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Between Monstrous Accords: the Sound of Solid Decisions

This is a response of sorts, to Dominic Fox’s “Immanence and Objectivity“.
It addresses the now widespread trend of Realist nostagia; within SR; in recent receptions of Deleuze; in Meillassoux’s epic, yet futile, rehabilitation of tradition; & in Laruelle’s essays towards developing rapprochement between long entrenched cultural habits, tacit assumptions hegemonic even in philosophy, & the new outlooks so obviously called for by scientific thought, yet not provisioned by it. It is with reference to Laruelle’s ‘return to the Real’, as inflected by Dominic Fox’s tentative yet clear interpretation, that the following is concerned.

 

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[Dominic Fox]: “Rather than thinking “according to the Real”, or from the premise that both “knower” and “known” are immanent to the same reality (and thus share a fundamental identity), the stance Fox Keller describes is “decisional” in Laruelle’s sense: it begins by making a cut, and by giving itself the authority to repair that cut.”

 

{AK}: Here, the notion of “the Real”; as an identification; as an identified realm that provisions a “fundamental” habitat; remains within the same range of metaphysical assumptions generating the epistemological duality of Subject/Object.
If ‘Subject’ & ‘Object’ are problematised on the basis of an essential supervenience of interconnection, rendering both as “effectuations”; though it might seem natural to posit an underlying ‘field of interconnection’; the ‘Reality’ of “effectual” ‘Appearances’, corresponding to the missing corollary within the Appearance/Reality distinction that  “effectuation” suggests; this is merely a respondent epistemological gesture of totalising identification, in search of the stabilised, absolute knowledge that “effectuations” are unable to provide. But searching for closure or completion, at greater levels of a superveniency scale, or at least the level accounting for all “effectuations”, misses the point. The point being, that such desire for absolute knowledge, without remainder, is a corollary of, & necessitates, classical identification as an ens, as a self-contained entity; or, in the language of Mahayana Buddhism, as being self-originated (having “own-being”) rather than being dependently originated.
Just supposing, if one followed this totalising or completionary model; hoping to achieve closure, & thus self-containment, at the level of the greatest “metaphysical monster”, that of ‘Totality’ or the ‘Whole’; then such a ‘Totality’ would still require identification, i.e., liminal definition, if it is to serve as a determined foundation.
But there are only “effectuations” available to form such identificatory definitions; thus, it could be thought, that what is required, is a productive algorithm, a key of interlocking representations, the veridical condensation of all “effectuations”; one of such persuasive veracity, that it ineluctably presents itself as an algorithm of absolute knowledge, without remainder; as an ultimate structural reduction, where said ‘structure’ is identified as essential ‘Truth’, as the sufficient set of liminal conditions, accounting for the Totality. But would not such structural condensation, according to this alethic procedure of liminal definition, itself constitute an “effectuation”? Aside from possibilities of recursive & differential ‘feedback’, instigated by its completionary obligation to account for itself & its own operations; would it not, itself, be an artifact arising, essentially, from the same untenable, classical model of dualised epistemological structure, that the holistic notion of “effectuation” was supposed to circumvent?
This, of course, is the result of expecting such a classical model (of dualised epistemological structure) to account for a ‘Totality’ on which it is imagined to supervene; that exceeds or subsumes it in various ways; from which it is held to originate; & of which it is considered to be an ‘effect’. Even if the objection, that such an algorithm of absolute knowledge is not a ‘knowing subject’ or ‘knower’, is perhaps vitiated by its representational function within epistemological economy, whether such an Algorithm of the Absolute, as it were, falls into epistemological duality through its representational function suggesting epistemological economy, is an interesting question. To what extent, can Representation represent ‘Totality’, without the “cut” of “objectification”, without liminal definition?
It seems, though, that the assumption & privileging of some, homogeneous plane of the “immanent Real”, as it were, neither escapes these issues of self-reflexivity precluding liminal definition, nor the attribute of being metaphysical monstrosity.
It can be seen, quite simply, that liminal definition can only obtain when & where there are “effectuations” available to form them. But the scope & logic of liminal definition can only stretch so far, before conventional modes of relevance collapse.
It may not be coincidental that the antimonies of metaphysical monstrosity frustrating secure liminal definition, are given mocking resonance by the behavioural semiotics of the ‘Quantum Mechanical’ realm?
Even if the practical “reality” of quantum mechanical phenomena are simply accepted, cultural & scientific practices blithely continuing on in some ecstasy of imagined immersion in ideological ‘immanence’, such decelebratory backpedalling away from traditional configurations of ‘transcendental’ habit, means very little, if conducted under one polarity of a metaphysical distinction whose fundamental character & wider context have not been understood, & whose other polarity of ‘transcendence’ has become contemporary anathema, repressed in arenas of academic fashion, only to return as various forms of cultural distortion.

 

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Continuing to use the confused, yet received, metaphysical distributions of philosophic history in the same ways; reserving moderate liberatory insights only for arcane specialist contemplations; can only sustain the very forms of ignorance such moderation was designed to entirely avoid, leaving the general culture wholly under the sway of a market culture; under its commandeering of an engineered socio-philosophic history; under the inflationary deployments of the symbolic forms of transcendence belonging to that history; under the sign of an administered Hysteria, the hegemonic rubric of a global theatrics of oneiric consumerism in which all are coerced into finding a role.
In such an ongoing production, administered by an engine of administerial hierographics, running on the sparklines of statistical contemplation, everyone gets to play with the prefabricated beast of socioeconomic dreams.
Over it all, run the the advent(ures) of the geometrick mind, taking measurements of all Earthly bodies, their terres-trial minds held in (c/s)inematic dreams, in the designs of desire issued by a base, yet sparkly, commerce.
Is it here; in this self-consuming ecstasy of metrics; in this distillation of everchanging essence, the perpetual quest & turnover of LCD* transcendence; that resides the final vision of Anthropos?
The last reflections of Man, chasing only after his own Truth, yet only finding that of Others; turned, by the voracious mirror of his own creation; by the inexorable & mechanical intent of his own desire; into a Medusan mineralisation, upon which play disciplined sparks, in his image, eternally cast, on crystalline silver screens?
Here, can be seen, the final resolution of two transcendent orders: the ‘knowing subject’ & the ‘known object’.
Powered by the petrified liquefactions of a prehistoric vitality, a contemporary vitality accelerates its transition to a solid, substantial future form, one whose glistening facets announce a fresh stratigraphic layer; the culmination of a new force of erosion, that called itself ‘Consciousness’; & the lithographic conclusion of the Techno-Geo-Logic Era.

* (‘Lowest Common Denominator’)

No Conclusion to the Inclusion of Illusions

This is a response to Dominic Fox, here.

 

[Dominic Fox]: “Now, it seems to me that for Laruelle, the Real is “like” (but see caveats below) a sort of global codomain that absolutely everything has an inclusion function into, since all “regional” domains are just subsets of this codomain. So for absolutely anything you like, it has both a “regional” identity (mapped by the identity function on its regional domain) and a One-in-one identity (mapped by the inclusion function from that domain into the Real).”

{AK}: Hasn’t this “Real” as “global codomain” always been in both formal & informal use, anyway, in practice?
The notion of “global codomain” as “Totality”; “Universe”; “Brahma”; “Being”; “Universal Set”; etc., with all their derived regionalisations, is not a novelty, & I’m not sure what Laruelle’s reinscribing of it, under the sign of “the Real”, can add to that?
The full panoply of such cartographic projections, of metaphysical contextualisation as perspective, between ‘atman’ & ‘Brahman’, for example, has been done, for millenia. It’s a necessary corollary of ‘meaning’; for ‘meaning’ is always selective; & a selection is necessarily a perspective.
Likewise, is a “principle of unilateral identity-in-the-last-instance with the Real” a uniquely necessary condition for inclusion?
I could accept it as a retention or reminder of initial region of origin, as it were, when speculative developments reach such levels of innovation as to form ‘regions’ in themselves, but I would think that the need for such reminders characterises the propensity to exclusionary dogma, the kinds of “tunnel vision” that actually do forget such constitutive delineations (regional origin > levels of innovation >>>>etc.,> new principle, or, new excuse for dogmatic ignorance).
It could be Laruelle’s way to lead those stuck in habitual metaphysical fixations to a looser, more flexible consideration, but really, is this necessary, in the 21st century, for those not so stuck?

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[Dominic Fox]: “the One is not”

{AK}: If read literally, as ‘the One IS Nothing’, it becomes the Sunyata of Mahayana Buddhism, or the ‘Neti, Neti’ of Vedantic Hinduism. Both concepts are at the borders of the determinate, they operate at the zone between the determinate & the indeterminate, neglecting neither, but not exhausted by either, whether singly, or in any combination.
If “the Real” & “the One”; both of which already, & do, function as synonymic moments of Sunyata or “Neti, Neti”; is, or are, Laruelle’s chosen & privileged signifiers for essentially the same referent & tasks as that which Sunyata or “Neti, Neti” already cover; then it seems to me, that Laruelle’s choice of emphasis runs risks of metaphysical fixation.
A Nagarjuna would say that the concept of “the Real” derives from the metaphysics of realisation & identity, i.e., the realisation of (an) identity. But identity is always supervenient, “dependently originated”, lacking the “own-being” of any ‘Absolute Substance’; in its limited & abstracted form, precisely as an ‘identity’, as an identified or selected variable or ‘thing’.
Thus, the concept of “the Real”, as derivation of such a metaphysics, is already implicitly determinate in a very particular way; & in a potentially paradoxical way; the ontological hunt for essentialised structures of the “Real”, or of “Truth”, is necessarily an ordering of metaphysical localisation, which contradicts its identification as general & global  all-inclusiveness. Through additional developments, ‘global all-inclusiveness’ is shown  as supervenient conceptualisation, too.
For these reasons, Laruelle’s choice, like that of the Speculative Realists, can be seen as a localised project of metaphysical nostalgia, one determined by histories of fixation that they as yet lack the theoretical understanding or inclination to think beyond or through, & whose local character they reject in advance, as such a localisation necessarily suggests explicit access to a terra incognita, an unknown terrain not susceptible to any effective utilisation or exploitation, not amenable to the replay of previously ‘successful’ procedures of the Enlightenment & Modernity.

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[Dominic Fox]: “the mathematical analogy breaks down, as we should probably expect it to.”

{AK}: This need not be the case for a future mathematics, no longer bound by habits of unthought ontological commitment, in a mathesis liberated from unnecessary metaphysical fixation.

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[Dominic Fox]: “We must not picture whatever structures we can imagine being stabilised, held fixedly within an underlying global order of structure that is just like them only somehow bigger.”

{AK}: Yes, I agree. It’s an implied corollary consideration, of what I was referring to here, on Terence’s “PRINCIPLES OF THE EMPTY SIGN”:

“Of course, one can ground all this with “emptiness” (or “empty sign”), but such a sunyata is at the root of every such ‘ground’. However, the “empty sign” cannot be uniquely identified as “the possible foundation of the mathematisation of the world without us”, alone, it is far more than just that, & far less.”

However, that is not to say, that ‘effects’ of such a hypothetical “global order of structure” are not produced (whatever those might be). Giordano Bruno’s: “The Universe is a sphere whose centre is everywhere, but whose circumference is Nowhere”, (Now Here?), is an insight that might well be relevant. Lol
It’s natural to import notions of ‘scalar magnitude’ into the metaphoric of topological distribution used in all theorisations, but they are supervenient constructions, too.

A bit of fun:

-3, -2, -1, ?0, +1, +2, +3
                @1,
                @2,
                @3, hree Domains

The Dancing Constructions of Wisdom

 Introduction

 

This, “The Dancing Constructions of Wisdom”, was written back in early November, along with the posts on “A Divine Avenue”.
It concerns the notion, & more particularly, the signifier, of “Philo-fiction”.
Terence Blake has already informed me of the Franco-institutional origin from which Laruelle has derived this categoria inventio, as it were.
It seems to me, that this origination, & more especially, its subsequent dissemination, are strongly indicative of a weak & farcical repetition of earlier innovations, namely SF.
It is the bandwagon jumping of those who were never inventive in the first place, those who require institutional permission to think at all, let alone think for themselves. Just as with OOO, SR, etc., it is faintly ridiculous to see such people struggle to articulate the obvious, in the language & thought-styles of the dogmatically ignorant, & then pose as ‘discoverers’ of an already inhabited continent.

Henceforth, if it proves necessary to refer to Laruelle’s “Philo-fiction”, I’m probably going to use ‘Philosophiction’, or whatever occurs to me, at the time. It can be a zone of critical & differential play.
 

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“Philo-fiction” does not suggest philosophical fiction. “Phil-” signifies “love”; “sophia” signifies “wisdom”. So “Philo-fiction” would only suggest the love of fiction. I guess that “Philo-fiction” has an abrupt, alliterative appeal, but it’s clumsy, & indicates only the kind of market-centred mindset catering to populist degenerations. In addition, it seems to be a kind of market-generated ghetto genre, purpose-built as a containment, another ‘holding-pattern’.
That’s not where I’m from. Ghetto for ghetto, I prefer SF, as it developed through to the early 1980s. That’s one of the ‘worlds’ I inhabited, that gets inflected through my writings. As far as I’m concerned, Philosophy occurs very much within the spaces of thought already opened up by those earlier contemplations.
Having crisscrossed, combined & differentiated, recombined & re-differentiated in countless other ways; at so-called ‘root metaphorical’ levels, & when a young teenager in the 1970s; the emphasis, for me, if there is one, is no longer something which can be communicated easily to others.
There is no need to territorialise, in the Deleuzian sense, over realms already mapped, so to speak. Those cartographic excursions issue from presuppositions already dogmatic from the outset. Such charts can only serve the demands of insular navigation, extending that insularity, in turn. Though better topographies are available, they have, on the whole, not been implemented, being consigned to manifestations of undeveloped ‘idealism’ instead.

“A Divine Avenue” is not “Philo-fiction”, whatever that is.

ETTA, MOLLY: GEE! DO THEY BE IDENTITIES?

Responses to Dominic Fox, discussion here.

 

[Dominic Fox]:” I used to be quite fond of arguments from etymology, but I’m not so enthused about them now. What I would say about “identity” is that, once again, the mathematical treatment of identity is not a simple thing; to say that mathematics is contingent on identity is to beg some very important (mathematical) questions about how identity is established in different domains – it’s not so much presupposed, as defined and defined again at different levels of abstraction.”

 

{AK}: Derrida again:

“Grammatology, the general science of the ‘archi-trace,’ presents itself as an explicating thought of the myth of origins. It is a search not for ‘historical origins,’ but for the original,  the true, the authentic etymon always already present which obscures it.” [E. Roudinesco, p. 223.]
Here, misunderstanding takes on grandiose proportions.) Wherever the values of propriety, of a proper meaning, of proximity to the self, of etymology, etc. imposed themselves in relation to the body, consciousness, language, writing, etc., I have attempted to analyze the metaphysical desire and presuppositions that were at work. (Derrida)

 

{AK}: ” I haven’t “redefined” anything. I’ve merely located everything, in its allegedly ‘proper’ place, or ‘topos’, without undeclared elisions.”

 I excavate etymological proprieties, as it were, to prevent the closures of disciplinary insularity. Either that, or drive the line of disciplinary inquiry, according to its own internal procedures, to its limit, & into areas which it lacks the resources to enclose.

I used “identity” as an interchangeable synonym. I could have used “specification”, “reification”, “entity”, “object”, or whatever.
I’m not necessarily arguing about the specific ‘internal’ procedures of Mathematical definition, but rather, at the points where it intersects with wider or other concerns (pick a rubric – in this thread, it’s the ‘ontological’), about what common factors it shares with those concerns, mutatis mutandis, likewise with ‘identity’, too.

It doesn’t really matter, because the logic I’m always implicitly critiquing, is that of conventional determination (or ‘definition’?) ‘itself’.
The critique seeks no justification, though all justifications are available to it. It is carried out under no sign in particular, but it can create one if the need so arises. It can know all things, even though, classically, there isn’t anything to know.

THE SIGN: SWITCHING IT ON/OFF

Responses to Dominic Fox, discussion here

 

[Dominic Fox]: “Is it still situated within semiosis? I’m minded to say not, because semiotics however general is still the domain of the *sign*, and the grammatology Derrida’s talking about points beyond that domain.”

{AK}: “My conception of “language” is not restricted to what humans do.”

Concerning the “sign”, he says: “Now, it is inevitable that not only inequalities of development (which will always occur), but also the necessity of certain contexts, will render strategically indispensable the recourse to a model known elsewhere, and even at the most novel points of investigation, to function as an obstacle.”

Concerning the “beyond”:
Derrida: “There is  not a transgression, if One understands by that a pure and simple landing into a beyond of metaphysics, at a point which also would be, let us not forget, first of all a point of language or writing.”
                       

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 Derrida: “Psychologism is not the poor usage of a good concept, but is inscribed and prescribed within the concept of the sign itself, in the equivocal manner of which I spoke at the beginning. This equivocality, which weighs upon the model of the sign, marks the “semiological” project itself and the organic totality of its concepts, in particular that of communication, which in effect implies a transmission charged with making pass, from one subject to another, the identity of a signified object, of a meaning or of a concept rightfully separable from the process of passage and from the signifying operation. Communication presupposes subjects (whose identity and presence are constituted before the signifying operation) and objects (signified concepts, a thought meaning that the passage of communication will have neither to constitute, nor, by all rights, to transform). A  communicates B to C.  Through Semiology and Grammatology, the sign the emitter communicates something to a receptor, etc.”

{AK} The emphasis of structures of ’emission & reception’ is unnecessary in inquiries where they are not an explicit or overt issue.
 

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“Kristeva:  If language is always “expression,” and if its closure is thereby demonstrated, to what extent, and by means of what kind of practice, could this expressivity be surpassed? To what extent would nonexpressivity signify? Would not grammatology be a nonexpressive Semiology and Grammatology “semiology” based on logical-mathematical notation rather than on linguistic notation?
 
Derrida: I am tempted to respond in an apparently contradictory way. On the one hand,  expressivism is never simply surpassable, because it is impossible to reduce the couple outside/inside as a simple structure of opposition.
This couple is an effect of differance,  as is the effect of language that impels language to represent itself as expressive re-presentation, a translation on the outside of what was constituted inside. The representation of language as “expression” is not an accidental prejudice, but rather a kind of structural lure, what Kant would have called a transcendental illusion. The latter is modified according to the language, the era, the culture. Doubtless Western metaphysics constitutes a powerful systematization of this illusion, but I believe that it would be an imprudent overstatement to assert that Western metaphysics alone does so. On the other hand, and inversely, I would say that if expressivism is not simply and once and for all surpassable, expressivity is in fact always already surpassed, whether one wishes it or not, whether one knows it or not. In the extent to which what is called “meaning” (to be “expressed”) is already, and thoroughly, constituted by a tissue of differences, in the extent to which there is already a text,  a network of textual referrals to other texts, a textual transformation in which each allegedly “simple term” is marked by the trace of another term, the presumed interiority of meaning is already worked upon by its own exteriority. It is always already carried outside itself.
It already differs (from itself) before any act of expression. And only on this condition can it constitute a syntagm or text. Only on this condition can it “signify.” From this point of view, perhaps, we would not have to ask to what extent nonexpressivity could signify. Only nonexpressivity can signify, because in all rigor there is no signification unless there is synthesis, syntagm, dif[erance, and text. And the notion of text, conceived with all its implications, is incompatible with the unequivocal notion of expression. Of course, when one says that only the text signifies, one already has transformed the values of signifying and sign. For if one understands the sign in its most severe classical closure, one would have to say the opposite: signification is expression; the text, which expresses nothing, is insignificant, etc. Grammatology, as the science of textuality, then would be a nonexpressive semiology only on the condition of transforming the concept of sign and of uprooting it from its congenital expressivism.”

 

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“Kristeva:  Semiology today is constructed on the model of the sign and its correlates: communication  and structure.
What are the “logocentric” and ethnocentric limits of these models, and how are they incapable of serving as the basis for a notation attempting to escape metaphysics?

Derrida:  All gestures here are necessarily equivocal. And supposing, which I do not believe, that someday it will be possible simply to escape metaphysics, the concept of the sign will have marked, in this sense, a simultaneous impediment and progress. For if the sign, by its root and its implications, is in all its aspects metaphysical, if it is in systematic solidarity with stoic and medieval theology, the work and the displacement to which it has been submitted-and of which it also, curiously, is the instrument-have had delimiting effects.  For this work and displacement have permitted the critique of how the concept of the sign belongs to metaphysics, which represents a simultaneous marking and loosening of the limits of the system in which this concept was born and began to serve, and thereby also represents, to a certain extent, an uprooting of the sign from its own soil.
This work must be conducted as far as possible, but at a certain point one inevitably encounters “the logocentric and ethnocentric limits” of such a model.  At this point, perhaps, the concept is to be abandoned. But this point is very difficult to determine, and is never pure. All the heuristic and critical resources of the concept of the sign have to be exhausted, and exhausted equally in all domains and contexts. Now, it is inevitable that not only inequalities of development (which will always occur), but also the necessity of certain contexts, will render strategically indispensable the recourse to a model known elsewhere, and even at the most novel points of investigation, to function as an obstacle.”

The Tests & Observations of History

 

A response to Jonah Dempcy – (Deleuze): “It was Nietzsche who said that nothing is ever free from a ‘nonhistorical cloud.’

 

“experiment (n.)
    mid-14c., “action of observing or testing; an observation, test, or trial;” also “piece of evidence or empirical proof; feat of magic or sorcery,” from Old French esperment “practical knowledge, cunning; enchantment, magic spell; trial, proof, example; lesson, sign, indication,” from Latin experimentum “a trial, test, proof, experiment,” noun of action from experiri “to test, try” (see experience (n.))
experiment (v.)
    late 15c., from experiment (n.). Intransitive sense by 1787. Related: Experimented; experimenting.”

Experiment – Online Etymology Dictionary

 

To inhabit the event, or to subject that eventuality to sequential knowledge, to commemorate it in some form of historical reflection?


Is this choice not contingent on a secret complicity?
What is an ‘event’ as an ‘event’?
What is this multiplexed object with “all its components or singularities”?
How does it arise, how is it conceived?
If “history amounts” to “only the set of preconditions” for this ‘event’, then it is assumed the ‘event’ is historically conditioned, a historical ‘effect’.


But, regarding the ‘event’, is not “going through all its components or singularities”, not itself the construction of another ‘history’, even if a personal & experiential one, inscribed on the ‘body’, a lived chronicle, unrecouped by the formalisations of grouped memory?


‘History’ is not possible without ‘events’ to sequence & recount.
The very essence of the eventual presupposes the sequential & the transitional.


If “Becoming isn’t part of history”; if incommensurable with that history; from where else does it derive the character of being ‘new’?
From the ‘experiencer’, whose ‘bodily history’ ‘feels’ the novelty?
In such a scenario, then, is it the case, that the character of ‘innovation’ occurs through a ‘recognition’, in which the ‘experiencer’ engaged in “Becoming”, is itself the emissary & receptacle of the ‘History’ that it allegedly has left behind.
“You can take so&so out of the ghetto, but you can’t take the ghetto out of so&so.”


‘History’ is already a Becoming; & every Becoming is a history.


What drives this desire for such conceptually staged ‘novelty’?
-An oppressive ‘History’, itself constructed?
-A need for Messianic regeneration from the horrors of Modernity?
-Exhaustion, horror, or guilt, over exploitation?
-A barbaric boredom with the complexities of life?
-Is this desire for a pure inhabitation of “components or singularities”, a modularised fascism; the nostalgic desire for the clean existential lines of an ahistoric neo-Modernist rupture; the inability of all these dogmatic desires to think through more complex bio-geometries?


And, if it is claimed that “History isn’t experimental”, what does Benjamin’s “Angelus Novus” gaze on, if not the carnage of experiment? ‘History’ is just the writeup of ‘Results’ & ‘Conclusions’ in an ongoing ‘Scientific Method’ or “Wissenschaft”.


In the languages purporting the Absolute, though, has there ever, really, been an ‘event’?

The Thoughtscape of Levelled Promotions

This is a response to John Ó Maoilearca’s “Thinking In Equality: On Laruelle’s Democracy Of Thought”, here.

 

 
[John Ó Maoilearca]: “Individually, they are all One – and this is firstly a performative gesture before it becomes an ontological thesis (that tells us ‘what they are’)”:

{AK}: If this “One” is “firstly” a somatic sign, is such deliverance into an ecstasy of accomplishings, not a flight into an ‘action mysticism’?
There are two possible subtextual registers operating here: one, is the anchoring in a kind of  Wittgensteinian “showing” that sidesteps interpretative drift; two, is the implicit valorisation of an unquestioned expediency, in the appeal to ‘practical action’ as an unquestioned ‘given’.
The dancing ‘body’ is, in-deed, important, but it is precisely because of that import that it risks returning to whatever insidious & coercive dualisations are floating around: the remnants of Cartesian afterglow.

 

[John Ó Maoilearca]: “Individuals invent equality, they do not possess it (as a philosophical property of difference, multiplicity, and so on).”

{AK}: The very notion of the “individual”, too, is a categorisation complicit with the machineries of identification, as are the “philosophical properties] of difference, multiplicity” etc..

If overly restrictive definitions were not turned into dogmas in the first place, there would be no requirement to needlessly multiply distinctions. It was the demand for an abbreviated & telegraphic linguistics of efficiency, stemming from a culture of expediency, that created those  fragmentary understandings of dogmatism.

 

 [John Ó Maoilearca]: Alternatively, if there were no third quality or type, then their equality is not defined but invented: in other words, it is performative (a concept I discuss in the final chapter of my book).

{AK}: Equality is a relation. In order for its operation to function, the relata to be equalised require a ‘level’ at which equivalence can obtain. So ‘equality’ is always a relational construction, one that calls on metrical thinking, evaluation, similitude, etc.. But note, the relata have to be specified as perceivably distinct ‘identities’ first, even if the work of definition is held in abeyance. It is this very identification; this production by the machineries of identification; which is the first ‘levelling’, the initial entry into the democracy of entities.
The selection of further ‘levels’ of equivalence (your “third quality or type”) are a function of the remaining combinatorial possibilities available to those specified entities. Further ‘levels’, moreover, usually draw on logics of similitude & analogy. The elaboration of such logics can, of course, reinscribe & transform the initial characterisations of the specified entities, or ‘identities’, or relata.

 

[John Ó Maoilearca]: “And yet – haven’t I earlier said that film and philosophy both think, that they are equally thoughtful? Isn’t that a third quality? Well, yes and no. The reason I say ‘no’ is because I haven’t defined what thought or thinking is.”

{AK}: Is there a need to define “thought or thinking”?
Or its usual corollary, the concept of ‘Self’?
Oscillating between a pantheistic solipsism of all encompassing ‘Self’ & an extreme eliminativism that can no longer find any determinate thing or ‘self’ to eliminate. But notice, an all encompassing ‘Self’ with no negation, has no determination, either. Such lack of determination effectively equates with a lack of a determinate thing or ‘self’:  solipsism equates with eliminativism. In pantheistic solipsism, all determinations are consumed by a movement of rampant synthesis around the notion of ‘Self’: in eliminativism, the notion of ‘Self’ can no longer be located or identified in an absolute or final way with regard to determinations in general. The very determinations that define, are exceeded in both cases, by an absolutist drive.
Mutatis mutandis, the same overall logic applies to any determinate conception of “thought or thinking”.

 

[John Ó Maoilearca]: “I have simply said that film and philosophy equally think, but in their own way. This is a pluralistic gesture to be sure, but, according to Laruelle at least, it is also a non-philosophical gesture, because the job of philosophy (by contrast) is to attempt to enforce one or other image alone of what counts as thought.”

{AK}: I’m not so sure this is true.
That there are institutional preoccupations which follow trends, is not so controversial. But are such institutional trends the whole of Philosophy? Do they even pretend to be? If one looks at Philosophy, philosophia, as a strictly Occidental formation; following strict lines of demarcation & exclusion; as a history of self-identified institutions; Laruelle could have a point. But I’m not so sure, even there, that such lines could be so neatly drawn.
Could Laruelle be conflating such institutional ambitions of self-identification with actual philosophical practices & work(s)?
I’m not saying that there aren’t monolithic tendencies in the tradition, but they don’t exhaust it. Even your chosen expression, “enforce one or other image”, suggests plural contention between ‘images’.

 

[John Ó Maoilearca]: “Despite what appears to many as philosophy’s benign, abstract, and consequently (perhaps) even irrelevant status, Laruelle takes philosophy to be the supreme form of thought control, or, to be clear, a device for controlling what counts as proper or fundamental thought.”

{AK}: Again, this seems to indicate negative experiences of institutional contexts, rather than the works themselves. I’m not saying it’s wrong. But noone is forcing Laruelle to go along with the control, if he claims to be able to discern it.

 

[John Ó Maoilearca]: “All thoughts can be equal, but what that equality consists in has to be invented each and every time in an ongoing process of equalizing.”

{AK}: An “ongoing process of” relating, in which all the relata are ‘equally’ relata, available for consideration. What such considerational ‘use’ or ‘performance’ might consist in, is open to question & interpretation, & even, for those so inclined, open to that com-forting rhetoric of ‘agency’, with its  ‘choices’ & ‘decisions’. But a conventional metaphysics of ‘agency’ is not necessarily the only game in town.

The Anxious Superpositions of Wisdom, When Philosophy Is Quantified

There’s an Alice Hoffman novel, from the 1980s, where she constructs an anthropology of academia. Her classification is along these lines, if I recall it correctly.
The degree to which there is consensual agreement among the scholars of a subject concerning the nature of its object, is the degree to which sartorial appearance & outward social focus is neglected.
Pure mathematicians, theoretical physicists, & some philosophers (probably logicians), wander around the campus grounds in a disheveled state, oblivious to others, in their own worlds, where a proof is a proof, & nothing else is relevant. Their social status is contingent only on their ability to produce said proofs.
The humanities scholars, conversely; where the nature of their object of study, even its existence, is in question; require the consensual approval of their peers; so they cultivate impeccable diction, dress smartly, give off an impressive demeanour.


I would add to this, by saying, that the obligation to produce benefits discernible to whatever present-day understandings of utility are circulating amongst those who distribute funding, devolves, essentially, into the demands of commodity production, of results held to be tangible.
And, yes, a direct, results-oriented appoach, that neglects holistic context, in favour of the minimal conditions that are deemed necessary to produce a desired effect; one that can, moreover, be fetishised by capitalism as a ‘commodity’; is going to have more general, global consequences that are not taken into account, precisely because of the neglect of holistic context. The mere awareness of this, in the form of environmental cost reports & the like, means nothing if resulting problems are not acted on with the same zeal & investment given to ‘commodity’ production & ‘profit’.
This affects the ecosystem of philosophical thought, too.
Philosophers are coerced into producing vast amounts of rubbish, & then fall into infighting over its dubious merits. (innocuous noises concerning clarity & obscurity are a big favourite). The coercion is towards quantity, not quality. It isn’t possible to do anything worthwhile under the duress of such a ‘professional’ demand. So most fall into the silent agreement of pretending that the copious trivia of their output is ‘philosophical work’.
Unable to let go of a ‘career’ already invested in, grumbling sets in. In danger of disappearing in the deluge of their own output, desperate overtures are made to other disciplines, or public life, seeking a spurious relevance. But secretly, they are looking for shelter from the self-imposed, Tantalean tasks of turgidity they erroneously imagine are necessary in attaining the brilliance they covet as a corollary of career advancement.


It may be a symptom of self-loathing that so many professional philosophers wish to deny that they are doing Philosophy, whilst accepting salaries from Philosophy Departments.
Has any physicist ever claimed to be a ‘non-scientist’?
It may be that the fad for switching Philosophy ‘On’ & ‘Off’, as if it were a delimited ‘ens’, is the anxious “fort/da” logic of a mindset that can only think according to a metaphoric of simple tangibilities; that ontological consideration brings to its methodological limit, beyond which it is only able to nervously repeat the banality of its methodological procedures; over & over, or return to the easier disciplines of increased tangibility, to the overt presences not requiring anything more challenging than basic representation & its transactions. But crossing over disciplinary boundaries contrived centuries ago does not, in itself, constitute a radical innovation. Going on about it all the time, in the 21st century, only shows the dismal mediocrity of mundane minds not used to thinking naturally.


There are countless conceptual platforms that could be contrived, from which to ironise any & all philosophical output.
Circumscribe it, find out what it doesn’t say, construct a rhetoric of central indispensability concerning this neglect; analyse the output, in the light of the neglect; bingo, you can restate the entire tradition according to the linguistics & internal conceptual structures you’ve concocted to elaborate that neglect. Though this procedure could be said to characterise many acknowledged contributions of the 20th century, there is a significant difference between them & the philosophical productions of the 21st. Those of the 20th century, developed new perspectives on the structures of knowledge. For some, they were often counterintuitive perspectives, not in line with habitual beliefs. But their logics were demonstrable. Those of the 21st century, however, & as far as I can tell, are not of this character. They do not introduce anything not already commonly known & accepted. In some cases they are reactionary nostalgias, pining for the metaphysical simplicity of traditional intuitive positions; the comfortable cultural abbreviations, & their stock variations, that the Social substitutes for the possibility of fresh thought.
Has Philosophy turned into ceremonial ritual, the discursive display, the social signalling, of one’s location on a map of traditional identities? A game of simplistic assumptions, of fully known territories, & their well worn contentions?
It does seem as though the nostalgia for discursively invulnerable ‘givens’ displayed by so many ‘philosophers’, is characteristic of the desire to establish territories of imperialised elaboration. If such projections produce insight or innovation, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But that doesn’t seem to be happening. Instead of a potent & potentially productive “contest of interpretations”, there is only the unchanging gladiatorial contention of dogmas.

Default Assumptions: A Comment by Terence Blake

 [Terence Blake]: “This is the default assumption.
Whitehead insists that we actually do directly encounter things other than ourselves:”
Amazon Kindle: A Highlight and Note by Terence Blake from The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (Posthumanities)
Terence Blake – This is the default assumption.


{AK}: Depending on how the concepts utilised are defined, there is no problem with the above statements. They indicate a possibility, but that possibility is a systematic production that is irreducible.
I like Wittgenstein’s refusal to acknowledge that there wasn’t a rhinoceros in the room. That refusal indicates, to me, anyway, that he understood the radical variability at the root of identity; not only in ‘lingistic representation’, as if ‘lingistic representation’ was somehow a metaphysically fixed realm; as if its apparent anthropic site of origination conferred absolute determinations on its ‘nature’; but radical variation obtains for the very ‘grounds’ of any such thought, to the thinking of any ‘ground’ metaphysics as well, and even to the notion of ‘thought’ itself. This is why, in the 90s, I was working on a project, tentatively titled “After Thought” or ” Beyond the Laws of Thought”.
As to ‘representation’, its whole metaphysics is contingent on the notion of ‘presence’, ‘identity’, and their corollary assumptions of ‘givens’ of various types. ‘Presence’ in the classical sense, of an absolute ‘identity’ that is determinate, has never been established. It can’t be; every essay, attempt, at establishment; escapes what it is establishing; only faithful dreams of economic fidelity continue on in their endless recoveries.
Without ‘presence’, there can be no re-presenting.

Phil Zero So Fee: The Real, I Deal, is So Free!

Interesting discussion here: McKenzie Wark – “… philosophy on the whole is in a posture that is…
Have only briefly scanned it, but this resulted:

 

 

   For me, the notion of ‘Reality’ has always been an ‘idealisation’, & it has never only been singular, except as the consensual mirage of unity that various thinkings celebrate, through various monistic apprehensions. But notice, a ‘mirage’ is nevertheless an event, a constrained ‘effect’, a necessary structural moment. One can reduce it to various forms of supervenience, using empirical, theoretical, aesthetic vocabularies; but these differential positionings, too, are supervenient ‘metaphysical’ operations, always issuing from some cave of conceptual enclosure, as it were; the slums of imagined ‘sureness’ constituting ‘Knowledge’ with a big ‘K’; which invariably turn out to be yet another consensual coercion, another do-be-us invitation to inhabit the same set of theoretical limitations; limitations constituting yet another mechanism, another production line, of dogma production; of fetishised conceptual circulations forever in search of (an) ultimate expediency.

 

                                                                                    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

“Perhaps, after all, modern capitalism is a great factory for the production of angels.” Sol Yurick, “Metatron”:1985

   Sol Yurick certainly seems in in favour of ‘idealistic interpretations’ of capitalism: so does Weber: so does Bataille.
You’re not going to get away from the iniquities of capitalism by sheltering in the locales of a ‘produced immanence’.
Deflating 19th century characterisations of the ‘ideal’ in no way dissolves the forces that produced those characterisations.

 

                                                                                 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

   ‘Reality’ is a bad word. The notion of ‘reality’ has had its day. It no longer deserves the tiresome preeminence that is given to it.

In raw metaphysics, if the ‘real’ is positioned as subjectless ‘objectivity’; the subject is then a negative condition, a limit, for this subjectless ‘objectivity’. But is not such an ‘objectivity’ supposed to be subjectless?
Let’s say it is: but then you have an ‘objectivity’ that has no connection with the ‘subject’.
If an eliminativist, materialist, etc., derives ‘subjectivity’ from some scientific-consensual imaging of the ‘objective’; some constant structure of regularity, with respect to which all ‘subjectivity’ is vacillating variation; this in no way obviates the metaphysical difficulty. It merely buys in to the traditional metaphysical gesture of monistic ordering that is at the root of Philosophy, not that such is ‘wrong’, but it is an operation, that seems to go from one ‘perspective’, to another. Both ‘perspectives’ are assumed, though, & it is at this stage that the traditions fragment into one dogma or another, whether backwardly privileging the ‘isms’ of prior positions leading up to the metaphysical difficulty, or arbitrarily celebrating the results, as a ‘perspectivism’ that can be harnessed for whatever conception of pressing expediency takes the eliminativist’s or materialist’s fancy, though, of course they do have to be ‘consensual’ & ‘scientific’ about it. Incidentally, this is precisely the same stalling of metaphysical consideration that religious dogmatism chooses to indulge, though with seemingly different backward privilegings.
If the consensually accepted, empirical limits of conventional ‘subjectivity’ are inflated to a metaphysical level, a space opens wherein all empirical variation is potentially ‘metaphysical’; & all ‘idealistic’ metaphysics is potentially ’empirical’.
This happens because the ’empirical’ & the ‘metaphysical’, are mutual derivations. You can’t get round that possibility, if you follow the logic of the initial conceptions. Conventionalised attributions of ‘immanence’; ‘transcendence’; ’empirical’; ‘metaphysical’; etc., are all very much contingent & fluid; dependent on whatever discursive norms are held to prevail during consideration.

Nevertheless, whether scientific-consensual, or religio-consensual, imaging is involved, there is always a movementation of clo(sure), with one or another metaphysical plant chosen to ‘philosophically’ buzz around.
Anyhow, if we accept these metaphysical tribalisms, it can be observed that with each one, all that was formerly rejected or devalued, returns, albeit according to hierarchical appropriations of the chosen monistic ordering. But each ‘monistic ordering’, each ‘consensual imaging’, is merely that, an ‘ordered image’, the delivery of philosophical pizzas, for a ‘subjective’ feast of banal ‘objective’ insights. Therein resides the secret of not only “modern capitalism”, but of the ‘subject’ & ‘object’ as well. The reciprocal & inflationary fetishisation of two ill-conceived & half-baked notions. It is not the fetishisation in itself that is necessarily the problem. It is the fact that dogmatisms choose to reside within it, incessantly reiterating its banal mantras as bad cultural habits that should be taken seriously, when sustained consideration easily shows that what underlies such dogmatism, is more often than not, a confusion of metaphysical registers; the unawareness of systematic derivation of assumptions that are treated as ‘givens’; a desire to articulate the ‘real’ which always involve paradoxical assertions of simultaneous inclusion & exclusion, done in the same cliched & unknowing ways.

There are a lot of people; academics, too; who, to paraphrase Hume, go into a billiard parlour & proceed to complain about not being able to play croquet. When such complaint gets institutionalised, turned into accepted dogma, one can only say, with Adorno, not only that “Philosophy does live on”, but that it has indeed realised itself, in an era where it is not only ‘Science’ that “does not think” (Heidegger), but Philosophy, too, has reached an apex of unthinking tedium, though it is an apex bereft of any ‘Zen realisation’.