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.