Dark Chemistry

Fall Reading List - Time to get busy...

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 22:35:55 GMT

It was nice to take some time off, but now it's time to put my head to the grind and do a little catch up on reading and writing. Here is my short list of works to work through:

Graham Harman:
             1. Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making
             2. The Quadruple Project

Levi R. Bryant
             The Democracy of Objects: now online!

Eugene Thacker
             In the Dust of the Planet: Horror of Philosophy: vol. 1

Iain Hamilton Grant, Jeremy Dunham, Sean Watson
             Idealism: The History of a Philosophy

I'd ordered each of these before I went for my trip for the summer, and found them all stacked up at the post office in their brown wrapped amazon boxing waiting for me. So many good books and thoughts to ponder. Time to get reading....

Sabbatical Is Over: Time to Catch Up

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 02:49:05 GMT

     "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness."
           - Mark Twain

      "The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead
       of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are."
            - Samuel Johnson

Where to begin is not obvious. One is reminded of that old Saxon poem The Wanderer of the "fare paths of exile." And so I, often full of that desperate melancholy, home bereft, far from the objects of the heart, have tumbled with the earth's dark loam, enfolded by its summer-breath, lifted my eyes toward the boundless ocean's unyielding spray. Like some solitary creature of habit I took leave of my solitude and sought out my kinsmen: my children, cousins, and near relatives among the stones of this strange land with a bundle of well-worn books.

Steinbeck in his short travelogue Travels with Charley tells us that "A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike." Or as Lao Tzu: "A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step." And, those steps, how they take us into strange worlds, into realms of the real that recede from us even as we move toward them. That's the beauty of Objects: you can never completely know them, they always shift and shuffle just beyond our thoughts, like imps laughing at us from afar. One can enter a forest, see a tall tree suddenly rise up like an old man, a whiff of moss flowing down in a gray moss beard with horned knobby eyes, full of brown light dancing in the late afternoon sun. A movement just beyond, a deer springing from a ledge, a great wrack of  antlers weaving back and forth, the pounding hooves, the snorting in the undergrowth, sound and motion, light and darkness, the mind overseeing and overhearing the life of objects that it can never fully comprehend, yet begins to discover in its journeys new forms to take hold of that uncanny familiarity that is its own dark emminence.

Vacation time is here again... have fun all! :)

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 16:28:50 GMT

Just a short note:

It's vacation time... I'll be making the rounds to visit children, friends, going fishing, etc. :)

cya in about two or three weeks ... have fun all!

* Addendum: well my vacation is a little longer.... decided to take a short sabbatical with an old fishing buddy for the season, so may or may not be posting till the end of summer. I'll be doing a lot of reading and thinking through some issues concerning the current state of philosophical speculation.

So as always, enjoy the ride! I'll be back, strong as ever... enjoy what I've got on the site! There will be more down the pipe... :)

Niklas Luhmann: Unit Operations and Systems Theory

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 20:40:18 GMT

"Reality is what one does not perceive when one perceives it."
     - Niklas Luhmann

Niklas Luhmann in a little critique of the latter work of Maturana on autopoiesis and its notion that circularity is an objective fact, argues that Maturana leaves out the problem of self-referentiality altogether. Luhmann also tells us that we must be wary of using such analogies borrowed from biological sciences and casting them across other disciplines such as sociology or psychology. For Luhmann what is important in any system are "general patterns which can just be described as making a distinction and crossing the boundary of the distinction [which] enables us to ask questions about society as a self-observing system[s]". [1]

This reflexive interference or distinction made by any system goes beyond just human consciousness or even some notion of a transcendental subject, yet as he emphasizes there are systems that use recursive practices that make distinctions using memory functions to guide its self-reflexive modality. For him there are also "formal similarities between psychic systems and social systems, and this is for me important in trying to write a theory, a social theory, of self-describing systems, in particular of society" (TDO, 13)

As Luhmann puts it in the Kantian mode humans never see reality as it is in-itself, we always distort it through the lens of perception. Luhmann puts all this into perspective telling us that it can be rephrased. One possible path to take is the analytical path of seeing this as a problem of language, of oppositional thinking within the binary structure of linguistic terms themselves. As he states it you could formulate the problems saying that "reality emerges if you have inconsistency in your operations; language opposes language, somebody says "yes," another says "no," or I think something which is uncomfortable given my memory, and then you have to find the pattern of resolution." This would be the path of an Analytical philosopher in the sense as that as he says reality "is then the acceptance of solutions for inconsistency problems..." (TDO, 14).

Later on in the interview he tells us that "we need an evolutionary explanation of how systems survive to the extent that they can learn to handle the inside/outside difference within the system, within the context of their own operation. They can never operate outside of the system." Luhmann is trying to infuse theory with a sense of temporality, of time as the distinction in the self-reflexive movement of any system: "I would rather think that a system is always, in its operation, beyond any possible cognition, and it has to follow up its own activity, to look at it in retrospect, to make sense out of what has already happened, to make sense out of what was already produced as a difference between system and environment" (TOD, 22).  He goes on to say,

"So first the system produces a difference of system and environment, and then it learns to control its own body and not the environment to make a difference in the system. So cognition then becomes a secondary achievement in a sense, tied to a specific operation which, I think, is that of making a distinction and indicating one side and not the other. It's an explosion of possibilities, if you always have the whole world present in your distinctions."

In another essay Luhmann shows us that the concept of autopoiesis is a grand tautology (i.e., the unity of the system is produced by the system itself), but the methodological task that needs to be done is to deconstruct this tautology. He goes on to tell us that such a methodology must do this "empirically identifying the operations which produce and reproduce the unity of the system." [2] To get there he asks us if the older classical issues surrounding the problem of reference (as a condition of meaning and truth) is itself a meaningful question in regards to the distinctions we make about subject and object, observer/observed, inside/outside, etc... Instead he tells us that we need to transform that question into how we distinguish between "self-reference and external reference".

In his communications theory he states flatly that as a system it depends upon "introducing the difference between system and environment into the system" as the internal split within the system itself that allows it to make the distinction to begin its operative procedures to begin with (OC, 1420). He defines communication as "a kind of autopoetic network of operations which continually organizes what we seek, the coincidence of self-reference (utterance) and external reference (information)" (OC, 1424). He details this out saying,

"Communication comes about by splitting reality through a highly artificial distinction between utterance and information, both taken as contingent events within an ongoing process that recursively uses the results of previous steps and anticipates further ones" (OC, 1424).

This distinction between utterance/information or self-reference/external reference is central to this dualistic process that is both contingent and open to a temporal forms of difference. The most difficult question he tells us is "how to define the operation that differentiates the system and organizes the difference between system and environment while maintaining reciprocity between dependence and independence" (OC, 1426).

Autopoietic systems unlike the input/output models of open systems rely on the concept of structural coupling: it renounces the idea of an overarching causality, but retains the idea of highly selective connections between systems and environments (OC, 1432). Structural coupling is the concept he uses to define and organize the difference between system and environment while maintaining reciprocity between dependence and independence. In some ways autopoiesis is the way things are, their mode of being in the world, and the way they overcome entropy. It is the self-perpetuating system that performs operational closure continuously, selecting, condensing, confirming, changing, or forgetting structures that help it continue its on autopoiesis. As he states it this will not prevent its ultimate destruction, but if "a system can organize structural changes, it can increase its adaptive capacity, but also its maladaption" (OC, 1440). In a final quip he tells us that autopoietic systems are "systems organizing dynamic stability" (OC, 1441).

I will need to read more of Luhmann in the future, yet I do see some interesting features that could be used to move beyond his epistemological mixture of empirical and naturalist leanings and toward an Object-Oriented mode of thought. Even my own personal involvement in those vast Service-Oriented Architectures of network systems I deal with on a daily basis use these concepts of structural coupling/decoupling of objects (autopoietic systems). One must be careful to cross the boundary between one's involvement with Object-Oriented Programming and Object-Oriented Philosophy, yet there are certain ties that resonate - at least for me, on a personal level. His idea of communication as "a kind of autopoetic network of operations which continually organizes what we seek, the coincidence of self-reference (utterance) and external reference (information)" (OC, 1424) is empowering. The sorts of operations that are performed daily in enterprise systems among disparate and often conflictual systems that speak procedural languages of differing types and kinds plays into this for me. I think of one example as the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), a sort of mediator object among disparate systems that allows these systems to communicate with each other indirectly through a mediator object (i.e., a vicar). Within the ESB the translation and transformation of differing operations, languages, and objects takes place according to rules that are guided by the relations among the disparate systems themselves. It's a sort of black box within which operations can be performed that allow systems that otherwise would never come into contact to make contact with each other without the need of direct communication. I'll not go into the intricacies of enterprise development but only use this as an example to show how systems are always negotiating boundaries between the utterance/information in an autopoietic or object based system. Yet, one does not want to equalize these two approaches as if they were the same. They are not. I do see some conflicts, yet also some strange resemblances in the two theories; yet, I need a better understanding of Luhmann's ideas and his empirical and epistemological position before making any final judgements.

I think Graham Harman's Prince of Networks and Ian Bogost's work on Unit Operations extends much of this in a profound way by developing an Object-Oriented mode that allows for reference and withdrawel, or structural coupling/decoupling in Luhmann's terms. Levi R. Bryant is working with much of this territory as well, and I'm sure Democracy of Objects should open up some interesting territory on this line of thought. Fascinating stuff that I'll need to work through in a more lucid fashion to see how all the terminological and philosophical implications play out.

1. Theory of a Different Order: A Conversation with Katherine Hayles and Niklas Luhmann (TDO) Author(s): Katherine Hayles, Niklas Luhmann, William Rasch, Eva Knodt, Cary Wolfe Source: Cultural Critique, No. 31, The Politics of Systems and Environments, Part II (Autumn, 1995), pp. 7-36 Published by: University of Minnesota Press
2. Operational Closure and Structural Coupling: The Differentiation of the Legal System, by Niklas Luhmann (OC) (Cardoza Law Review Vol. 13:1419 1991 -1192)

Levi R. Bryant: On Luhmann; or the Distinction Between Utterance and Information

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 19:53:52 GMT

"A central axiom of Luhmann’s thought is that information repeated twice is no longer information. Systems require the production of information so that they might engage in further operations (the production of communication events) that allow them to exist from moment to moment, thereby reproducing themselves."
- Levi R. Bryant, Luhmann's Antagonistic Commons

Levi makes an interesting observation in his notes on Luhmann's Antagonistic Commons in reference to mass media production as a vehicle for producing difference through oppositional modes of communication. His main thrust is that our "weird sort of Common" ("The commons," for Hardt and Negri "is the incarnation, the production, and the liberation of the multitude" (Empire 303, my emphasis)) is an "antagonistic unity where this world is able to reproduce itself as a unity not through the production of consensus, but through a production of antagonism or difference."

Niklaus Luhmann in The Reality of Mass Media comes to a point where he wonders how communication must be, in "order that it can not only reproduce itself but also take on cognitive functions and separate reproductive or informational components" (96). [1] He then goes on to qualify this - and, I quote at length:

"The answer is that communication only comes about at all by being able to distinguish utterance and information in its self-observation (in understanding). Without this distinction, communication would collapse, and participants would have to rely on perceiving something which they would only be able to describe as behavior. The difference of utterance and information corresponds precisely with the requirement of not making the progress of communication to communication dependent upon information being complete and relevant. And only because this primary, constitutive difference exists can communication code itself in a binary form ... and in this way feel its way around the environment with a distinction for which there is no correlate whatever in the environment itself. Without this distinction, which has been entered into its own operation, the system would not be capable of constituting any recognizable identities or developing any memory. Nor could it evolve, or build up its own complexity, or test the possibilities for structuration positively/negatively and thus meet the minimum condition for the continuation of its own autopoiesis. Society as we know it would be impossible" (96-97).

What seems significant in the above remarks is that a system constitutes its difference through inserting a distinction within its own operation between utterance and information, and it is out of this distinction that a system constitutes its self-production and reproduction. It is not the reproduction of information itself that produces difference, it is the distinction made between the utterance and information in the very production process itself that produces difference and makes the continuance of the autopoietic system possible. As Luhmann said in the passage above, without "this distinction, which has been entered into its own operation, the system would not be capable of constituting any recognizable identities or developing any memory." It is the fine line or distinction between utterance and information that is the differance that makes a differance.

1. Niklaus Luhman, The Reality of Mass Media (1996 Westdeutscher Verlag/ Polity Press 2000 )

Brian Cantwell Smith: The Conduct of Science; or, Episteme Devices for Human Calculation

Fri, 11 Mar 2011 21:26:10 GMT

"The naturalistic challenge is to explain intentionality without viciously presuming intentionality. A similar moral holds for ontology, in my view. Because ontological categories are in part intentionally constituted, attempting to explain representation while dining out on ontology is, for analogous reasons, fatally circular."
- Brian Cantwell Smith

An interesting quote from Brian Cantwell Smith, author of a powerful book on ontology, On the Origin of Objects. His work shows how a commitment to epistemological naturalism is still a part of the correlationist program, yet his ideas on irreductionism are to me viable and empowering. Below he comes to the conclusion that scientific laws reduce things to their features as part of "epistemic apparatus involved in the conduct of science as an intellectual activity (on a par with mathematical models); they are not ontological commitments of the theory as a whole." It's obvious then that as long as science reduces things just to their features (qualities) observable from the outside through an epistemological approach that it will leave out those aspects of objects that elude the nets of the reasoning mind; yet, as heuristic devices in the pursuit of Science such distortions if seen for what they are do contain value as long as they do not pretend to displace ontology:

"As a way to muster support for simply availing ourselves of 'common-sense ontology', Dennett says 'Look, why not just assume sub-atomic particles and tables and mountains and galaxies, in the way that science does?' This leads me to mention a radical thesis that I hold, although I can't give it much defence here: namely, that science may not be committed to objects at all. Consider: an amoeba splits. Biology doesn't care about the individuals in the situation: whether one amoeba died and two new ones were born; or whether we now have a spatial distribution of unitary amoeba-ness; or whether one of the two emerging amoebae is the original one, and the other one is new; or any other possibility. Another example: in California I own an ancient redwood tree that has clumps of very substantial shoots (some as much as 50 feet high) sprouting around its base. How many redwood trees are there? Science doesn't know, and science doesn't care. Similar conclusions hold for fog, for the units of selection, for a myriad other examples. What this leads me to believe is that scientific laws (like animals) may in fact deal only in features; and that the objects we think of as constitutive of science may merely be simplifying epistemic devices that allow humans to calculate. Objects in science, that is, are in my view properly understood as part of the epistemic apparatus involved in the conduct of science as an intellectual activity (on a par with mathematical models); they are not ontological commitments of the theory as a whole."

- From: Brian Cantwell Smith - Reply to Dennett - in: Hugh Clapin (ed.) - Philosophy of mental representation - Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2002, pp. 241-242 (notes omitted).

A Grammar of Ontologies: Unlocking the Infrastructure of the World

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 22:03:13 GMT

Heidegger in Being and Time once said: "Metontology is possible only on the basis and in the perspective of the radical ontological problematic and is possible conjointly with it. Precisely the radicalization of fundamental ontology brings about the above-mentioned overturning of ontology out of its very self. What we seemingly separate here, by means of "disciplines," and provide with labels is actually one-just as the ontological difference is one, or the primal phenomenon of human existence! To think being as the being of beings and to conceive the being problem radically and universally means, at the same time, to make beings thematic in their totality in the light of ontology." (Being and Time, p.157) What if what we need is a Grammar of Ontologies, rather than a singular ontology: a meta- ontology of all particular varieties? This collection or grammar of ontological statements could be used to describe any other ontology – whether your dominant or preferred view is physical, spatial, temporal, material, process, functional, people, mental, conceptual or whatever. The collection – the URIdentified, referencable superset – is all that is needed.

Temporality is at the heart of the Object-Oriented philosophical project. If we reverse engineer ontology we get a metontology: a metaphysics of existence within which one can raise questions of ethics. What Heidegger once called a fundamental ontology, which he divided into two parts: the analytic of Dasein, and the analytic of temporalitas. [5] As Harman tells us "If developed, it would be nothing less than a thorough ontology of the metabole, the Umschlag or turnabout between a being's infrastructural depth and its sparkling exterior contours. This must be done concretely, and not just once-for-all as Heidegger does it. Unless and until this happens, most of his specific terms will remain nothing more than distracting literary figures for a single recurring dualism of light and shadow" (TB: v). [1]

One of the things that Heidegger performed, and the French deconstructionists tried to do after him, was to destroy (deconstruct) ontology from within, and by that I mean that the idea of presence as our sole concept of Being's habitation needed to be displaced, deconstructed, destroyed: the issue of Time as kairos instead of chronos (chronological time) - the threefold of past, present, future replaced the concept of presence. As Harman relates it, Heidegger wanted to destroy ontology as it had come down to us from the Greeks and "expose its inner structural skeleton" (HE, 59). Heidegger knew that this would not be an easy task, and that it would probably take countless generations of philosophers to perform such a feat; yet, with Being and Time he felt that he'd performed a new beginning for ontology by setting just such a task. To begin such a task we must remember that Being as conceived by Heidegger in his concept of Dasein is a 'who' not a 'what', and that it is an event, action, or performance that cannot be described from some outside vantage point(i.e., Being or beings cannot be reduced to its/their features, properties, or qualities as viewed from the outside by either a Transcendental observer or a discrete entity or consciousness ). Beings or objects are always already absorbed in the worldhood of the world: enmeshed in its infrastructure or environment, woven together and "fused within a colossal web of meaning in which everything refers to everything else" (HE, 63). What is being devalued in this ontological perspective is knowledge and consciousness as a special view onto this realm within which we are all, along with other objects, entities, or things enmeshed like bugs in a venus fly-trap.

[Addendum: I am in the midst of revising this essay. Below is but a subsection that will be removed into another blog post as a separate issue. I am in the midst of rethinking many issues surrounding the traditions of ontology that emerged out of its modern manifestations within the work of Brenatano, Pierce, and Frege and their many progeny within both the Analytic and Continental camps. So much to do. So little time. But somehow in my mind all of this will be connected back to the underlying currents that face opposing camps within both the Analytic and Continenatl camps. Not an easy task, and one that might take a long while... a lifetime perhaps. Yet, for the moment, one must define and delimit the territory, understand the questions, raise the issues in a form that will allow the opposing views to be displayed in a way that sets them to work on the major problems facing us in regards to this strange speculative philosophy I've found myself to be both an observer and participant.]

1. Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Elements in a Theory of Objects (TB) ( 1999 UMI Company)
2. Graham Harman, Heidegger Explained (Open Court: Caruse Publishing Company 2007)
3. The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman, editors (re.press Melbourne 2011)
4. Iain Hamilton Grant, Schellingianism & Postmodernity: Towards a Materialist Naturphilosophie (Philosophy and Culture )
5. Jean Grondin, Sources of Hermenutics (State University of New York 1995)

Nick Land: The Nature of Shadows; or, The Anti-Humanist as Historian of Atrocity

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 19:50:08 GMT

"Sex is the natural in man."
      - Camille Paglia

"Since homo sapiens has prowled the earth, nature has adapted to new shadows."
     - Nick Land

At the heart of Nick Land's polemic is a hatred of 'the superstition of self'. He sees in the thought of both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche an unfolding attack upon the humanistic traditions that have centered themselves upon homo sapiens as the center and horizon of all thought and praxis. As he states it: "Nietzsche is perhaps the greatest of all anti-humanist writers. ...his writings attest to the most powerful eruption of impersonality in the Occidental world. ...nowhere outside Nietzsche’s texts is there an antipersonalistic war-machine of equivalent ferocity" (98). [1] Of Schopenhauer he says: "Schopenhauer is the great well-spring of the impersonal in post-Kantian thought; the sole member of the immediately succeeding generation to begin vomiting monotheism out of their cosmology in order to attack the superstition of self" (98).

Land sees both of these thinkers as precursors to a philosophy of difference. In his view "the difference between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is not simply that between thoughts of indifference and difference. It is more a question of phases in the emergent thinking of unilateral or non-reciprocal difference, which departs from the bilateral difference synonymous with ontology" (101). This difference is immanent in its relation between the organic and the inorganic in that "the difference between the two is wholly immanent to the inorganic as primary term" (101). In his view of the libidinal economy of energy he sees the idea of the recurrence of the same as the "impact of undifferentiable zero; the abortion of transcendence" (101). Nietzsche's movement is toward a unilateral, materialist, or genealogical interpretation of difference.

Instead of the Ubermensch (Overman) Land tells us "humanity cannot be exacerbated, but only aborted" (103). He goes on to say: "It is first necessary to excavate the embryonic anthropoid beast at the root of man, in order to re-open the intensive series in which it is embedded" (103). Between Schopenhauer's metaphysical pessimism ('European Buddhism') and Nietzsche's Dionysian pessimism ('exultation of dissolution') we get the motor of nihilism: Christianity - "the great zero, and the impersonal generator of nature and culture in their incompossible consistency" (103-104).

Christian history had one goal, and one goal only: the return to God. With the advent of nihilism that goal was lost, nullified, brought down to the level of shit and waste. All those posthumanists or transhumanists who seek to transcend the human in some Overman, a restoration of teleology, are all marked by that nihilism of production and productivity of the Puritan smile: an ascetic grimace that aligns both capital and industry in a pact to institute a permanent war through peace. This is religions revenge: to move into the zero world immanently and emerge as the terminal phase of the human project toward God as Man; the zero-function. The acquisition of the material forces of the earth as a project in transcendence of the human through a teleological affirmation of Zero. How to get there these posthumanists ask? Land tells us: War. But War is Peace as Nietzche affirms: "You should love peace as a means to new wars. And the short peace more than the long one./I do not advise you to work, rather to struggle [N II 312]." As Land tells it these "are the most profound words in the history of military thought; the libidinal comprehension of peace as a unilateral differentiation from war" (106). After a lengthy discourse on the dark demarcations of war he shows us along with Freud that war is the free-flow fundamental "violence of desire." "Civilization (with its attendant militarism) is war subject to repression, and the energy of war is Thanatos; base hydraulics" (107).

History as the study of atrocity is for the genealogist to gaze into the "buried horror" of the laboratory of human cultures. Land then tells us of those scholars of this strange history, saying,

"Academic prose has the remarkable capacity to plunge one into a sublime dystopian nightmare: is anything this appalling really possible? one asks. What happened to these people? Is it part of some elaborate joke perhaps? Or do they just hate books? ... One only has to read genuine scholarship to be wracked by ardent dreams of incinerated cities." (110)



1. Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation (Routledge 1992 )

Richard Rorty: Pragmatism and Anti-Representationalism

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 17:21:06 GMT

A man’s maturity: that is to have rediscovered the seriousness he possessed as a child at play.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

I used to be a pragmatist. Famous last words. Well in my younger years I used to read the logical-postivists and Analytical philosophers as well. Continental philosophy at that time seemed foreign to my ways of thinking, and seemed to be leading into a realm of pure language, what has now been termed 'the linguistic turn'. Sometimes I go back and think about this part of my life. A guest on a previous post asked if I had any thoughts on Rorty's post-Quine Kuhn/Davidson mashup? Below is a little rendition of past thinking that I have now moved beyond, but fondly go back and remember as the portal onto a younger self struggling with philosophy.

No pragmatist will dispute that there is something beyond our physical being that people have termed 'reality'. What we are saying is that, as humans, we are not separated from that reality in any objective sense of the word, that we are already so connected and part of this continuum that the idea of 'Objective truth' would be to try to distance and separate ourselves from something that we are already so interwoven with that it would be impossible.

The idea of 'Representation' goes back to Kant. "Representation" means that the belief concerning the existence or the attributes of a "thing" in the world is a taking-inward of a substituent of the "thing", of the eidos, the idea, the ousia, the hyle or the sensual components of the thing or object into consciousness. Some part, some constituent or some feature of the object as substitute or "envoy" will be present in or to the subject's consciousness. In the traditional representational model the taking-inward happens through the sense organs and mostly by seeing, where seeing is always "impregnated" by cognition. To say it "in" the ocular metaphor, spontaneity and receptivity mediate the "world" to the "mental eye". What the mental "eye" "sees" is not the world or the thing in itself, but a result of an interaction. The structure and the capacities of the mediators determine what can be "seen" and so the object (or thing) as "seen" is constituted by the capabilities of the subject and by "something" out there. The main point of the transcendental turn was that the origin of knowledge is neither a sensorial taking inward of the outside world, nor an a priori rational construction of it, but a result of the interaction between object and subject, between world and the inseparable receptivity and spontaneity that happens in the gap between the two.

As I understand it Rorty argues, since Plato, philosophers have understood our primary relationship with the world as one of representation. We attempt to represent the world as accurately as we can; the pursuit of truth is based on the hope that we might represent the World As It Really Is, the world in-itself for-us. Representation, Rorty claimed in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, is a worn-out metaphor, a philosophical position that leads to endless squabbles: if we believe we have represented the world accurately, we fall victim to a blinkered and arrogant dogmatism; the other extreme, the fear that we may never overcome the gap between our subjective minds and the objective world, leads us to epistemological skepticism—the idea that we can never really know anything. Rorty suggests that we replace the idea of representations of the world with the idea of descriptions of the world designed to help us achieve particular, finite purposes. Rather than ask if we are in touch with the way the world really is, Rorty asks if our descriptions and our vocabularies help us complete our projects. This is the pragamatist path...

Rorty sees this break with the idea that reality can be 'represented' as abandoning the correspondence 'theory of truth', which means that we no longer need to insist that truth, like reality is one and seamless. As he states it: "If a true belief is simply the sort of belief which surpasses the competition as a rule for sucessful future action, then there may be no need to reconcile all one's beliefs with all one's other beliefs - no need to attempt to see reality steadily and as a whole (totality, totalist vision) (p. 270)."

For antirepresentationalism, the stance of Rorty, the "causal interaction" of the subject with the ("outside") world, the "coping with the world" is a broader term than the "receptivity and spontaneity" of Kantian thinkers. Antirepresentationalism does not try to see the world as it is, it does not investigate knowledge or accurate representation of reality, since in every statement about the world there is an inseparable "mixture" and "cohabitation" of the subject and the object. That means if we think that we know something about the world, we can never exactly make a distinction, what part of it comes from us and what part comes from the "outside world". Consequently, it makes no sense to make investigations about the epistemological presuppositions of the possibility of knowledge, it makes no sense to research "the idea of knowledge of, or successful linguistic reference to, a reality underlying the appearances that nature presents." Since in the model of Rorty there is no distinction between the objects as they appear and as they are in themselves, it makes no sense in his view to think substantially about the things and consequently Rorty argues for an anti-essential view of the world.

Also antirepresentationalists like Davidson and Rorty tell us we do not need mediation between "minds and the world", between beliefs, sentences and the world. Rorty thinks with Davidson that mind and human being are continuous with the world, we could even say, both philosophers ontologize the interwovenness (the impossible distinction) of scheme and content. Rorty follows from the impossibility of separation of scheme and content, that "philosophically" it makes absolutely no sense to make further investigations of the correctness of our knowledge, of the representative character of our cognitive structure. That is why Rorty rejects the separationist representational model of knowledge and proposes to think of knowledge as a continuous interaction between human beings and the outside world, as a "matter of acquiring habits of actions for coping with reality".

When I was younger I was an avid reader of Analytic and Pragmatist philosophy, but now I have problems with both... but, that is another story.

Epistemic Naturalism: Quine, Goldman, Kuhn

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 00:25:08 GMT

"Philosophy of science is philosophy enough."
- W.V. Quine

Broadly speaking the Analytical tradition in philosophy can be characterized by an emphasis on clarity and formal logic and analysis of language, and a profound dependence and respect for the natural sciences. Some of the main precursors of this movement in philosophy are Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittegenstein, G.E. Moore, Gottlob Frege, and the logical positivists who derive from them.

W.V. Quine was one of the first to propound an influential naturalized epistemology. He ultimately wanted to replace traditional epistemology with the natural sciences (i.e., psychology ). He felt that the psychological study of how people produce theoretical “output” from sensory “input,” and the other is the logical reconstruction of our theoretical vocabulary in sensory terms. In Quine’s view, the second approach cannot succeed, and so we are left with psychology. The basis of this view is a theory of knowledge that limits its scope and methods to those of the natural sciences and their conclusions. Within this domain there is three main forms of naturalized epistemic theories: replacement, cooperative, and substantive naturalisms. Replacement would have us abandon traditional forms of epistemology in favor of naturalist science and its methods. Cooperative epistemic forms tells us that traditional epistemology would benefit from the cognitive sciences. Substantive epistemic centers on the factual assertions of 'facts of knowledge' and 'natural facts'.

Alvine Goldman on the other hand provided what he termed causal reliabilism. This is a theory of knowledge that states that a justified true belief counts as knowledge only if it is caused in a suitably reliable way. What Goldman tells us is that it is necessary also to construct a theory of what epistemic justification really is, as opposed to how common sense takes it to be. That theory will be grounded in our psychological understanding of how beliefs are formed, and it will include assessments of those processes in terms of reliability.

Thomas Kuhn applied a naturalistic approach to the social sciences using epistemological questions. Kuhn inspired naturalism is not incompatible with the naturalism that draws on psychology and the natural sciences. Such naturalistic epistemologists as Alvin Goldman and Philip Kitcher have fruitfully applied insights from both the natural and the social sciences in the attempt to understand knowledge as a simultaneously cognitive and social phenomenon.

Naturalistic epistemologists seek an understanding of knowledge that is scientifically informed and integrated with the rest of our understanding of the world. Their methods and commitments differ, because they have varying views about the precise relationship between science and epistemology and even about which sciences are most important to understanding knowledge.

Epistemic naturalists usually try two sorts of approaches: 1) either they try to show the issue is empirical and then to apply scientific data, results, methods, and theories to it directly; or, 2), they try to undermine a problem’s motivation by showing it arises only on certain false, non-naturalistic assumptions.

Yet, despite its efforts, naturalistic epistemology does face serious challenges from the problems of circularity and normativity. They are seeking nothing more nor less than the unification of science and philosophy.

Graham Harman: Quote of the Day!

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 19:23:24 GMT

"To explain philosophy is not to explain the content of the philosopher's opinions at any given moment. Instead, to explain a philosophy means to approach the central insight that guides it through its entire lifespan, through all surface changes of opinion and all troubled reversals of viewpoint."
- Graham Harman, Heidegger Explained

China Miéville: Interview on BLDGBLOG

Mon, 07 Mar 2011 22:54:49 GMT

"I’m always much happier talking in terms of metaphor, because it seems that metaphor is intrinsically more unstable. A metaphor fractures and kicks off more metaphors, which kick off more metaphors, and so on. In any fiction or art at all, but particularly in fantastic or imaginative work, there will inevitably be ramifications, amplifications, resonances, ideas, and riffs that throw out these other ideas."
- China Miéville

New interview on BLDGBLOG of China Miéville!

Philosophical Ethics: To Blog or Not to Blog?

Mon, 07 Mar 2011 18:59:01 GMT

Bill Vallicella over at Maverick Philosopher has been around for a long while now blogging, and knows the in's and out's of it with the best of them. Blogging as an activity isn't for everyone, but for those of us who use it as a tool and a prod toward a more structured form of discourse within a democratic community it is becoming essential. Bill gives us his reasons for blogging as follows:

1. An on-line notebook: a place to preserve and organize quotations from and notes on my reading.

2. An on-line journal: a daily record of the twists and turns of my intellectual life, along with some other sides of my life. A celebration of the life of the mind, an exemplification of the philosophical life. A record of one man's quotidian grappling with the world and its riddles.

3. A didactic site: a place where a serious and resolute reader can learn some philosophy for free.

4. A research site: a venue for trying out ideas and refining them in the teeth of critical comments.

5. An exercise in learning how to write better.

6. An experiment in what blogging might be good for.

7. A soapbox from which to deliver my commentary on the passing scene and do my bit to improve the world, one blog post at a time.

8. An open-ended project some of the purposes of which have yet to emerge.

I think if we look at this list we'd see aspects of our own blogging adventures in there, too. Bill has one more tidbit of information worth listening to in regards to this hypermedium of our age (read more) :

"There is a bit of a paradox in my project, the blogging of philosophy. Sauntering along life's byways, cooling his heels at the margins of society, the philosopher bids us slow down! Whither the headlong mad rush? Quo vadis? Take thought, he suggests, take heed. Socrates knew how to stand stock still in the scene of strife and consult with his daimon. Wittgenstein, denounced in these pages as a Cave philosopher, yet had the good sense to recommend as salutation among philosophers, "Take your time!" (Der Gruß der Philosophen untereinander sollte sein: Laß dir Zeit! Vermischte Bemerkungen.) And in a place unknown to me, Franz Brentano, once a Catholic priest and no stranger to the contemplative disciplines, observes that "He who hurries is not proceeding on a scientific basis." (Wer eilt, bewegt sich nicht auf dem Boden der Wissenschaft.)

So in the belly of the blogospheric beast I too do my bit to slow things down."

Let us hope Bill continues for a long while with his aphoristic wit and charm to build an empowering tool of blog posts for use in our daily philosophical thought and praxis. Thanks, Bill!

Ray Brassier: Enlightened Tact and Disrepect; or, the Academy of Idiots goes Live

Sun, 06 Mar 2011 19:16:32 GMT

"I am a nihilist because I still believe in truth..."
     - Ray Brassier

The latest Ray Brassier Interview. In this interview he offers us an encapsulated view of his nihilism, which is based upon the "crisis of meaning" he sees as a part of our historical era. He puts this crisis within an epistemological naturalist framework and narrative of transitioning stages from a religious (poly- to monotheism) view whose overarching formation is guided by a worldview based upon a "natural order, and that order is comprehensible to human beings in its broad outline, if not in every single one of its details." He also castigates and maligns all those armchair metaphysicians who wander astray in his opinion after the secrets of nature without the support of science. In another academic appeal he attacks the use of blogging as erroneous and that it has only produced so far an "orgy of stupidity." Strong words from a dogmatist of science and epistemological naturalism that finds itself boxed into a corner. In his opinion philosophical bloggers have all become monkey philosophers deluded by the illusions of metaphysics, chasing after the fantasy of a speculative realism that is itself a pipe-dream in the mind of an Orangutan.

In the old worldview he sees a naturalist perspective in which God is the "ultimate source and guarantor of this meaningful order", one in which humans are the central players in a cosmic drama within which they struggle from Genesis to Apocalypse between an ethical agon of good and evil forces. Against this backdrop is the emergence of natural science and mathematics during the 16th Century. One might call this the Age of Unraveling, when the monotheistic worldview began to come apart at the seams, each thread unraveling until we reach the Age of Nihilism in which life is seen as without purpose and meaning. Yet, for Brassier this is freedom from the long dominion of a false system, and the opening toward a new worldview in which " intelligibility has become detached from meaning" thereby providing us with the postulate that knowledge no longer needs the support of a posited God to support meaning.

Brassier sees this as a "decisive step forward in the slow process through which human rationality has gradually abandoned mythology, which is basically the interpretation of reality in narrative terms." In this next stage a naturalist narrative takes over as the engine and driver of our narratologies with science and philosophy as supporting methods that interact and formulate the underlying threads of this strange realism that is shaping us. Instead of an existential view that still supported humanity as the central player in this ongoing creation of meaning, the newest perspective sees humanity as just one more object for the mill of science to work on. The newest project explains humanity and consciousness in particular not as meaning creation system, but as part of "products of purposeless but perfectly intelligible processes, which are at once neurobiological and sociohistorical."

Yet, even our aspiration for a narratological perspective that would encompass this new naturalist worldview is but an "epistemically derivative ‘useful fiction’." He tells us that the elimination of metaphysical explanations and the implication of a narrative of "cognitive progress" can be backed up by the philosopher Robert Brandom’s reconstructive reading of Hegel, which he states "frees the normative ideal of explanatory progress from its metaphysical, and ultimately mythological, inflation into the universal history of Spirit." Against the nihilism Nietzshe's as if fictions that are life-enhancing Brassier considers himself of another type in that he refuses "this Nietzschean solution and continue to believe in the difference between truth and falsity, reality and appearance. In other words, I am a nihilist precisely because I still believe in truth, unlike those whose triumph over nihilism is won at the cost of sacrificing truth. I think that it is possible to understand the meaninglessness of existence, and that this capacity to understand meaning as a regional or bounded phenomenon marks a fundamental progress in cognition."

The other aspect of Brassier's stance is in regards to the continuing philosophical fascination with monotheism that he sees in such philosophers as Quentin Meillassoux whose latest book L'inexistence postulates an inexistent 'God-to-come'. He says that philosophers should instead instigate a moratorium and declare any further 'God talk' to the dustbin of history. He goes on to say that religion "obviously satisfies deep-seated human needs, but it has been a cognitive catastrophe that has continually impeded epistemic progress," and that human knowledge has "progresses in spite of religion, never because of it."

As an aside the interviewer asks Brassier about his musical proclivities, and Brassier offers us a site where he and Mattin, Jean-Luc Guionnet, and Seijiro Murayama have collaborated on certain texts: 'Idioms and Idiots' and 'Metal Machine Theory' (@ http://www.mattin.org/essays/essays.html).

In an open attack on philosophical blogging Brassier shows his academic hand as an enforcer of the status quo and the return of the Academy as watchdog, saying, in regards to both SR and philosophical blogging in general:

"The ‘speculative realist movement’ exists only in the imaginations of a group of bloggers promoting an agenda for which I have no sympathy whatsoever: actor-network theory spiced with pan-psychist metaphysics and morsels of process philosophy. I don’t believe the internet is an appropriate medium for serious philosophical debate; nor do I believe it is acceptable to try to concoct a philosophical movement online by using blogs to exploit the misguided enthusiasm of impressionable graduate students. I agree with Deleuze’s remark that ultimately the most basic task of philosophy is to impede stupidity, so I see little philosophical merit in a ‘movement’ whose most signal achievement thus far is to have generated an online orgy of stupidity."

Anti-democratic and elitist is what I call this perspective and its cynical regard of the community of individuals that are shaping the future of both communication and technology on the internet. What is strange is that Brassier is so pointed in his attack toward what he sees as central: actor-network theory, the spices being secondary. After some research I wondered just where he focused his attention, and I discovered the historical trail. A post on LarvalSubjects, A Brief Actor-Network-Theory History of Speculative Realism that outlines the roots of this movement in detail. What is interesting in this essay by Levi R. Bryant is what he says about the internet itself:

"I am not making the absurd claim that somehow SR has overturned the predominant ideological and power structures of Continental philosophy as practiced in the English speaking world. Clearly it remains a small and marginal movement. The claim I’m making is that that movement would not have been able to intensify at all had it not been for a medium like the internet. All of this raises questions of how thought comes to be structured differently as a result of media like the internet that are a strange combination of oral culture and written culture and where the book and article as a polished thought holds sway; but also questions of how normativity functions in this space where new collectives are formed, all sorts of riddles about identity emerge, and where there are not established norms to govern interactions."

Levi's remarks on the need for a normative set of principles or guidelines to govern interactions is something that will arise out of the democratic process itself in my own opinion. But to want to close it off from a viable platform of debate for philosophical discourse in the way Brassier proposes is a little premature and reactionary as in this statement: "I don’t believe the internet is an appropriate medium for serious philosophical debate; nor do I believe it is acceptable to try to concoct a philosophical movement online by using blogs to exploit the misguided enthusiasm of impressionable graduate students."

Freedom is the very essence of the web. Blogging has become for better or worse the new medium of choice for many in our day and age, and I for one welcome it as both a democratic realm and a network medium that allows for interactions between philosophers in a global world. Rather than being closed off in a lock-and-key environment such as the academy of experts and scientist communitarians that Brassier avows in his discourse I would rather take my chances in this open and uncontrolled world of networking and comaraderie.

Yet, as we all know it is the internet as a social medium that has forced Ray Brassier to become defensive in his posturing and to fight as a rearguard reactionary against the very medium that we have all seen used effectively in a network-theory capacity in the recent events of the Middle-East. Maybe this is not a platform for as he says "serious philosophical debate", but then what platform does he suggest? Shall philosphy stay within the Academy? Shall it be guided by the experts and gurus of the community of academics with all their prestiguous degrees and soverign power? And what of the history of those non-academic philosophers who always struggled against just this very sort of closed world? Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bataille... and, even that favorite of Brassier himself, Nick Land? As Land tells us in The Thirst for Annihilation: "Pessimism, or the philosophy of desire, has a marked allergy to academic encompassment. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud all wrote the vast bulk of their works from a space inaccessible to the sweaty clutches of state pedagogy, as, of course, does Bataille." More pointedly Land states specifically on Schopenhauer's disenchantment with academia and the control of philsophers during the 19th Century by State influence:

"By the end of this text Schopenhauer has argued that the university is inextricably compromised by the interests of the state, that this necessarily involves it in the perpetuation of the monotheistic dogmas that serve such interests, and that the consequent subservience to vulgar superstition completely devastates it; degrading it to a grotesquely hypocritical sophistry, fuelled by a petty careerism spiced by an envious hatred of intellectual independence, and articulated in a wretchedly obscure and distorted jargon that allows its proponents both to squirm away from the surveillance of the priests, and to hypnotize a gullibly adoring public. (7)"

What's at the heart of this is something Land hits a homerun on:

"What is at stake in both cases is not argument, however rancorous, but the relation of mutual revulsion between the academy and a small defiant fragment of its outside. Neither recognizes the legitimacy of the other’s discourse; for the university considers its other to be incompetent, whilst the part of this other—admittedly a very small part—that has seized and learnt to manipulate the weaponry of philosophical strife, considers the voice of the university to be irremediably tainted by servility. (7)"

One can see in Brassier's revulsion of the coterie of affiliated philosophers and their online blogging as an affront to the authority and prestige of the Academy as an institution that wants to solidify its social and political power over potential graduate students. Brassier like many academic brokers wants to contain this energy, this desire, and rechannel it and institutionalize it back into the formidable world of academic tradesmanship that has been prevalent since the Enlightenment. And let it be known that this is the issue: Ray Brassier champions the Enlightenment and is progressive heritage, even if under the guise of a bounded nihilism turned epistemic naturalist. Some day I will explicate in details my own views on this philosophical heritage and how it seeks its own power over the hearts and minds of those "impressionable" young philosphers.

On another note Alex Reid's digital digs: on the value of academic blogging also enters into this informal atmosphere showing both the pros and cons of academic blogging in an intelligent and helpful essay. His perspective is both refreshing and one that is appropriate and on mark in regards to blogging in general.

Brassier's attack on what he terms "armchair metaphysics" is another dismissive attack on Speculative Realism and its phenomenological tendencies within Object-Oriented and Immanence Process based philosophies stemming from some of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth-century: Martin Heidegger (and Edmund Husserl), and Alfred North Whitehead. Instead of argument we get this: "The idea of a purely a priori, armchair metaphysics, presuming to legislate about the structure of reality while blithely ignoring the findings of our best sciences, strikes me as indefensible." Yet, what if that very science was itself indefensible in some of its methods? What if the naturalist epistemological perspective and practices of those philosophers and scientists that Brassier so highly regards were themselves retrograde and uninspiring, if not downright wrong about their so to speak findings? He points to Peter Wolfendale's Essay on Transcendental Realism (Warning: pdf) as providing "the most perspicuous account of the relation between metaphysics and the natural sciences". This is neither the place, nor do I have time to lay out arguments pro/con on epistemic naturalism. It's just too easy to dismiss someone you do not agree with, and this is the point I'm trying to convey: that Brassier seems not only dismissive of certain philosophies but to be taking it to a personal level in many of his interviews and essays of late. Not sure what the problem is there, but it is not a good sign from a mind that otherwise is so intelligent and full of good ideas.

And, in an offhand remark against such terms as 'weird' being used in debates of 'common-sense' and 'ordinary language' philosophy he tells us it's use is both debilitating for philosophy and counter-intuitive if not "vacuous as it is idiotic." Against idealists of any stripe he tells us that whereas "empirical commonsense leads to the science whose counter-intuitive results challenge the limits of human imagination, idealist disdain for commonsense often ends up ratifying a more rarefied, more insidious orthodoxy in which ‘failures of imagination are mistaken for insights into necessity’ (Dennett)."

Brassier himself is promoting a one world view based upon epistemic naturalism and its control of the sciences. His closure of philosophy as a mode of open ended discussion and debate on the internet, and his elitist and scientific judgements lack any form of openness and democratic appeal to the community at large. His castigation of philosophers that oppose his views as 'idiots' is both pernicious and lacks the tact of an ethically enlightened mind.

As Michael Strangelove in his profound meditation on Capitalist strategies, The Empire of Mind: Digital Piracy and the Anti-Capitalist Movement once said:

"It is quite possible that as unconstrained expression becomes a generalized expectation, individuals will be less willing over time to submit to the institutional containment of human creativity. ... Capitalism and its empire of mind constitute a system that substantially determines thought and action, but it is neither omnipotent nor eternal. In the Internet Age, resistance is not futile." (231)

Addendum:

Last night I was a little OTT in my appraisal of Ray Brassier, and feel that I, too, got a little personal in my attack on his perspective, so have retracted earlier remarks that impinged on political rhetoric of a nature I admit was a strong in reaction to his interview. Yet, I feel strongly that his stance needs some amending too. One can critique one's enemies without dragging it down into the gutter as he does with language like "orgy of stupidity". It's this type of sophistry that irks me and makes my gander rise up and want to say: Why are you doing this? Why the animus?

Peter Gratton on Philosophy In A Time of Error  points to Eric Schliesser's article on Ray Brassier's immoderation: here and here! As well as the comments by Brad Johnson, Anthony Paul Smith, Adam Kotsko and others at An und fur sich. Another take is from Chris at Being Suffciently: Ray Brassier doesn't Like You.

FreeMind: Organizing One's Mind; or, How to Visualize One's Ongoing Writing

Sat, 05 Mar 2011 20:02:54 GMT

Decided to download an application that helps you visualize and capture the ongoing process of writing essays, books, or cooking recipes - for that matter. It's FreeMind - a free mind mapping software. It's a tidy, light-weight application that is Open-source and available freely on the web. It works with exports to other applications as well.

One of the nifty features I've discovered is how easy it is to create outlines, notes, and both hyperlinks and local links to documents. If you're like me, it becomes a little time-consuming to keep wandering round one's blog search out all those interesting tidbits one developed, or left underdeveloped and have them at one's fingertips.

Another feature I already enjoy is that I can create an Outline as I read a work, add in the data in a subsection of notes with references, etc., then allow myself to continue reading, and then later export all this to Word or other applications.

Documentation is great, and there is a link on the wiki page to a Mind Map Gallery of user based maps that one can study or import to help one understand the differing uses of the system.

Check it out:

http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Tim Morton: Vaya-dhamma sankhara; “All created things are impermanent.”

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 21:12:50 GMT

At the end of his life the Buddha declared: Vaya-dhamma sankhara: “All created things are impermanent.”

Tim Morton of Ecology Without Nature fame seems to be an unhappy camper in regards to the Radical Atheism argued by Martin Hägglund in his new book. Of course, to be fair, Hägglund is supporting a reading of the work of Jacques Derrida and a materialist one at that.  Hägglund along with a coterie of fellow within what is now being termed new wave materialists, because of their concern for ideas surrounding life and the transformation of its connections with the older forms of vitalism as such. (See: Nothing Lasts, but...)

Speculators such as Jane Bennett, who considers herself in line with Hans Driesch and Henri Bergson felt that life is irreducible to matter, and that there is a life-principle that animates matter, exists only when in a relationship with matter, but is not itself of a material nature (NM: 47-48). As she asked, what ""would happen to our thinking... if we took more seriously the idea that technological and natural materialities were themselves actors alongside and within us - were vitalities, trajectories, and powers irreducible to the meanings, intentions, or symbolic values humans invest in them?"

Even Tim himself seems - and I do mean seems in the etymological sense of befitting, conforming, in agreement with, or reconciliatory toward the idea of a pansychism of some type. I'm talking about his concept of hyperobjects, which as he tells us in his essay Materialism Expanded and Remixed "causes us to rethink materialism." For Tim this means that even such things as Global Warming can no longer be seen within some outmoded worldview as the old materialism proffered, instead what "emerges in its place is the outlines of what elsewhere I am calling the mesh: a total interconnectivity that goes beyond normative vitalist images of the web of live to include, for example, non-living beings, or beings that do not easily fall on one side or the other of the life–nonlife boundary, such as viruses and artificial life" (ibid. 5-6). Yet, aligning his thought with that of Graham Harman we must understand that against an older pansychism we see a new transformation taking place within object based philosophy: it affirms against the idea of everything is alive, that objects perceive only when in relation, that at all other times they can be just as unperceptive and indolent or withdrawn as James Joyce's idea of the artist:

“The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”

But to bring us back into focus, what Tim is upset about within Hägglund's work is that he is not "convinced that impermanence implies radical atheism. I keep returning to the possibility, which Hägglund simply doesn't consider, that there is a god, and that she is mortal, and that she created the Universe, or that she is the Universe. Such a god would exist as much as a pear or a floating iceberg exists—not that much, according to this view, but existence nevertheless." Ultimately what Tim is truly upset about is the idea that Hägglund seems to be presenting that temporality (Time, impermanence) is a given, which "implies radical atheism", as if a deep set facticity of Derrida's trace existed within the substratum or totality of the universe just below the threshold of objects.

As Jean-Michel Rabaté stated the "notion of survival that Hägglund articulates is quite incompatible with immortality, since it defines life as essentially mortal and as inherently divided by time. Mortal life is the possibility for both the desirable and the undesirable, since it opens the chance of life and the threat of death in the same stroke. (Slought Foundation)"

Peter Gratton on his site Philosophy in a Time of Error criticizing Hägglund tells us that his arguments not only imply that one should not want immortality, but, "contrary to conceptions of desire running from Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium to Freud, Lacan, and beyond, does not in fact want immortality." Gratton sees this as particularly hubristic and ingenious on the part of  Hägglund "telling people what they don't want." (emphasis mine)

As commentator Danielle Sands in his review of Hägglund's book tells it "Hägglund’s rejection of religious readings of Derrida in light of the affirmation of mortality entailed in ‘radical atheism’ again highlights both the strengths and weaknesses of his position." [2] Against a reading of Derrida that enforces a "desire for the impossible", such as philosopher Philip Caputo offers us, Sands tells us that Hägglund argues that a "a desire for totalization, would be contradictory as it conflicts with the desire for the temporal spacing which sustains our mortal survival" (DS, 75). Yet, as Sands states it, having "acknowledged Derrida’s denunciation of lack-based desire, he fails to fully pursue both the psychoanalytic implications and alternative theories of desire" (DS, 75). Sands tells us that  Hägglund misreads Derrida and is often not only dismissive of his ideas at times, but also oversimplifies them in ways that distort the underlying arguments thereby weakening Hägglund's own discourse.

One must confront Hägglund's conception of Derrida's trace, which he tells us in a recent interview (Warning: pdf): "Derrida defines the trace in terms of a general co-implication of time and space: it designates the becoming-space of time and the becoming-time of space, which Derrida abbreviates as spacing (espacement). Spacing is according to Derrida the
condition for both the animate and the inanimate, both the ideal and the material" (61). For Hägglund the concept of trace is "not an ontological stipulation but rather a logical structure that makes explicit what is implicit in the concept of succession." Against a reading of succession as a linear view of time as one thing after another (i.e., a infinite line theory of line stretching from an infinite past toward an infinite future), he offers us the idea of a "constitutive delay and a deferral that is inherent in any temporal event (i.e., the structure of the event implies both a retrospective and prospective view on past events; all that has always-already happened, which leaves its spacings or traces in time.).

Hägglund argues that succession cannot be thought conceptually without "without presupposing the co-implication of time and space that Derrida articulates in terms of the structure of the trace." His concept of the trace seems to imply a episteme, a theory of knowledge, not grounded in ontology, phenomenology, or science; one that is rather a metatheoretical notion, a sort of fictional construct or conceptual tool that defines succession as dependent for its justification on a notion of spacing "dedicated to making explicit what is implicit in the condition of spacing".

Another notion of his is "arche-materiality", which he worked out in deference to those who argued that he had made no distinction between life and nonliving matter, and that this new conceptual notion tries to do that. His understanding of the trace seems to be that of a ghost, an absence rather than a presence that ever becomes a solid object or substance. As he implies for time to be an event we cannot have moments suddenly becoming solid as fully developed presence that can be affected by its own sense of vanishing, instead the "succession of time entails that every moment negates itself–that it ceases to be as soon as it comes to be–and therefore must be inscribed as trace in order to be at all." So this trace is a ghostly absence that persists through time as a spatial being, which seems to exist in a wavering movement that is "always left for an unpredictable future that gives it both the chance to remain and to be effaced."

This strange entity that is demarcated by the metatheoretical apparatus of a posited "arche-materiality" as a ghost that is never fully present, but is situated within the Darwinian cosmos as an "animated intention" of the "mindless, inanimate repetition" of matter, and of the contingent and destructible phenomenal world of living things.  Hägglund's eliminative idealism comes out when he offers us instead of current versions of neo-realism or neo-materialism an articulation within Darwinism that is based on a "logical infrastructure that is compatible with its findings." His epistemological turn shows up succinctly in this passage:

"Following this logic, one can make explicit that the structure of the trace is implicit both in our understanding of the temporality of living processes and in our understanding of how time is recorded in the disintegration of inanimate matter. That is how I account for how the trace structure can be expressive not only of linguistic and phenomenological experience but also of the temporality of evolutionary processes and material structures."

His use of "our understanding of the temporality of living processes" and the use of expressivity in linguistic, phenomenological, and evolutionary terms implies both a for us and a subject that does the expressing. This concern with finitude and subjectivity is at the heart of his Radical Atheism. For as he states it "radical atheism seeks to demonstrate that the so-called desire for immortality or timelessness dissimulates a desire for survival that precedes it and contradicts it from within." Almost sounding like a postmodern Rilke he argues that "the finitude of something is intrinsic to what makes it desirable. It is because things can be lost that one cares about them."

Here is Rilke:

Look: trees do exist; the houses that we live in still stand.
We alone fly past all things, as fugitive as the wind.
And all things conspire to keep silent about us, half out of shame perhaps, half as unutterable hope.
     - Second Elegy

Here is Hägglund on care: "If things were fully present in themselves–if they were not haunted by what has been lost in the past and what may be lost in the future–there would be no reason to care about them, since nothing could happen to them. Care in general thus depends on an investment in survival." For him immortality is not life but, oddly, a form of death, because it puts an end to mortal life. And, in a strange reading he tells us not only is immortality unattainable but that it is also undesirable, "since it would eliminate the possibility for anything to survive or anyone to care."

In a future work he seems to be moving toward contestation of both Freud's and Lacan's notions of the death drive, seeking to "demonstrate how the chronolibidinal notion of binding provides a better model for thinking the constitution of the libidinal economy and why the logic of survival is more expressive of the problems of attachment, trauma, and mourning that are at the center of psychoanalytic inquiry." This fusion of temporality with an inversion of the libidinal economy of desire fuses a sort of Ballardian vision of existence that subtends our desire to transcend time in eternity into an investment in a "life that will be lost". So instead of immortality and its desires we have the melancholic nostalgia toward loss and its ramifications. He tells us that he will develop three key concepts, that together will provide the underpinnings to his theory: "time and space thought together under the heading of archemateriality, life and death thought together under the heading of survival, desire and indifference thought together under the heading of chronolibido."

His concept of survival is the central motif of his radical atheism and aligns him toward all those transhumanist ideologies that seek mortal survival rather than religious consolation. It is the radical drama at the heart of "libidinal being" in "the very bond to mortal life" that is the ambivalent source of all our temporal finitude, and of "what we desire and what we fear, both the desirable and the undesirable."

With this idea of temporal survival in mind we might now understand his need for a concept of succession based upon a "constitutive delay and a deferral that is inherent in any temporal event." For Hägglund this is another way of describing the contingency of any temporal being, no matter if that being be a living system or a nonliving system. The trace becomes just another attempt to describe causation by other means. The problem being that he speaks of clarification, but it seems that he obfuscates the issue through a temporal effusion of both delay and deferral that never does find a resolution.

Tim is right that "Hägglund simply doesn't consider, that there is a god, and that she is mortal, and that she created the Universe, or that she is the Universe." I would also begin to remind myself and Tim that our Buddhism favors a particular term called anicca, which describes impermanence as an undeniable and inescapable fact of human finitude from which nothing that belongs to this earth is ever free.

Even the Buddha had a concept of entropy stating that "decay is inherent in all component things." In Buddhism time is comparable to Heraclitus's river into which one can step as many times as one likes, but it is never the same river and we are never the same individual. One of my favorite poets Basho once illustrated this point:

Clouds appear
and bring to men a chance to rest
from looking at the moon.

Yet, Koji, in almost a echo of this master says:

A pattering of rain
on the new eaves
brings me awake.

The subtle persuasion of kensho verse distills the awakening of anicca or impermanence at the heart of existence. Anicca, anatta (the absence of a self), and dukkha (“suffering”) together make up the ti-lakkhaṇa, or three characteristics of all phenomenal existence according to Buddhism. I'll leave it there, for we have moved beyond debates of Hägglund, finitude, or survival with this little excursion.



1. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics By Diana Coole, Samantha Frost (Duke University Press 2010)
2. Danielle Sands (DS), PARRHESIA (NUMBER 6 • 2009 • 73-78)

Martial Arts and Philosophy?

Thu, 03 Mar 2011 22:49:57 GMT

Levi felt a little sheepish in asking about martial arts as a form of exercise in his recent post Sheepish Questions, saying:

"A martial art seems like it would solve all these problems. The thing is, I have no idea what to look for or what I should be pursuing (how do you choose a school?) and I wonder whether this is only something kids do. Do adults really take these sorts of classes? And if I go to one of these places will I find myself surrounded by a bunch of militant fascists? Any advice?"

Oh for the days... in my more formative years I did work through some of the same dilemmas and decided on Kung Fu and its unique traditions as conveyed within the Shaolin Temples of China. My master, Grandmaster Chul Woo Jung from Korea, whom I had the honor of working with in Denver, Colorado for several years retired in 2004. The tradition he taught steeped in ancient history as it was descended from a disciple of the original Indian monk named Bodhidharam (Dalma in Chinese) who came to Northern China around 540 A.D. where he built a temple called "Young Forrest" (Shaolin in Mandarin, Sil Lum in Cantonese, and So Rim in Korean).

Approximately 400 years ago, a disciple of So Rim named Wong Long (Dang Rang in Korean) developed the Praying Mantis style of Kung Fu. His code of attack and defense was based on the tactics of the insect. Oral tradition dictates that Wong Long entered an annual contest in which many highly trained and skilled practitioners of Kung Fu took part. Invincible in his style of self-defense, he fought and defeated some two-hundred Kung Fu martial artists who challenged him to a duel. He later went into seclusion to further systematize his martial art. The details are recorded in the book of divination called Suk Yang Pi Kup from which the style was handed down through many generations.

The guiding principles of their charter from So Rim Dang Rang Kwan, states: Reverence for life is as important as offense and defense within the Dang Rang Kwan. Our basic charter charges all members to protect life, even that of an enemy. Training goals held forth by the charter encourage reverence for nature, and emphasize beauty, speed, and rightness of action."

As for advice... one must discover through the awareness of one's own unique body and mind the form within which your art can be both enacted and realized. Of Kung Fu there are many styles and one should check out the accreditation of the Masters in your area against the World Registry of Grand Masters before truly committing to the discipline of any one teacher.

There are many styles from hard to soft, and each offers its own rewards, and varies according to one's own ability to become disciplined in practice and theory. It does, to me, relate well to both a western/eastern philosophical practice. Zazen and the daily ritual of forms practice has always been a daily affair for me, a way of focusing and emptying my self of the detritus of effects that so subtend our lives and minds, leaving within me that ability to concentrate and awaken the discipline necessary to be aware of each moment as it emerges. Being surprised by existence at all times, this is the key to zazen and the arts.

Some of the more self-defense paths as in Tae-Kwan Do (Korean), or other national favorites is of course a sure bet as well; for each offers a great openness to a region of thought and being that stems form the ancient worlds of the Buddha to this day.

Ian Bogost: Unit Operations

Thu, 03 Mar 2011 21:34:54 GMT

"I will suggest that any medium - poetic, literary, cinematic, computational - can be read as a configurative system, an arrangement of discrete, interlocking units of expressive meaning. I call these instances of procedural expression unit operations."
- Ian Bogost

I must confess I've left a blank in my preoccupation with reading Graham Harman, Levi R. Bryant, and Timothy Morton over the past months: the work of Ian Bogost. These four philosophical thinkers make up if not the four horsemen of SR, then at least the empowered object-effect of their ghostly absence as key members in its offshoot: Object-Oriented Philosophy.

But I finally purchased two of Ian Bogost's works on videogame theory: Unit Operations: An Approach to Video Games and Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Already I'm fascinated by his clear and precise expositional style, that is neither ostentatious nor full of that arcane terminology I find in a lot of computer theory. Instead this is the work of an insider and an enthusiast, who has learned through experience the darker demarcations that interpenetrates differing fields of endeavor without ever overstepping the limits of those domains. Yet, this is one of the keys to his unique approach, he walks between the regional worlds of literature and philosophical speculation on the one hand, and the highly sophisticated and technological savvy realms of the computer literati like a dark diver in a postmodern chaosmos where cyber-theory and speculative realism meet in the twilight lands of our posthuman(ist) age. But don't confuse this with some pie-in-the-sky idealism, no he knows the nuts-and-bolts of the cold hard economics that underwrites the production of both domains, and as he tells us both the "hardware and software tools that underwrite the production of these and other works of digital art and software remain rooted in the moil of the marketplace." [1]

I just received both books today, so will have to reserve my commentaries for later, but what I see so far is intelligent, energetic, and formidable. I see why now he is not only a key asset within this weird realism that has taken many into that metaphysical return to speculations on the great outdoors, but offers a theoretical clarification and teasing out of the implications of OOO within both the literary and technological domains as well.

And, lest we forget, of gaming, too!

Visit his blog today: http://www.bogost.com/blog/

1. Ian Bogost, Unit Operations: An Approach to Video Games ( 2006 Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Bacchanalia: Another OOO enthusiast on LJ

Thu, 03 Mar 2011 20:43:28 GMT

Over at Bacchanalia I've discovered recently another OOO enthusiast. This time a literary creature who is pursuing some interesting tie-ins between literature, objects, and scholarship. As he says, "I’ve been considering for awhile now crafting a new writing sample to use for my graduate school applications, one that better reflects my present interests in the field. I’ve had a life-long infatuation with stone, with rocks and pebbles, gemstones and crystals, and with my growing passion for OOO, I realized I could fuse those interests together and search for the agency of stones in medieval literature (which lends itself nicely to the sort of post-humanism of OOO and the dark ecology of Timothy Morton, considering the middle ages existed before Kant)." In his current essay Some Notes on Object Horror and Vibrant Matter in "The Franklin’s Tale" and Historia Regum Brittanniae he explores an intermixture of ideas ranging from post-human(ist) to OOO to Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter.

Check it out:

http://thebacchanal.livejournal.com/76105.html?view=111945#t111945

Cengiz Erdem: Quote of the Day!

Thu, 03 Mar 2011 11:59:06 GMT

"Mimicry tries to regress to a world before the separation between nature and culture, the signifier and the signified, the subject and the object. The desire to play with spectres results in a becoming spectre. The subject leaves behind all individuality and becomes one with the world. Mimicry wants to take the shape, colour, and the structure of nature. And it wants to do this through cultural products. Mimicry erases the boundary between life and literature and even when there is no head, there is the subject automatically doing what it has to do."
- Cengiz Erdem, A Pineal Eye Soliloquy, or, The Critique of Surrealism Continued

Levi R. Bryant: Autopoietic and Allopoietic Machines; or, the Renewal of Objects

Thu, 03 Mar 2011 11:00:05 GMT

"One of the more interesting things to watch in the debates surrounding OOO in the last couple of years is how strongly people react to the term “object”. "
     - Levi R. Bryant, Don't Just Sit There! Some Remarks on Objects

"I will show that objects themselves, far from the insipid physical bulks that one imagines, are already aflame with ambiguity, torn by vibrations and insurgencies equaling those found in the most conflicted human moods."
   - Graham Harman

What is an Object?

Levi R. Bryant in his latest post on Larval Subjects describes objects as autopoietic and allopoietic machines. He defines these terms after the work of Niklas Luhmann, as well as Maturana and Varela. The key to this use is based upon both time, events and novelty. He is trying to work out a theory of causation, one that goes beyond either the forms of occasionalism (the God fearing dogmatists or Humaen empiricists). Instead of a vicarious causation (occasionlism) that Harman champions, Levi is opting for a "difference that makes a difference":

"If information is the difference that makes a difference, then information repeated twice is no longer information. Consequently, if objects or objectiles are to maintain their existence across time, they must perpetually renew themselves through the production of novel events."

This temporal reproduction of objects through a process of renewal is similar to Maturana and Varela's "living machines":

"An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components that produces the components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in the space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network." (Pp. 78-79) [1]

Explicating on this passage Niklas Luhmann in an essay tells us something interesting:

"Autopoietic systems, then, are not only self organizing systems. Not only do they produce and eventually change their own structures but their self-reference applies to the production of other components as well. This is the decisive conceptual innovation. It adds a turbo charger to the already powerful engine of self-referential machines. Even elements, that is, last components (individuals), which are, at least for the system itself, undecomposable, are produced by the system itself. Thus, everything which is used as a unit by the system is produced as a unit by the system itself. This applies to elements, processes, boundaries and other structures, and last but not least to the unity of the system itself. Autopoietic systems, of course, exist within an environment. They cannot exist on their own. But there is no input and no output of unity." [2]

Let's try an experiment and translate this autopoietic metaphorics into Object-Oriented terms: an Object is a self-organizing living machine, one that is organized as a productive network that continuously creates new objects through translation and absorption, thereby constituting itself as an irreducible entity occupying a space within the system of forces that is the world.  Levi tells us that a key feature of this process is that these machines being both autopoietic and allopoietic ultimately maintain both the integrity of the object itself and also create other objects that exist independent of the system itself through a "production of events."

Think of our physical body as one of these machines. From the time we are born we begin creating and maintaining all kinds of objects within the horizon of our fleshly envelope. We also translate objects from the surrounding environment into terms that our internal being can use (i.e., the intake of food and water; or, the transfer of bacteria from a mosquito bite). Homeostasis is a fancy word meaning "equilibrium," and it entails many interwoven variables that are amazing to consider. Temperature is among the most straightforward of these. The body sweats to keep cool and shivers to stay warm. But the human body is masterful at balancing many other factors. Most are subtler, involving the regulation of hormones and other bodily chemicals. All of the body's systems self-regulate using an intricate coordination of three principle roles: signal reception, centralized control and action.

All of the body's systems work together to maintain balance in the body, but various systems do have specific roles. Two of the most important systems for maintaining homeostasis are the nervous and endocrine systems. Basic bodily functions such as heart rate and breathing may be stimulated or slowed under neural control. The nervous system helps regulate breathing and the urinary and digestive systems, and it interacts with the endocrine system. For example, part of the brain triggers the pituitary gland to release metabolic hormones in response to changing caloric demands. Hormones also help adjust the body's balance of fluids and electrolytes, among other key roles in all the body's systems. Less energetically expensive, but no less important, roles in the maintenance of homeostasis include the lymphatic system's ability to fight infection, the respiratory system's maintenance of oxygen and proper pH levels, and the urinary system's removal of toxins from the blood.

The human body fends off many challenges to its maintenance of balance. A diet that lacks the right nutrients in the right amounts will induce the body to compensate or become sick. Exposure to drugs, alcohol and other toxins kick the excretory functions into high gear, lest these substances accumulate and damage the body's cells. Stress and depression can challenge the respiratory, cardiovascular and endocrine systems, and thereby weaken their respective abilities to maintain homeostasis. And insufficient sleep can work all of the body's systems too hard, impairing the body's balance. So, while the human body is an amazing entity with exquisite abilities it is still a machine that needs maintenance.

The body is not some solid substance in the Aristotelian sense, but more of an object-effect of this homeostatic, as well as novel, process; it  is more an assemblage of objects or systems of objects working in unison to maintain a body-effect in which certain machines come together and are "plugged into certain limited systems of machinery while excluded from others", so that every object "exerts a determinate and limited range of effects in each instant, and is equally determined by the equipment that surrounds it" (TB, p. 10). [3] One could say the the body is an object that hides within itself an infinite regress of other machines. This is just one instance of the system of forces that hide below the surface effects of the sensuous realm, in the depths of a subterranean world that "is an invisible realm from which the visible infrastructure of the universe emerges" (TB, p. 11).

As Levi tells us "objects come and go, sometimes getting destroyed, at other times moving out of the object and landing elsewhere, while that substantial form, that processuality, remains." This Whiteheadian concern with process is more of a gesture toward the processual philosophers in the SR community it seems, and it shows an aspect of conciliatory thinking on the part of Levi toward those others in our community. As he says, if "that’s not “evental” and “processual” enough for you, I just don’t know what you’re asking for." It seems the pressure of others brings out the depths of one's investment in certain forms of thought, and the democracy of an egalitarian mind as well. This is not meant as a critique, only an observation of the pressure of philosophical community and the day to day process of working with a network of fellow laborers.

The Entropic Effect

"All complex order seems to be wrested from decay."
     - Niklas Luhmann

Levi also remarks on the "problem of entropy". As he relates, the "life of an object is such that it is always a question of how it can get to the next event. How is it that an object can produce the next event, the next components, that will allow it to continue its adventure or life through time for a moment longer?" To continue the ability to produce objects a dynamic system (autopoietic and allopoietic machines) must convert energy into productive force, as well as allowing for that accumulation of entropy within the system to dissipate in the form of waste or heat.

Levi seems to be following Niklas Luhmann and Whitehead again when he states that "every object is called a society." Levi sees a temporal aspect to this entropic effect of the disintegration of objects as waste or heat. Objects for him as part of a process in which "disintegrating events" become the "fodder to create new events." Niklas Luhmann tells us that social "systems use communication as their particular mode of autopoietic reproduction. Their elements are communications which are recursively produced and reproduced by a network of communications and which cannot exist outside of such a network" (ibid.). For Luhmann a society is founded on communication; yet, communications are not living units, conscious units, or actions. As he iterates it communications is "the network of events which produces itself, and structures are required for the reproduction of events by events" (ibid.). Communications is self-referential is is based on three aspects: information, utterance, and understanding; they are aspects which for the system cannot exist independently of the system; they are co-created within the process of communication. An object is a recursively closed system with respect to its communication among its components

Back to my body metaphor. The formal definition of autopoiesis gives no indication of the span of time during which components exist. Autopoiesis presupposes a recurring need for renewal. On the biological
level, however, we tend to think about the process of replacement of molecules within cells or the replacement of cells within organisms, postponing for some time the final, inevitable decay. As Levi tells us objects "thus “use” their entropy as a way of (re)producing themselves, but perpetually face the threat of entropy from the outside. What distinguishes different types of objects is thus not whether they are processual or not, but rather the degree of negentropy they enjoy." One could say that negentropy is the force that seeks to achieve effective organizational behavior within the object and lead to its steady predictable state of equilibrium. Ultimately it is the instability of the system that makes the system viable and novel, as well as productive and active. As Luhumann tells us:

"Events, too, occupy a minimal span of time, a specious present, but their duration is a matter of definition and has to be regulated by the autopoietic system itself: events cannot be accumulated. A conscious system does not consist of a collection of all its past and present thoughts, nor does a social system stockpile all its communications. After a very short time the mass of elements would be intolerably large and its complexity would be so great that the system would be unable to select a pattern of coordination and would produce chaos. The solution is to renounce all stability at the operative level of elements and to use events only. Thereby, the continuing dissolution of the system becomes a necessary cause of its autopoietic reproduction. The system becomes dynamic in a very basic sense. It becomes inherently restless. The instability of its elements is a condition of its duration" (ibid.).

An object maintains itself through its connection to time and irreversibility, which are built into the system not only at the structural level, but also at the level of its components and elements. Its elements are operations. Disintegration and reintegration, disordering and ordering require each other. It is this processual aspect that I think Levi is supporting of the polar effects of this systemic interplay of entropy and negentropy, disintegration and reintegration which is the self-organization of the object and its components. Time is the key to this whole process. And as Luhmann confirms systems "based on events need a more complex pattern of time" (ibid.). This is where I believe Levi implies his "difference that makes a difference", when Luhuman tells us that events "are happenings which make a difference between a 'before' and a 'thereafter'. They can be identified and observed, anticipated and remembered only as such a difference. Their identity is their difference" (ibid.).

Levi explores the use of SR blogs as a metaphor for this process, but I'll leave that for the reader to explore. He finally closes his thoughts saying " objects are operationally closed but dynamically open. “Operational closure” is one of the terms I use for withdrawal. Objects are operationally closed insofar as they never encounter other objects directly, but always as a function of their own internal organization. ... Every object always encounters the world under conditions of closure, translating it in its own particular way. However, objects are nonetheless dynamically open insofar as these perturbation provide impetus for the evolution and development of objects, contributing to their growing complexity over time."

As Luhmann remarks the "problem, then, is to see how autopoietic closure is possible in open systems. The new insight postulates closure as a condition of openness, and in this sense the theory formulates limiting conditions for the possibility of components of the system. Components in general and basic elements in particular can be reproduced only if they have the capacity to link closure and openness." It's this dynamic tension between openness and closure, interaction and withdrawal, dormancy and action, information and knowledge: the communication of a difference that makes a difference, which seems to be what Levi is striving for within his philosophical discourse.

Yet, one must not forget that each and every object in the universe is fully deployed and fully actual; and, that an object's relations or non-relations are based upon its autonomy: relation implies perception, whether that relation is with the components of its own interior life, or the interactions with other objects exterior to itself through the distortions of its own active negotiations in participating in the 'system of forces' that is the world.

It is premature to provide critique, we must await a full reading of Levi's new book The Democracy of Objects to gain a better understanding of this fine philosopher's intricate and unfolding system of speculation. I must commend him for detailing day by day many of his new thoughts on Larval Subjects. He is a bright and powerful mind that hones in on the central motifs of the SR movement and in particular its outgrowth within Object-Oriented Philosophy's thought and praxis.

1. H. R. Maturana and F. J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition. Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1980.
2. The Autopoiesis of Social Systems (N. Luhmann, The Autopoiesis of Social Systems, in: F. Geyer and J. van der Zouwen
(eds.), Sociocybernetic Paradoxes, Sage, London, 1986, 172ff.)
3. Tool-Being: Elements in a Theory of Objects by Graham Harman (TB) ( 1999 UMI Company)

Helvete: a journal of black metal theory

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 07:14:28 GMT

Tim Morton informs us that Ben Woodard and gang are down for a little dark nihil of the black metal variety....

A new journal arising out of the dark hinterlands of speculation! Looks like their accepting proposals too: Forthcoming!

http://helvetejournal.org/

Helvete is an open access electronic and print journal dedicated to continuing the mutual blackening of metal and theory inaugurated by the Black Metal Theory Symposia. Not to be confused with a metal studies, music criticism, ethnography, or sociology, black metal theory is a speculative and creative endeavor, one which seeks ways of thinking that “count” as black metal events—and, indeed, to see how black metal might count as thinking. Theory of black metal, and black metal of theory. Mutual blackening. Therefore, we eschew with any approach that treats theory and metal discretely, preferring to take the left-hand path by insisting on some kind of connaturality between the two, a shared capacity for nigredo.

Editors
Zachary Price
Aspasia Stephanou
Benjamin Woodard

Editorial Advisory Board
Dominic Fox
Nicola Masciandaro
Dan Mellamphy
Michael O’Rourke
Karin Sellberg
Steven Shakespeare

Rondo Keele: Ockham Explained

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 05:52:02 GMT

"Ockham was an excellent logician."
-Rondo Keele, Ockham Explained

I have Graham Harman to thank for turning me on to this excellent and informative book by Rondo Keele. As Harman tells us it is from the same Open Court series as his own Heidegger Explained. Keele opens the book with a theft, the theft of the Franciscan Order's stamp of authority used to maintain its power in the world. William of Ockham belonged to this order, and had recently undertaken the dubious task of uncovering the heresies of the Pope living in Avignon John XXII. It was against the Pope's power and politics that both Ockham and many in the Franciscan Order had decided to leave under cover of night for parts unknown.

Keele interweaves the actual life and thought of William of Ockham in a story that illuminates the medieval world: its politics, religion, and power struggles in both spheres. Along with Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus, William Ockham was the third in the a tripartite of still valued philosophers from the Medieval world. As Keele reminds us it was William Ockham's "logic, defiance, and piety" that will be remembered, his abandonment of his native England for Germany where he "would finally die in Munich"; and, it was here that for the last twenty years of his natural born life he would use the full gamut of his intellectual resources to battle against the "problems of power and authority, church and state, prince and pope" (OE, p. 2). [1]

Ultimately two key points underlay all of Ockham's basic philosophical logic: first, how we use language to describe the world or the real can lead us into false and "absurd metaphysical conclusions" (i.e., we must be more subtle about language); and, second, philosophers sometimes believe optimistically in the power of their own arguments, and therefore invest more in "the power of reason" than is warranted (i.e., we must be more realistic about such things) (OE, p. 3). And, of course, as we all know Ockham is known for Ockham's Razor: but how many know that he never used the term razor? Instead it was coined hundreds of years later. Instead what we have is his classic statement that "No plurality should be assumed unless it can be proved (a) by reason, or (b) by experience, or (c) by some infallible authority," in his Sentences Commentary from 1318-1319, in Treatise on Quantity from 1323-24, and in other places (OE, p. 94-95).

The book is less than two hundred pages and is lively, entertaining, and informative; full of anecdotal and factual information; short, crisp passages, that move quickly over the details of Ockham's life and thought. This is a book for both the beginner and the expert, it is always good to reacquaint one's self with those key figures and precursors of our philosophical heritage, otherwise we fall into the lax belief that we know more than they did, when all we know is our own laziness and sloppy habits of thought. William Ockham can teach you to cut through bloated discourse and reach the kernel of any argument with a razor that bleeds logic. And, Rondo Keele is your guide on this journey, and as a guide he makes this journey both fruitful and equitable, that challenges us to see the man in his time, as well as how he still lives on within our minds even now.

1. Keele, Rondo, Ockham Explained From Razor to Rebellion (Open Court 2010 by Carus Publishing Company)

Objects and Powers: Graham Harman and Levi Bryant

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 05:14:02 GMT

In his essay Intentional Objects for Non-Humans (2008 via Anthem) Harman tells us that while "Husserl’s phenomenology describes things in terms of their appearance to consciousness, Heidegger notes that things primarily do not appear in consciousness. Instead, they withdraw from view into invisible usefulness. The floor in this room, the oxygen in the air, the heart and kidneys that keep us alive, are generally hidden unless and until they malfunction."

Recently I came across this unique site Thinking with Shakespeare by Julia Reinhard Lupton as I was doing some research on that great poet/playwright's work for another community blog I work with dealing with purely literary pursuits. Her essay suddenly gave me the uncanny feeling that I was overhearing Graham Harman's voice popping out of a black box like a found object amid her strange abstract for a talk on Romeo and Juliet:

"Things disappear: they disappear into the routines of use in daily life, except under circumstances of failure, want, or breakage, or in moments of special appreciation and acknowledgment, which include both curation and celebration. Things also disappear in academic analysis, insofar as they too quickly turn into symbols or symptoms, semiotic messages divested of their lived properties. By taking things as objects of analysis, we tend to make their normative modes of being withdraw from attention. I would like to grasp here the special ways that things disappear and reappear in daily life, in order to short-circuit the way that things disappear in academic discourse."

I would like to grasp instead just that strange moment when an object decides to withdraw or recede into that sphere of "invisible usefulness" that has nothing to do with our attention. Harman in his essay tells us that the important thing to distinguish is not that an object is either invisible or visible, but "of the transformation of a thing’s reality." Against those that would give a pragmatist reading to Heidegger's Tool-analysis he tells us that "praxis is more stupid than theory. This is why theory was invented, after all. The act of using something distorts and oversimplifies its reality even more than theory does. Heidegger is no pragmatist."

Yet, Harman, tells us like the good revisionist he is, that Heidegger did not get it all, he needed to go further to complete this line of thought that would have built an "unexpected highway from Heidegger to pansychism," one that acknowledges the subtle truth that if "theory and praxis both distort, caricature, or transform the hidden reality of things, then the same must be true of any relation whatever." The key to this is that it doesn't matter if humans or non-humans relate to objects, the key is relationality itself; for only through relations do objects emerge: or, as he states it: "all relations are on the same footing."

Ultimately Graham Harman's basic model of Object-Oriented Ontology is based on the unique premise that objects are irreducible to any relations with other objects, and that while dependent on their component pieces, they are also irreducible to those pieces; objects merely encounter caricatures of each other, and in ontological terms this happens in the same way whether a human or animal is involved or not, the fact that objects cannot encounter each other directly means that only indirect relation is possible. However, we cannot follow either the occasionalists (who make God the sole medium of relation) or Hume or Kant (who invert occasionalism by making human habit or categories the only known site where this occurs), there is an infinite regress of objects, but not an infinite progress toward ever larger ones, up to and including the “universe as a whole” (which doesn’t really exist for me); both real and sensual objects are polarized between an object-pole and a quality-pole, this yields a fourfold structure, which generates not only space and time, but their previously disowned sisters which we might term essence and eidos. [1]

In sliming down the above rendition of his model Harman tells us that "you’re going to have a hard time not only finding a past or present philosophy that agrees on all of these points (perhaps that’s setting the bar of resemblance too high) but even of finding one that matches the basic model: a cosmos of objects at countless different scales, all real regardless of whether anyone or anything is currently interacting with them, and all withdrawing from one another and interacting only indirectly through a sensual medium."

Levi Bryant on Invisible Objects

Levi gives us his rendition of George Molnar's Powers: A Study in Metaphysics. He took the lead from Steve Shaviro's advice from Pinnocchio Theory in which he tells us that Molnar "asserts a realist ontology, one that is directed against the skeptical empiricism of the whole tradition derived from Hume." He goes on the draw parallels between Molnar and Harman, saying, "Molnar insists, as much as Graham Harman does, that a thing, or an object, is not just a bundle of properties or characteristics, but exists in its own right apart from and in addition to these."

Levi on this advice draws parallels between Molnar's use of powers and his own conceptual framework of onticology: "I argue that objects are split or divided between their virtual proper being and their local manifestations. The virtual proper being of an object is its powers, what the object can do, while local manifestation is the properties that an object comes to embody or actualize." Instead of Harman's use of the split between the real and intentional object, Levi gives us a new set of metaphors: virtual proper being and their local manifestations. He equates his concept of VPB (virtual proper being) = powers and the LM (local manifestation) = properties.

Levi tells us that Molnar breaks these powers down into five feature sets:

1. Directedness, or physical intentionality:

"Intentionality is not restricted to the domain of the mental, according to Molnar, but is a feature of physical objects as well. The directedness of a power is a form of intentionality insofar as a power is directed towards its manifestation in a quality. Thus, for example, the solubility of salt is directed towards salt dissolving itself in a liquid. The manifestation is that towards which the power (solubility) tends or is directed."

2. Independence:

"The key feature of powers is that they are independent of their manifestations. Salt has the power of solubility even if it is never dissolved in water. In this regard, powers are non-identical to their manifestations. This is one of the reasons that I endlessly emphasize the role played by regimes of attraction in the actualization of objects. Regimes of attraction can be roughly equated with context. Insofar as powers are independent of their manifestations we never entirely know– to quote Spinoza and Deleuze –what an object can do. We discover the powers of an object by placing it in different contexts and seeing what it does. Yet in doing so, other powers contained within objects remain dormant insofar as they can only be actualized or manifested in other contexts."

3. Actual:

"By this Molnar means that powers are not mere possibilities, but are real features of objects. They belong to the actual object itself."

4. Intrinsic:

"...powers are non-detachable “parts” of objects. It is for this reason that I’ve been led to equate power or virtual proper being with the substantiality of objects.

5. Objective features:

"...powers are objective features of objects. Hume had argued that our notion of powers is merely a psychological effect of how the mind associates events. By contrast, Molnar argues that powers are real properties of objects."

Levi seems particularly fascinated by the second feature, independence, saying, "I find the feature of independence particularly fascinating. If the substantiality of objects is defined by their powers and powers are independent of their manifestations in qualities, this seems to entail that it’s possible for there to be objects that are completely unmanifested or “invisible” within the world. This would take place in the case of objects whose powers are actual and real, but which are completely dormant. Such objects would appear as if they don’t exist precisely because they don’t appear at all, but would nonetheless be entirely real and existent."

But why do these objects need to be invisible at all? Why not transparent? Think of the ocean within which the fish live and breath without ever thinking of the medium within which that move and swim; is it not a sort of sleeping object through which they move but in a way that is transparent rather than invisible to them as an independent object? For us the ocean can become a force for destruction as all those shipwrecks like the Titanic will attest too. But the ocean for us as compared to the creatures that live within its depths is another level or scale within that ontological region of our universe that is open to us only through a negotiated struggle between levels of existence (i.e., we must have dive suits or submarines to plunge deep into its depths), except as a vehicle for our own tools to cross (ships), plunder (fishing), dig (oil derricks), or study (climatology).

To be "unmanifested" does not imply appearance (invisibility/visibility) at all. As Harman stated in his essay above the important thing to distinguish is not that an object is either invisible or visible, but "of the transformation of a thing’s reality." In this statement Levi seems to confuse the issue of the real and intentional object by implying that if an object is dormant it would appear as if it didn't exist precisely because it doesn't appear at all, yet would still be "real and existent". But again what does appearance have to do with it? Since a real object never appears to us or another object directly, but only indirectly through its intentional or sensuous appendages, properties, or qualities then why does appearance become a problem? An object does not need to appear to us or another object to relate, think of all those little microbes and bacteria that daily infest our lives and travel in the midst of that transparent region of our terrestrial globe we call the atmosphere, that negotiate there way burrowing through our porous flesh and into our subdermal systems and into our bloodstreams infesting us with all those terror born diseases we term epidemics.

Harman speaks of a "carnival of levels extending throughout the cosmos" in which objects flicker from one level to another using a common language of charm or brute force in which they are able to persuade or annihilate one another. Each level of the world has its own unique language by which objects communicate with each other, and it is this "intermediary zone through which objects signal to one another, and transfer energies for the benefit or destruction of one another that the carnal phenomenology of Object-Oriented philosophy touches base with. For it is in this intermediary zone of the carnal and sensual medium that "objects are able to interfere with one another" (GM: 70). It is in this interzone where "beings collide with one another in a field, in a series of levels that connect them with one another. These objects can never be fully deployed in any single level, since their nature is never to manifest themselves entirely in any interaction at all" (GM: 70). [2]

The appearance of an object either to us or another object will always be partial or perspectival, for the simple reason that it reveals itself only through its intentional properties or features and does that through a negotiation and translation that is a distortion of the real objects hidden interior life. A real object is autonomous which always-already is independent and withdrawn, not fully manifested in any relationship of any type except through the interaction in that field or volcanic core where all change manifests itself. We do not need to worry over appearances, objects can be real and independent, withdrawn and sleeping and dormant without being either invisible or transparent. Objects can exist without relations; yet, as Harman has reiterated, it is only in relation that objects perceive.

I will hold off on discussing the issues of language, metaphor, hyperbole, etc. for now, except to ask why we need so many strange obfuscations of terms that seem to distort rather than clarify. By this I am referring to Levi's use of virtual proper being and local manifestation as against Harman's real and intentional objects. I see that there is a difference in emphasis here, that VPB seems to imply a potentiality; ergo., the reason for the need in equating Levi's terms to Molner's powers and properties. Maybe I'm all we here and that this is less an emphasis on language, than it is on philosophical influence: knowing that Levi came out of struggles with Deleuze, and Harman out of Husserl/Heidegger. The love of one's originals is always a driving force in one's ongoing projects, and always difficult to overcome or subtend in a way that is beneficial to all concerned. This is part of being individuals.

I am still an avid reader of both philosophers, and it is interesting to see this friendly struggle or agon within the OOO community. I await, avidly, both Harman's (On Meillassoux, The Quadruple Object, etc.) and Levi's (The Democracy of Objects) new books. Hopefully the deeper implications of both philosopher's systems will be detailed out and further explicated. I see in OOO something congenial to my own thinking and wish them both the best in coming years as they continue to develop productive and worthwhile lives and thought.

1. now Peirce got there first - from Graham Harman's blog Object-Oriented Philosophy
2. Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (GM) (2005 by Carus Publishing Company)

Nick Land: Quote of the Day!

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 19:54:00 GMT

"Transcendental philosophy needs to be scaled, just as chaos theory needs deepening transcendentally. Between real scales there is always a difference of condition/conditioned, but this difference is only ever scalar (never polar). Unlike a Menger sponge the labyrinth cannot be expressed within a transcendent grid, since it maps an uncircumscribable terrain of immanence. Space and time find their construction ‘in’ the labyrinth, or nowhere. Scale is an irreducible difference. "
- Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation