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.
I think you are right that plurality without incommensurability is a mere de-centering of control, and not its radical contestation. Bryant has no place for individuation, because he is busy searching for the perfect philosophical vocabulary and posture. But as you know “if the wrong person uses the right means they will not work”. Some of Bryant’s words are OK, but he is the wrong person and turns them into ideology. Some can use the wrong words, as I argue that Laruelle does, but it begins to get us out of the mess, at least in noetic flashes.
Incommensurability, in Kuhn’s or Feyerabend’s works, or indeed anyone who is actually thinking through things, is a sensitivity and respect for holistic difference. There can be more than one ‘big picture’, ‘arche-theory’, ‘world-view’, that fits the data. Perhaps the wave-particle duality reflects this: wave theory of light, corpuscular theory of light?
This kind of incommensurability is informed by a thought that seeks insight. Without consulting a text, that is my understanding. It’s probably simplistic, but it’s the best I can do, right now. Unfortunately, there is another use of the logic of incommensurability. When networks of power (corporate entities, privileged social groups, etc.,) wish to disown responsibility for negative effects produced by their operations, they often call such a logic into play. It’s the stock answer to any questioning of the status quo.
I haven’t read enough of Levi Bryant to know what his goals are. I left a comment on one of his posts about Buddhism some time ago, and received notifications when he posted. I read one or two, and then didn’t bother with the rest. I was busy, and didn’t feel they were a priority. His “Fighting Words” post was an exception, I commented on that. And, of course, you’re right, a certain ideology seems to configure his discourse. He isn’t aware of it, though. I explained to someone that he might be better at making BBC documentaries, easy explications for the masses. It’s a kind of coffee-table philosophy. He has since explicitly confirmed this is his objective, to be accessible.
I had a look at Badiou’s “Being and Event” the other day. He seems to be a good writer, although I find some of his assumptions questionable.
What I’ve gathered of Laruelle, so far, is interesting and funny. His interchange with Derrida is hilarious. Because he turns Derrida’s own tactics back on to Derrida himself. But, really, this is an obvious move to everyone who seriously thinks through something. Derrida refers to it somewhere, when he speaks of the ‘deconstruction’ of a ‘deconstruction’, ‘guide rails’, etc., or whatever. At such points the dogmatist is usually dismissive of the entire procedure and its results, returning to the habitual structures of their idée fixe. I’m not sure if Laruelle’s valorisation of ‘decision’ really counts for anything, it’s too much like a Buddhist move, and seems to lend itself to appropriation by a coercive empiricism, the apppropriators using it justify further exploitations. And whether ‘non-philosophy’ is any more than a reactionary hypostasis, a holding position for the ‘Occidental tradition’, the last outpost of an imperial ‘reality’, is debatable.
I should note that I am not necessarily implying that being “like a Buddhist move” doesn’t count for anything. To qualify: Laruelle seems to avail himself of Buddhist epistemological techniques, but only up to a point. He doesn’t follow through, as far as I can tell. His notions of the “One”, “Vision-in-One”, etc., are valorised in an arbitrary way, using a half-baked conceptualisation of “decision”. In one sense, his characterisations of “the One” are reminiscent of Zen gestures towards the ‘Absolute’ or ‘Sunyata’. Unlike Buddhism, and unlike Derrida’s playfulness, he is engaged in a discourse of ‘mockery’: a ‘mockery’ and a ‘mock-up’. I can’t avoid the feeling that his work is completely a reaction to Derrida, that it is reactionary in the worst sense. Having said that, there are passages where some ‘insight’ seems to occur. And whether he likes it or not, his perspective attempts the metaphilosophical (“The One is a real absolute and not only a transcendental principle, and it is capable of grounding Difference itself without letting itself be exhausted, in its essence, by the use that Difference at any rate makes of it.”), if he wishes to circumscribe ‘the philosophical tradition’ as a determinate set of procedures which falls short of the ‘One’ or the ‘real’, as he characterises them. One could say that Derrida was operating from a Zen perspective, too, but he doesn’t seem reactionary in the way Laruelle does. There is a genuine contribution to the Western tradition, and doesn’t Derrida speak of interrogating the tradition from a ‘non-site’, that is no longer determined by the tradition? So, as yet, I don’t see anything in Laruelle that is not a mere re-application of Derrida’s approach. but one that clings on to a notion of the real as determined by Laruelle’s decisions.
Light (as well as matter) can be described in terms of a wave or a particle, but the term “or” in this proposition is not indicative of a question being posed, as if to invite an answer to a question of light such as “which is it”, (although certainly such questions have been asked of light) but is indicative of a relationship being proposed between the concept of a particle and that of a wave, with respect to light. These concepts (wave on the one hand, and particle on the other) are being proposed as non interchangeable concepts. The term “or” signifies that the relationship between the concepts is such that they would exclude each other. They would be mutually exclusive concepts. And this would be to distinguish such a relationship from alternative ones in which they were related by, for example, equivalence: wave = particle, or related by both being true: both wave and particle are true, or equally that both are false. Rather it will be that when one is true, the other is false, and vice versa. And the term “or” signifies this relationship.
But instead of the terms “true” and “false”, which have a bit too much baggage, one can use other terms, such as the digits “0” and “1”, or letters such as “A” and “B”.
In this way we can say that when the relationship between wave and particle is given as “wave or particle” it means that whenever the value of a wave is A then the value of a particle will be B, and vice versa. The relationship is such that it excludes the case where both have the value A, or both have the value B.
Light is able to embody this logic (or concept), as much as the logic/concept is able to otherwise signify the ability of light to embody this logic. We could argue that when this logic is used to represent light, this logic becomes a function of light insofar as if light were unable to embody this logic, the logic would fail as an adequate representation of light. The logic, however, has it’s own existence, unrelated to light, eg. in digital computation.
The question then is not if the logic is ‘correct’ (since the logic can work across all sorts of domains, regardless of light) but how light might embody this logic. In short: in what way is light a wave or a particle? The answer to this question is not to be found in the logic, but in experiments with light. Does light conform to a representation of it, as a wave or a particle?
The short answer is yes it does. The long answer is given by a history of experimentation with light, out of which emerges a description of light (not a question of light) given by the expression “wave or particle”.
The ‘question of light’ is satisfied by a dual representation, or a combined metaphor.
To elaborate this further, when a description of light is re-posed as a question, such as: “Is light a wave, or a particle?” the resulting question, in terms of physics, becomes a yes/no question. Not a wave/particle question. And the answer from physics to such a question would be “yes – light is a wave or particle”.
To otherwise treat the question as a wave/particle question, is to pre-suppose that light was not a wave or particle, but was either both, or neither. The neither is always a default option (and no doubt appealing to nihilism) but the both option is conceptually painful. In the conceptual domain the concepts of wave and particle are just not interchangeable in any way. In other words there is already an internal difference between wave and particle, as much as one might suppose any externalised or materialised difference.
However there is one important internal relationship, between wave and particle, which makes sense of their mutual exclusivity in relation to light, and that is that one can transform a wave into a particle, and back again. In the form of a particle, it is no longer a wave. And in the form of a wave it is no longer a particle. The conceptual procedure, which is able to perform this transformation, is called a “Fourier Transform”. And it is this which provides early quantum physics with the means to describe the relationship between wave and particle with more than just the mutual exclusivity operator. If light is to be described as a wave or particle, it can be further described in terms of a transformation between these two without in any way altering their mutual exclusivity.
The conditions of the complementarity ‘itself’, are susceptible to delineation.
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