Category Archives: Responsivities

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.”

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.