It’s my contention, that where Laruelle says anything valid or worthwhile, this would consist of highly obvious extensions and implications that do not, it seems to me, contribute much in the way of insights, but nevertheless, licence a regression of sorts; the kind of nostalgia, of positional retrogressions, that can be observed as instancing a more general cultural movement of the contemporary era.
More suited to the populist demand producing Donald Trump, ‘Laruellean licence’ similarly, serves a philosophy readership unused to thinking ‘radically’ and questioningly, always, and as a matter of course. Such a readership always looks through ‘reversed telescopes’, exercising a kind of ‘consumer choice’ on what it sees, projecting, fixating and privileging, only along the lines of its own, essentially positivist, understanding. The resulting buffer zone of doxic fragmentation, the zone of positivist consumer psychology wherein in a host of superficial and easily accessible opinion-choices, can be proffered, again and again, as philosophy, even under the rubric of its apparent negation.
There is a price to pay, of course. In this case, it seems to me, the valorisation of current receptions; no matter how superficial, uninventive, or uninformed; is the unfortunate result. Thus we see, more or less, only a history of bad and uncharitable interpretations, each being the necessary condition for subsequent promotional campaigns of philosophy production. Countering one bias of poor interpretation with another, all the while clinging on to the modality of superficial opinion transaction. The value of this procedure is eminently social and communicative. The reversed telescopes move together, communally, avoiding the arduous alienations and depths of solitary contemplation. This is ‘hive learning’, a ‘swarming philosophy’ for an increasingly networked world. The mass distribution of loved wisdom, engineered according to protean and prevailing, real-time, l.c.d. (lowest common denominator) needs. It is a market philosophy, modeled on the 6.00 news, telegraphic, televisual, telly-typed (sic). Because its emphasis is social, it opens up the usual sociopolitical possibilities, various theoretical worlds transitioning into a perpetual broadcast context and its configuring logic. Usually, that logic’s hegemonic principle is reality, or as its proponents insist on calling it, ‘the real’. Such insistence, of course, is paradoxical, especially when those same proponents declare themselves both to always inhabit this ‘real’, and yet to never reach this alleged habitat of their own declaration. There are obviously two different and unanalysed conceptions at play, the interstices of which are readily susceptible to the most banal discursive productions, whilst still being able to retain the rubric of philosophy, somewhere in the vicinity. This, of course, enables populist relevance; multiplies interdisciplinary employments; and increases the market value of various academic philosophy brands.
Market context and configuration, whilst important to some, is not necessarily radically pure conceptual critique, as it were. So, I’ve put Laruelle on the critique list. Let’s see what all the non-sense is about!