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the Quantum: a Clear Convention, or a Vague ‘Reality’?
Discussion with Terence Blake, here.
{AK}: The specification that creates an ‘immanence’, ineluctably creates ‘transcendence’.
Contesting a history of privilegings, whether of the ‘immanent’, or ‘transcendent’, even Plato’s own, does nothing to address the initial specification.
Shifting initial specifications, so that they are more in accord with current, received intuitions, of whatever constitutes the ‘given reality’ of an age, merely shifts the microscope’s field of vision from one area of the heavens, to another. It doesn’t relinquish the microscope for a telescope.
In a way, any language at all, necessarily exemplifies a monistic flavour; the identity of a language, as a language, suggests that. So ‘monism’ can’t really be escaped, it’s a necessary corollary of ‘plurality’. If you combine languages, like George Steiner, the combination, if it becomes standardised, could be characterised as monistic. Hybridity begets new forms of unity, as it were.
Apophatic caution ensures that one doesn’t get fixated by any horizon, by a single star.
Mathematical reductionism
Mathematics is just a language essentially contingent on the ‘metric’.
The ‘metric’ is the ‘measured’; the ‘measured’ is a specification, as system, that produces further sub-specifications within its field.
I don’t really see that Mathematics is essentially different to any other semiotic system.
It’s natural that subcultural uses of language proliferate.
If “mathematics is ontology” is suspect, why wouldn’t ‘ontology is ontology’ be suspect, too?
One has to ask “what is mathematics?”, “what does it specify?”, & is this any different to the ontological?
If ‘measurement’ is specification; if specification is identification; if identification is entity production; if this entitification, as it were, is ontologisation; then, mathematics is just another branch of ontological specification.
In fact, one could see all languages that use any categorical specification at all, as branches of mathematics.
All of this stuff is transitive, interchangeable, conventional.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
[Terence Blake]: “Laruelle’s own solution is to make a “weak”, allegorical, use of quantum physics as a style of thinking, but his explanations are scientifically vague, incomplete, and one-sided as well as philosophically obscure, due to his use of his typically inadequately defined but quite abstract vocabulary.”
{AK}: Terence, if you rule out both “Mathematical reductionism”, & if the holistic metaphors of “Eastern traditions” are ruled out “as philosophically obscure” or vague, what else is left to avoid the “scientifically vague”?
Remember, quantum physicists, themselves, don’t really have any clear theoretical interpretations, they just do the mathematics.
ARE Ontological Fictions, fRictions?
In response to Terence Blake’s citing of “Philo-fiction”, here.
Terence, I wrote a little comment on this “Philo-fiction” word. But, due to technical issues (HD issues, wasn’t backed up), it’s not accessible.
The gist of the comment is etymological.
Philosophy, is philo, love; & sophos, wisdom.
Thus, “Philo-fiction” would be Love-Fiction, or Love-Making (fictiō – fashioning, forming, formation; fiction)
Instantly predictable, the knee-jerk responses of the plodding habitués of institutionalised academia; reluctant to abandon the unthinking easy innovations characteristic of those with no linguistic flair, habituated to a mindset of marketing banality; would declare that there is no greater ‘wisdom’ than ‘love’, instantly tapping into common sentiment.
But this base level, metonymy of ‘wisdom’, & alliteration of ‘Philosophy’, is blatantly for the ‘coffee table’ set who wish to be seen as thinking; even “filofax” was a better, more apt, nom de nouvelle, as it were.
‘Sophiction’, at least would be etymologically accurate.
‘Sophiaction’ – Wisdom in action?
a ‘phiact’, is better than a fact!
A fiat, lol.
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.
PAN-cognitive equivalence & flat CAKE theory
[John Ó Maoilearca]:”After 5 years work, All Thoughts Are Equal is finally out. There’s a link to a 20% flyer below. Coffee and biscuits not included.” (here)
{AK}: “All Thoughts Are Equal” & “Coffee and biscuits not included”?
Although assertions of pan-cognitive equivalence do not directly contradict considerations of inclusivity with respect to the work on offer, the exclusion of such baked confections is worrying. The unilateral banning of a beverage, too, without explanation, is no less bereft of such anxiety.
Aside from the uncertain particularity of the ‘biscuit’ subset, regarding the general category of baked confections – Jaffa Cakes? – a more pressing consideration presents itself.
It is asserted that the unity of a textual work (“5 years work”), concerning an all-inclusive cognitive democracy, has been finalised (“is finally out”). Yet a subset of baked confections & a beverage appear only as negations, moreover, as negations mentioned ‘outside’ the allegedly ‘finalised work’. Whether or not they are cited within the hallowed confines of Ó Maoilearca’s pan-cognitive opus is uncertain. But, if such is not the case, are we confronted with the author’s mockery of his own work & claims? This is difficult to determine.
Ostensibly, the work could be seen as an integrated demonstration of the titular thesis, the externally mentioned negations as orbital confirmations of that thesis: “All Thoughts”, wherever they are, “Are Equal”, ‘textual work’ (“book”) boundaries notwithstanding.
Or, by couching the work in a hypothetical ‘transaction’, where the exclusion of biscuit & beverage purchases a reduction in cost of the “book” (the work-as-commodity; “a link to a 20% flyer”), has Ó Maoilearca secretly written a work of political economy?
More disturbingly, perhaps: does the author’s finalisation of his work index a departure from cognitive democracy itself? Was pan-cognitive egalitarianism a five year task that is “is finally out” & finished with? Is Ó Maoilearca free to return to hierarchical concerns?
Or, there is always the possibility that the author’s overt exclusion of the baked confection & beverage industries masks a covert collusion with them. The lack of brand specification in “Coffee and biscuits” suggests the complicity of general, industry-wide marketing boards, experimenting with the instruments of generality characteristic of Philosophy.
Whatever the details, it is obvious that the work itself, the “book”, is merely a pretext for its author. At the risk of initiating a new orthodoxy of interpretation concerning Ó Maoilearca’s work, it seems “incontournable” that everything hinges on the “Coffee and biscuits”!
The author’s real achievement, of which he was entirely unaware during its performance, is that of writing a work that has nothing to do with Francois Laruelle, whilst copiously citing that very thinker throughout the work! Only by giving himself over, entirely, to a Laruellean pretextual consciousness, was Ó Maoilearca able to generate, as a quantum effect of ‘critical emanation’ (cf. ‘Catastrophe Theoretics’), the random manifestation of baked confection (bcp) & beverage (bvp) particularities, in such a definite configuration (C(bcp-bvp)).
Consumed by the localised labour of the Laruellean thesis, even the possibility of non-local ‘critical emanation’ of C(bcp-bvp) was necessarily obscured to Ó Maoilearca. Nevertheless, as soon as that labour was complete, the inexorable law of non-local ‘critical emanation’ exercised its power through Ó Maoilearca himself, using him as its instrument of production.
No doubt, the author’s protestations are to be expected; & can be attributed to the proportional persistence of Laruellean pretextual consciousness; spellbound by his earlier labours, as Ó Maoilearca must be.
It is difficult not to fall into the position of Russell surveying Frege’s work on the foundations of arithmetic, or Bohr critiquing Einstein’s “hidden variables”, but, of course, this review is of far greater import. Those earlier encounters merely concerned local disciplinary concerns. This evaluation, like the work it examines, concerns everything, all that is thought.
Of the three scenarios of scrutiny, this review, definitely, & non-locally, “takes the biscuit”, even though only non-biscuits were offered.
[Tags: Area 51, Extraterrestrial Confection Conspiracy, Hollow Earth Semiotics & Jammie Dodgers as Transcendental Edible]
Playing a ‘Beyond Game’ with Materialities of Cognition
[Bill Benzon]: “But who’s going to develop a discourse of freedom and dignity in the context of the computational sophistication of the cognitive sciences? What would that look like?” (Slavoj Žižek, a Note)
{AK}: If “the computational sophistication of the cognitive sciences” operates with specifiable variables, in a specifiable context, producing specifiable computations: then there is a specific layer of mechanism, a limited arrangement, that can be distinguished by the very fact of its specificity. Such limitation and specificity necessarily indicates a limited governance, too. Though its field of “computational play” may be infinitely productive, to the extent of perhaps exceeding and subsuming its very nature as a ‘structural origin’, this subsequent proliferation of moments retains the traces of ‘limited governance’, so long as it is seen through the optic of ‘specifiable computation’, the metaphoric of mechanism. In no way, however, does it follow that such systems of computation exhaust their own contexts of emergence, that which was not specified during their constitution. It is here, in these ‘contexts of emergence’, lacking systematic specification, that the essence of “freedom” resides. For it is here, that all specifications are ‘selected’, that all orders and arrangements are built. To understand this is to see infinite understandings without limit, ‘worlds’ without end. This ‘understanding’, never exhausted by specifications, systems, presences, or meanings, yet traversing them all, constitutes perhaps the only “dignity” worth having.
The Trait of Treat(mentation): How to Treat A Philosophical Tradition
Discussion here: “What Is “Continental Philosophy”?”
On this: “16 TRAITS OF CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY”
To the layperson, Anglo-American analytical philosophers would be as obscure as Continental poststructuralists. Lacking facility with symbolic logic, the Anglo-American tradition would seem even more obscure. For those of us who grew up reading SF from a young age, the ability to infer entire ‘worlds’ from a few lexical clues is a strong prerequisite. One always gets a rough idea of what’s going on in a text.
It is always possible to read disingenuously, to appropriate offered specificities & consider them in the light of an entirely different problematic altogether. Has this been done here, to Terence Blake, in the preceding comments? Well, maybe.
I don’t think that Zizek is the best example of a ‘Continental’ or ‘Poststructuralist’ thinker. I see him as an explicator turned media intellectual. He’s ok, but I don’t see him as an originator. However, his sources, and what he discusses, are ‘canonical’, I guess, & so he is going to exemplify them to some degree (don’t really know, haven’t read his books).
If academics in the USA can be considered ‘Continental’, I don’t see that there ought to be any difficulty with those who so consider, to consider Zizek, too, in the same light.
Emile Cioran, after all, was East European, too. Of course, he was brilliant! But brilliance is not the distinguishing criterion at issue.
As to Terence’s “16 Traits of Continental Philosophy”, it might be more valuable to see it as a Borgesian ‘classification’, so to speak: provisional and subject to revision, and additions.
In any case, if Chomsky attacks Derrida, Foucault, & Zizek, etc., for obscurity, is that so significant? He is a towering intellectual figure, but he isn’t a philosopher, some could argue. But it isn’t only Chomsky that thinks thus. Who remembers the controversy over Derrida’s honary degree from Cambridge?
It could be that Anglo-American philosophers never got over Descartes being French. That they obsess over clarity and “jargon” because, subconsciously, they are out to prove that they can be as clear as Descartes? lol
Secretions of Eternity: The Secrecy of Eternal Agency
These notes are in response to the discussion, here: Freedoom (Prelude-1)
Introduction
Usually, I find discussions of ‘free will’, determinacy, etc., constrictive & boring. I don’t want to be restricted by the metaphysical emphases of ‘traditions’ that I consider to be dogmatically limited. I just can’t take them seriously. Conversely, I can take anything at all seriously, if recontextualised in ways that I find interesting.
I guess the topics of ‘agency’, free will’, & ‘eternity’, are important ones, having considerable historical relevance, so I’ve tried to begin some sort of inquiry into them. No doubt, there is a vast prior literature involved, which I haven’t referred to, & of which I am mostly ignorant.
I’ve attempted to analyse the implicit assumptions that give rise to folk conventions, whose subsequent formalisations, in the abbreviated caricaturisations of an expedient & utilitarian mode of conceptualisation, so often produce paradox. The approach has very much been from the ground up, as it were, looking at the conceptual ingredients that sustain the apparently paradoxical. It isn’t my intention to domesticate the paradoxical, rather to see where it might be a contingent effect. In a sense, I’m suggesting that one has to go beyond ‘doxa’, anyway, but in a more radical way, than a safe circling around localised conundrums, from the perspective of largely unrevised ‘doxa’, would suggest. There has to be a more profound recontextualisation.
The first comment on your post, by Mai La Dreapta, expresses the same objection which I, too, somewhat tendentiously state (Mai La Dreapta’s expression is more elegant), concerning the core illogicality of the paradox you suggest:
“Philosophizing on this manner tends to turn opaque, because we want to smuggle in temporal language like “the future already exists”, ascribing grammatical tense to eternity. This is a false view of eternity and leads towards the absurdities and monstrosities discussed above.”
I’ve tried to outline the conditions for why such inflation of chronological convention occurs. Unlike Mai La Dreapta, though, I would question the notion of an objectively existent & fixed future.
Finally, you say that Calvinism is an “intellectual abomination”, that it “cannot be thought without ruin. You add: “It is also the dark motor of Western (and thus global) modernity: the core paradox that makes a horror story of history.” Could it be that the core animus of Neoreaction, itself, is the continuing “shock wave” “of a soul-shattering involvement in eternity, fusing tradition and catastrophe as doom”? Is the same obsessive need for certainty & precision characterising a Europe traumatised by centuries of plagues & wars, the same need atrophying the European mind around a fixated order of representation, all of whose receptions & implementations are localisations of a general traumatic field, which they are constrained to recapitulate?
NL’s Claims
““The notion of ‘eternity’ only indicates an endless series of events.” — This is totally not getting it. Eternity is the Outside of time (or perhaps, time-in-itself — the transcendental edge of time).”
A Note on ‘Apprehension’
Though the notion “apprehension” has been used, here & there, the use is ‘formal’, as it were, not a call to return to, or privilege, the ‘slums’ of a conventional metaphysics of the ‘subject’. The appeal is to open the ‘understanding’, to reconfigure “apprehension” beyond the grasp of the ghettos of insular error, not to confirm yet another locale of ignorant convention.
An Endless Series of Events as Eternity
An “endless series of events” implies a principle of perpetual continuity – the conditional unity of the endless series. This ‘conditional unity’, of an “endless series”, bears a relation of necessity to this “endless series”, the logical necessity of nominal unification. But note, if the ‘conditional unity’ is the unity of an ‘entire’ “endless series”, then no sequential limitation is possible for it: no objectification, ‘in time’, can occur, to it: it cannot be temporally reified: so, the relation must be one of ‘transcendental’ necessity.
So, to speak of an “endless series of events”, is to cite its unity, at least nominally, is necessarily to speak of “the Outside of time”, too. From what perspective, other than the ‘transcendental’, is it possible to speak of an “endless series of events”? Moreover, there would be as many ‘transcendental perspectives’ as there are ‘events’: the unity would be ‘holographic’.
Footnote to “An Endless Series of Events as Eternity”
If something – necessarily an identity of some sort, whether the structural constancy of an economy of events, or an ideality, or whatever – is “without beginning or end” & “lasts forever”: is that essentially identical with saying that that identity is ‘outside’, or unaffected by, time? If the element of identity is eternal (“without beginning or end” & “lasts forever”), does that constitute ‘timelessness’?
If it is suggested that the identity ‘changes’ through time, then it is no longer the same identity, its singular integrity has been vitiated by hybrid composition, it is no longer identical to itself. So, by virtue of being an identity at all, in the absolute, Parmenidean sense, ‘change’ could not be relevant. This, of course, precludes all attributions of conventional identity. Even ‘the One’ can’t be asserted. In order to articulate any identity, differentiation is required. Such ‘differentiation’ is always an event.
Conventional use of identity thinking is contingent on various contextual factors: the metaphysics of ‘subject’ (consensual agreement as to what is to be ‘identified’, & the nature of resultant identities produced)/’object’ (the ‘what’ – scenarios of the mundane – ‘worldness’): whether those ‘identities’ are ‘temporal’ or belong to ‘time-independent’ formal systems.
As can be seen, in the other comments, as soon as a ‘lockdown’ of identity is desired, the yen for an absolute consistency of function, of the ‘universe’, considered as an ‘objective system’, limits are quickly reached. The desire to be absolutely sovereign over worldly mechanism, yet wholly autonomous from ‘it’ (‘free will’), is the desire for absolute control of the ‘Object’ by this ‘Sovereign’ Subject. The whole structure is predicated on a metaphysical model that has become an obsession, an ideological fortress. Hence, all the contrived pathos, the searching for a zone of ‘freedom’, a ‘Mission Control’ of ‘autonomy, untainted by the imaginary of networked manipulation hallucinated by this ‘Sovereign’ Subject.
Shlomo Maistre’s Void
“It’s certainly not some endless cascade of events it’s the lack of events, it’s infinite, it’s an endless void you cannot even conceive of… Some things are beyond human understanding.”
“…to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, this very real world of ours, with all its suns and Milky Ways, is — nothing.”
Schopenhauer “The World As Will And Idea (Vol. 1 of 3)”:526
It could be that this ‘void’ is the very ‘condition’ that enables ‘eventuality’: in which events have their ‘being’: the requisite tabula rasa that arises as a corollary of all reificatory dreams.
In this metaphysical drama of distinctions, this litany of ontological limits, Man would rather risk the ‘void’ in order to retain his defined teleological role in an objectified ‘Being’, than see that the very ‘freedom’ he so covets, is the very void that he hallucinates with horror as a fixed emptiness from which he attempts to flee.
“He who attaches to the void is truly lost.”
Time as an Object
Events
There is no such thing as an event-in-itself.
If events are contingent, so, too, are their configurations: any laws of ‘constancy’ inversely derived from the oscillations of eventuality, derive their ‘constancy’, too, through systematic comparison. ‘Constancy’ is a temporal indication: ‘constant with respect to (perceived) change.
The notion of ‘timelessness’ is derived from the fact that an identifiable tendency, structure, or object, appears invariant with respect to a delimited field of ‘change’: identities in transition (events or ‘objects’, being themselves assumed & unanalysed structural constancies).
However, it can be seen that anything identifiable as a structural constant, through ‘its’ actions, is often a constitutive moment of transitional ‘force’ within the economy of another ‘object’ or ‘constant’. There is no final object(ification).
Laws of configuration are ‘abstract’ principles, whose ‘immanent’ ‘reality’ is inferred through the economies of ‘tangible’ haecceity that delineate them, & which they suggest. Such ‘inferences’ are available through the varying admixture of different scales of apprehension, of variant modes of perception, which bring different perspectives, or even ‘worlds,’ into ‘view’, as it were. The play of possibilities is endless. The conventional systematics of ‘Nature’ is only one possible configuration.
The Formalisations of Eternity
The formalisation , or mythologisation, of the notion of ‘Eternity’, as being ‘outside of the ‘temporal’, allows nominal objectifications of Time. Projecting or positioning chosen considerations into this ‘site’, or ‘topos’, of Eternity.
Objects, Times, & Totalities
1) You can’t objectify time: it’s the way objects are delineated, both experientially & otherwise.
2) As objects are interdependent, their essences are mutually derived & co-implicated. Are these ‘essences’ ex-changed, through time?
3)As a final objectification of time is not possible, it can’t be negated. So, timelessness is not objectifiable, either.
4) Chronological time is always derived from objective references, so is variable, referentially contingent.
5) Eternity is an ‘reductive’ objectification.
6)Temporal indications are reductive objectifications.
7) The notion of an essential structure that produces or generates secondary phenomena, is contingent on…
Any object requires a context.
The drive to understand wants totality.
So it always tries to objectify the totality of whatever field of identities concerns it.
As there is nothing else, it has to use nothing, negation, to do this.
Using negation, it can reintroduce all the known identities, but in different ways: fresh combinatorics, rearrangements, that weren’t done before ‘negation’
[The notion of ‘totality’ is always itself a contingent conceptualisation, one that is essentially dependent on the notion of ‘fragmentation’].
As the negation is the negation of a freshly discerned ‘totality’, according to whatever episteme prevails, the “fresh combinatorics” & “rearrangements” are going to differ, too, as long as there is sufficient historical continuity preserving earlier knowledge & insights with adequacy, & there are mechanisms of ‘conscious apprehension’ capable of discerning the respective relevances over time, but not overly tied to the episteme of their temporal location.
Free Will
Free Will as ‘Its’ ‘Own’ Determinant?
The notion of Absolute Free Will has one determinant: that of Will, ‘itself’. What could be the nature of this ‘will’, abstracted from all determining conditions? Is not its essential nature that of responsivity? If so, then does all that it responds to, constitute ‘it’.
It may well have an integrated economy of appropriations, that are identified as ‘it’, but, in truth, ‘it’ has no absolute boundaries.
Environmental Range
If ‘free will’ produces acts & decisions, this production always occurs in a determining context of choices. So, there is always an environment of determining constraints that sets the range of possible production, of possible forms of response.
What is ‘Free Will’, Without ‘Context’?
What is ‘Free Will’, anyway? What would it be outside of the interactions of physiological, cosmological (perhaps astrology is a proto-reading of quantum entanglements? lol), a myriad, subtle influences? A soul-in-itself? Another stupid object? Another braying of ‘Being’?
The Imaginary Universe of ‘FreeWill’
Imagine a universe consisting of a single entity called ‘FreeWill’, & various expressive media.
Take away the ‘expressive media’.
In what way can the freedom of ‘FreeWill’ manifest, be, be known, occur, realise ‘itself’?
Put the ‘expressive media’ back.
If ‘FreeWill’ has complete control of the ‘expressive media’, to the extent that any ‘wish’, any desired transformation, is simultaneously a realisation, then is the metaphysical model of ‘Will’ correct in this scenario?
Such a model often has connotations of ‘resistance’ or ‘difficulty’, such that the articulation of form generates problems of ‘choice’. Concerns of construction, involving these connotations, would not be relevant. Perhaps they could be generated, as aesthetic possibilities?
The point, though, is that if the prevailing structure is that of a wholly undetermined wishfulness-without-limits, as it were, & instant realisation, is it possible to speak of there being anything other than ‘FreeWill’? Is it possible to speak of ‘expression’, even? If there is no ‘Other’, would ‘self-expression’, too, be suspect?
If such a suspicion obtains, what then of the status of ‘FreeWill’? An undeterminable process of transformation(s)?
So, the notion of ‘free will’ only has any significance in a context of determinations other than those of ‘will’. But such a context can be inflated, to the point where ‘will’ disappears, becoming a moment of contextual determination: & the ‘will’ can be inflated, to the point where all contextuality disappears, becoming mere solipsistic resonance. Both are ‘correct’, both are the results of conventions of reification. The mystic transcends both. The mystic realises that the ‘disappearance’ of either, entails the ‘disappearance’ of the other. The mystic realises that everything between is conventional. The mystic realises there are other possibilities.
Do What You Will, See What You Want
Even if we assume future predetermination, would it not follow that this future is inclusive of the results of free will?
If you’re going to objectify all of time, if you’re going to objectify ‘free will’, to the extent of calling it ‘free will’, why not objectify & repeat the whole ‘universe’? Once, as ‘potentia’, twice, as ‘realisation’? Would a repetition vitiate freedom, in any way? Would it vitiate a structure, where, in the ‘moment of action’, the agent’s act is solely derived from a wholly undetermined ‘Will’, thereby conforming to an ideal of absolute autonomy?
But, what is ‘autonomy’? Autonomy is always independence from a determining Otherness. If you assert, reify, or objectify, ‘freewill’, you’re simultaneously asserting, reifying, objectifying determination, too. So, the essence of the autonomous is essentially dependent on a determining Otherness, to operate, to be. No determining ‘otherness’ to be autonomous from, no autonomy, either. Therefore, ‘autonomy’ always arrives as a structural effect, in an inalienable complicity with ‘determination’.
But we’ll put that to one side, for the moment, we can entertain the common view & see where it leads. So, getting back to the ‘repetition of universe’ idea: if it is stated, that for the act of an agent to be ‘free’: at the ‘moment of action’, the time of enactment: ‘its’ ultimate source, as a ‘decisive act’, must not derive from any pattern of temporal determination, i.e., causality. If it is so derivative, does this render the ‘decisive act’ a determined one, suggesting an automaton rather than an agency of ‘freedom’?
If it is held that the future, which would be inclusive of ‘free acts’: that, in principle, are unamenable to prediction: is already pre-existent in ‘Eternity’: does this suggest that ‘Eternity’ is a wholly determining factor, vitiating the uniqueness of the moment of ‘free will’s’ enactment? Does Eternity’s preduplication render the unique moment of ‘free will’ as a ’caused’ re-enactment?
Firstly, if the preduplication is timeless, it cannot, strictly, be subsumed categorically by notions of temporal sequence (past, present & future), at all, so no temporal relation can obtain.
Secondly, is it even a ‘preduplication’? Or is it an Eternal ‘apprehension’, as it were, of a singular action in time?
Thirdly, if the contingent nature of temporal objectivity vitiates any actual achievement of an object, in the Presocratic sense, what is there to timelessly preduplicate, to eternalise?
Any argument from ‘eternal duration’ (eternal law, etc.) rests on a comparative systematically derived from the eventualities already rejected. The timeless definition of Eternity, ironically, could be said to reject eternal duration, too, if such duration is ‘temporal’.
As concepts, the past, present, & future are systematically interdependent. What would they be without the objective interrelationships & sequences that provision the indexes for any actual (referential) chronological measure?
Their intuitive distinctness is a concomitant of apprehension, & is contingent. If the attempt to anchor apprehension in a referential objectivity is posited, such anchoring is vitiated by that objectivity’s temporal nature.
To sum this section up: if the aforesaid dubious reifications are indulged, a problematic schism, between a ‘timeless Eternity’ & ‘the temporal’ is produced. This produces a schismatic doubling, under the twin signs of ‘Eternity’ & ‘Temporality’, which can only produce the conundrum of an illusory “‘intra-temporal’ agency”, sub specie aeternitatis, if the doubling is reified so as to produce two distinct & separate entities (the ‘future’ & its timeless ‘Eternal preduplication, as it were): & if the timeless subsumption, as it were, of all temporality by Eternity, is temporalised in an illegimate way.
Notwithstanding the conventional nature of temporal measurement & objectification, even if all that is granted: even if we grant that the timeless duplication of a ‘future action’ would imply the sheer existence, ‘somewhere’, of a preduplication of that action: then there are only two choices.
If the eternal preduplication is identical with the ‘future’, then so are their respective agencies & actions: temporal agency is timeless, eternal agency: if it isn’t identical, then “the future” cannot be spoken of in the singular, in the formulation “If the future is (already) real”.
Reruns of a Fixed Universe
It would seem that ‘free will’, in the absolute sense, would entail a freedom from any pattern of necessary determination not having its source in the self to whom the ‘free will’ belongs, or with which it can be identified. That is to say, the self has to have a freedom of choice with respect to all the causal streams it encounters. It may not always avail itself of this ‘freedom’ in explicit ways: it could just ‘go with the flow’: but the freedom to do nothing, as it were, is still an expression of freedom, if it is chosen.
For the ideal of ‘Absolute Freedom’ to obtain, for a willing self to truly express such an ‘Absolute Freedom’, the ‘moment’ of this willing self’s action, has to be wholly without reference to any other force, except itself. The ‘will’ has no connection with anything else except itself.
If this conception of an absolutely free will is said to ‘belong’ to a ‘self’, or (id)entity, indeed, in some way, is thought to be essential to such a ‘self’, this would imply that the essence of this ‘self’, too, is non-contingent, underived, not susceptible to being subsumed under any economics of causal determination that does not originate within itself. It becomes an origin, an original source of ‘expression’. Its relation to the temporal ‘universe’, then, is one of ‘transcendence’. It is the intervention of an absolute autonomy, in the causal streams of ‘determination’ constituting the temporal ‘universe’.
The possibilities of these two conceptions can be run through, as a ‘thought experiment’. Assuming the idea of a wholly determined ‘universe’, & the static image of fixed events which it suggests, the notion of absolute free will can be repeatedly tested against this background of fixed variables, to chart its conditions of metaphysical possibility – rerunning freedom over a fixed ‘universe’.
If, over a number of reruns, it shows any kind of discernible patterns of preference, any kind of consistency, ‘it’ enters the realm of predictive determination. Whether such a realm indicates the work of ‘universal’ causal determinacy external to a ‘free will’, or expressions of ‘eternal & innate characteristics’, as it were, of that ‘free will’, is an irresolvable & open question. But, even if the latter, such ‘eternal & innate characteristics’ retain complicity with the system of causal determinations within which the ‘discernible patterns of preference’ find ‘expression’, such preferentiality being doubly contingent, on ‘eternal & innate characteristics’ of the will, & on the system of causal determinations. Given this model, does the complicity introduce causal determinacy into the autonomy of will? Even if the ‘autonomous will’ possesses a ‘timeless’ structure of selective preferences ( its ‘eternal & innate characteristics’), is such a structure not, at least, informed by the system of causal determinations, or their possibility? If so, would not such an anticipatory informing constitute, essentially, a contingency (of anticipation), on ‘the system of causal determinations’, without which no anticipatory structure would be necessary?
If it is wholly random in its choices, at every rerun, is it possible to distinguish it as a coherent entity, as an entity, at all?
Its ‘selfhood’ would only consist of a somatic continuity, a situational form it is seen to inhabit, or whatever signifying traces collect under its nominal rubric. Other than that, it would not be identical to itself in any way, so could not fulfill a fundamental criterion of identity.
This would not necessarily obviate a transcendental essence, as it were, of ‘Self’, but it renders this ‘essence’ insusceptible to ‘intra-universal’ representation.
Realities – A Question of the Real
Reality as a Fixation
Reality is a necessary concomitant of realisation. Realisation is essentially temporal.
Furthermore,the notion of reality as a fixed narrative (of events), presupposes that the distribution of observable events & their laws of configuration: all of which are time-dependent: is somehow determinably objective (capable of finalisation, as a network of structural constants). But is it reasonable to project the linearity & limitations of the modes of objectivity that are characteristic of the empirically ‘real’, into the ‘Eternal’? Need ‘Eternity’ correspond to the extrapolations of conventional, temporal determination? If ‘Eternity’ is the negation of time, then even time-invariant laws, which derive their status of invariancy from fields of temporal variation, cannot, strictly, be seen as ‘timeless’? If you reject events from a ‘timeless Eternity’, are you not going to reject their time-invariant laws of configuration, too? Even if they’re of ‘eternal’ duration (lol)? What renders a discernible ‘law’ so special? Abstraction? Where is the absolute border between the ‘abstract’ & the ‘real’? Is it not contingent upon apprehension?
‘Reality’, as an empirical event, is always going to be a sampling, from a ‘temporal’ perspective.
To presuppose that an ‘Eternal’ view of ‘time’ would see only a singular & fixed sequence of events, is to extrapolate the temporal modalities of sampling, or reception, onto that which one has explicitly stated configures & transcends all realisations.
You’re assuming that Eternity operates according to a model of fixed presence: that the “finite or ‘intra-temporal’” apprehensions of determinate existence, necessarily configure Eternal apprehension, so to speak.
Eternity & Illusion
A timeless perspective would not imply any ‘reality’ of past, present, or future, with respect to each other, because they are realities of time, realisations. To say, “‘’If the future is (already) real, which eternity implies’” temporalises ‘Eternity’. If you abandon the temporal qualifier, the most that can be claimed is that ‘Eternity implies a Platonist reality’, from which all of time is ‘’equally accessible’’. You can’t treat Eternity’s access to the future as an “‘intra-temporal’” fact which somehow renders only “finite or ‘intra-temporal’ agency’” unreal. You can’t have it both ways. You have to admit the illusoriness of the “finite or ‘intra-temporal’, objective world, too.
A ‘real’ Eternity would imply that all of temporality is an illusion.
Topological Distributions
Positions of the Real
1) If Eternity, is positioned as ‘Real’, this turns all of the temporal into ‘illusion’, not just ‘finite or ‘intra-temporal’ agency’. The negative logic that opposes a timelessness conception of Eternity’ to the ‘temporal’, demands that all of temporality be considered ‘illusion’, if ‘Eternity’ is ‘real’.
Such being the case, ‘reality’ cannot be temporalised, at all. You can’t start mixing the intuitive conceptualisations of ‘finitude’, which are contingent, with half-baked domestications of metaphysics. The calculus of contingent abstr(actions), exemplified by the temporal indexes of ‘past’, ‘present’, & ‘future’, are essentially perspectival, linked to the metrics of objectivity, of eventuality, of perceived limitations.
If you say Eternity is real, trying to appropriate this ‘reality’ in the operations of ‘finitude’, in the calculations of ‘illusion’, when you’ve expressly stated such a ‘reality’ is the negation of all such contrivances, necessarily produces error.
2) If Temporality, is positioned as ‘Real’, then Eternity, being its negation, has to be considered an illusion, according to the same negative logic. But if you do this, ‘Reality’ is subject to contingency, arbitrariness, & infinite recontextualisation – the position of the ‘Real’ changes. Or is perspectival, if there is an attempt to reify an ‘objective principle’ & derive a hierarchy of superveniences. Any logic of valorisation just produces more perspectives.
3) The nub of the ‘error’ is in neglecting to mention ‘eternal agency’, such an elision possibly suggesting that ‘agency’ is only ‘finite or ‘intra-temporal’, instead of ‘its’ temporal ‘effects’ being so. You might not be saying that, explicitly, but an undue emphasis on the “‘finite or ‘intra-temporal’”, on the consensual abbreviations of manifest agency, could suggest it. The ‘agent’ can be considered in many ways. If you insist on measuring, or identifying, ‘it’, only according to the language of observed ‘finitudes’, of the consensually observed & legitimated distillations of historical narrative, you’re dealing with a socio-political & domesticated symbol of agency, not ‘real’, metaphysical agency, in the sense of ‘Eternal Reality’.
Summary
So, to sum up, if it is claimed that Eternity is not an endless sequence of events, then it cannot be identified with them, or their operations. If Eternity is seen as ‘real’, then temporality is necessarily unreal, including any ‘agency’ seen as temporal (“finite or ‘intra-temporal’ agency)”.
Though you didn’t state, explicitly, that Eternity was ‘real’, you did state that Eternity’s hosting of ‘the future’ implied that ‘future’s’ present reality. This, as has already been indicated, engages in a complicated itinerary of metonymic transference, wherein Eternity’s hosting is implicitly configured as the preduplication of a fixed ‘future’, whose sheer being or existence, though ‘timeless’, confers the status of illusion on all timely proceedings, including those of agency. The itinerary plays off one positioning of ‘reality’ against the implicitly suggested derivations of another*, in a subtle conflation that masks a blatant incompatibility with the folk metaphysics of idiomatic usage.
* Achieved through an elision.
Brooding on the Genesis of Reality, Nightmare and Dreams
There was an exchange on Nick Land’s blog, here, that broached the topics of evolution and genetics. It’s not very long, didn’t really get off the ground, as it were. I’ve turned my concluding comment into this post.
A silent debate? It seems that minds are caught up in a ‘reality’, so involved in (d)evolution? ‘Up-to-the-minute’ flows, weaving ‘can-do’ narratives of a tangible empiricism, tracking the ‘market’, repeating the decisional practices of ‘administration’, political phantasies, playing games of power.
I think I’ll carry on dreaming…
Continuing Nick Land’s logic:
If you cooperate to ‘kill’ the entropic forces that threaten an ecologically informed democracy, that is a lot more cooperation than converting vegetation resources into ‘meat’ through the vector of domesticated forms of animal vitality.
If cooperative predation leads to a development of specific and goal oriented cerebral systems, in which the strategies of elusiveness are countered by the tactics of ‘capture’, it follows that such developments occur within a context of ecological management: the appropriation of the somatic resources of one form by another form.
Predation functions within a holistic economy of circulations: it could be said to have a function within this economy.
If it is the case that the tactical thinking of capture itself turns into an administration of ‘prey forms’ as harvested resource, has there not been a transformation? The “intelligence-enhancing” challenges of prey acquisition no longer obtain in quite the same ways. Control displaces capture, there is nothing left to capture. And yet there are those who remain enamoured of the atavistic ‘culture of capture’. Isn’t it time to consider this culture from a critical perspective, from a visionary perspective, is this not a truer, better evolution?
If an ‘ecologically informed democracy’ is too much of an abstraction for those bound by the militant logics of meat consumption, the visceral theatrics of predation, and the atavistic heroics of conquest, it would be wise to remember that the homogenising logic that turns everything into a ‘resource’ works with an ruthless and indifferent efficiency. The more it is accessed for the local and hierarchical concerns of anthropic culture, the greater the displacement of these initiating concerns, and the increased likelihood of their radical ‘downsizing’ to a singular embodiment – “There can be only one”.
Cooperation based only on an imaginary of conflict and scarcity, rooted only in the habits of violation, do not lend themselves to sound holistic administrations.
The belief in the productivity of harnessed ‘Newtonian’ mechanisms, the concentration of powers through frugality, the avaricious parsimonies of colonial aggression, the hedonisms of relentless consumption and destruction: all these are elements in the same equation and they cannot end well. Not because of any ‘objective’ necessity, but because Man has hallucinated the wrong ‘objects’, and he can only obsess on a mirage of impending dooms, as he orbits, and is orbited by, this constellation of traumas.
All ‘sense of wonder’, mystical feeling, contemplation, has gone, leaving only the endless calculations of imagined catastrophe: Man, caught in a binding web of resentful ambitions, that only he has spun.
The Final Refractions of Common Sense (sensus communis), the Clarifications of Commerce
This is a response to Terence Blake’s comment on Fighting Things You Cannot See: A Quick Response to Larval Subjects, October 26, 2012, Fighting Words 2
It was an involved and complex comment, suggestive of a general logic that perhaps governs the global opera we seem to inhabit, the coercive global operations that configure contemporary being.
1. furtive shifting between an extended concept of naturalism as the suspending of transcendence
The “extended concept of naturalism” as: “the suspending of transcendence”; “naturalism as immanence”; “there is nothing outside the world”: all these are a particular rhetoric of containment, preliminary categorisations that set up an epistemological schema or framework, a world: a world to be ruled. When transcendence was necessary, to compensate for lack of sufficient material control, a central principle was arrived at and implemented with brutal force (in the Occident, at any rate). The principle was tightly governed, authoritarian, and inflexible. As networks of cyber-kontrol and exploitation developed, the central principle was contested and recontextualised as an element of these networks. The essential movement of assimilation continued, the element of earlier brutalisations transposed into the ‘scientific’ implementations of an ‘industrialisation’ that colonised almost without limit.
As the innate pragmatics of this deprived and depraved barbarity prevailed: as the entire globe was cast into the abyss of the lowest common denominator: an ‘l.c.d. consciousness’ took hold, crystallising a mundum depletus whose ever-renewing facets glittered out to the void: powered by a circuitry of oneiric commerce, endlessly replaying nostalgic imagery of the earlier stages of liquid vitality, even of the ‘l.c.d. consciousness’ itself, all of which had been displaced: the crystal world shone its twinkling visions of frozen desire, but its invitations to the dream life were in vain, the mechanism of seductions now only a museum for passing inspection by alien ‘brains’, an exhibition of the “Era of homo insane“.
2. naturalism as immanence (the thesis that “there is nothing outside the world”)
This is the imperative: “You are in the ‘world’. You must do what we say, because we know best. We have fixed the very meanings of the words everyone uses, in a way that predisposes their ‘common sense’ connections in our favour. Nevertheless, you can only accept this, “there is nothing outside this world.””
3. more restricted notion of naturalism as the extrapolated unifying framework of the sciences
The “extrapolated unifying framework of the sciences”, in effect, is the ideological extension of a process of legitimation.The legitimation produces whatever counts as ‘valid knowledge’, as ‘truth’. The milieu of this process gains an almost ecclesiastical authority, dispensing reality to the herd.
4. On the extended sense of naturalism, nothing can be ruled out a priori except transcendence and transcendent causation.
“nothing can be ruled out a priori except transcendence and transcendent causation.”
‘Transcendence’ is always a threat to every closed system.
5. In this sense a naturalist could accept teleological causes, that would be a matter of research
6. Husserl is a philosopher of immanence and the bracketing of the natural attitude brackets out concepts and assumptions that are transcendent to this field
Yes, but isn’t it an immanence with respect to the phenomenological field of investigation, the ‘things themselves’, rather than a metaphysics of ‘nature’ or ‘materiality’? And Husserl’s eidetic procedures introduce ideality at the very foundations of his project.
7. Bryant falls foul of the Laruellian critique that he posits naturalism twice
The problem with any dogmatism is not the multiple positings of its basic position, rather it is the pretence of plural incommensurability when its characterisations of these posits are questioned. This is the monolithic utterance characteristic of an insidious imperialism, the surreptitious and easy delineation of a coercive weltanschauung as ‘nature’ (“This is the way it is!”).
8. the extended but weak sense of immanence
The use of the term “weak” for the philosophical concept of ‘immanence’ favours the identification of ‘strong’ with ‘physical realisation’, with ‘material presence’, ‘weak’ with the idealised abstractions of philosophic conceptuality. But I guess you’re right, for the actual difference is between a concept that occurs only in specialised discourse, and a concept that is amplified by more general and ‘powerful’ representations in the ‘world’ .
9. and then some hoddgepodge that he can never decide, on containing whatever specific hypothese he needs at the moment of proclamation to specify his naturalism.
The ‘hodgepodge’ is the ‘sorting house’ where elements are selected to constitute the scenography of ‘reality’: obviously, explicit modalities of truth play a large part in this process, but there is considerable room for disingenuity, too.
10. The strong, but always changinng and ever oscillating between mechanism, materialism and physicalism,
Oscillating between the philosophemes of mechanism, materialism and physicalism, reinforced by a philosophical naturalism that is itself reinforced, in its turn, by scientific demonstrativity.
11. is somehow meant to be reinforced by the weaker more philosophical naturalism,
‘Philosophy’, yes, the cultural veneer that obscures a history of networked exploitations.
12. which is itself reinforced by the “scientific” content.
Such “scientific content” is always administered, ultimately, by political interests who kontrol the vast sums of kapital which finance scientific research.
13. Having two forms of immanence he can exclude a maximum of potential rivals.
Professor Bryant is free to circle on the merry-go-round of as many immanences as he can think up. I don’t have to join him.
14. With weak philosophical immanence he thinks he can exclude teleology in the sciences (but he can’t!)
15. and with strong scientific immanence he thinks he can exclude Husserl and Foucault and whoever.
16. But research (and here I include both philosophy and science) is not so much about demarcation and exclusion as critical investigation and experimentation.
Yes, this is the ideal, the dream, the spin, of that benevolent ‘science’ everyone has such faith in.
It is a great pity that they are not clever enough to realise it.
Fighting Things You Cannot See: A Quick Response to Larval Subjects, October 26, 2012, Fighting Words 3
Naturalism or materialism are hardly perspectives struggling to disseminate novel insights to a population ignorant of their ‘virtues’. Their outlooks are well-known.
In actual ‘Contental philosophy’, on the Continent, Bachelard, Serres, Thom, and Monod, have been hugely influential. In the Anglophone reception of this tradition, these thinkers have been well-represented over the years. They are not ‘outlier’ figures. If you’re claiming they are ‘outliers’ for you, and your milieu, you are the best judge of that, but it certainly doesn’t apply to the rest of the philosophical world.
When you speak of ‘dominant tendencies’, in the Anglophone world there is one, and one only, the Anglo-American analytical tradition and all its sub-schools. ‘Speculative Realism’ is merely an intermediary form that has developed in response to the perceived ‘excesses’ of some Continental thought, it is an attempt to domesticate such thought to the basic outlook exemplified by a large, hegemonic strain in the Anglo-American tradition.
There is nothing in my response that can be construed as implying the rejection of Althusser or Foucault, not that I would hesitate to do this if it was necessary. But I would actually read them first.
Your silence regarding the rest of the points in my response is notable.
You are very prolific, philosophy takes time.
