[Matt Barber] “The “quantum image” is this image of the radical identity of the material which is real, absolute, immediate and not involved in any false process, dialectic, differentiation etc. The only way to reduce L’s work to a scientism would be to hack off the part of his project which includes radical and static emplacement of the chora which distinguishes and defines the universe and world in a way philosophy fails to achieve.”
{CJ (AK)}: Being able to treat anything at all, any potentially identifiable ens, whether ‘real’ or ‘imaginary’, as a ‘reality’, ‘absolute’, or ‘immediacy’, is merely one of the corollary operations of Science Fiction thinking and assumption. It’s Science Fiction bricolage, you pick it up quite naturally as a child when reading science-fiction. It’s a prerequisite of reading lots of short stories with different kinds of world building. That process, in my experience, involves conceptual operations, some of which appear in various kinds of philosophy or even Laruelle’s ‘non-philosophy’. But there are a lot more possibilities.
It would be possible to do a structural combinatorics of philosophical or non-philosophical positions, or discursive elaborations of radical, seed ens or entities, as various kinds of formal and informal outlines. This might seem to have considerable appeal to those intimidated by spectres of processual, dialectical, and differential, necessity. But each one of those seeming necessities itself potentially constitutes a radical seed entity.
The khôra could be said to paradoxically refer to the characterisation of the non-characterised, but such antinomy would be contingent on essentialised notions of ‘characterisation’ and ‘non-characterisation’, those essentialised notions themselves ‘characterisations’, if that convention is insisted upon.
But notice, the ‘khôra’, as a determination, is contingent on the theoretical construction which it might be said to exceed, or even ‘originate’, if the relation of origin is projected onto this alleged excess. Likewise, each and every moment of the theoretical construction, including the ‘khôra’, could be seen as permeated by the hegemony of any other moment, as the sign or symbol of any other. All of this, of course, in addition to the usual holistic nominations.
These possibilities are simple, first stage, speculations. They should be fairly obvious and intuitive, if all faculties are brought to the task. There are many understandings or possibilities beyond these first stage extrapolations of convention, but they require something more than than the channelled preoccupations of contemporary commitment.
Regarding the ‘quantum image’, a first step would be to consider the concepts and assumptions drawn together in its construction, and to radically consider those concepts and assumptions from all possible perspectives. This conceptual analysis lays out the background of discursive and philosophical assumptions in which the so-called, ‘quantum image’, is able to function. One then merely has to ask what the logic(s) of this ‘quantum image’ says (say).
“Distinguishing and defining the universe and world in a way that philosophy fails to achieve”, is an assertion contingent on methodological claims of constructive definition, as well as universal and worldly assumption. The attribution of success and failure implicitly brings in selectivity of outlook. The notion of achievement indicates the possibility of accomplishing such a selective outlook.
All of these operations presuppose some kind of systematic theorisation and necessity sufficient to produce the nebulous accomplishments of ‘success’ and ‘failure’. There seems to be a kind of vague and everyday existentialism involved? A nostalgia wishing to foreground the presences of its ‘reality’, as absolute and immediate possibilities available for its economy of libidinal desire?
The closest analogy to such a vaguely expressed position or assumption, would perhaps be an outlook of consumer dominion, based on an ideology of its own freedom from any other form of necessity. The system of consumerist immediacy becomes the only and absolute form of reality. Is this the only dominion that matters to Laruelle and his followers? A dominion of everyday freedom, in which all considerations of wisdom can be seen as failures?
If this is the absolute metaphysics of catering and consumption; of axiomatic appetite and its order; then it is no surprise that Laruelle would seek radical incommensurability from any philosophical gesture that might question that order. Just as Donald Trump has deleted climate change data, Laruelle seeks to delete the powers of philosophy, or perhaps copy-paste them into a bazaar of cognitive baubles and consumer cognitions, a market stall of mimetic ‘wisdoms’?
It is no wonder, then, that the distinguishing and defining ‘chora’ actually symbolises the always imagined, cornucopian overflowing of the ‘agora’.