s instantiation through experience and his principles of experience (experience’s transcendental condition). According to Kant: we can have objective knowledge of reality confined to the experiential realm of phenomena and bounded by the necessary structure of sensation. This represents the destitution of intuition as intuition is tethered to sensation. Which brings the discussion back to thinking/sensation in Aristotle who states: we have access to the essential nature of things because being is meaningful.

In response, Graham Harman says that it is necessary to rehabilitate a version of substantial form, positing reality as a mind-independent, which revives Aristotlean form’s essential nature and inessential accidents. However, Graham doesn’t define this in an Aristotlean manner. Is it possible to say what a substantial form is unless you have the resources to define it? How do you account for the inessential nature of individuated entities (objects under Harman’s thesis)? Under what conditions can we access this? The metaphysical dogmatist requires God. For the dogmatist, intelligibility is inscribed in reality through the invocation of god, which results in a transcendental delimiting of the knowable phenomenal domain. Unfortunately, pre-critical realism  cannot be rehabilitated. We can no longer maintain the link between essence and meaning in the face of scientific understanding. Being cannot be meaningful, because we aren’t equipped to ‘know’ this. In a post-Darwinian world these claims are untenable, because we can’t say that evolution — let alone God — has equipped us to track the essential nature of things (i.e. reality). There is an incongruence between the mind and the world.

Why should we be committed to a mind-indpendent reality that is divine or natural? Will speculation allow this?

Yes, says Brassier. We should be committed to a reality with a determinate and cognizable structure. But it isn’t possible to reinscribe epistemology in metaphysics or dissolve it in ontology without degenerating into strong correlationism (things cannot exist without being perceived). Interestingly, Kant does not use the Stove’s Gem ‘worst argument’. For him objective reality is circumscribed within phenomenal bounds and consequently, he universalises reality through the structure of the correlate. The idealist heirs of Kant lop this off, absolutising the correlate and creating the illusory dichotomy between thought and being that we encounter in Nietzsche and Heidegger. Toscano later usefully reminded us that solutus ab means to sever or set apart from. The correlate can then not be grounded due to this absolutisation, arriving at the bounded finitude of reason. Knowing then supervenes on a set of conditions that cannot be exhaustively known [i.e. Dasein]. The ultimate consequence of the contingency of the correlation (facticity in Heidegger) is that we cannot ground the necessary conditions of the correlation, in turn producing a plurality of correlations. The undermining of dogmatism lets in fideism and superstition via the proliferation of post-Kantian absolutes.

This creates an association with materiality that is not useful, such as embodiment in phenomenology. It is a kind of materialism without matter that has no definition beyond the metaphysical definition of matter which gives a primacy to praxis. Material becomes an index of human practice. Materials are then an alibi for for this idealism manifested as social practice.

Correlationism was based around a legitimate qualm about the sensible and the intelligiblity of matter and form. But it creates an uncircumventable philosophical problem when it does away with subject/object dualism in order to overcome; it does away with epistemology itself. Second-order discourse then centres on human practice with its attendent ideological policeman. Brassier maintains that this is just not a good solution and in fact it represents a point of intellectual exhaustion. He says that this must be overcome and refused without regressing into further dogmatism or the correlationist circle.

In this respect, Laruelle is very useful. We could assume the difference between the conceptual and the extraconceptual as Hegel does. What is this extraconceptual residue? Concepts are always contingent. We cannot fix the the structure of ideation. We can know what things are without exhausting the essential nature of what things are, in the same manner that science is contingent. Laruelle says that every positing of the conceptual has a presupposition(?) that can’t be conceptually determined; a gap between the real and ideal that can’t be reinscribed within the correlationist circle. He offers a transcendental haitus here.

Iain Grant-Hamilton treated us to a highly amusing and quick-witted excoriation of Fichte’s completion of Kant, dealing with the problem of ground as treated by Gunnar Hindrichs. Sadly, though my notes aren’t really up to a decent description of his paper, particularly as I haven’t read Iain’s book which is now out in paperback.

Graham Harman gave a similarly entertaining examination of substance and whether speculative realism gives an adequate description. He proposed that most treatments of objects in philosophy were ‘not weird enough’; either being overmined or undermined. He then explored Giordano Bruno’s conception of substance, who he felt Spinoza had certainly drawn on. I enjoyed his colourful use of examples of objects which included chairs, tables and centaurs. Sadly, there were no hobbits this time.

Alberto Toscano offered a ‘critique of the critique of the critique’ entitled ‘Against Speculation’ in which he examined the only apparent moment of ethico-political import in After Finitude, raising the question as to whether materialism and speculation are compatible. Toscano drew on Lucio Colletti’s Marxism and Hegel and Marxism and the Dialectic contrasting it with Meillassoux’s thesis to ask:

1. Is non-metaphysical speculation possible?
2. What is the difference between materialism and realism?

His argument ran along the lines that dialectical materialism is an irrationalism for Colletti who sought to excise Hegelian idealism from Marxism. By setting entities against processes Colletti makes plea for pro-scientific materialism by asserting the extralogical nature of reality:

The fundamental principle of materialism and science…is the principle of non-contradiction. Reality cannot contain dialectical contradictions but only real oppositions, conflicts between forces, relations of contrariety. The latter are ohne Widerspruch, i.e. non-contradictory oppositions, and not dialectical contradictions. These assertions must be sustained, because they constitute the principle of science itself. now science is the only means of apprehending reality, the only means of gaining knowledge of the world. There cannot be two (qualitatively different) forms of knowledge. A philosophy which claims itself the status of superior to that of science, is an edifying philosophy — that is, a scarcely disguised religion. [Lucio Colletti, Marxism and the Dialectic, 28-9]

Toscano argued that the when Meillassoux attacks idealism, he could in turn be be cast as idealistic. Meillassoux states that fanaticism is the effect of rationality, a pernicious by-product of ‘dogmatic intellect’. For Melliassoux it is the errors of the intellect that create fanaticism, not errors in material reality. This seems a very credible query as that particular passage in After Finitude had given me pause.

Hume, Hyper-Chaos and Contingency

“That the sun will not rise to-morrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise.” – David Hume

My understanding of Hume is via Deleuze who has an idiosyncratic reading. Hume was the subject of Deleuze’s first book Empiricism and Subjectivity and pops up again later as the focus of Pure Immanence, although Deleuze is concerned with partiality in Hume’s moral philosophy, as well as empiricism. This article is an attempt by me to get to grips with contingency in Hume in relation to Meillassoux’s critique of Kant’s solution to the problem of induction.

As an empiricist, Hume begins his philosophical investigations with everyday observations about the world. So he privileges direct experience and seeks to ascertain the relations between things that provide the reality of our experience, rather than building an immovable philosophical edifice. In so doing, Hume seeks to emulate the method of scientific empiricism and physics of his time.

For Hume, the mind is just a radical set of ideas (not the origin of experiential thought). This amalgam of ideas can then be endlessly reconfigured and restructured into new associations, so it is never predetermined or preprogrammed. In essence, this amalgam of endlessly re-combinable and dynamic ideas is what constitutes the ’self’ or ‘I’. Accordingly, the self for Hume is a fiction that is determined by practice (habits or custom). There is therefore never any ‘universal’ laws or constancy that governs the relation of these ideas. If there are any ‘rules’ these are merely contingent and impermanent, much as we observe in science, which allows us to ’suppose’ a set of contingent rules until we encounter new evidence that refutes the model that we have espoused. Hume had a distinct influence on Karl Popper’s philosophy of science here, particulalry regarding falsification.

Deleuze appropriates Hume from the group of Enlightenment thinkers that he is usually lumped with (Descartes, Locke and Berkley) and reckons him to be a philosopher of the future, despite some of his more obvious flaws. He even claims that Kant owes something essential to Hume. Hume seems as relevant as ever at the moment, as the reality that he problematizes still lies at the heart of philosophical debate. These problems are confronted in After Finitude by French philosopher and speculative materialist Quinten Meillassoux. He embarks on resolving some of Hume’s questions, which Ray Brassier investigates in turn in Nihil Unbound in the chapter titled ‘The Enigma of Realism’; which is eminently useful for unpacking these core controversies.

The question that Meillassoux principally addresses is the controversy of the problem of causality and Hume’s ideas regarding contingency and the uniformity of nature. This is commonly known as the Problem of Induction. Which is all fascinating.

If we look at any causal relationship (A follwed by B) we know through experience and observation that B always follows A; it has done so in all past occurrances. Yet Hume maintains that A and B are not bound by any universal principle of causation. So the problem is characterised by the question: why do we infer that the regularity of B following A, which has been observed until now, will hold in the future? How do we know the sun will rise tomorrow?

Hume’s response is that of ‘inductive inference’, which is merely the association of ideas and hence a psychological habit formed over time. In so doing Hume casts doubt on inductive reasoning; which is presumed to be the core of scientific enterprise. This critique of induction casts doubt upon the verifiability of scientific theory. For Hume it is logically impossible to verify a universal proposition by reference to experience. In response to this argument Karl Popper develops his falsificationist philosophy of science, through which science’s law-like generalisations are not inductively verified, but deductively falsified.

Therefore, an experiment can never verify a scientific law; it can only falsify it, since a single counter-example allows us to deduce its falsity. This very much correlates to the importance of contingency in Hume. So, even the best corroborated scientific theories could be overthrown by one counter-instance. Part of the problem of Popper’s science philosophy is that it presumes a uniformity of nature, but Hume’s critique of causality undermines this.

Hume is fascinated by the discrepancy between the vast realm of logical possibility and narrow domain of empirical actuality. Brassier uses Hume’s example of billiard balls to illustrate this:

When I see for instance, a billiard-ball moving in a straight line towards another; even suppose the motion in the second ball should by accident be suggested to me, as a result of their contact or impulse; may I not conceive that a hundred different events might as well follow from this cause? May not these balls remain at absolute rest? May not the first ball return in a straight line, or leap off from the second in any line or direction? All these suppositions are consistent and conceivable. Why then should we give preference to one, which is no more consistent or conceivable as the rest? All our reasonings a priori will never be able to shew us any foundation for this preference. [David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding]

Whilst there is no good ‘reason’ why we should find one outcome more plausible, our ‘belief’ in causality encourages our predicted outcome to be necessary. This is the uniformity of experience that Hume says we predict through habit; so the nature of belief is somewhat habitual. It is therefore merely habit that allows us to perceive nature as anchored in a uniformity of occurrences. Habits generate the appearance of uniformity. We have an irrational faith in the sun rising tomorrow through necessity; we believe it will through the constancy of appearances.

By confiscating the ground of uniformity from reason, Hume abandons it to faith. In so doing he paves the way for Kant’s natural theology, the transcendentalisation of uniformity and his legitimation of fideism (synonymous with christian apologetics and apposite to strong corelationism under Meillassoux’s definition). Kant completes the question of whether constancy should be a necessary feature of our experience of phenomena. This is the question that Hume begins by rooting uniformity in association and association in habit. Kant comes up with a ‘frequentialist’ solution to the problems of uniformity and constancy, which Meillassoux then counters with an ‘anti-frequentialist’ answer in which he deploys mathematics to demonstrate that Kant’s solution is untenable. If Hume denies the rationality of our belief in the reality of uniformity — without denying that uniformity itself — by identifying belief as originating in habit, he transforms the problem of induction into a question of how our experience of constancy is possible.

This is the aporia that Kant takes up in the The Critique of Pure Reason and it falls to him to complete it. Kant in turn transforms it from a metaphysical question about reality-in-itself, into a transcendental question about our experience of phenomena. Kant surmises that: If there is no constancy in appearances, then no representation of appearances (i.e. phenomena) would be possible.

So, in summary, since representation manifestly occurs, it suffices to refute a sceptical hypothesis of a world without constancy. Kant concludes that in a world in which causality and the principle of uniformity are suspended — a world in which not only billiard balls are unpredictable, but also their entire global context (the table, the walls, etc.) — such a world would be unrepresentable to ourselves, therefore unimaginable and an impossibilty. For Kant all such phenomena would be subject to endless chaotic transformations, which is inconceivable.

Kant therefore claims that uniformity is not a necessary feature of noumena (things-in-themselves), but that the possibility of consciousness and representation itself requires the constancy of phenomena. It is essential to it. One presupposes the other to produce a global stability of context. So in The Critique of Pure Reason Kant goes on to demonstrate that the law-like regularities which science finds in nature are essential and necessary features of phenomenal reality.

Meillasoux, in After Finitude, infers from Kant’s answer to the problem of induction a ‘transcendental legitimation’ for the necessity of uniformity. This is perhaps an unstated inference, but nonetheless detectable. Meillasoux observes that if representation presupposes constancy, and constancy requires a uniformity, one cannot conclude that uniformity is necessary. This relies on assumption and perhaps to legitimation via transcendental recourse.

Kant would have it that if phenomena were inconsistent and the laws of nature based in contingencies, it is the frequency of their transformations that would render them unrepresentable. This is why we could characterise Kant’s solution as ‘frequentialist’, as the rate of capricious transformation in an unstable global context would preclude the act of synthesis whereby the mind reproduces the properties of appearances from one moment to the next:

If cinnabar were sometimes red, sometimes black, sometimes light, sometimes heavy, if a man changed into this and sometimes into that animal form, if the country on the longest day were sometimes covered in fruit, sometimes with ice and snow, my empirical imagination would never find opportunity when representing red color to bring to mind heavy cinnabar. [Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason]

So the ’sometimes’ of Kant’s solution is a unambiguous reference to a ‘putative’ frequency that precludes representation. Meillasoux’s counter-argument calls this into question. Meillasoux then sets about constructing a ’speculative’ solution to Hume’s problem in which he posits reality as a storm of hyper-chaos.

Sources:

Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (2008)
Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity (2001) and Pure Immanence (2001)
Quinten Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (2008)

Luca Bertolo: The Domain of Painting

Italian painter Luca Bertolo is having a solo show at Arcade Fine Arts, opening tonight. I’m looking forward to meeting Luca and pleased he liked my press release. The show consists of advertsing pages from Art Forum that he’s painted over and elaborated on. And from what I’ve seen so far, it looks great.

Arcade Fine Arts, 87 Lever Street, London EC1V 3RA

March 19 – April 18 2009 Private View Wednesday March 18, 18:00 – 20:00

Press Release

If we take culture as the most ‘frivolous and serious’ of activities, we can see how Luca Bertolo’s most recent experimental and playful work might fit into this schema. Through his appropriation of the communicative fashion supplement or art journal advert – which he uses as a substrate to re-inscribe with his singular painterly subjectivity – he creates his own auto-referential Universe, which cannot be reduced to formalism or mere informational conceptualism. Here is an example of painting as a mode of construction and production of subjectivity, a heterogenetic practice in which subjectivity is a further augmentation to the painter’s polychromatic palette.

Art occupies a privileged position in contemporary capitalist society. This unique self-positioning can be traced back to the Renaissance when artists first began to express their own subjectivities. Art was able to detach itself from the specific axioms that governed society and consequently, art now heralds a novel ethical and aesthetic paradigm of previously unforeseen and unthinkable qualities of being. It performs this through processes of emergent potential and techniques of experimental creativity. It ruptures and sutures reality with the materials it finds present-at-hand, utilising all of the plastic arts to mobilise the vectors of sensation in order to offer resistance to capitalism’s overcoding regimes of communication. Accordingly, art is a laboratory for the crystallisation of mutant subjectivities, painterly or otherwise. Art, in the institutional sense is fully integrated and complicit with capitalism, yet the productive and constructive qualities of art still privilege and engender the radically new. This resingularisation is counter to the totalising and subsuming continuum we inhabit, a system that only produces for production’s sake.

As an inheritor of Duchamp’s readymade, Bertolo goes beyond the merely informational re-presentation of the commodity, overflowing the discursive and linguistic boundaries that Duchamp intended, in which the readymade is circumscribed as capitalist signifier. And whilst Bertolo still has formal and conceptual concerns, his work cannot be reduced to bald concept or simple commodity alone; it constructs anti-materialist existential territories via the affective register. This surpasses the discursive artistic games of the informational readymade and speaks of something more implicitly political and democratic that teeters on the anarchic. Subsequently, meaning actively multiplies in the work – it swarms in the manner of poetics. The work becomes a ‘movable host of metaphors’, an irreducible mobile cusp that more adequately models the chaos of our reality. By this operation it delimits itself from capitalist purview and invents its own unique domain.

Andrew Osborne 2009

More of Luca’s work: here

On The Idea of Communism

Here is the speedy write-up of my notes from the three-day conference on The Idea of Communism, hosted by Slavoj Žižek at Birkbeck College, which included Judith Balso, Alain Badiou, Bruno Bosteels, Terry Eagleton, Peter Hallward, Michael Hardt, Toni Negri, Jacques Ranciere, Alessandro Russo, Alberto Toscano and Gianni Vattimo. I have only managed to type up my notes on a few of the papers, although I may try to add Judith Balso’s a little later, if time and the legibility of my notes allows. Please excuse my mangling of some of the terms. The conference was a resounding success and Žižek was thoroughly entertaining, if only the same could be said of some of the questions that the speakers were subjected to. I particularly enjoyed Michael Hardt’s contribution on the concept of the common and its relation to immaterial labour. Also, there was a fair few mentions of the cultural revolution and the Shanghai People’s Commune, which is something that would appear to warrant further investigation on my part, as my understanding of Chinese mass politics is limited. Žižek’s attempt to get the 800-strong audience to sing the ‘Internationale’ at the end was nothing short of heroic. However, the call for the abolition of christmas got the biggest round of applause.

UPDATE: Dr. Nina Power has posted Alberto Toscano’s full paper on Infinite Thought: Communist Power/Communist Knowledge

Costas Douzinas began by making some comments on the denaturalisation of neo-liberal values that the crisis has brought about. And there were apologies for the lack of  representation from Latin America.

Further introductions:

Alain Badiou: Addressed the word ‘communism’ as a dead word and its need to become a new positive word. The need for it to talk not of generalities, but about different significations and convictions. Therefore not a return to classical critique, but a search for something new, a renewal.

Slavoj Žižek: Began by mentioning that today was by coincidence Friday 13th, a good day to discuss dangerous dynamics. He also mentioned that a particular academic, who currently resides in the US, could not attend the conference as he was told he would not have his visa renewed for re-entry to the States. He continued by saying that the epoch of the party-state is over, but there was a new urgency to bring about existing communism. It needs to be resuscitated and rethought. Now is the time to think! An injunction to engage in the blood, sweat and tears of theoretical work (reminding us that this is a philosophy conference). We need to break from the ethical blackmail of neo-liberalism. ‘The Stigma of Communism is Over!’, this should be our new slogan. Apology is over. We can do it better! He concluded by saying that we should be like Lenin in 1915, two years before the Bolshevik revolution, when he perversely retreated to Switzerland to read Hegel.

MICHAEL HARDT: The Production of the Common

excerpt from his latest book, co-written with Toni Negri entitled Commonwealth

The common in the word communism. The terrain of the common is composed of two parts:

- the production of the common.
- the common being antithetical to property.

We are faced with a choice, either to to invent new terms or struggle over the meaning of existing but corrupted terms. Communism is a degraded term and democracy is a similarly corrupted term. In order to produce a critique of political economy and bring about the destruction of property, we must move from Lenin to Marx. We must investigate the contemporary composition of labour and the conditions of property that we labour under.

Therefore, by returning to Marx we can enquire into the relation between property and the common, the movement from immobile property to mobile property and how mobile property ‘attacks’  and triumphs over the stasis of immobile property. In this way, profit triumphs over rent. This is the dominant mode of expropriation under industrial capitalism, at the time Marx wrote Das Kapital. But now, under cognitive capitial, there is a reversal of rent triumphing over profit. Marx’s claim is a statement of industry’s hegemony over agriculture; this is a qualitative claim about the discipline of industrial capitalism. Today industry no longer has hegemony; this is also a qualitative claim. The successor maybe bio-political and immaterial hegemony; an informational hegemony. Now the product/commodity is immaterial, not the labour. Affective, emotional work is now essential to the valorisation process (the air hostess, call-centre worker, etc.).

This takes us back to two forms of property (reproducible and irreproducible, mobile and immobile). The current conflict over copyright, the human genome, etc. highlights this reversal and inaugurates new problems for property: the immaterial over the material and the shared over the exclusive. Ideas, images and affects must now be shared. The commodity itself is now becoming a fetter on the capitalist mode of production. Neo-liberalism has been a continual battle against that which is common (or the commons in the 17th century sense). Hence, the perpetual necessity to privatise the common and commons; this is thoroughly documented by David Harvey and Naomi Klein. Biopiracy is exactly this sort of privatisation, giving actual pirates a bad name, a kind of inverse piracy.

So, there is a reverse movement within cognitive capitalism from profit to rent and exploitation through appropriation of the common. The turn to economic financialisation is characterised by this general trend of profit to rent. In Marx’s description of mobile property’s triumph over immobile property capital must remain tied to production, which in turn leads to the increased autonomy of the common (see Marx’s early manuscripts).

If we want to discuss the common in relation to communism it is necessary to talk about the abolition of private property and property in general; both private and public. The dialectic between private and common property ignores the common (private property under capitalism and public property under socialism).  The divestment of the common is key to human self-estrangement and the means by which our subjectivity is appropriated. Subjectivity is the creation/production of something sensorial (‘man produces man’). This has some relevance to the bio-political turn. ‘Living beings, as fixed capital, are directly productive of value’, says Christian Marazzi. Capital in its essence is a social relation, not a commodity. Commodity is merely the appearance of that relation. For Foucault, who pronounced that ‘man produces man’, he is not talking about humanism or human essence, it is an injunction to produce the new as a bio-political process.

There is a proximity between property and bio-political production. Capital in this sense, is ‘producing its own gravediggers’. Therefore, the common is a terrain of sharing. So here we have:

- a plea for a critique of political economy of how and what we produce.

- and an affirmation of the common (the autonomy of the common/communism as a weapon).

PETER HALLWARD: Communism of the Intellect, Communism of the Will

The virtues of the communist idea are distinct from anti-capitalism. Anti-capitalism concedes too much to the idea of capitalism. How long must we wait for capitalism’s destruction? We must decriminalise the notion of communism and disregard objections about distribution; which are very similar to the arguments for slavery, unable to envisage a future post-slavery. It is crucial to anticipate the solution in the manner of the Jacobins or John Brown, rather than wait for a solution. Communism is far from indeterminate. It is not just an ideal, but a real movement that abolishes the present state of things. There is always a danger of abstraction (to adopt an idealistic Kantian  ‘program’) or conversely, over-identifying with action. But rather than doing nothing or everything, instead to do something sensible.

How far do we need to prepare the ground  for capitalism’s grave and how much do we dig the grave of capitalism? Revolution is a thinking process of becoming. The class called-forth by capitalism will expropriate the expropriators. Communism is therefore an egalitarian movement of free producers. What is at stake? Mastery of humanity over nature and their own social organisation, as the example of the Paris Commune shows us. Voluntary self-determination comes about through will and self-determination is the will of the people. The Jacobin will is carried over into communism as a collective will.

Dialectical voluntarism is a difficult propostion. Will is a philosophical problematic (will/intention/volition). Rousseau maintained that political will is voluntary rather than involuntary, it is a willing freedom which renders one alternative better than another according to what is in our power and capacity. As Robespierre suggests, it is to ‘freely prescribe our own ends’.

Political will is composed of our direct action and participation. It is a willing of the Platonic general without which there is no common. It is the inaugural association in the common or general interest, that which is most just and most equal, in which the self is carried into the general.

The willing of the general interest will dissolve if the will cannot be reconciled with ‘a people’. Therefore, the need to identify with a general will. This is revolutionary, the mobilisation of the people themselves; i.e. The Will of the People. This is not an intellectual conception of justice, but a popular self-empowerment. Class is action. The will is a practice that cannot be represented. Will commands the execution of action The oppressed already own that which they are reappropriating (this is a demand external to time, without time, so there is no waiting involved). There is then a necessity to create a ‘living communism’, by which we no longer wait for socialism to be built. Otherwise we could wait forever, socialism would be endlessly postponed.

Rights protect order, prosperity and property. Freedom is achieved through will and acting, and as soon as it sleeps it is enchained. Virtue is equal to the dedication to the general will. Rousseau proclaims that, ‘…we must make virtue reign’.

If we go forward to Marx’s dictatorship of the proletariat, will only proceeds in the face of resistance (will with resistance). The question then morphs into: to continue or not to continue? To stop before the end is to perish. Therefore, there is a requirement for continual revolution. The Jacobins would contend that ‘that which is good is often terrible’, in order to maintain the deliberate will of the people. In a sense this a defence of violence, when the State adopts the will of the people and carries out violence in their name. Will ≠ Wish/Fantasy (Sartre). Through acting will is consolidated; a concrete determination (see Hegel vs. Kant).

We prescribe our own ends and make our own history. Disemancipation is tantamount to voluntary servitude, as  Étienne de La Boétie names it (we only have to look at our own impotence in the face of the Iraq War). Therefore there is a need to reengage with collective politics against the the repacification of people (e.g Gaza and Haiti).

The question is: who’s side are we on?

ALBERTO TOSCANO: The Politics of Abstraction.

Toscano begins by stating he will not address action, more the question of communism for philosophy. There is a need to define how communism rose from and against philosophy. This is crucial to its reinvention. The political politics of abstraction are a doomed attempt to philosophize the world through abstraction. The enthusiasm for the abstract (negativism) brings about a fanaticism of the abstract against the concrete.  There is a critique of communism as an ideocracy (via its abstraction) which comes from Anglo-Saxon empiricism. Yet Marx himself was against dogmatic abstraction or the dogmatic anticipation of the world to come. The problem therefore becomes one of non-dogmatic anticipation

What does it mean to anticipate? Philosophy anticipates inversely(?) (see German backwardness in The German Ideology). The unmasking of religion leads into the unmasking of politics. This is productive immanent negativity. If I negate A, I am still left with B. This is the farce of restoration without revolution. So political backwardness is set against the radicality of Marx’s philosophy. The classical model of revolution is inactive, therefore philosophy is impractical and action/actuality must strive towards thought (isn’t this also the ideality of capitalism?). The specificity of communism contains a tension towards revolution in the idea. Equality, revolution, power and knowledge which are defined in contrast to economics are inherently problematic.

In his critique of the Gotha Program Marx is opposed an economic theory of justice and the equal right of all. The abrogation of exploitation will not simply end in justice. Distribution is still problematic in the transition to communism. And equality is still predicated on capitalism, it is a capitalist form of measurement and bourgeois right(s).

Communism is the determinate, not a negation of capitalism. It requires a non-standard equality without a concept. A post-revolutionary situation would require the creation of a society in which inequalities are inoperative beyond standard right and equality. This realisation is intrinsic to communism, not secondary. Accordingly, communism is a problem not an idea (see Deleuze’s Bergsonism  for his definition of problems and ideas). Communism anticipates politics philosophically and there is an antimony here between aim and practice. Reification and concretisation are deeply unsatisfactory beyond the question of right and value. There is a need to find ways of fostering political capacity. What is the role for knowledge (not just truth)? Tronti says, ‘Science as struggle is an ephemeral knowledge’.

There is an urgency in this task for a world that only imagines that it believes in itself.

The question of communism needs to be turned into a real question.

TONI NEGRI: Communism, Reflections on the Concept and Practice.

The basis of historical materialism is one of class struggle. Class struggle is communism. It is a case of being inside the movement and its critique is not a telos.

Communism is a history of class struggle and a relation of power characterised by the hegemony of capitalist command. It is the relation between worker and boss. Capital’s hegemony is global, meaning that we are encompassed by its totality (both worker and boss). This is a reality in which we only experience exchange value, there is no longer use value. Communism takes shape when the worker targets and reappropriates community. As Marx states, ‘Money is itself the community of capitalism’. For instance, who could conceive of doing without finance? The common now belongs to exchange value, soiled by the apex of Capital. So there is a new question, regarding the metamorphosis of Capital through struggle, struggle being the antagonism between workers and Captial. The event is the starting point, not the destination.

Being a communist means being against the State, composed of private property, production and exploitation, and being against the public, again which is a source of alienation and exploitation. The public is the State’s common. Therefore, communism is the enemy of socialism. Socialism has a tendency to neutralise the history of class struggle without questioning capitalist command.

Workers form an immanent subjectivity inside capitalism itself. Resistance and refusal form/produce new power with new knowledge, it is the constant motion of the production of new subjectivities. Dual power is short-lived, this is constituent power’s importance. Communism is neither anarchy or dictatorship.

Building a new world requires starting from our present circumstances, it is the realisation of building power that is superior to present power. Only force makes this possible (e.g. strike, riot, migrancy, exodus). Collective revolutionary will exalts the rupture. There is no revolution without organisation (the organised surplus or surplus value). Communism is closer at hand today because of cognitive capital, that surplus that is indigestible to capitalism. This is where present capital differs from industrial capital (see Hardt). We require a multiplication of struggle and the development of new institutions of the common from below. This is not a dialectical affirmation of the will, but it is generated from the inside the multitude itself. Under capitalist command, bio-power itself is put to work.

What is a communist ethics? It is indignation and refusal in which militance and struggle open onto a new plane, working towards a multitude, a true democracy. We therefore need to radically think the democracy of the common belonging to all. Solitude is death through individualist reality. We need new forms of constituent power through the take-over of bio-political dispositives (i.e. figures of power). In this manner use value will be returned to the inside of the totality. A multi-coloured Orpheus will emerge from underground, a new use value, a new common. Use value will be the new foundation of this new constitution.

ALAIN BADIOU: Communists without Communism.

Construction of the concept of communism requires the proposal of 4 elements. It is therefore a complex idea:

1/ The Political
2/ The Historic
3/ The Subjective
4/ The Ideal

THE POLITICAL: The condition of political truth.  Empirically, it is the a concrete sequence of emancipatory politics (the French Revolution, the Cultural Revolution, etc.). A truth procedure and the construction of new truth in the political field which is specific and particular.

THE HISTORICAL: Truth has historical dimensions. There is an interplay between different truths and the truth is also retroactive.

THE SUBJECTIVE: There is the possibility of an individual to decide to become part of  a truth procedure, a militant truth beyond his or herself. A new subjectivity, that represents the subjectivisation of the concrete sequence of emancipatory politics.

THE IDEAL: Which is the synthesis of the other 3 element’s nature. The subjectivisation between political truth and global history, an operation through which the singularity is connected to the global movement of history. It is a historical decision and a realisation of belonging to a movement of history.

To be a communist empirically means to be a militant of a communist party, a historical agent of the becoming of humanity. This cannot be a purely political idea. It is not purely ideological, but inside the synthesis of the aforementioned elements.

Communism is the Real of politics, in the construction of a historical fiction.

Some abstract definitions:

THE EVENT: An event is a rupture, not the realisation of a possibility, but the creation of a new possibility. Not simple possibilities, but the possibility of possibilities.

THE STATE: The State is a system of constraints that limits possibilities. That which is possible or not. The event is beyond the State and not prescribed by the State.

THE TRUTH PROCEDURE: The truth procedure is a fact by opposition to the event. Truth is not composed of facts. What is it? Truth is the becoming of a new subject. The creation of the truth. This creation is the creation of a ’space’ of communism. An idea presents the truth as fact and inside the idea (of communism), we have the presentation of truth. Between event and fact some facts are symbols of truth, exposed like a historical fact (the direction of history), a real sequence of the truth.

A PROPER NAME: The function of an idea is a function of the exposition of the truth. Something in relation to empirical existence and its realisation. It is the inscription of the real in  the symbolic order of history. There is an imaginary point in the idea of truth between the anonymous and its proper name (the symbolic form). The proper name is a singularity that saves the truth from its invisibility. The truth is also in art, science, and love. It is the possibility of exposition in the form of a new state.

How can we be prepared? We must be orientated towards the acceptance of the event. We live in political passivity, in which State’s law is historical necessity. Therefore, we must have an idea — the possibility of possibilities — of something else. We require the affirmation that new truth is historically possible (a synthesis between the pure real and an event with the support of an idea). Communism is the name of this idea, the name of  politics itself. It is the name of the possibility of possibilities, inscribed within a space, the fact that an event is possible. The point is not continue the communist hypothesis, but to reestablish the hypothesis.

The idea of a communist state is a monster. Communism requires the decline of the State and is in fact the organisation of the the decline of the State (see Mao). We must beware of false syntheses of certain communisms, we must separate communism and the State.

Today we are nearer the 19th century than the 20th century  with the arrival of utterly cynical capitalism. We are witnessing the return of all sorts of 19th century phenomena such as pirate nationalisations, nihilistic despair and the servility of intellectuals.

We must create strong subjectivity and subjective existence in relation  to the communist hypothesis, this must be a new form of existence, other than its existence in the 20th century.

If we take De Sade’s injunction: ‘You must, so you can’ and reverse it, we arrive at ‘We can, so we must’.

[The failure of socialism is a political failure due to distrust and secrecy in politics. The masses are not exposed to politics]

The Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm: Tribal Assemblages and Space Rock

Here is a transcript of the talk I delivered at the Royal Academy for the GSK Contemporaries. The evening was titled Psychosomatic Acid Test and hosted by Mark Titchner. My mini-lecture preceded a Hawkwind tribute band, Evel Gazebo, who played Space Ritual in its entirety, hence the references to ‘Space Rock’ in the closing part of the text.

The ethico-aesthetic paradigm is an object of experimentation that seeks to circumvent obstacles in the formal structure of power – whether it be neoliberal-democratic, Marxist-Leninist revolutionary, or whether that power is constituted by Habermasian democratic consensus or by LacLau and Mouffe’s antagonistic discursive negotiation of difference.

Subjectivity – or that which constitutes the self – is key to the ethico-aesthetic paradigm that Félix Guattari prospectively traces in his late book Chaosmosis. Here he attempts to conceptualize the creation of new collective subjectivities and in this it is very much a continuation of Foucault’s writing on the self and bears some similarities to Marshal McLuhan’s move from individualism and fragmentation towards a collective identity, with a ‘tribal base’. Throughout the 20th Century being-against is pretty well formalised and Guattari seeks to enquire into being-together. Much of this research is derived from Guattari’s own psychiatric practice at La Borde Clinic and his afflilations with political groups, such as Italian Autonomous Marxism.

The subject and its individuation is an objective and target within Capitalism. The most of obvious historical example of this is the creation of the figure of mass assembly-line worker called forth by Fordism. Under capitalist command, the subject is individuated through particularly miserable processes of subjugation and capitalist discipline. So Guattari’s inquiry into subjectivity concerns new possibilities of being and consequently experimental political configurations, coordinations and situations that have yet to be defined.

In Chaosmosis, Félix Guattari develops a geneaology of Assemblages of Ennunciation (i.e modalities of subjectivation). He then uses this to illustrate how art has recently detached itself from its axiological references – particularly, Capitalism’s overcoding field of axioms/the laws governing and pertaining to capitalist society. Accordingly, he identifies an exceptional new paradigm that art has come to embody. Art now has the ability to produce alterity, mutant creative subjectivities and actualisations of heterogeneous otherness. Through art, individuals find themselves ‘enveloped by transversal collective identities’ and ’situated at the intersections of numerous partial subjectivations’. The subject is now connected to the exterior with a direct contact to outside/social life rather than building ‘interiorised faculties’. Guattari states that a new ethical understanding is brought about from this relation to the exteriority. In a sense, ethics reconnects us to the external. Importantly, when Guattari talks about art he is not referring to the institution of Art – which is completely compliant and intergrated with Capitalism – more the techniques and practice of art and the emergent creativity it privileges and engenders.

Art, in contrast to other spheres of human activity, through the restraints of finite materials, through percept and affect, allows the infinite, virtual and immaterial instances to irrupt and crystallize on the plane of the real (and for us this is Capitalist reality). This is entirely a result of certain mutations that have allowed art to detach itself from its historical axiological references and ascribe it a privileged position as laboratory for the subject. This has its beginnings back in the Renaissance, when artists first began to express their own subjectivies. Gauttari’s genealogy of this evolution of the Assemblages of Enunciation is divided into three modalities of subjectivation, which chart the development of societies through history to demonstrate how art has arrived at what he names ‘the ethico-aesthetic paradigm’. It is perhaps useful to point out that these assemblages overlap somewhat and are not necessarily distinct historical periods:

• The first assemblage is the Collective or Existential Territories. This is the nascent, emergent territorialized assemblage, the clan, tribe or collective-for-itself; that which we previously and erroneously called primitive hunter/gatherer societies. This assemblage articulates itself through pre-institutional religious practice and has the ability to actualise immaterial universes through chants, ritual drug use, dances and animism and affect a positive, affirmative drive toward deterritorialised infinity. Everything the collective-for-itself does connects it to the immaterial or cosmic and all other universes of value and their consequent potentialities. So, all practice, including hunting, healing and reproduction performs this.

• The second phase in the geneology is that of the Transcendent Universals (or Capitalistic Deterritorialised Assemblage). The mechanisms of this assemblage are very much in keeping with Lacan’s Name of the Father, which Guattari expands and retools here. The society of transcendent universals ‘erects’ an autonomised pole of reference, which precedes the individuation of the subject and gives rise to the error in thinking of the individual as the end-point of a progressive specification of the species. The Assemblage of the Transcendent Universals attempts to reify the immaterial universes of the collective-for-itself into material form, a process of concretization. It creates hierarchies of Will, Reason, Understanding and Affectivity. What was rhizomatic and polyphonic in the Collective Territories of the tribe now becomes bi-polar, dualist and dialectical. This bi-polar nature results in valorisations such as good/evil and creates its own axioms of morality. It also rests on a continual recourse to transcendent, despotic and homogenetic instances such as Truth, God, the Signifier, the Scriptual, the Law, the Phallus, the Name of the Father, the Familial, the Imperial Order, The State, and eventually Capital – Finance Capital or Cognitive Capital in its highest incarnation. In contrast to these universals the collective-for-itself becomes unsure in the face of this signification. It is now risky for the collective to perform its ritual activities in the face of such universal surety. So there is a motion from the emergent values of the tribe towards neutralised universals, which operate via the Lie of the Ideal, as Nietzsche calls it. Through this standardisation of the subject the ennunciative compositions are limited. In some respects these mechanisms infantilise us and, as Lacan would no doubt say, fix us as the cause of others. This is the nature of collective individuation and subjectivation under Capitalism. In the most extreme instances the subject is informationalised ‘as so many pieces compatible with the mechanics of social domination’, that is to say, reduced to mere data.

• The third assemblage, the most pertinent to contemporary art practice, is Processual Immanence. This is the assemblage we currently find ourselves partially situated in. Guattari traces out this assemblage somewhat prospectively, as it still bears many symptoms of the proceeding assemblages. We should perhaps be mindful that this is also the assemblage under which global Capital operates. Yet, rather than marginalising the aesthetic paradigm it privileges it and ‘confers a key position of transversality with respect to other Universes of Value’:
  

  “Patently, art does not have a monopoly on creation, but it takes its the capacity to invent mutant coordinates to extremes and engenders unprecedented, unforeseen and unthinkable qualities of being.” [Guattari, Chaosmosis]

  Art contaminates homogeneity through creativity and the affirmation of the extremis. In this respect, artistic practice is an auto-affirming and self-creating machine. It crosses the threshold of Capitalist values and ideological structures. Art under the new aesthetic paradigm, through its extreme modalities, creates a perspectival ethics of its own not dependent on transcendent values. Art manages to crystallize into singular and dynamic constellations through its own mechanism: self-creative and ethico-ontological. The third assemblage should lead to the fall of an ontological Iron Curtain, the one erected between mind and matter. So this is a call for univocity from Guattari.

So if we are to wind back slightly, to the assemblage of the collective Territories and tribal cultures that proceed the fixed assemblages under the Transcendent Universals, then it is probably useful to discuss the anthropologist Pierre Clastres and his studies of Yanomami and Gauyaki Indians in the Amazon. Clastres, along with Richard Lee and Marshall Sahlins,was involved in a reversal of anthropological orthodoxy in the 1970’s and very much informed by May ‘68 in Paris, which had radical implications for their thinking. Both Sahlins and Clastres’ provided a polemic to the received ethnomarxist understanding of what were erroneously called ‘primitive’ societies.

Clastres levels his argument directly at Marxist anthropologists, who he accuses of ‘curling up in Marx’s beard’, and takes issue with the ethnomarxist presumption that primitive tribes live a life of subsistence, when in fact Clastres characterizes it as one of superabundance. Clastres mentions this isn’t entirely the fault of Marx and much of the problem lies with the understanding of scarcity that he inherits from the classical economists Adam Smith and Ricardo. There is both a Capitalist and evolutionist moral dimension to this assessment of lack. This inadequate perception of hunter/gatherer societies then persists unchallenged in the 20th Century academy, where primitivism is still prescribed as being a society without a State and living in bare subsistence; in other words societies without distinct organs of power or economic development. Clastres overthrows the received Marxist ethnological idea that the economy of these tribes is one of scarcity and poverty, he points out that if anything they suffer from an overabundance in relation to their needs that allows them to pursue their primary recreation: warfare. They work to clear the land for growing crops for two months of the year, the rest of the year is their own to produce their own cultural life, via warfare, hunting, shamanistic practice and reproduction. They do much more than merely subsist. Similarly in North America the ‘cult of the brave’ emerges historically with the arrival of horses with the Conquistadors, a technology that allows the sedentary pueblo farmers to follow the migratory paths of the buffalo, creating a situation of superabundance that frees them up to pursue expanded cultural practices.

With regards to univocity and cosmic universes of value, when Clastres comes to describe the therapeutics, drugs and shamanic activities of the Yanomami and Guayaki, he explains how these rituals take the form of an exploration of the invisible world and spiritual combat with entities that have broken the body/soul unity of the sick individual. So here we have a clear example of the assemblages connection to cosmic universes of value through the ritual practice of  therapeutic rites.

In the books The Society Against the State and The Archeology of Violence Clastres not only elucidates how the ‘primitive’ political organization of the Yanomami and Guayaki tribes is horizontal, that is to say egalitarian, he states that they actively resist hierarchy and the rise of any one individual over the rest of the tribe through complex political structures. The tribe is cleary an expression the collective-for-itself, a being-together or assemblage of the Collective Territories, as understood in Guattari’s genealogy of assemblages of enunciation. Violence in these societies maintains their singularity. Violence resists and wards off the rise of ‘monstrous’ power structures within the tribe and consequently the rise of The State, whilst the tribe continues to operate as a unitary whole. The role of the chief in these societies is unique in that he has very little agency and authority within the tribe. His main role is to speak for the tribe and determine the collective will of the tribe. If he is too forceful or initiates a war that tribe doesn’t want then he will be replaced or forced to commit suicide (usually through suicidal combat with an enemy tribe). War, therefore, ‘maintains the dispersal and segmentarity of groups’. It is a differential motor of distribution.

By positioning the subject of warfare at the heart of the tribe’s principal activities, Clastres asserts it as a positive affirmative trait that ensures the health and parcelization of tribal units that maintains their autonomy. Therefore, violence maintains difference and heterogeneity. The more warlike these tribes are the more they resist outside interference and this isolation protects them from our diseases and the ethnocidal consequences of contact. Homicide rates within their society are extremely high, and the average male has killed at least one other man in his lifetime. A couple of months ago the Brazilian department for Indian affairs released aerial photos of one of the last remaining uncontacted tribes on the Peruvian/Brazilian border. Members of the tribe were pictured fully painted red and black, which a representative of the Brazilian Indian Protection Agency identified as war paint, confirming this as a positive trait. He says:

“When I saw them painted red, I was satisfied, I was happy…Because painted red means they are ready for war, which to me says they are happy and healthy defending their territory.”

In Clastres’ writings in Society Against the State and Archaeology of Violence we find an effective model of how artistic-practice and other radical assemblages might function in creating emergent externalities to Capitalism, capable of instances of resingularisation and the preservation of heterogeneity. This is why Clastres becomes important to Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualisation of the nomadic War Machine – a nomos against the logos of sedentary distribution – finding an expression of the ‘crowned anarchy’ that Deleuze privileges in Difference and Repetition.

Contemporary art is shorn of the mystical and magical aura of tribal practice and techniques, but bears some similarities, namely the emergent nature of its creativity and ability to produce novel subjective configurations. So, if we take the 70’s rock group Hawkwind we find an example of a contemporary artistic assemblage that typifies Guattari’s ethical-aesthetic paradigm. They also perform the noisy, chants and dances of the tribe, but coordinate in a novel configuration. Here we have a group, an assemblage or collective-for-itself that creates new modalities of being-together. Hawkwind perform not only as a rock group – musically, within their accepted genre – but also as an ethico-aesthetic object; an experiment in anarcho-syndicalism and communal living that seeks to break capitalist temporality, occupying urban ’space’ in an unprecedented manner. In fact, they seem to have a preoccupation with space and consequently time. They seek to rupture the striated space of capitalism, in order to create a smooth space for their war machine through operations of different speeds. They are literally In Search of Space. Consequently, they herald a new ethical situation and seek a qualitative transformation of values that are simultaneously archaic and futural. They retroject themselves into the archaic past and project themselves to speak of societies and situations yet to come. They do so in an untimely speculative manner that is counter to the present, in the manner of science fiction.

In so doing, Hawkwind and other experimental groups from that period mobilise the materials of sensation and co-ordinate with similar collective assemblages which operate through transversal relations between different orders, artistic and anartistic, political and non-politcal, discursive and non-discursive, offering resistance to the overcoding axiomatic of capitalism. These materials of sensation are fashioned into what Alberto Toscano identifies as ‘new vectors and components for the construction of collective forms of existence […] a form of production which subtracts itself from the blackmail of security and the perceptual lures of a fragile and anxious commercial peace’. So the ethical-aesthetic paradigm is a mode of construction and production that attempts to discover a politics adequate to the desires of the collective subjectivity and productive forces of society.

Mark Titchner's flyer for the Psychosomatic Acid Test

Ray Brassier: A Critique of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition

I have just typed-up my somewhat haphazard notes from a lecture earlier in the year by the philosopher Ray Brassier, author of Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. In the lecture he outlined Deleuze’s critique of representation as found in Difference and Repetition, offering his own short critique at the end. When I spoke to him after the talk he told me about the ‘terrifying’ rigour of Deleuze’s book. He felt the only point of possible critique comes with this ‘leap’ to a spiritualisation of reality. Brassier suggests that Deleuze doesn’t provide an adequate explanation of his arrival at this pronouncement.

Firstly, Delueze’s critique of representation as found in Difference and Repetition is in distinct two parts:

1. Ontological

2. Epistemological

The critique continues on from Heidegger’s (Being/Time → Dasein), but is more radical as it presents new problems to the task of philosophy. It reconfigures and reconciles the Universal and the Singular with a positive concept of difference and repetition.

In Kant thought is capable of grasping reality and deals with identifying the conditions of understanding our objective reality. Kant’s transcendentalism is a critique of metaphysics (i.e. Aristotlean Matter and Form). The Universal pertains to Form, whilst Matter pertains to the sensible — that which can be sensed — which in turn pertains to the Singular. These are conditions that determine the structure of reality.

Deleuze in turn attacks Aristotlean metaphysics and Kantian epistemology. For him the logic of categorisation is specification, which is an unsatisfactory schema of difference. In the schema of difference generality and specificity represent the limits of the graph of distribution (x: general/universal y: specific/singularity). Deleuze shifts into a new terrain to reconcile the two.

Deleuze does this by addressing categorical difference or differences in the classification of being; being subsumed as a category of one its own species. Being as a category is a problematic super-category for Aristotle and later this is taken up by Hegel. It would have to be both Universal and Singular in order fulfill this, which is impossible for Aristotle. This precludes a univocal being and loses the difference that Deleuze values.

Deleuze also wants to get rid of Kantian judgement and representation: logical/analogical. Representation evokes judgement. Judgement attributes being by measuring the subject of judgement. The distributive predicate, the conservative nature of judgement and the ideal of justice are the guiding priniciples of judgement, which results in the parcelization of being to each thing-in-itself (noumenon). Deleuze then distinguishes between distribution that divides that which is distributed and distribution that occurs where an open space is occupied.

Sedantry distribution: Judgement disregards the material singularities that cannot be subsumed by the generic category. Judgement operates by allocating things to different pre-established categories.

Nomadic distribution: This is difference without a concept, an affirmation of the extremis. Inequality is the motor of distribution and resistant to hierarchies since things that distribute themselves cannot be compared legitimately to one another.

Delueze is therefore anti-egalitarian (Nietzschean). Egalitarianism is not necessarily radical. Neither is the ideal of fairness or equivocity.

In Deleuze being cannot be a generic category. It therefore leads to a renewal of the problem of individuation, which seeks an intelligible difference in the Idea. He sets the logic of representation against the logic of expression. Deleuze wants a theory of individuation through the universal and singular without conceptual mediation. For him, ontological univocity reconciles being to difference through expression (see Spinoza/Nietzsche). The problem of Spinozist monism is that it is still a transcendentalism of modes. Deleuze evacuates this, becoming nothing but an expression of modes. He therefore posits an alternate logic of expression to supplant the equivocal illusions of analogy.

So what does Deleuze’s shift mean?

He privileges essence (intuition) in order to overthrow Kantian representation: things as we know them and things as they are in themselves. He collapses thinking and being. Expression is being thinking itself. He folds Kant’s dialectic into one: thinking/being. In this there is univocity. This leads him to extravagantly claim that concepts become things themselves.

He describes this as Transcendental Empiricism which he sets against metaphysical Aristotleanism and Kantian transcendentalism (which divides concepts and things). Ideas then become differential structures. For Deleuze, Ideas are defined as multiplicities — things in continuous variation and resistant to identification — they are pure differences that cannot be named accurately. We sense creatively through innovation and in so doing incarnate relations of pure difference, unlike hypotheses drawn from observations that are based in identification. Thinking then determines the logic of expression. Reality is then an expression of thinking. Therefore sensation thinks, which is an anti-materialist pronouncement. The consequence of this is that the World thinks itself. It generates its own determinate structure (determinant differenciations).

Problems that emerge (Brassier’s critique):

Representation is not just ideological bad habit. The world encourages representation, it encourages its own distortion. Deleuze reiterates the Bergsonian dualism of duration and space, which is a useful dualism that is irreducible. He qualifies 3-dimensional space as a kind degenerate form of time and hence a form of representation. Representational thought is a degenerate form of thought. Deleuze seeks to free thought from the strictures of representational thought, whether it be recognition, identification or equilvalence. Thinking should be the ultimate expression of difference.

Is there anything wrong with the dualism of Deleuze or Bergson? Is it a relapse? Are some dualisms useful or fruitful?

One possible problem is that Deleuze spiritualizes reality. Thought (philosophy) is considered a maximally creative act, an ontological edict. Brassier puts forward the idea of the rehabilitation of representation/epistemology, perhaps through alternate forms of representation. Deleuze’s ‘leap’ to a peculiar Pan-Psychism (the spiritualization of reality) leads to the prospect of being meaning something. This for Brassier is extravagantly imperialistic. Here there is the possibility that knowing might be more important that than thinking. For him it is a mistake to politicize ontology.

Brassier contends that conditions of representation are secreted and reality generates representation in degenerate form. Thinking is therefore a synonym for duration in which thought spatializes itself through expansion; a dialation. This allows intelligence to represent it through the inexplicable residue of intensity.

Update: A similar lecture by Ray Brassier has been posted on YouTube here. It is in six parts and includes a much more detailed examination of Heidegger and Being:

The Pure and Empty Form of Death: Deleuze and Heidegger (Parts 1-6)