tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-90230233211700516662024-03-13T08:08:43.544-07:00Apparitions of not Being PithyA blog in which size mattersBrianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06496620812252728998noreply@blogger.comBlogger83125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9023023321170051666.post-75961982801393834912011-04-06T08:08:00.000-07:002018-01-01T07:11:29.372-08:00About-You.Tumblr.comThis blog (for the few who’ve read it) has been a place to put up rough drafts for essays I wrote for two independent studies I had this year. Any responses I’ve received were used to help me clear up/edit the writing for formal papers. It’s been a place to gather up my ideas and to have independent study professors check the logic of the ideas before it went to a formal paper. It’s helped with my writing in general because these rough drafts were sort of meta-rough drafts making the formal work I did much better than if I didn’t write these drafts. That being said, I won’t have another independent study until the summer (end of June). I think I will still continue to use this space for rough drafts in the future. For now though, it’s break time. I set up a Tumblr account at: <a href="http://about-you-blog.tumblr.com/">http://about-you-blog.tumblr.com/</a> which is going to be much more fun for everyone (including myself). The idea is basically the opposite of this blog. Instead of reading long winded rough drafts, About You will specifically be pithy, but still substantial (sometimes). Everyone likes reading quick posts. With that in mind, this blog really has no intention of being anything other than a testing ground for ideas. For those who have read these testing-ground posts, there will be more when I start the next independent study this summer. For everyone else who don’t have the time to digest long-winded (and mostly unnecessary) theory, About You will be much more fun and easy/quick to read. I look forward to it. I will eventually be back on here, but will be having much more fun on the Tumblr space.Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06496620812252728998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9023023321170051666.post-5551203096456066372011-03-09T08:46:00.000-08:002011-03-31T15:23:59.678-07:00The Truth of Extinction; Enlightenment and Extinction, Conclusion<div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xb7waGhk_Lk/TXewDkBnjMI/AAAAAAAAAUI/axoPRiYppF0/s1600/asteroid_impact.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 255px; height: 320px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xb7waGhk_Lk/TXewDkBnjMI/AAAAAAAAAUI/axoPRiYppF0/s320/asteroid_impact.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5582123838405577922" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">Kaput<br /><br /></span> <div style="text-align: left;">Freud's concept of the death-drive found in <span style="font-style: italic;">Beyond the Pleasure Principle </span>can be said to have a philosophical analogy in the concept of the "will to know." This death-drive that we elaborated on with the help of Brassier in the last post showed us the curious nature of the human being that mentally repeats it's traumatic events in order to muster the anxiety required to buffer the shock of any future traumatic event. While Freud's reasoning in <span style="font-style: italic;">Beyond the Pleasure Principle</span> made this phenomena less curious, it still seemed strange for any organism to constantly relive a state of anxiety regardless of any possible shock that may occur in the future (notice how <span style="font-style: italic;">futural </span>time here plays the pivotal role in creating anxiety. It's here where Heidegger as a psycho-theorist works best rather than a philosophical critic that makes claims like "science does not think" for example). Beyond the patient, the philosopher can be said to reappropriate the death-drive in their incessant drive to know. From this, we can understand that the will to know is a drive to death. We will come to understand this in the conclusion of <span style="font-style: italic;">Enlightenment and Extinction</span>. This is important because Brassier isn't grounding the enlightenment of extinction simply on the solar catastrophe he refers to in Lyotard's account of the suns incineration, but on the mental phenomena of the repetition of trauma, and it's philosophical analog in the drive to know. In this sense, I think it would be erroneous to classify him simply as a "nominalist." He has engaged in the theoretical constructs of <span style="font-style: italic;">Dasein </span>rigorously while also engaging in the scientific-material conditions of the universe. This engagement is rigorously sincere to me. This sincerity will lead us to faithfully understand <span style="font-style: italic;">Enlightenment and Extinction</span>. Lets then try to understand as faithfully as possible the analog of the death-drive in the will to know. Much beyond the responsibility to the author is an opportunity for discovery. The only thing holding one back from taking this opportunity is the fear of extinction.<br /><br />"...it is precisely the extinction of meaning that clears the way for the intelligibility of extinction. Senselessness and purposelessness are not merely privative; they represent a gain in intelligibility. The cancellation of sense, purpose, and possibility marks the point at which the 'horror' concomitant with the impossibility of either being or not-being become intelligible. Thus, if everything is dead already, this is not only because extinction disables those possibilities which were taken to be constitutive of life and existence, but also because the will to know is driven by the traumatic reality of extinction, and strives to become equal to the trauma of the in-itself whose trace it bears." This explanation of the lack of purpose for <span style="font-style: italic;">being </span>is at a distance from the commonly understood classical existentialism. One isn't simply "left with nothing" because extinction is absolute. On the other hand, one is precisely "left with nothing" because of extinction. The import for Brassier is not to take on a state of consternation, or apathy because of this extinction (notice the <span style="font-style: italic;">taking on </span>which I hope to distinguish from an enlightenment of extinction where nothing <span style="font-style: italic;">personally</span> is being <span style="font-style: italic;">taken on</span>) . Being "left with nothing" need not be existentially symbolized. This existential symbolization is certainly a possibility but one that is relative to symbolic being. Instead, this "gain in intelligibility" that occurs with the enlightenment of extinction does not have to be understood as an affirmation of <span style="font-style: italic;">being's</span> existence, nor an ethical impulse for political freedom. Simply put, the enlightenment can occur completely independent of the subject that it happens to. The concept of "horror" is specifically quoted by Brassier in order to reapporpraite what was once understood as horror into a non-existential connotation. What was at once horrific is now simply understood (thereby losing its "horrific" element). This move past the ontology of being towards a "pure" epistemology loses it's horrific element then. Horror happens to the ontologically invested. Again, this is one possibility; the possibility of an epistemological ontology. Extinction then disables what we can understand as "vital ontology." What was once to be taken as constitutive of life (Aristotelian: growth, or Heideggerian: temporal dying, for example) is now understood through the enlightenment of extinction. We understood this in the last post through Freud's discovery of the death-drive and Brassier's appropriation of the death-drive in cosmological repetition. This enlightenment of extinction is specifically epistemological though, meaning a <span style="font-style: italic;">matter of knowledge</span>. In this sense, it wouldn't be inaccurate to see Brassier as an idealist because of his thinking that thought can come to understand extinction. This idealism is simply not ontologically invested. This thinking, this will to know is always a reduction. Every attempt to know is an attempt to "get at the bottom of things," and when it appears that there is ostensibly nothing more to discover, this sense of "horror" (existentially understood) finds that the will to know was a will to get at nothing. The act of incessant reduction simply discovers itself as an operation of incessant reduction to discover nothing. This nothing is specifically understood philosophically as the "in itself." The will to nothing forms a trace of the "in itself" that's nothing other than its own drive. The philosophically understood "in itself" then is the trace of nothing as the recognition of its own drive to know. But this "in itself" need not be understood philosophically, meaning unitarily in order to establish a "sufficient philosophy." The will to know can simply borrow verbiage from philosophy and use it tyrannically. It would be tyrannical in the sense that it need not feel the compulsion to reference the historical inception of the concept. In this sense, the "in itself" understood non-philosophically could be called historically irresponsible from the philosophical perspective. It's here where the "pure" epistemological break with ontology simply doesn't recognize the classical gestures of philosophy, philosophical gestures that we can say are historically ethical. The use of a concept without reference to its historical inception is closer to what is called "the real," because an expression happens without the ethical responsibility towards history. In this sense, what is called "the real" happens every time something is stated without reference to context or pretext (It's with this in mind that it's not so odd to see how ethical of a thinker Derrida was, broadly speaking). The trace then of the "in itself" is not an ethical drive, but a tyrannical drive to know itself as its own drive. In the drive to know nothing ("in itself"), concepts are used and disregarded at will.<br /><br />"In becoming equal to it, philosophy achieves a binding of extinction, through which the will to know is finally rendered commensurate with the in-itself. This binding coincides with the objectification of thinking understood as the <span style="font-style: italic;">adequation without correspondence</span> between the objective reality of extinction and the subjective knowledge of the trauma to which it gives rise. It is this adequation that constitutes the truth of extinction. But to acknowledge this truth, the subject of philosophy must also recognize that he or she is already dead, and that philosophy is neither a medium of affirmation nor a source of justification, but rather the organon of extinction." The death-drive as the will to know for Brassier becomes equal to what is understood as the "in-itself." When seeking something called the "in-itself" what is found is the will to know. This understanding of the will to know is without end because it seeks nothing. It seeks nothing in the sense that it incessant reduces "substances," and in doing so finds something that is epistemically nothing. Thinking then is understood as the "reality of extinction," and the "subjective knowledge of trauma" experienced by a subject without any correspondence between "reality," and "subjectivity;" in other words, without causality between "reality" and "subjectivity." The will to know resembles extinction, and is experienced traumatically by the subject. There is no experience of extinction, and there is an experience of trauma. Subjective trauma and the reality of extinction are absolutely different, but thinking is understood by both concepts. When one acknowledges this truth, one must acknowledge that their thinking is a trace of nothing. In this sense, one is passively in death. In the act of knowing, one is already dead, because the drive to know is knowing nothing. Death is the knowing of the nothing that already happens. If philosophy is the will to know, it's not the static affirmation of something, nor the justification a subjective trauma it may experience. It's the "organon of extinction." We can say that it's "death as text," or "the textual form of death." What we learn here is that while death may have different forms, this has nothing to do with the absolute reality of extinction, not only on physical-material grounds, but on the grounds of what is called "subjectivity." What is called "subjectivity" is not alive but always dead. Because nothing takes on a different form, in this case of what's called "subjectivity," doesn't mean that it's not driven towards its own extinction. What we can say then is that there are different forms in which death always happens, none of which are alive if they are always grounded in death. Death has different ways of happening and repeating itself. It's these different ways of happening and repeating itself that are open to speculation. The question is: how are different forms always dying? Every question put forth to philosophy then is always a will to know nothing. This text of the drive to know nothing is philosophy. Within nothing, discoveries are always made with no end in sight. These discoveries with no end in sight don't have to take on the possibility of "existential conundrums," and/or "political consequences" for example. If the will to know is always the will to know nothing, then there are no "existential conundrums" because there is no meaning<span style="font-style: italic;"> to be desired </span>in the will to know. But what if a form of nothing doesn't follow its own drive? If <span style="font-style: italic;">Dasein</span> as a form of nothing stops driving to know, then what is happening? How is it? How does a form stop its extinctive drive. It's crucial to allow these questions to happen without any pejorative adjectives in its questions. If one is faithful towards their own drive, there will be no room for the personality that would allow for the pejorative disposition. In other words, the death-drive is without ideology. As a preliminary question, it can be asked: "How does control happen to the extinctive drive?" How does the drive break? Maybe more pointedly, does the drive take a break, and if so, how does it take a break.</div></div>Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06496620812252728998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9023023321170051666.post-69596432831744432012011-03-02T09:08:00.000-08:002011-03-02T12:03:41.079-08:00Cosmological Death-Drive; Enlightenment and Extinction, Part 11<div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--m89mgJeMGA/TW58b7P-L2I/AAAAAAAAAUA/BLjGRZ_xo0c/s1600/death-drive-ride.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 231px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--m89mgJeMGA/TW58b7P-L2I/AAAAAAAAAUA/BLjGRZ_xo0c/s320/death-drive-ride.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5579533807561617250" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">Ride the death drive. An organic experience of entropy.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">In opposition to Deleuze and Heidegger's ontologies, Brassier casts Nietzsche's will to power reappropriated as the will to nothing which we discussed in the last post. The will to nothing becomes extended and more specific through Freud's concept of the death-drive found in his groundbreaking work <span style="font-style: italic;">Beyond the Pleasure Principle</span>. Brassier will want to extend the concept of Freud's death-drive into a cosmological framework, meaning an explanation of how organic life always tends towards it's entropic and non-organic nothingness. It's an extension of Freud's original concept in the sense that Brassier will find exact scientific phenomena to represent the death-drive beyond <span style="font-style: italic;">being, </span>most specifically in the suns incineration roughly 4.5 billion years from now. First though, I think it's important to understand Freud's concept of the death-drive and Brassier does this wonderfully. We won't be understanding Freud on our own terms as if we had more authority to speak on the subject than Brassier (even if we did). Instead, we will let Brassier speak for himself regarding the concept of the death-drive. This will help us understand the initial concept of the death-drive and will also help is in understanding this concept within a cosmological context. The concept of the death-drive is one of the most important philosophical insights of the 20th century. It's something that confounded Freud before and during the <span style="font-style: italic;">Beyond the Pleasure Principle</span> text. Freud though was never someone to stop a reduction when in the process of understanding anything (which makes him more of a philosopher than a psychoanalyst.) The understanding of the death-drive within the context of ontology will serve as the grounds for understanding it through the context of cosmology. Only when we can wipe away our teleological presupposition of vitalism can we come to grips of the sense of the death-drive concept. Brassier will help us with Freud, and then we can fully understand the farther reaching extension of arguably Freud's most important work.<br /><br />"The phenomenon that motivates Freud's investigation in <span style="font-style: italic;">Beyond the Pleasure Principle </span>is that of traumatic neurosis. The latter gives rise to a 'compulsion to repeat,' wherein the sufferer compulsively relives the traumatic incident in his or her dreams. Yet if the function of dreams is primarily that of wish-fulfillment, in conformity with the pleasure principle, which strives to maximize pleasure- where pleasure is defined as a diminution of excitation - and to minimize displeasure - where displeasure is defined as an increase in excitation- then traumatic neurosis poses a problem for psychoanalysis because it resists explanation in terms of the pleasure principle: why is the patient compelled to relive a shatteringly unpleasurable experience?" When Freud confronts traumatic neurosis in his patients, he's confounded by the fact that the patients repeat the traumatic event(s) that happened to them. This is at odds with what Freud preliminarily called the "pleasure principle," which simply put means that <span style="font-style: italic;">beings </span>are driven to pleasure. What <span style="font-style: italic;">beings </span>are driven towards in this classical concept of the pleasure principle is fulfillment of wishes. <span style="font-style: italic;">Beings</span> wish and hope things for themselves and the pleasure principle defines beings in terms of the drive to attain the things they ideally wish and hope for. They are driven by their dreams. It's important to understand more specifically how Freud understood pleasure. Pleasure was firstly the drive to attain ones wishes. But more specifically, it was the "diminution of excitation" and an "increase in excitation." So contrary to the idea that pleasure would mean that one would be overly excited, pleasure is the diminution of excitation. In other words, the more placid one would be would signify a more maximal state of pleasure. This is important to highlight because it can be seen that someone who's overexcited is ostensibly experiencing "pleasure," whereas for Freud, this anxiety was neurotic and not pleasurable. That being said, how come patients were reliving their traumatic experiences not only in their dreams, but in their non-dream states where images would float into someones mind of the traumatic experience. Why was there a temptation and curiosity to relive something that was painful? In general, how is this perversity possible (How is a fetish possible?)? If Freud's patients, and anyone in general relives traumatic events either in dream states or non-dream states, then how much of the pleasure principle is really a principle? This is what leads Freud to write <span style="font-style: italic;">Beyond the Pleasure Principle</span> and give an answer to the repetitive acts of trauma in his patients. Brassier writes, "Freud's answer is that through this repetition, the psyche is striving to muster the anxiety required in order to achieve a successful binding of the excess of excitation released by the traumatic breaching of its defenses." The psyche of the patient then is driven to continually allow anxiety to enter into their psyche in order to successfully bind to the original excitation of the traumatic event. The psyche is driven to equal the anxiety that was originally caused by the traumatic event. The psyche is driven to match the anxiety of a traumatic event. Why does it do this? "The compulsion to repeat consists in an attempt on the part of the unconscious to relive the traumatic incident in a condition of anxious anticipation that will allow it to buffer the shock, thereby compensating for the impotent terror that disabled the organism and staunching the excessive influx of excitation brought about by a massive psychic wound." The patient then repeats the traumatic event in their mind to "buffer the shock" of another hypothetical traumatic experience of the same kind. By repeating a traumatic event in ones mind, any new traumatic event won't be new to it. The patient will already have something in their own mind that they have experienced over and over again by the neurotic repetition of anxiety that drives to equal the hypothetical future traumatic experience. Any future experience of trauma will be staunched because the patient has relived the anxiety of trauma so much that the actual experience of trauma will be nothing new. The patient then is always in a state of anxiety anticipating a traumatic event. The patient can't know if the traumatic event will happen again or not. All that matters to the subconscious mind of the patient is that something traumatic has happened and could happen again, and the patient believes the traumatic event will happen again. If they didn't, they wouldn't hold in anticipation for something they know wasn't going to happen (just because it happened before). "The excessive influx of excitation brought about by a massive psychic wound" will be matched by the subconscious repetition of anxiety it knows will happen to itself, even though it may very well never happen again in reality. They key for the subconscious is to buffer <span style="font-style: italic;">shock</span> specifically. Shock is the traumatic experience. Anxiety is a diminutive form of shock. It's a livable form of shock. One will never be shocked if they're always in a state of anxiety. If the subconscious keeps repeating the anxiety of a traumatic event (a trace of the traumatic event), no shock can happen to it because it constantly keeps shocking itself in smaller, more livable degrees than the initial shock that happened to itself. But for however much shock is buffered by the subconscious repetition of anxiety, this repetition of anxiety is anything but the pleasure principle. If the pleasure principle is defined as the diminution of excitation, then the drive to relive a trace of a traumatic experience is not a pleasurable drive. It's not a pleasurable drive to keep exciting oneself into small states of anxiety. If the preliminary concept of the pleasure principle given by Freud was to be an axiom for the operation of the subconscious, then the subconscious would simply forget about a traumatic event, and wouldn't feel the need to relive it in small states of anxiety in order to staunch massive excitation caused in a shock. The subconscious would say to itself: "because it happened once, doesn't mean it will happen again." If the subconscious said this to itself, it would do the opposite of repeating a traumatic event. It would end the traumatic event in the assertion that one event doesn't mean that the same exact event will happen again, or even more simply, that <span style="font-style: italic;">one event doesn't cause another event</span>. In Freud's thought in <span style="font-style: italic;">Beyond the Pleasure Principle</span> though, the subconscious is overwhelmed by the wound of the traumatic experience to rationally be able to reason with itself. It's here where the rationality of conscious life can take hold of the subconscious' death-drive proclivities by consciously reasserting to oneself that "I will always be shocked by something." This negates the subconscious drive to relive a traumatic experience in order to buffer a hypothetical future one because one is always constantly aware that something "shocking" can happen. Instead of constant bubbling anxiety, there's an acceptance of the constant possibility of traumatic events. Shocks will come and die away. In this sense, conscious life is retraining the ostensible function of the subconscious defined in Freud's death-drive to accept shock as something that will always happen, instead of letting one shock fester to shield from a hypothetical future shock. This is a digression from the post, but something I will want to explore later.<br /><br />Brassier states "If the death-drive qua compulsion to repeat is the originary, primordial motive force driving organic life, this is because the motor of repetition - the repeating instance - is this trace of the aboriginal trauma of organic individuation. This death-drive understood as repetition of the inorganic is the repetition of the death which gave birth to the organism - a death that cannot be satisfactorily repeated, not only because the organism which bears its trace did not yet experience it, but also because that trace is the marker of an exorbitant death, one that even in dying, the organism cannot successfully repeat." Here we find the move from the death-drive understood in Freud's sense to the death-drive understood through the framework of Deleuze's concept of repetition that grounds everything. In the psychoanalytical patient, we saw the drive to constantly repeat trauma that put them in a constant state of anxiety, working against their own ostensible "pleasure principle." With Brassier (with the help of Deleuze's meticulously detailed account of repetition in <span style="font-style: italic;">Difference and Repetition</span>), we find the cosmological context for the death drive as the repetition of death. The psychoanalytical patient had a subconscious that repeated the anxiety of trauma that would lead towards its death, not towards its pleasure. The organic in general is driven by a repetition of death just the same way. In this sense, the subconscious classically understood is analogous to the cosmological repetition of the inorganic. The inorganic constantly repeats itself, thereby creating nothing. But this repetition of death "gave birth to the organism." The inorganic constantly repeats itself, and in doing so, creates constant nothings, one of them being what we call the "organism." <span style="font-style: italic;">Being</span> is a "form" of death. It's one that has been repeated, and one which we see with the same functions in our own species. But this death can't be repeated. The death that happened where we are the trace of that death is not something that we can say was the cause of <span style="font-style: italic;">us</span>. Nor can we go back and live any death in general, because <span style="font-style: italic;">being</span> (as idea) has no access to the death-event. This "exorbitant death" is beyond the bounds of reason and image. It's non-symbolic and non-causal. Again, we have to let Laruelle's concept of "unilateral duality" simmer to fully appreciate the non-correlative aspect of identity without difference, and "process" without causality. Even our experience of dying which once thought itself able to ground death can't discover the repetition of death. As we stated in a prior post, the anticipation of dying is at an absolute distance from pure death. We are the trace of a death, not the death itself. If nothing happens, and something is a "form" of nothing, then this "form" is not nothing, nor can this "form" repeat nothing. The organism cannot repeat the death-possibility that breaks nothing. At the very most, we can say with Brassier that this "repeating instance - is this trace of the aboriginal trauma of organic individuation." The trauma of individuation; this concept of the repetition of death is but a trace of inorganic repetition. To speculate just a little further in somewhat of a sporting interest, we can say: "Something had to live to be able to die."<br /></div></div>Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06496620812252728998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9023023321170051666.post-69097620318862767132011-02-23T08:58:00.000-08:002011-02-24T17:41:29.404-08:00The Will to Nothing; Enlightenment and Extinction, Part 10<div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-L_CKq3LdP9w/TWU9xnBPJ0I/AAAAAAAAAT4/SNkBVjcueqo/s1600/will.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 212px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-L_CKq3LdP9w/TWU9xnBPJ0I/AAAAAAAAAT4/SNkBVjcueqo/s320/will.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5576931636065281858" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">Someone literally willing nothing.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">With Brassier's repudiation of Heidegger and Deleuze's conceptions of time as being anthropomorphic and specifically temporal, Brassier moves onto the pure movement of time as <span style="font-style: italic;">nothing,</span> crystallized in Nietzsche's concept of the will to power. Brassier reappraises this notion though as a will to nothing. Nietzsche's writing has been extraordinary for thinking nothingness regardless of his seeing of the will's direct object in power. The fact that his writing is still fresh today within the domain of "thinking the death of thought," is a testament to his unconscious quest for utmost honesty; honesty not as a virtue in itself, but as a compulsion of a certain organism to simply will something absolutely independent of itself. Brassier acknowledges this power found in Nietzsche's writing but tweaks it towards its absolute logical extension; that the will that wills itself can't be understood as willing power, but as willing something that is so absolutely void of substance that at most we can say that the "will wills nothing." We can fully understand this through the tenor of Nietzsche's aphorisms which makes his insistence on power as the ground of existence curious. It's not worth trying to personally analyze the reasons behind this. For one, they would be boring, and two, it takes away justice to be done to the actual sway of Nietzche's writing which is most striking about great writers rather than solidified concepts that often serve as cursory introductions to the very writing of an author that transcends those solidified concepts. This post then will be a reappraisal of the concept of the will to power rather than a reappraisal of Nietzche's writing. We will understand the absolute logical conclusion that can be drawn from the will to power into the will to nothing with the help of Brassier. Being will no longer be understood ontologically, either in it's finitude or micro-biological aspects of difference. Instead it will be understood as a pure difference that couldn't possibly signify an ontology classically understood. The questions of <span style="font-style: italic;">being</span> then becomes a non-question because there's nothing to question. Rather, the question of <span style="font-style: italic;">being</span> becomes the question of nothing. The substance that ontology would like to premise its thought is non-substantial. Ontology then becomes something that can preliminarily be called "non-ontology," but even this idea couldn't be understood in a dialectical distinction to ontology. It would have to be understood purely as nothing regardless of the ostensible duality that the "non" signifies within the context of "ontology" (It's here where Laruelle's concept of "unilateral duality" explained earlier by Brassier is important to understand).<br /><br />"For Nietzsche, 'will to power' is a synonym for the world interpreted as a chaotic multiplicity of conflicting forces - 'This world is will to power- and nothing besides!' which is to say, a synonym for 'becoming,' then to think the will in its being is to think the being of becoming in its essentially dissimulatory, inherently self-differentiating 'essence' as a flux of perpetual transformation. Thus, the affirmation of recurrence marks the moment when the will comes to know that it cannot know itself in itself because its knowable aspect necessarily corresponds to nothing - since there is nothing, no aspect of the will 'in-itself', for it to correspond <span style="font-style: italic;">to</span> or adequately represent." Lets first distinguish between an immediate understanding of the will to power and the one we want to establish as the will to nothing. An immediate understanding of the will to power would echo a Hobbesian sentiment that conveys a political characteristic. You could conjure up ideas of absolute imperialism in this concept and you wouldn't be wrong considering the recorded time of actual peace in our archived history of the world (which ranges somewhere between 0 and 32 seconds). On the other hand, one can understand the concept of the will to power on a much more personal level. One can see it very simply when one is playing a game <span style="font-style: italic;">against </span>anyone. One is always trying to win, or quitting because they don't want to compete thinking they can't compete, which can often lead to the quitter uttering a masked humiliatory sentiment such as "I don't believe in competition." With Nietzsche, we gain a concept of the will that's devoid of all morality, or at the very least reduced to the fact that if there is a morality in the process of phenomenal power, it's an interpretation of the phenomena and not the phenomena itself. This connotation is what Brassier will want to reappropriate. Because the phenomenal world is interpreted as chaotic forces that are always in conflict with each other doesn't lead to a logical jump of saying that power guides these conflicting forces. It can certainly be interpreted that way, but it can just as easily not be interpreted that way and stay reduced to it's dissimulatory nature. The idea of conflicting forces doesn't have to be understood anthropomorphically as personal conflicts understood in the immediate conception of the will to power. Instead, conflicting forces can be understood simply as entropy; meaning different things are always happening. That this difference can be interpreted as chaotic and conflicting is for the interpretation of an interpreter, not for anything preemptively understood as "the real." If we accept that the will to power for Brassier is a synonym for 'becoming,' then the concept of the will to power transitions into the will to nothing because no substance underlies the concept. What's "self-differentiating" and always in a "flux of perpetual transformation" is something different from the connotations one thinks of when thinking of power. One is taken back to the laconic phrases of Heraclitus. But the idea of "flux" need not symbolize an end point for the power of conceptual thinking, and this is what leads Brassier in a Q and A to say that he's an idealist because he thinks highly of the power of thinking to be able to out-think itself into what it's not. So the speculative opportunity of this nihilism doesn't end in an eternal look-of-awe into something normatively understood as "the void," but into an active movement that's wholly nothing. Thinking about this wholly nothing gains speculative help from the idea of eternal recurrence elaborated by Nietzsche. Briefly, the idea of eternal recurrence is the idea that what happens will always happen again making the idea of free will a non-factor in any sort of action-<span style="font-style: italic;">being</span>; for what will happen now will have always happened and what has always happened will eventually happen again. In this sense, any choice that one thinks they are making at their own discretion has already been made an eternity of times. The ostensible "will" of this eternal recurrence though can't be known. We can describe it but we know that we can't because the "phenomena" is not knowable, or rather, is not a matter of knowledge. We can say that something will happen again that has already happened, but this isn't recurrence in itself because there is no static identity to recurrence. As we stated above, if we accept the will to power as the will to nothing - which is synonymous with "becoming"- and this becoming we understand as inherently self-differentiating, then the will to nothing would be an eternal self-differentiation of recurrence. So then, what is it to grasp the eternal self-differentiation of recurrence? We can first grasp it very simply as difference and repetition, self-differentiation and recurrence. We can understand it as the eternal phenomena of continual differences always reoccurring. The self-differentiating nature in recurrence points to nothing that can be known because no identity can be understood with something that is inherently always in a state of difference (Derrida). If nothing can be known, and the will wills nothing, then the will can't know anything. In other words, what the will "is," is not a matter of knowledge. At the very most, we can vaguely conceptualize the will as a pure process and nothing else. Even this concept of "process" needs to be annotated with a non-dialectical character though, putting the concept of process into the original reduction of the wills direct object to nothing. No aspect of the will can "correspond <span style="font-style: italic;">to</span> or adequately represent" anything. It's important to make clear that the matter at hand seems to be an epistemological issue. While we can say that the will is "nothing," we can also say that it's "something that happens." But this later qualification doesn't pertain to the knowledge one may think it would like to convey. When someone says that at the very most "something happens" in reference to the will, this statement is non-declarative. It's not made in order to archive a truth or establish a philosophy. It's something that's said without any substance, but nonetheless something that is said. It's important to not make this statement into a<span style="font-style: italic;"> conviction </span>or declaration. There's nothing in this statement that points to anything personal. If we allow ourselves this, the will then is non-representational, and so one would go too far in establishing the will's "movement" as one synonymous with power. We can certainly understand the idea of the will to power within our context of being (<span style="font-style: italic;">Dasein</span>) but this doesn't always have to be the case. Whatever the will is as becoming is not symbolic, and so is henceforth nothing, epistemologically speaking. The trick is in thinking the will not as it pertains to knowledge for us, but as non-knowledge, or non-ontology, or simply as nothing. The trick again is in thinking non-thought if something called "the real" can be appropriated. This transition from the will to power to the will to nothing is in this sense exactly not an epistemological event, or rather an attempt at making it a non-epistemological event. No new knowledge is gained when the will is understood as willing nothing. If anything, knowledge is lost. With the will to power we could give an innumerable amount of examples of powers sway over the word, but the will to nothing has no examples since it's nature is always self-differentiating, and this self-differentiation doesn't signify a Heraclitean aphorism (it can, but it doesn't have to), it simply signifies nothing. At the very least, it's important to understand that self-differentiating and conflicting phenomena doesn't necessarily point to some sort of conscious or unconscious power being waged in behalf of micro-biological organisms or nothingness itself. It simply points to something that is not a matter of knowledge, and hence close to something called "the real."<br /><br />The transition from the will to power to the will to nothingness is not a subtle one, but for thinking it appears subtle. The move isn't the easiest in the world because thinking something without an intentional-direct object is contrary to a metaphysics of thinking. It's something that one lets simmer after an initial understanding. Much like Laruelle's concept of unilateral duality, the more the idea simmers, the more it becomes "appropriate." Of course, a brief but close reading of Nietzsche will acquire a deeper perspective of the will as becoming, and hence as the will that wills nothing, and that eternally reoccurs. For better or worse, it's in Nietzsche's style that we can best attain this perspective and not necessarily in a scientific understanding of the will. If there were a scientific understanding of the will, it would learn from science but would appear philosophical in style. It's not as if scientists concern themselves with the will to nothingness, not yet at least (it's not a matter of discovery). But <span style="font-style: italic;">being in the work</span> of science is something like the will willing nothing. In regards to the speculative-philosophical perspective though, it takes a certain style to conjure this perspective and there's never been anyone before or after Nietzsche to do this. To understand this, the best thing to do is let Nietzsche speak for himself: "<span style="font-style: italic;">Becoming must be explained without recourse to final intentions; becoming must appear justified at every moment (or incapable of being evaluated, which comes to the same thing); the present must not be justified in reference to the future, not the past by reference to the present. Becoming is of equivalent value at every moment; the sum of its values always remains the same; in other words, it has no value at all, for anything against which to measure it, and in relation to which the word 'value' would have meaning, is lacking. The total value of the world cannot be evaluated...</span>" - <span style="font-style: italic;">The Will to Power</span>. The world is a different nothing. The world is nothing different.<br /></div></div>Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06496620812252728998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9023023321170051666.post-2050853237268822642011-02-20T05:04:00.000-08:002011-02-20T05:46:12.425-08:00An errant attempt at phase cancellation<div style="text-align: center;"><iframe title="YouTube video player" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/11_4Lg9THJ4" allowfullscreen="" width="480" frameborder="0" height="390"></iframe><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Tom Goes to the Mayor</span>, "Bass Fest"<br /></div>Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06496620812252728998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9023023321170051666.post-37291940193223310752011-02-16T09:28:00.000-08:002011-02-16T15:44:37.533-08:00Time is the Difference; Enlightenment and Extinction, Part 9<div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-di62ZYFJyL4/TVwXKDfcEQI/AAAAAAAAATw/8nOqn1AU0IM/s1600/now_and_then.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 178px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-di62ZYFJyL4/TVwXKDfcEQI/AAAAAAAAATw/8nOqn1AU0IM/s320/now_and_then.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5574355900281131266" border="0" /></a>What a difference time makes.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">When trying to destabilize the ontological notion of time through it's temporal existentiality, Brassier doesn't find this ontological gesture simply through the work of Heidegger, but also finds it's extension in Deleuze. Brassier confronts Deleuze specifically in his <span style="font-style: italic;">Difference and Repetition</span> text which stands as Deleuze's most theoretical work. To compare this work to Deleuze's work with Guattarai is like comparing applies to oranges. At the very least, one is extremely difficult to understand (<span style="font-style: italic;">Difference and Repetition</span>) while the other is much easier (e.g. <span style="font-style: italic;">Anti-Oedipus)</span>. It's the difference between reading a pure philosophical text and reading a text which is more sociological with a philosophical style. Regardless of <span style="font-style: italic;">Difference and Repetition's</span> difficulty, it will be important to understand the basic premise of this latters text in order to fully understand the pure and empty nothingness that Brassier continually tries to convey in <span style="font-style: italic;">Enlightenment and Extinction</span>. While Heidegger finds time as the constituting form of <span style="font-style: italic;">Dasein</span> (or the human being), specifically in its temporal nature, Deleuze digs deeper to find time as a differentiable operation that is made up of a logical emptiness devoid of sequence, meaning time as temporality is pure difference, and not an observed and objective sequence of time. It's with this explanation that we have a preliminary understanding of the slippery difference between time and temporality. While the earlier would like to serve as the pure objective sequence of phenomenal nature, the latter would like to serve as an abstract difference that works as a sort of difference maker between anything at all. While the observation of time entails nothing else other than the fact that things are happening at different times, the observation of temporality entails a difference that constitutes not just the <span style="font-style: italic;">being</span> of <span style="font-style: italic;">Dasein</span>, but anything in general. Temporality as time functions specifically as the sense of difference. The emphasis on time is the unconscious observation of phasing, while the conscious emphasis of time as temporality is the recognition of time as difference. One can understand then how time as temporality serves a correlative sense since it emphasizes a difference between things, most conspicuously to<span style="font-style: italic;"> us</span>, while the pure observation of phasing seeks nothing other than what's already happening in a observation. To understand this basic premise of <span style="font-style: italic;">Difference and Repetition </span>(that Brassier explains in order to throw the shackels off the privilege of time "de-vulgarized"), lets take a look at what Deleuze specifically states regarding time and difference.<br /><br />"It is the empty form of time that introduces and constitutes Difference in thought; the difference on the basis of which thought thinks, as the difference between the indeterminate and determination. It is the empty form of time that distributes along both its sides an I that is fractures by the abstract line [of time], and a passive self that has emerged from the groundlessness which it contemplates. It is the empty form of time that engenders thinking in thought, for thinking only thinks with difference, orbiting around the point of ungrounding." First, we have an explanation of time as an empty form. For us to understand this, we have to think of something with no form, and in this case, we apply to our previous conception of time. Whatever one's conception of time was needs to be emptied to have no form. Time is nothing then. It's not the sequence one may have first thought it was or was initially taught. Rather, it constitutes difference in thought. What we understand here from Deleuze is time as the possibility of there being thought independent of thinking. The logic of this statement is grounded on the premise that this is thought and the formlessness of time makes a difference for thought. Thought is no longer what it is because of time. Time makes thought different. While thought was ostensibly happening without having to think anything, time engenders a difference for thought whereby it no longer simply happens without having to think. Instead, the difference of time engenders thinking into thought. Thought then no longer is in pure space, but temporalizes itself by a difference. This difference is time. Thought can no longer be thought but ends up thinking something. While thought didn't have a direct object for whatever it was, it now as a direct object in its process of now becoming thinking. It's difficult to think of what thought is without thinking. At the very most, it's being-nothing which means we can't think thought. We can't understand it as an activity of thinking because we are thinking beings as the difference from being-nothing. Attributing a character to being-nothing is on Deleuze though, and calling it something like "thought" is on us to try to understand through <span style="font-style: italic;">Difference and Repetition</span>. Nonetheless, we are given a difference from thought by way of time. Time separates the being-nothing of thought into thinking. Deleuze further describes this distinction as the difference between the indeterminate and determination and this makes sense within the explanation of thought and thinking given above. Thought is indeterminate or simply being-nothing. Thinking on the other hand is determination in the sense that it has a direct object. We won't go so far to say that it functions in intentionality, but was can say that was it <span style="font-style: italic;">does</span>, is give a direct object. The difference here is between saying what something <span style="font-style: italic;">does</span>, and calling what something <span style="font-style: italic;">does</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">intentionality</span>. We certainly can understand Husserl's gesture of making this leap because the arrow of what something <span style="font-style: italic;">does</span> can be synonymized with <span style="font-style: italic;">intentionality</span>, but this arrow is always for <span style="font-style: italic;">us</span>, as much as thinking is for <span style="font-style: italic;">us</span>. But if we are working past us, then we can understand the break at wanting to formalize the <span style="font-style: italic;">doing</span> of an operation as an intentionality. So far then, we have thought as something completely indeterminate and thinking as determination. When we move forward in Deleuze with this passage, we find two characters that time distributes. One is the fractured I. What is the fractured I? What is an I that is fractured? What Deleuze means to say with the concept of the "fractured I" is the fact that the I is never unchangeable. The I will always change because of the abstract line of time. Now, we can't forget that this line of time is abstract which means we can't think of it in terms of a symbolized sequence. Instead we understand it as a difference that always happens. It's easier to understand time here simply as difference. The difference of time fractures the possibility of an I, meaning an identity. Nothing can ever be identified because abstract time as difference will not allow identity of something understood as an I. The identity of something is then never possible. Time breaks the possibility of being an identity. On the other hand, a passive self "happens" that has "emerged form the groundlessness which it contemplates." So time as difference does two things here. Firstly, it makes the possibility of the I as identity impossible since something can never be identified as the same thing. Secondly though, something called a "passive self" happens that emerges from the groundlessness of abstract time. To be more clear, for Deleuze, time engenders a fractured I, and also engenders a passive self. From this, we can understand there's a difference between an "I" and a "passive self." The passive self is an organism that is the receptor of passive phenomena which it may or may not allow to receive passive syntheses, meaning it has no choice in how "reality" happens to its own faculties. On the other hand, this phenomena that happens to to the "passive self" never is understood as an "I" because the very idea of the "passive self" is enveloped by continual phenomena because of its passivity. In other words, passivity doesn't allow for identity. Something that continually receives something passively can't stand ground and neurotically stop the passive phenomena. In the human being, it can try to, which we learned leads to the neurosis of <span style="font-style: italic;">Dasein</span> (understood in our previous explanation of Deleuze and Guattari's <span style="font-style: italic;">Anti-Oedipus</span>). But even this attempt at a stop to the phenomena of reality which eventually gives way to any number of modern-day labels of "sicknesses" where one has "lost their mind," (meaning the "I") has been fractured by the absolute nature of abstract time. From nowhere then, time contemplates this nowhere, and from this, a "passive self" is derived, meaning something which receives nothing. The contemplation of nothing engenders passivity. We can say that an organism receives something from pure nothingness. This is the difference that time makes. The break in nothingness is the difference of time and this break constitutes something that receives nothing, but this difference mimics this nothingness and changes it into something that's other than nothing; a different nothing if you will (because time breaks thought, thinking takes places which can only think about what ever is available, that being the nothingness of thought). We can understand that how "thinking only thinks with difference, orbiting around the point of ungrounding." The key here is how thinking orbits around the point of ungrounding. Ungrounding is a "taking-apart." It's an "explanation." It's an "enlightenment." Psychoanalytically, we can call it a "want to figure out." Thinking excavates nothing that was thought. Thinking hovers around the idea of discovering something from nothing. How much can be discovered though if there's nothing to be discovered? What we understand from this preliminary question is that thinking doesn't operate off some pragmatic virtue to "truly understanding what's outside of us" for example, instead, it's "content" to simply to unground nothing for the sake of ungrounding anything at all, even if there's nothing to unground. When time creates the difference of thought in thinking, this thinking that ostensibly ungrounds nothing doesn't think in order to discover something from nothing, but wills itself for no reason. Thinking is "content" with pretending it's doing something when it's really uncovering nothing. But the action of <span style="font-style: italic;">pretending it's doing something</span> is the operation of thinking. In this sense, its discovery of nothing is the difference from nothing. This difference that breaks thought is the essence of time. It's the difference from being-nothing; essentially to think there's something to unground in being-nothing when there's nothing to unground. It's the eternal failure of thinking in time that makes the difference. And boy, what a difference it makes. Within this context that Deleuze sets up for the reader, we can fully appreciate the existential analytic of Heidegger, specifically the<span style="font-style: italic;"> being</span> that is<span style="font-style: italic;"> looking around for something to do</span>.<br /><br />For however much Deleuze's account of time as temporality digs deeper than Heidegger in understanding ontology beyond existential <span style="font-style: italic;">being</span>, this time understood as temporality still relies on a view of time that Deleuze wishes to convey under the auspices of an ostensible first-person perspective. What's privileged for Deleuze is the fact that something called a "first person point of view" is something worth understanding, and the fact that the "person" is something worth understanding . These presumptions lead to the correlationism that Brassier is trying to move away from in order to establish the absolute de-personalized science of non-correlationism where reality happens on its own. Difference need not be simply temporal, but may be something that happens in pure objective time. To understand this though, time can't be conceived of as something happening to <span style="font-style: italic;">us</span>. It has to be "seen" happening completely independent of <span style="font-style: italic;">being's</span> existentiality. It's here where time becomes de-privileged for Brassier. Instead, space as something that "is" independent of time (as we observe) is something that we can preliminary call "reality." How much can this space be understood in the third person perspective though? Maybe though, all that there "is" is the third person perspective, meaning everything that is understood (thinking) comes from a place that is always and already an observation, and that the ostensible access to <span style="font-style: italic;">being</span> via absolute "knowledge of oneself" independent of the knowledge that one is a knowledge-being (discoverer of nothing) is a hopeless wish somehow brought about by the will that wills itself for no reason. How can this happen? How can <span style="font-style: italic;">being</span> not realize it's own operation of actively seeking to know nothing? How can it not know itself as a knowing-being that simply wills to know nothing? How can it think that it's something other than the pure operation to know nothing and not ever find anything in the process because nothing is ever possible to be found? In other words, how can an impossible <span style="font-style: italic;">end</span> come about? It's not as if the <span style="font-style: italic;">end</span> of knowing-being is to know that it's simply a knowing-being with no other <span style="font-style: italic;">end</span>. It's certainly has other ends in mind whether that be "being a good person," or "trying my hardest," etc. And it's not as if one can simply reduce this phenomena down to a christian-judeo historical context because the reduction can keep going endlessly. How one finds out about these "how's" is the trick that non-correlationsm and speculative realism is trying to convey. Ultimately, I think, it's trying to defer the authority of these questions to a pure third person scientific perspective at the destruction of any other perspective. The answer is really established though. Time breaks thought into thinking which makes an "I" impossible but at the same time creates passive organisms. Take this last statement, bracket out the "I" and "organisms," and substitute them with " pure and empty form of nothing" and then ask the "how." In the next post we will explore this pure movement further with Nietzsche's concept of the will, but Brassier will re-appropriate it to a place that's truly a will that wills itself, meaning a will that wills nothing other than its own operation; it's own end without ever knowing anything understood as an "end."<br /></div></div>Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06496620812252728998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9023023321170051666.post-18361026934088687792011-02-13T04:33:00.000-08:002011-02-13T05:09:55.961-08:00Reaction to being a stepfather<div style="text-align: center;"><iframe title="YouTube video player" class="youtube-player" type="text/html" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/i3dhJEn8JnE" allowfullscreen="" width="480" frameborder="0" height="390"></iframe><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Tom Goes to the Mayor</span>, "Bear Traps"<br /></div>Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06496620812252728998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9023023321170051666.post-81868144784552603792011-02-09T08:42:00.000-08:002011-02-14T09:00:18.572-08:00Temporal Dying and Dying in Time; Enlightenment and Extinction, Part 8<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves/> <w:trackformatting/> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:donotpromoteqf/> <w:lidthemeother>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:lidthemeasian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:lidthemecomplexscript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:snaptogridincell/> <w:wraptextwithpunct/> <w:useasianbreakrules/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> <w:splitpgbreakandparamark/> <w:dontvertaligncellwithsp/> 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mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><iframe title="YouTube video player" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/pzz9WuUdfQM" allowfullscreen="" width="480" frameborder="0" height="390"></iframe><br />An example of the spiritualization of death in Ingmar Bergman's <span style="font-style: italic;">Seventh Seal</span>, perfectly slighted by the </span><span style="font-size:85%;">maternal figure. 5:12-6:20.<br /></span></div><br />Before moving further in the concept of "the real," Brassier needs to repudiate the spiritualization of death that has become conspicuous in 20th century thought. This is in order to give credence to a real that is purely being-nothing, which means at an absolute independence from subjectivity. Brassier will want to show how Laruelle's "unilaterlization" that "lies at the heart of the diachronicity...which indexes the asymmetry of thought and being" constitutes a real time that is not temporal. We will distinguish between objective time and subjective temporality in this post. If we are to understand "the real" that happens completely on its own without reference to anything, then this will first need to be understood at the expense of temporal dying which finds its spiritualization through Heidegger. If the idea of Diachronicity is a "time" that happens completely independent of human subjectivity, then the idea of "time" itself will be something different than the explanation of "time" given by Heidegger where "time" is the "who" of subjectivity, and ultimately the "who" of <span style="font-style: italic;">Dasein</span>, meaning "time" is absolutely the structure of <span style="font-style: italic;">Dasein</span>, and nothing else. This circumscription of time by Heidegger that has certainly held a strong sway over philosophy in the 20th century into the 21st century has kept philosophy from looking past its veiled mystical proclivities. If this last statement holds any ground, it should point to the curious nature of certain philosophers who ignore science in its discoveries, and who rely on an idea of transcendental "pure reason" that's ostensibly able to make discoveries that ground the work of science. But how much of this ostensible "pure reason" is actual discovery and how much of it is a pretense for privileging a neo-platonic conception of the universe where there is always something beyond us, making one self-satisfied in the belief of a transcendental-invisible realm that can never be accounted for, except by pure subjectivity? This is a question for an honesty that may not be possible for Dasein. If this explanation of temporal privilege holds ground, then it will serve as an introduction to this post that will distinguish the difference between dying in time and temporal time, or between absolute death, and spiritual death. We will come to learn the basics of Heidegger's temporal dying as <span style="font-style: italic;">Dasein's</span> utmost possibility in difference to absolute bio-physical death that happens without subjective privilege of its own possibility. For all intents and purposes, Brassier takes a sledgehammer to the temporal-subjective interpretation of death in the next passage.<br /><br />"It is the occlusion of temporality's bio-physical instantiation which inflates phenomenological death into an impossible possibility - but an impossibility which is recoded as the condition for the possibility of everything else. Yet to say that that impossibility is the ultimate condition of possibility is still to say that it never happens. Just as the transcendental conditions of representation cannot be represented, so death as quasi-transcendental condition for all happening cannot itself happen. This sophism points not so much to the un-actualizability of death as to the irreality of the phenomenological attempt to absolutize the disjunction between its possibility and its actuality. I can certainly anticipate the actuality of my own death, but the reality of the latter cannot be reduced to my anticipation of its actuality because the reality of the time of death remains incommensurable with the temporality of its anticipation." Death for Heidegger is "impossible possibility" in so far as death is 1. unable to be experienced and 2. the ground for the experience of "presence." What this means is that <span style="font-style: italic;">Dasein </span>(human being) can never know its own death. It's not an epistemological matter. One can't possibly "know" ones death in its absolute "presence." At the same time, the foreboding of the eventual death that everyone experiences in others (not in themselves) is what makes "presence" (consciousness) possible. So while death for Heidegger cannot be understood in itself (ontically), it functions as the ground to human existence since it's something "to come." In this sense, the question of death becomes the question of dying for Heidegger. Instead of asking about death, <span style="font-style: italic;">Dasein's </span>should ask about "dying" because this is what death actually is according to Heidegger. It's the non-present possibility that grounds existence. It's the process of always being-towards-death, and not the absolute bio-physical reality of the death instance. Being-towards-death is the absolute function of subjectivity. As a generalization of part I of <span style="font-style: italic;">Being and Time</span>, all categories ascribed by Heidegger to <span style="font-style: italic;">Dasein</span> are all looking-ahead which for Heidegger shows <span style="font-style: italic;">Dasein's</span> constant (albeit unconscious) attention towards its own death as its eventual possibility. The verbiage though of the "impossible possible" still points to the fact that death is impossible. In other words, for Heidegger, it's always possible to be dying but never to die. One can always be in the Heraclitian process but one can never simply die. While death can ground <span style="font-style: italic;">Dasein</span>, it can never actually "happen" because it's impossible. This raises the question for what exactly the word "happening" is and a cursory realization of how cloudy this concept has become through the idea of phenomenology. Like this impossibility of possibility in regards to death, the transcendental conditions of representations cannot be represented, which is to say that the transcendental conditions of death cannot "happen." Death for Heidegger then is merely a transcendental condition that forms the <span style="font-style: italic;">Dasein</span> (human experience) and constitutes its existentiality. It's something that actually never happens. Regardless of how many people and things we know die, this actually isn't what's happening for Heidegger, but this is already assuming too much for Heidegger because he isn't interested in understanding anything beyond human possibility. But as Brassier sharply lets us know, this idea of death points "not so much to the un-actualizability of death as to the irreality of the phenomenological attempt to absolutize the disjunction between its possibility and its actuality." Because phenomenology (working within the confines of human consciousness) can’t realize the space outside of human consciousness, doesn't mean that death isn't something that actually happens. To put it more simply, just because we are self-conscious beings who can't think outside of ourselves, doesn't mean that there isn't something outside of ourselves that isn't "experienceable." Working within consciousness, we only have the "who" of <span style="font-style: italic;">Dasein</span> (transcendentally understood as the "we") and so all reality is grounded on what we do (ontology). The premise for this phenomenological impulse is not dishonest nor necessarily presumptuous though. It simply thinks it can't know anything other than itself. But there comes a point where the phenomenological method of absolute naiveté has to be understood as somewhat disingenuous, or rather, one can simply escape out of the phenomenological attitude as quickly as they came in. One can understand that another has died and isn't coming back as quickly as one can enter into a mindset that the process of dying functions as the axiom to human existence. Brassier surmises this perfectly in final passage of the quote above. We will quote it again for extra recognition: “I can certainly anticipate the actuality of my own death, but the reality of the latter cannot be reduced to my anticipation of its actuality because the reality of the time of death remains incommensurable with the temporality of its anticipation." In other words, my knowledge of my eventual death is at an absolute difference with the fact that I will die. I can know that I'm going to die. I can "anticipate" that something will happen to me called "death," but because I can't ever know this "death," doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. Because I'm limited to only being able to anticipate my absolute finitude doesn't mean that something called "death" doesn't absolutely happen to myself as a biological organism independent of my temporal-memorial consciousness. Just because I'm limited to only knowing what dying is, 1. doesn't mean that death can't happen to me <span style="font-style: italic;">from without</span>, and 2. doesn't mean that dying and death are the same things. In fact they are very different things. If I can only think of what dying is and not of what death is, then they must be very different things. This is very easily solved when we understand that we can't have a 1st person understanding of what we call "death" but can absolutely witness a 3rd person observation of "death," while phenomenologically speaking, we can have an "ecstatic" experience of dying, but this wouldn't be a "knowing." This knowing of an "ecstatic" experience of dying would be a transcendental figuration for <span style="font-style: italic;">Dasein</span> which for Heidegger is the ontological ground for <span style="font-style: italic;">Dasein</span>. The transition in Heidegger's thinking into this "ecstatic" being is where modern philosophers don't realize that this shouldn't be considered a "transition of thinking." More specifically, thinking doesn't happen in<span style="font-style: italic;"> ekstasis</span> (The closest Heidegger will come is in privileging poetry as being able "to speak for experience"). Regardless of this phenomenological digression, death is a happening that is not a matter of knowing for us, but just because it's not a possibility for our experience and knowing, doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. In this sense we can understand "happening" in a much broader sense than "knowing" and "experience." At the very least, we can say that something happens absolutely independent of my knowing it to happen, even if it happens to me (from some ostensible 3rd person outside perspective). Temporality does not equal time. My anticipatory human nature that thinks in terms of a past, present, and future is at an absolute distance from the diachronicity that separates the nervous system from everything else that could ever possibly happen.<br /><br />Brassier finds it necessary to destabilize this anthropomorphic idea of time from diachronic time. Philosophy rarely has a sense or appreciation of scientific time and often has the compulsion to understand it in terms of the human being. Again, this points to the compulsive correlationism assumed by philosophy; that everything outside of the human being has to be in reference to the human being, and more grotesquely in the new 21st century, that everything that we are as human beings, has to be in reference to a "larger world outside of us" (rarely does this "care" to situate the human being in the context of a larger-vaster world recognize the possibility of the larger-vaster world being able to cause volcanic explosions at will or causing meteors to smash structures to bits). This ideality of philosophy is what will lead Heidegger to point-blank call the scientific use of time "vulgar." Why is it vulgar? It's vulgar because it doesn't have any interest in human beings which for Heidegger had to be a problem for his project of fundamental ontology. Limiting the task of fundamental ontology to an existential analytic is Heidegger's work though. Ontology isn't limited to an existential analytic. We learned before in<span style="font-style: italic;"> Enlightenment and Extinction</span> of Badiou's ontology composed in the expansive problems of set-theory regardless of his eventual movement into the evental circumstance for human beings at the end of <span style="font-style: italic;">Being and Event</span>. What is ontology not in reference to us? What is <span style="font-style: italic;">being</span> not in reference to us? How can we think the non-dialectical logic of "unilateral duality" understood by Laruelle where anything that comes after something called "the real" has nothing to do with something we understand afterwards as something called "the real?" How can we understand duality without dialectical logic? How can we understand unilateralization without identity? Brassier asks more precise preliminary questions: "<span style="font-style: italic;">How does thought think a world without thought?</span> Or more urgently: <span style="font-style: italic;">How does thought think the death of thinking?</span>"Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06496620812252728998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9023023321170051666.post-85970865359518030652011-02-06T05:01:00.000-08:002011-02-06T05:03:16.723-08:00The Disingenuous Nature of Humility<div style="text-align: center;"><iframe title="YouTube video player" class="youtube-player" type="text/html" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/FpRWv9k7FhA" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="390" width="480"></iframe><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Tom Goes to the Mayor</span>, "Bear Traps"<br /></div>Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06496620812252728998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9023023321170051666.post-39220599422144600052011-02-02T11:19:00.000-08:002011-02-06T05:22:15.409-08:00Introduction to the Real; Enlightenment and Extinction, Part 7<div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_KUimPH_5PHU/TUnhFWwF21I/AAAAAAAAATo/w24wdhReUzk/s1600/reality.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 250px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_KUimPH_5PHU/TUnhFWwF21I/AAAAAAAAATo/w24wdhReUzk/s320/reality.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5569229896343214930" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">As real as it gets...really.</span><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /><div style="text-align: left;"> In the last post we learned from Brassier and Laruelle of the decision made by philosophers who make a division between something called "the real" and "the ideal" whereby empirical reality ("the real") gets moved into ideality by transcendental functions of the mind. This decision can most easily be traced to Kant's <span style="font-style: italic;">Critiques. </span> We then bracketed this decision from the attempt to understand the real after the explanation of this decision. What then is "the real" independent of this correlation between empirical and transcendental conditions? Laruelle defines it as the "real of the last instance." We gave it a preliminary definition; "It's reality before it hits the fact that we are always-already thinking." In other words, it's whatever "is" independent of the fact that we are ideal beings. This post will be an attempt at an introduction to "the real" defined through Brassier and Laruelle. It will be an expansion of the "real of the last instance" which we elaborated on in the last post. Brassier starts this off in a distinction between objectivity and objectification. "'Objectivity' can be redefined to index the reality which subsists independently of conditions of objectification tethered to transcendental subjectivity, whether the latter be called 'Dasein' or 'Life.' What is original in Laruelle's work is in defining conditions under which thinking does not intend, reflect, or represent its object but rather mimes its unobjectifable opacity insofar as the latter is identical-in-the-last-instance with a real which is 'foreclosed' to objectification." This passage is enormously helpful in further understanding Laruelle's "real in the last instance" concept. At first Brassier distinguishes "objectivity" independent of "objectification" meaning that the real is independent of the mind taking something from something called "the real" and doing something with it. The word "objectivity" indexes reality independent of <span style="font-style: italic;">being's </span>objectification of the former. It belongs to itself independent of all the abstractions nominated for the human being whether that be the Heideggerian concept of the <span style="font-style: italic;">being that is there, </span>or the basic concept of an all encompassing spiritual-teleological life form enveloping the world. "The real" has nothing to do with these concepts. There must be more to "the real" though besides these gestures of de-objectification. We find this in the concept of the "real of the last instance." This real of the last instance is a place where thinking intends nothing nor does it reflect on anything. It does nothing, but it's there. It doesn't see an object for itself (like we would like to ascribe generally to the mind) and then take this object and represent it in mirror-form for us. The real in the last instance doesn't do what we think it does. Thinking as the real in the last instance "mimes its unobjectifiable opacity." Lets pause for a second to understand this. Reality is unobjectifiable and opaque. This "last instance" is not a matter of knowing anything about this last instance and hence is unobjectifiable because it's not matter of knowledge (epistemology). Thinking mimes this non-matter. It imitates what doesn't matter. It imitates what was never a problem for matter. The real in the last instance as "unobjectifiable opacity" is "foreclosed" to objectification. So whatever thinking is doing in this real in the last instance, it's not objectifying. Rather, Brassier gives us the verb of "mime" to describe the behavior of thought in this foreclosed reality. Brassier leads us to a concept of the mind that is imitating what is completely inimitable. Thus for Laruelle, "It is though we were to insist that the 'matter' of materialism should cognize itself and be capable of its own theorisation without having to pass through dialectical identity or some other philosophical apparatus designed to ensure the reversibility between the known object and the knowledge of the object." Matter happens to thought. Thought mimes the material which means absolutely nothing to us. The philosopher comes up with the idea that the mind "grabs" the material and puts it into ordered categories. This is the presumptive decision of the philosopher discussed in the last post. Thought "in the last instance" is merely something that mimes something that's unobjectifiable which is at an absolute distance from a "philosophical apparatus" that would create a dialectic between the real and ideal. Rather, there is no dialectic at all between the real and ideality. This is what is referred to as "identity without unity." "Identity without unity and duality without distinction are the hallmarks of determination-in-the-last-instance insofar as its structure is that of what Laruelle calls a 'unilateral duality.' By effectuating a unilateral duality between thought and thing, determination-in-the-last-instance manifests a non-correlational adequation between the real and ideal without re-incorporating the former within the latter, whether through the machinery of symbolic inscription or the faculty of intellectual intuition." Identity (ideality) happens to being not because of some unity to something that happened before it. Ideality was an occasional circumstance that happened that has no unity expect to itself which expresses "things." Nonetheless, we see "thing" and our "thinking" of the material thing that has no matter whatsoever. Seeing these two things though doesn't mean that there is a connection between the two. Because "thinking" sees something called "thing" that ostensibly happened to it, doesn't mean that this "thing" actually exists, nor does it mean that "thought" had anything to do with making this material into its own form. While there is certainly a duality for us in terms of making the assumption that there was a causality for our objectifying nature, this has nothing to do with the unilateral operation that happened on its own. The real is not ideal. No matter how much thinking at the very most mimes the nothing of the real, this miming has nothing to say about the real because the real by its very nature doesn't say anything. At the very most, thought comes to represent the real through symbols and even thinks itself the function that the real has to go through (absolute idealism). Thought thinks itself privy to something it can never know about. While this is a feature of thinking, this doesn't mean anything for the real. Because thought thinks it can distinguish between reality and ideality, doesn't mean that whatever is called "reality" is anything. "The real" is always at an absolute distance. The distance is so absolute that we understand Lacan's insistence in synonymizing it with "the impossible."<br /><br />We have a couple different concepts happening here. We have "determination-in-the-last-instance" along with "unilateral duality." To be more specific, "determination-in-the-last-instance" is "unilateral duality." We have to be careful in describing this because of how easy it is to present a correlative sense to the process that is trying to be described. Fortunately, Brassier is very careful in his logic and words when describing this process. "Unilateralization is foreclosed to reflection: it can only be effectuated non-thetically, that is to say, non-auto-positionally. Being-nothing does not distinguish itself from being; it is not transcendent...it is not the real which causes thought, but rather objectifying transcendence. Thus determination-in-the-last-instance requires objectifying transcendence even as it modifies it." The unilateral process that happens to the occasioned subject is not open to reflection. Thought can't reflect on the unilateral process because it was never remembering anything in the process. It didn't exist as a "mind" (we will see the phenomenological function of memory in the next chapter with Brasser's account of Deleuze's <span style="font-style: italic;">Difference and Repetition</span>.). Unilateralization doesn't happen from a "position." We are in a "position" as beings but reality is never in a position precisely because it's not <span style="font-style: italic;">beings</span>. If we allow Heidegger to call<span style="font-style: italic;"> being </span>the <span style="font-style: italic;">being that is there</span>, then we understand ourselves as positional beings. We are always somewhere looking around for something to do. This is our absolute limits. Reality though is not in a position where it's somewhere looking around for something to do. It's form isn't the form of the occasional <span style="font-style: italic;">Dasein</span>. This is what Brassier means when he says "being-nothing does not distinguish itself from being." Reality knows nothing of us and we know nothing of it precisely because knowledge is not a matter for reality and is a matter for us. The salient point to be understood is that if we want to encounter whatever is ostensibly called "the real," it can't come from the classical sense of "who we are," meaning the positional-being well-elaborated by Heidegger in Book 1 of <span style="font-style: italic;">Being and Time.</span> Reality doesn't matter. At the very least, when encountering "the real," it doesn't come from a position and obviously doesn't take a position. As was stated above, it's unilateral and we can further understand this by understanding that it's absolutely affirmative. It doesn't listen to anyone nor does it respond to anyone consciously. It happens on its own without the habit of memory getting in the way (the minds differentiation from reality comes fundamentally from memory and memory alone which we will go into in a future post). "The real" is not pacifistic, nor literally and figuratively understanding. It's totalitarian. We can infer micro-biological reactions in the process of unilateralization but these reactions wouldn't be dialectical and would only be our observations of the real of the unilateral. A question abounds. What is the real (as unilateral) under the guise of observation? More specifically what is the real to consciousness which is no longer dialectical? How much can "the real" still be understood even when the logic of "unilateral duality" usurps dialectical logic? At the very least, we understand that it's transcendence that causes thought, not what we call "material reality." Thought happens to itself. "Reality" doesn't cause thinking. Curiously though, "for thinking to effectuate the foreclosure of its real cause, it must be occasioned by its ideal cause." In other words, the only way we can know that we can't know about "reality" is by the transcendence of thought "letting us know" that we can't know anything called "the real" that we nonetheless ask about. Ideality provides the foundation for our asking of questions that are not a matter of the question-answer dialectic. At the same time though, <span style="font-style: italic;">sense</span> is in thought. We have the sense to understand that while ideality has opened up the possibility of the foreclosure of "the real," we have enough sense to not keep asking questions about something called "the real," but instead to follow "the real" in its unilateral process without asking questions. In this sense, thought opens us to "the real" to be exactly what it's not; a miming dialectical representation of what we call "the real." This doesn't mean that we are in some sort of Hegelian circularity between the real and the ideal where thought would realize itself as what it's not. Instead no distinction is being made in what we call "the real" which happens to be "the real." "The real" doesn't stop for an answer nor listen to what "everyone has to say." It moves on without distinction from what the memory distinguishes as the past. Memory will serve as the difference to "the real." It will serve as the sole difference to "the real" which complicates thinking's being able to think unilateralization because it always remembers something from the past which makes it stop and reflect. The problem and explanation of memory will come in one of the next two posts.<br /></div> </div>Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06496620812252728998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9023023321170051666.post-50271968489127146252011-01-26T19:10:00.000-08:002011-01-30T05:53:02.461-08:00Misery Pivot<div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_KUimPH_5PHU/TUDxb-XkOBI/AAAAAAAAATM/u0XSxva-ejM/s1600/Jane-Fairfax.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 267px; height: 320px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_KUimPH_5PHU/TUDxb-XkOBI/AAAAAAAAATM/u0XSxva-ejM/s320/Jane-Fairfax.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5566714602330535954" border="0" /></a>Jane Fairfax: "<span style="font-style: italic;">I was only going to observe, that though such unfortunate circumstances do sometimes occur both to men and women, I cannot imagine them to be very frequent. A hasty and imprudent attachment may arise - but there is generally time to recover from it afterwords. I would be understood to mean, that it can only be weak, irresolute characters (whose happiness must be always at the mercy of chance), who will suffer an unfortunate acquaintance to be an inconvenience, an oppression forever.</span>" - Jane Austen, <span style="font-style: italic;">Emma </span><br /></div>Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06496620812252728998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9023023321170051666.post-57956025023795882922011-01-26T07:54:00.000-08:002011-01-26T11:49:35.951-08:00The Decision; Enlightenment and Extinction, Part 6<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><iframe title="YouTube video player" class="youtube-player" type="text/html" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/URsYj-TVFjc" allowfullscreen="" width="480" frameborder="0" height="390"></iframe><br />Lacan's constipation in trying to understand <span style="font-style: italic;">the real</span></span>; 6:10 - 7:15<br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">In the last post we ended off by saying "..we can make a good guess at where Brassier is headed; a non-correlation between between <span style="font-style: italic;">being</span> and thought." We will understand this non-correlative thought more concretely through his elaboration of Francois Laruelle. We need to understand Brassier's theoretical acquaintance with Laruelle to fully understand the salient point of Laruelle's "non-philosophy," which will guide us to non-correlationism. There is much to gain from Laurelle's "non-philosophy" that comes across as a giant step for philosophy once fully understood. Laruelle identifies an essence of philosophy that leads him to analyze how philosophers think. Instead of coming up with a philosophical system in distinction and reference to previous philosophers, he instead analyzes how philosophers think. This analysis is a great step forward because of its originality and power. Laruelle does not rely on psychological concepts to define the philosophical thinker that tend to be turgid in description and lacking in precise rigor nor concepts of logic that would presume all the possibilities for philosophical thought. Instead, he finds one basic premise that every philosophers starts off at. What he finds is something he calls "the decision." As philosophers trying to understand something called "the real," this decision implicitly made by philosophers needs to be understood and open to bright lighting. Brassier explains Laruelle's position as such: "Every decision divides immanence between an empirical datum which it supposes as given through the a priori factum, and a transcendental immanence which it has to invoke as already given in order to guarantee the unity of a presupposed factum and a posited datum." First, lets understand the concept of "immanence." We understand immanence <span style="font-style: italic;">as a state of being within. </span>The "real" of what is happening <span style="font-style: italic;">within</span> is trying to be understood by philosophers. Now, a decision is made to how this immanence is to be understood. The implicit decision is a division between an outside and an inside. "The real" happens by a dialectical logic for the philosopher. This stems most notably from German idealism but find it's way into the neo-Kantianism and Phenomenology in the early 20th century. We first have an empirical datum which we only first come to know through a priori categories elaborated systematically in Kant's first <span style="font-style: italic;">Critique</span>. We come to know this empirical datum through transcendental categories of the mind that synthesize this "hyletic data" into human conception. The unity of what is presupposed as already having to happen and what is posited by the human being naturally is a theoretical structure decided on by the philosopher. What is happening is an attempt by a philosopher at an explanation of pure causation between outside and inside. This correlation says very simply that "I can think and talk about something because something outside of myself happened to me that gave me the impulse to talk about this very thing that I'm positing, but I only know this thing to be outside of myself as I'm talking about it because I'm first able to think about it." What's privileged in this pseudo-steam of conscious statement is a synthetic causation between outside and inside; that I'm able to think only because something happened to me from outside of myself. Laruelle identifies three "distinct structural moments" which constitute this decision. First, there's an inventory of a priori's established by philosophers. These a priori conditions of experience are understood in Kant's first <span style="font-style: italic;">Critique</span> as "transcendental categories." The most obvious one is the transcendental aesthetic that places space and time as the experiential grounds for the causal movement into concept (The Idea). Secondly, there is the "gathering-together" (synthesis) of a prioris by a single transcendental category. This synthesis is "said to be 'transcendental' then because it is supposed to exceed experience absolutely..." This transcendental synthesis then exists beyond the conditions of experience. This we can call the "correlative mechanism" that moves the conditions of experience happening to something other than itself into conceptualization (the Idea). Laruelle refers to this as the pure phenomenological Ego in Husserl's Phenomenology; "pure," meaning we have no choice that our mind synthesizes everything that is ostensibly happening outside of it. Thirdly, we have a unification of the single transcendental synthesis with the a priori categories of synthesis, meaning we see how the conditions of experience were understood through an extra-empirical mechanism of a single "gathering-together" mechanism. We make the connection (correlation) between the idea that there were things outside of ourselves that first needed to be the case and things inside of ourselves that had to be the case to make sense of what was outside of us. We remember this synthesis of rationalism and empiricism specifically in Kant's <span style="font-style: italic;">Critique</span> when he states, "There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience...But though all our knowledge begins with experience it does not follow that it all arises out of experience." In other words, just because knowledge had a place where it first began<span style="font-style: italic;"> for us</span>, doesn't mean that this first place constitutes all of what makes knowledge necessary. For Kant, it arises out of the transcendental faculty unifying the conditions of experience. But lets keep something in mind in this analysis of Kant. Kant was specifically focused on epistemology, i.e. knowledge. So his analysis was always in reference to <span style="font-style: italic;">knowledge for us</span>. Now, just because something happened to us where we happen to gain something called "knowledge," doesn't mean that this exteriority to ourselves is a matter of knowledge <span style="font-style: italic;">in itself</span>. Certainly all experience can't be accounted for as a reference <span style="font-style: italic;">for us</span>. We certainly only see experience <span style="font-style: italic;">for us</span>, but we should also see that seeing experience for us is a relative "function" of something we happen to call "experience." The philosophers "real" is understood not through an empirical or contingent sense but through the sense that makes Ideas possible in the first place (knowledge). For the philosopher, the decision is made that reality conditions ideality without interest into how "the real constitutes itself." "The decisional complex of transcendence, immanence, and the transcendental is ultimately determined by unobjectifiable immanence which Laruelle identifies with 'the real.'"<br /><br />Now that we have analyzed the decision the philosopher makes when trying to understand "the real," we can bracket out this philosophical decision when trying to understand something called "the real." "By suspending the premise that decision co-constitutes the real, thought comes to realize that it can have a relation to a real instance which is neither empirically presupposed nor transcendentally posited as determining, but defined by thought as already-determined and determining for it - a 'real of the last instance' in accordance with which thought can approach the circle of transcendental synthesis from a place which is 'always-already' outside of it." We can understand what we call "the real" then not in terms of a correlation between an empirical and transcendental decision made by philosophers that always must be in reference to <span style="font-style: italic;">our</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">possibility</span>, but the fact that thought is already determined independent of a theoretical system that would like to account for it. It's the case that we are already thinking. Kant's system isn't needed to understand "the real." In a certain sense this a return to the Cartesian method with a specific injuction not to move into the Kantian decision. We know in the "real of the last instance" that we are thinking beings and what happened "before" this is "always-already" outside of thought's purview. We know at the very least that we are always and already thinking. But what is this "real of the last instance?" It's reality before it hits the fact that we are always-already thinking. More precisely, it's the moment we are thinking at that exact moment we are thinking (without necessarily knowing we are thinking. Again, this "real" is at a distance from epistemology). The last instance of "the real" is already a thought, but it's at a shorter distance than the system built by Kant and Hegel to establish how thought came to be. It's this division from System that allows to find something called a "real in the last instance." Still, what is happening in this "real in the last instance, if anything at all?" At the very least, we know that "the use of the modifiers 'already' and 'without' in describing the 'real of the last-instance' is effectively shorthand for 'non-decisional.'" In other words, when we understand the "the real" in terms of having no choice in what happens, we understand that we make no decision in what happens to us, nor does "the real" assume some mystical/spiritual position that already makes decisions specifically for us. Neither what we call "the real," nor what we understand as Kantian synthesizing acts of the mind make decisions. "The real" happens independent of a decision. It happens in it's own way independent of what we would philosophically understand to be a "teleological presupposition." Lets let Laruelle speak for himself here. "To the extent that philosophy exploits 'transcendence' or 'being' in a privileged and dominant manner [...] the essence of transcendence or being according to their philosophical usage is the 'auto,' that is to say, the idea of philosophy's absolute autonomy in the form of a circle, of a self-reference such as becomes apparent in the dimensions of auto-donation and auto-position." From this, we understand that Laruelle sees the decision of the philosopher as privileging concepts of "being" and "transcendence" which is the essence of philosophy. What these concepts entail is a use of the concept "auto," meaning that the concept of being for example means that something automatically happens without decision. But this is what we understood above as Laruelle's non-philosophy. We understood it as non-decisional. We must distinguish between "auto-position" and "non-auto-decision." When Laruelle understands the decision made by Kantian and post Kantian philosophy, it's in the circularity between what's given (donated) and the position taken from the donation. Heidegger for example puts us in the position of the being of Being who thinks its own finitude by the modality of temporality. We are automatically in a position in other words with Heidegger's privileged-subjectivity . The idea conveyed by Laruelle in the form of a non-decisional non-philosophy is different from being put into an automatic position of being. The idea of non-decisionality obviates the correlation between subjectivity and objectivity as a duality (dialectical logic) in the first place. While Phenomenology would lay out what automatically happens to us without us having any knowledge of it, this non-decisional non-philosophy has no idea of "something happening to us automatically." This makes sense in the context of a "real in the last instance" because we are not yet at something we can identify as "being us." As was stated above, we are at a smaller distance with the "real in the last instance" than the system being constructed for the possibility of thought by Kant and Hegel. While "auto-positional" puts us in an automatic position we cant escape ("being"), "non-decisional" doesn't make available the philosophical decision to put us in an automatic place at all.<br /><br />This analysis of the philosopher's decision relative to understanding "the real" will help us with understanding what Laruelle will specifically refer to as "the real" in the next post. Bracketing out the philosopher's decision of having to see "the real" in terms of a synthesis between ostensible empirical and transcendental conditions is a giant step for thought being able to think something called "the real" without the history of philosophy weighing so heavily on it.<br /></div></div>Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06496620812252728998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9023023321170051666.post-32943150440470498412011-01-13T14:13:00.000-08:002011-01-16T06:05:13.412-08:00Empty-set syllogism<div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_KUimPH_5PHU/TS97NdLWWeI/AAAAAAAAAS8/IocgXKhIX3M/s1600/ham_better_than_heaven.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_KUimPH_5PHU/TS97NdLWWeI/AAAAAAAAAS8/IocgXKhIX3M/s320/ham_better_than_heaven.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5561799535926598114" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:100%;">Nothing is better than eternal happiness; a ham sandwich is better than nothing; therefore, a ham sandwich is better than eternal happiness</span></div>Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06496620812252728998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9023023321170051666.post-67204648646755096602011-01-13T10:38:00.000-08:002011-01-13T14:09:17.158-08:00Name Calling; Enlightenment and Extinction, Part 5<div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_KUimPH_5PHU/TS9IUQCwgDI/AAAAAAAAAS0/yUQftIP6KMk/s1600/name_calling.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_KUimPH_5PHU/TS9IUQCwgDI/AAAAAAAAAS0/yUQftIP6KMk/s320/name_calling.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5561743577566969906" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">Guy: "I think this flower is called..."<br />Girl: "Who gives a shit?"</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">In the last post, we asked a final question regarding the possibility of thinking <span style="font-style: italic;">being </span>without recourse to a linguistic guarantor. We came to this thought as a consequence of seeing a "strong conrrelationist" thought in Meillassoux which wanted to say that mind-independent reality is contingent regardless of this statement being made. This affirmation of<span style="font-style: italic;"> being</span> to the non-conceptual space of <span style="font-style: italic;">reality </span>forms a correlation that Brassier shows can't be made regardless of the "good" intentions Meillassoux may have had in destabilizing correlationism's inherent dualism (understanding <span style="font-style: italic;">being</span> in terms of thought). Brassier's next step is to "unbind the void" through the thought of Alain Badiou, specifically his most popular work, <span style="font-style: italic;">Being and Event</span>. It's with Badiou's move away from a linguistic guarantor for the disjunction between <span style="font-style: italic;">being</span> and thinking that Brassier finds important. This is done by treating ontology not as an existential signifier but as <span style="font-style: italic;">discourse</span>. The consequences of de-existentializing <span style="font-style: italic;">being</span> is seeing presentation's internal structure as that of an "anti-phenomenon" which is presence's necessarily empty and insubstantial contrary. In other words, what we conceive of as "presentation" is exactly opposite of <span style="font-style: italic;">being</span> (or presence). When we give ourselves the idea of presentation which we can find conspicuously in the "unfolding" of a musical presentation (work) (given as an example in Husserl's <span style="font-style: italic;">Internal Time Consciousness</span> essays) we can literally describe what <span style="font-style: italic;">we think </span>is the experience of the<span style="font-style: italic;"> presence </span>through the presentation of the musical work (presentation). But presentation is not <span style="font-style: italic;">being</span>. What <span style="font-style: italic;">we </span>think of as presentation happening in what<span style="font-style: italic;"> we think</span> of as "real time" is <span style="font-style: italic;">our</span> way of thinking <span style="font-style: italic;">being</span> by borrowing a catalog of concepts already in our conceptual lexicon and equating this idea of presentation with an idea of being. In other words, this phenomenological description relies on a historical lexicon of conceptions, or thinking in general and an equality between "presence" and what we figuratively do when we think and say something is being presented. With this being said, it's blatantly inaccurate and unfaithful to something called "being" to ascribe what we think it is to "what it is." Toward the end of the last post, I asked "Why then rely on a concept of ontology (<span style="font-style: italic;">being</span>) in general?" This was assuming we qualified the concept of <span style="font-style: italic;">being </span>as an existential characteristic. With Badiou, ontology becomes a claim about <span style="font-style: italic;">discourse</span>, not about the world. As Brassier states, "Anything that is must be counted-as-one, but unity is not an intrinsic characteristic of being; it is merely the result of an operation which produces consistent multiplicity, from inconsistent multiplicity." Brassier here is explaining Badiou's use of set theory to settle the discourse of ontology <span style="font-style: italic;">a contrario </span>a world of ontology. For example, when we see everything that compiles a tree, we see it as "tree." We see it as one thing called "a tree." This "a" functions to give unity to complexity. But because we call a multiplicity into a unity, this fact doesn't allow a leap into qualifying <span style="font-style: italic;">being</span>. Just because we were <span style="font-style: italic;">presented</span> something in some way doesn't mean that this says anything about <span style="font-style: italic;">being</span>. Our presumptions about presentations don't serve as a harbinger to <span style="font-style: italic;">being</span>. To put it more simply, "all access to being is via presentation, and presentation is always the presentations of something, never being itself" because concepts are always consistent which is incompatible with the claim that being is inconsistent multiplicity (and consequently it never being knowable and thinkable). With all this being said, the question still stands why the concept of <span style="font-style: italic;">being </span>is still something that philosophers ponder over and something that a speculative realism should ponder over regardless of Badiou's demarcation of it into discourse, for<span style="font-style: italic;"> discourse is still an attempt at explanation</span>, or is it (we shall understand this further in the post)? While this operates at a sure distance from an existential analytic of ontology (set-theory mathematics rather than Heideggerian mythologization of finitude) it still asks of something called "being." This distance we will explain in this post through the concept of the empty set ({}). At the end though, we will find that Badiou's finding of an "event" from ontological discourse doesn't serve his own method of subtractive ontology(through empty-set theory), and that ultimately and again, the concept of <span style="font-style: italic;">being</span> is one that is more than precarious for philsophical usage and something that can or even ought to be understood.<br /><br />"Set-theory begins by declaring that non-belonging exists, a non-belonging which authorizes all subsequent belonging, but the theory neither asserts nor presupposes the existence of belonging." This is somewhat of a tricky statement to find our way around. First lets understand the concept of the empty set ({}). An empty set is a set that contains no elements but nonetheless we can see the mathematical syntax (symbolization). For Badiou, it's important to understand that the empty set represents a discourse of syntax, not of existence. According to Brassier, "It does not predicate existence of any concept, whether it be that of 'non-belonging' or 'inexistence.'...Its import is that, even in order to deny belonging, it is <span style="font-style: italic;">at least</span> necessary to affirm the existence of a mark of belonging." So for Badiou, while using set-theory for a discourse of ontology that's at a distance from existential ontology, we are still required to use a <span style="font-style: italic;">mark</span> to <span style="font-style: italic;">mark out</span> this non-belonging. In other words, we affirm "the existence of a mark of non-belonging." The syntax then is in existence since it was marked. The empty set while operating mathematically instead of poetically and figuratively through Heideggerian post-religious secularized mysticism affirms its existence through non-belonging. Through non-belonging, (negation of belonging) which is presupposed by a set in general, (a set that is a multiplicity that we "count-as-one"), belonging is authorized to exist, "but the theory neither asserts nor presupposes the existence of belonging." Instead, we are in a discourse where we use a <span style="font-style: italic;">mark</span> showing no set belonging to the empty set, which nonetheless requires a <span style="font-style: italic;">mark</span> to show pure non-belonging. The key here is in not saying "Instead, we are in a discourse where we use a <span style="font-style: italic;">mark</span> showing no set belonging to the empty set, which nonetheless requires the <span style="font-weight: bold;">existence</span> of a mark to show pure non-belonging." Again, existence need not be relative to the operation of set theory. To be more specific, the logic of empty-set theory is an operation, not a predication about existence. With this being said, we understand how theory here "neither asserts nor presupposes the existence of belonging" or <span style="font-style: italic;">being</span>. Empty-set theory shows us nothing about existence, it shows us how marks are made from something that contains nothing. "The axiom of the empty-set asserts that the name of unpresentable is presented; or that there exists a name of inexistence. This nuance is crucial: asserting the existence of a name in discourse is quite different from asserting the existence of an extra-discursive concept. For it is through this nomination that presentation is able to suture itself to the unpresentable without presenting it. Thus Badious writes, 'the inaugural advent' of the unpresentable consists in 'a pure act of nomination' which 'since it is a-specific [...] consumes itself, thereby indicating nothing but the unpresentable as such.' This nomination neither marks the return of the One, since it does not make anything consist, nor does it index a multiplicity, since what it presents is strictly nothing." The key here is that empty-set theory has shown how <span style="font-style: italic;">the mark </span>is sutured (tied) to the unpresentable without presenting it. In other words, we see <span style="font-style: italic;">a mark </span>that happens when triggering what's unpresentable, but this mark that comes to represent what's unpresentable shows nothing about something called "presence" or "being." Instead, an operation happens where the <span style="font-style: italic;">empty-set is marked</span>. <span style="font-style: italic;">The mark</span> of the empty-set presents nothing nor does it make anything "exist." It indicates the unpresentable as nothing, and nothing else. This unpresentable doesn't <span style="font-style: italic;">gain </span>a "wholly unknown other" from it's nomination. It's completely unknown and that's it. The mark indicates nothing and that's it. (It's worth noting that we (along with Badiou and Brassier) use the verb "indicate" rather than "symbolize" in this operational process.) A name is asserted, not an "extra-discursive concept." This is important to understanding subtractive ontology. Alternatively, we can say that a "mark is made, not an extra-discursive concept." From the mark of the empty-set, we then have no reason to attribute any of what happened to <span style="font-style: italic;">us</span> (<span style="font-style: italic;">being</span>). In this example of the empty-set, that a mark was first made and counted-as-one to first establish the empty-set that is never counted (but nevertheless presupposes a count-of-multiplicity as one) doesn't show anything about something called "existence." Nor does it show anything about "presence." It shows a process that Badiou calls "subtractive ontology," and that's it. It's the jump into an existential ontology that Brassier wants to eliminate; this desire to existentialize the mathematics of set theory. It's this existentializing of scientific concepts that creates the mysticism that creates nebulous notions of scientific disciplines. While we understand the concept of Folk Psychology, we can also understand a concept of Folk Science. The differences in what is called "ontology" is not just one example either. The callous way in which the science of Quantum Physics is used to explain things as embarrassing as "changing the way you live" is another conspicuous example.<br /><br />What empty-set theory shows here for Brassier is that there is no "experience of being." While something is consistently presented (the mark which indicates the set with no elements), this doesn't account for the inconsistency of its own reality or <span style="font-style: italic;">being </span>(the <span style="font-style: italic;">being</span> of the empty-set). There's no understanding of what is the "presencing" within the logical operation of the nomination manifested from nothing. Instead we have an idea of this nothing that is exactly that, nothing and nothing else, and we have a mark that comes to indicate this nothing and nothing else. In other words, there's an operation that <span style="font-style: italic;">we</span> happen to understand. What this operation was, is something that we understood. The understanding is <span style="font-style: italic;">always after</span> an operation, and an operation is always on going on its own terms independent of thought. In this sense we can clarify the nebulous concept of <span style="font-style: italic;">being </span>simply as "something that is just not for understanding." Whether this proves to be the case as we continue on in <span style="font-style: italic;">Enlightenment and Extinction</span> remains to be seen. While Brassier appreciates the subtractive ontology that we just went into with empty-set theory above, he finds the "evental" conclusions drawn by Badiou to be problematic where Badiou inflates thinking to be the event and only event of being, meaning for example that "the Big Bang, the Cambrian explosion, and the death of the sun remain mere hiccups in the way of the world" because they operate at a large distance from the thinking being that Badiou privileges following the "change-the-world" syndrome experienced by many "thinkers" and naive idealists in general. "Thinking is sufficient to change the world: such is the ultimate import of Badiou's idealism." It's interesting to see how an ultimate import of "thought changing the world" can create useful objective thoughts on philosophical questions while having a possible initial import that's this embarrassing. But these aren't questions for philosophy, let alone anyone really. "Either Badiou denies that ontology is a situation, in which case he is obliged to choose between mysticism, Phenomenology, or metaphysics, or he accepts that the subtractive nature of presentation is such as to undermine all the non-ontological consequences he wishes to draw from it, specifically his theory of event." From this, we can make a good guess at where Brassier is headed; a non-correlation between <span style="font-style: italic;">being</span> and consequence, and ultimately between <span style="font-style: italic;">being</span> and thought. Still, how can the <span style="font-weight: bold;">concept of <span style="font-style: italic;">being</span></span> still be used? <br /></div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div>Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06496620812252728998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9023023321170051666.post-84922231825878134162011-01-09T08:34:00.000-08:002011-01-10T17:34:51.929-08:00Purchased Suffering<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_KUimPH_5PHU/TSoL2wHkloI/AAAAAAAAASk/v7MJEkIwIoM/s1600/Searle_winner.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 209px; height: 243px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_KUimPH_5PHU/TSoL2wHkloI/AAAAAAAAASk/v7MJEkIwIoM/s320/Searle_winner.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5560269725199799938" border="0" /></a>"Some of my friends claim that they suffer from the angst of post-industrial man under late capitalism. Now I don't suffer from that. If I did, I would run out and buy a beer." - John SearleBrianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06496620812252728998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9023023321170051666.post-33129620887971629492011-01-05T10:44:00.000-08:002011-01-06T09:14:50.166-08:00Thinking and Being; Enlightenment and Extinction, Part 4<div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_KUimPH_5PHU/TSS_co2oMHI/AAAAAAAAASc/Uexp70-tvs4/s1600/thinking_being_botox.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 180px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_KUimPH_5PHU/TSS_co2oMHI/AAAAAAAAASc/Uexp70-tvs4/s320/thinking_being_botox.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5558778338805821554" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">Thinking about being....and botox. (Picture has nothing to do with the post)</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /><div style="text-align: left;">In the last post, we finished by saying that Brassier would establish the thought of anti-correlationism by understanding the nuanced logic given by Quentin Meillassoux in regards to the principle of absolute contingency. This is established through Mellisassoux's "figures of factuality." Brassier will establish Meillassoux's "figures of factuality" in order to further establish the logic of anti-correlationist thought then. In this post we will go into the third figure under the name of the "inconstancy of nature." We will go into this because this is where the idea of anti-correlationism finds difficulty in establishing the anti-correlationist "perspective" it wishes to achieve. Firstly though, Brassier sites Meillasoux's nuanced argument in regards to the impossibility of contradiction which breaks the "law of contradiction" from giving certain and definite outcomes to phenomena in general (providing the first principle for contingency). The argument goes like this: "If something is at once what it is and what it is not, then it cannot undergo transformation for it is already what's not...a contradictory element always exists as what it's not. It remains <span style="font-style: italic;">self-identical</span> in <span style="font-style: italic;">being-other</span> than itself". In other words, contradiction exists so it's not a contradiction since it has an identity. There is no contradiction if it already exists. Even if we think of something right now, and can think of its contradiction, this contradiction already exists. At the very most, one can <span style="font-style: italic;">say </span>that 'two specific things exist at a difference from one another' but even in this statement the subject is already defined as 'two specific things' and being predicated in difference from one another. In regards to Hegel's original perspective on this, "absolute identity is capable of sustaining contradiction, since only the absolute can be identity of sameness and alterity." What is "wholly other" is already identified as just that, "otherness." Its nature is solidified in the identity of what's not, which already exists in <span style="font-style: italic;">being what's not</span>. With that being said,<span style="font-style: italic;"> the absolute </span>envelopes the possibility of any contradiction by understanding that everything is always <span style="font-style: italic;">identified</span>. What is contrary to what is happening is identified as a contrary nature, so this contrary nature simple exists as what is already not happening right now for instance. This argument for the non-possibility of contradiction is in order to establish the next point in Meillassoux's <span style="font-style: italic;">principles of factiality</span> which is the necessary existence of contingency. This principle will make the correlationist's attempts at understanding being through thinking difficult. This argument goes something like this: 1. the weak interpretation,"if and only if something exists, then it exists contingently" and 2. the strong interpretation, "that it is absolutely necessary that contingent entities exist." Brassier explains the infinite regress involved in the weak interpretation of the necessity of contingency which always relies on the idea of "existence," making contingency relative to something called "existence." When trying to prove existential contingency though, one will have to put the idea of "existence" in the contingency bracket itself. This will ultimately lead to the strong interpretation where regardless of something called "existence," contingency still exists (relative to whatever "entities" mean. "Entities" and "existence" need to be explained further.) The regress that manifests from the "if and only if something exists" in the weak argument is nullified when the contingency no longer is concomitant with the idea of "existence." So far then we have a non-contradictory contingency of phenomena that is being established by Meillassoux. In this sense, contingency is absolutely necessary. But is this statement included in a realism of non-contradictory contingency? If not, is this where the "speculative" in "speculative realism" finds its place? If it is, then "speculative realism," like phenomenology, is still a descriptive science. These problems we will move onto in this post with the third figure of factiality nominated as the "inconstancy of nature." Here we will run into problems with the anti-correlationist's hopes of absolute dissociation.<br /><br />The idea of the "inconstancy of nature" is to further dissociate our experience from "what's really happening" thereby fulfilling the realist interpretation. There's no better place to start understanding this anti-correlationist perspective than in Hume's<span style="font-style: italic;"> A Treatise of Human Nature</span>, specifically with his billiard ball example. Brassier explains it as such; "We cannot assume that any particular occurrence of AB - where A and B are bound together by contiguity, priority, and conjunction - instantiates a universal principle of causation...Hume's response is that our belief in causality and inductive inference more generally is merely a function of the association of ideas, and hence a psychological habit, nothing more. But habit does not provide a rational warrant for the inductive inference that the instance AB instantiates a universal law whereby it must follow A." To make this example more clear, lets establish the actual thought experiment that Hume made regarding billiard balls. When we see a billiard ball being hit into another billiard ball, we presume that the second billiard ball (B) reacted from it being hit by the first one (A) (This principle of causality is obviously established as "Law of Motion" for Newton). Hume assumes this much of the billiard balls in his thought experiment; 1. that they are in a <span style="font-style: italic;">position </span>of contiguity (proximity), 2. that they are in a position of priority meaning that one ball is <span style="font-style: italic;">before</span> another ball, and 3. that they are in a position of conjunction meaning that they are being perceived as being together. What's important to understand in these axiomatic relationships between billiard balls with this thought experiment is the fact that relationships first have to be perceived. But this is a problem for anti-correlationism that wants to firmly establish the dissociation between perception and reality. But if they follow Hume closely, they see that no matter how much it may be the case (high frequency) that "B follows from A", it isn't the case that this will always be the case, hence making this law of causality not a law because it can't be established universally. But who's establishing laws universally? <span style="font-style: italic;"> We</span> are establishing laws universally; The same "we" who perceive reality and are not reality. Maybe the contention put forward by anti-correlationism ought to be more in line with the<span style="font-style: italic;"> desire to create laws</span> in general. Newtons Laws of Motion are based on our never-ending perception of what always happens in experience. Newton took that much for granted in that there are <span style="font-style: italic;">beings</span> that have to have perceptive phenomena in order to establish something like a universal law. The anti-correlationist has to think to themselves that this taking for granted of <span style="font-style: italic;">perceptual beings </span>is a natural argument in favor of idealism. In other words, <span style="font-style: italic;">being</span> never has to think that it's perceiving in order to perceive and ultimately come up with ideas. When Brassier states that the perception of billiard balls ostensibly showing a universal law is a "psychological habit, nothing more," what is the impetus behind seeing psychological habits as simply as "nothing more." Mental habits exists. That the association of ideas becomes a habit is something that exists. That this is then taken and nominated as a transcendental category is something else. Even if we eliminate this Kantian impulse to put habit into a transcendental category, the habit of perception still exists. Even if we nullify the universal laws understood by Newton, it's still the case that <span style="font-style: italic;">being </span>will see things in high or low probabilities and instinctively react to these probabilities. But for Brassier and Meillassoux, these are all<span style="font-style: italic;"> our presumptions</span>, and that is the salient point in this thought experiment of dissociation. The unstated inference by correlationism is the one whereby the correlationist infers from the claim that "science's representation of reality requires the uniformity of nature the quite distinct claim that this uniformity - and hence the laws of nature- is necessary." In other words, because we (<span style="font-style: italic;">being</span>) happen to represent nature in a uniform manner, doesn't mean that we can then make the leap to say that our representation is necessary and always the case. The difference here is between uniformity and necessity. For example, because phenomena happen all the time in high probabilities doesn't mean that it's necessarily the case that this high probability will always happen (necessarily). But this subtle distinction assumes a sort of quasi-metaphysical space for "necessity." If this is the case, then the concept of "necessity" will need to transcend its own conceptual limitations into the sphere of the arche-fossil for example. It will have to presume that what happened in the dispossessed time of the arche-fossil was necessarily contingent. While we can't assume uniformity to this arche-time, we also can't assume non-uniformity (contingency) to this time. In other words, the idea of the "necessity of contingency" has to allow for the possibility for uniformity in a time before the nervous system. This needs to be emphasized. The necessity of contingency ought not to entail a conception of a chaotic universe, but simply a conception of the universe that is completely unknowable, whose contingency could be uniform or chaotic or anything else that comes to the imagination of the thinker who can never know the contingency. For our representation though, we can't assume that uniformity is always necessary, solely because the concept of necessity "transcends" representative <span style="font-style: italic;">being</span>. That everything can always be the case denies the possibility of uniformity, regardless of how much uniformity may always happen to us. In this sense, there's no problem with Kant's (correlationism's) transcendentalism as long as it knows that representable knowledge is always in reference to us. But this fact ought to be a harbinger for not being so interested in <span style="font-style: italic;">everything in reference to us</span> (This is a simple question to put forward: "Why are we so interested in everything in reference to ourselves?"). By this principle of contingency, we (<span style="font-style: italic;">being</span>) are not necessary, so why are we so interested with what happens to us? Brassier asks "Is uniformity a real feature of things-in-themselves or merely a phenomenal illusion generated by our relation to things?" The salient point for Brassier is establishing us (<span style="font-style: italic;">being</span>) as "merely" contingent. The "merely" speaks for itself and instinctively guides the <span style="font-style: italic;">desire</span> to wedge<span style="font-style: italic;"> being</span> from the arch-fossil.<br /><br />Now the problem appears. Brassier establishes the fact that Meillassoux has established the diachronicity between thinking and being by destabilizing the necessity of uniformity that <span style="font-style: italic;">being </span>and correlationism establishes for itself. What is left? There is a speculative opportunity that has not been reached yet for Meillassoux: "Thus, as Meillassoux sees it, the outstanding task yet to be accomplished by modern philosophy is a speculative explicitation of the dimension of diachronicity which subtends the Galilean hypothesis. It is philosophy's failure to recognize the speculative implications of science's Copernicanism which has resulted in the Ptolemaism of correlationism. In ratifying the diachronicity of thinking and being, modern science exposes thought's contingency for being: although thought needs being, being does not need thought." So then, what is the speculative opportunity for <span style="font-style: italic;">being</span> independent of thought that Meillassoux wants to overturn in his perception of philosophy's Ptolemaism? To be more poignant, what is <span style="font-style: italic;">being</span> without thought? If we refer to an arche-time, that's fine, but why then rely on a concept of ontology (<span style="font-style: italic;">being</span>) in general? While we can understand the desire for a Ptolemaic counter-revolution in philosophy, what's more difficult to understand is maintaining a <span style="font-style: italic;">concept of being</span> independent of the concept of thinking which is to be understood as concept-creation at an absolute distance from reality. But this separation of thought from <span style="font-style: italic;">being </span>can't happen without a separation from the concept <span style="font-style: italic;">being</span>. <span style="font-style: italic;">Being is thought because it's a concept</span>. Brassier sees this in Meillassoux's thought. "Mellassoux's problem consists in identifying a speculative guarantor for this disjunction between reality and ideality which would be entirely independent of the evidence provided by mathematical idealization of the ancestral phenomenon in the ancestral statement." The problem is in the idea of "identifying" some sort of speculative<span style="font-style: italic;"> guarantor </span>("guarantor": a word which we should be enormously suspicious of relative to an argument for a principle of absolute and necessary contingency) for the arche-fossil independent of <span style="font-style: italic;">being </span>(<span style="font-style: italic;">thinking being</span>). "If everything is necessarily contingent regardless of the truth of the thought 'everything is necessarily contingent,' then everything could be necessarily contingent even if we had no way of thinking the truth of that thought coherently." In other words, we have strong correlationism because we give ourselves the luxury of being able to <span style="font-style: italic;">say</span> at the very least that "everything is necessarily contingent regardless of the fact of this statement being made." We are saying something about something before the evolution of the nervous system knowing that what we are saying has nothing to do with that time. If the speculative guarantor is the "ancestral statement" of absolute disjunction between thinking and "<span style="font-style: italic;">being</span>," then the guarantor is simply a thought linguistically expressed, like every other philosophy that would <span style="font-style: italic;">like to establish</span> a reality for a mind-independent reality. At the end of Part 1 in <span style="font-style: italic;">Enlightenment and Extinction, </span>Brassier asks, "can we think the diachronic disjunction between real and ideal while obviating any recourse to a transcendental divide between thinking and being?" This is the question. And if it can be thought, can it be thought without being linguistically expressed, without it having to be expressed always to someone else, through a <span style="font-style: italic;">published book</span> for example?<br /><br /><br />(<span style="font-size:85%;">At the very least, the <span style="font-style: italic;">concept of being </span>shouldn't pertain to an arche-time. This arche-time wasn't "being."</span>)<br /></div></div><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span>Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06496620812252728998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9023023321170051666.post-32961915919509872702011-01-02T05:16:00.000-08:002011-01-02T07:47:40.270-08:00Publishing Fever<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_KUimPH_5PHU/TSCd_a591LI/AAAAAAAAASU/Yl1Z9Kj938c/s1600/JSearle.gif"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 200px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_KUimPH_5PHU/TSCd_a591LI/AAAAAAAAASU/Yl1Z9Kj938c/s320/JSearle.gif" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5557615653054960818" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: center;">"We've reached a peculiar situation in academic life where the requirement that you publish has produced a lot more books then anybody ever needs to read." - John Searle<br /></div>Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06496620812252728998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9023023321170051666.post-82567027337495732862010-12-29T11:39:00.000-08:002010-12-30T06:17:00.852-08:00Oblivious Philosophers; Enlightenment and Extinction, Part 3<div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_KUimPH_5PHU/TRyT4ju61vI/AAAAAAAAAR8/FuzvuC7QYQw/s1600/oblivious_philosophers2.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 271px; height: 320px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_KUimPH_5PHU/TRyT4ju61vI/AAAAAAAAAR8/FuzvuC7QYQw/s320/oblivious_philosophers2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5556478640142341874" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">Assholes</span><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /><div style="text-align: left;">In the last post we saw Brassier commending the work of Paul Churchland's Eliminative Materialism while at the same time criticizing the fact that Churchland ascribed pragmatic virtues to both the brains function (generally speaking) and a circumscribed theory of the brain based on this same<span style="font-style: italic;"> ideal of pragmatism</span>. This paved the way for the concept of<span style="font-style: italic;"> anti-correlationism </span>where Brassier wants to rigorously dismantle conceptual thought from Philosophy, and any sort of<span style="font-style: italic;"> being</span> in general. Later on, he gives a much more concrete example of this anti-correlationist gesture in the concept of the <span style="font-style: italic;">arche-fossil</span> first prescribed by Quentin Meillassoux. What is an arche-fossil? "An 'arche-fossil' is a material indicating traces of 'ancestral' phenomena anterior even to the emergence of life." This description already functions to separate "life" from an anterior phenomena. This anterior phenomena is understood by philosophers as a potential to manifest into an <span style="font-style: italic;">us</span>. Beyond this, philosophers in the post-Kantian style will ascribe "transcendental" properties to this anteriority by admitting that while they can't know anything that happens prior to<span style="font-style: italic;"> being</span>, they can know that certain things always had to be the case independent of our existence. It's where we find Husserl saying that Euclid's geometrical theorems would exist independent of anyone existing. The basic idea in this example is that the geometrical universe would operate the same way regardless of it<span style="font-style: italic;"> being seen</span> as having laws for us. But this can't be said for Brassier. We can't freely ascribe <span style="font-style: italic;">our laws</span> to something that was never a matter of lawfulness. At the heart of Brassier's argument is the simple distinction between existing and not existing, and if consciousness (the nervous system) did not exist, then nothing can be said of it. What natural science discovers as existing independent of us is surely vast, and it's this vastness that philosophers are oblivious to because they think everything is in relation to them (the manifest image). We will let Brassier speak for the vastness of what natural science discovers and in doing so, we will come to understand how what has been discovered by science is minimal to the philosopher <span style="font-style: italic;">par excellence</span>. This lack of understanding by the philosopher will further establish the nature of man to attribute everything outside of himself to himself (<span style="visibility: visible;" id="main"><span style="visibility: visible;" id="search">anthropomorphism) that we even saw in the scientific thought of Paul Churchland's placement of values upon consciousness. This anthropomorphic gesture is much more conspicuous in the philosopher than the scientist. Brassier will find it most strictly in what's understood as post-Kantian philosophy.<br /><br />Science wants to understand what happens outside of human existence. This arch-fossile gesture "provides the material basis for experiments yielding estimates of ancestral phenomena- - such as the radioactive isotope whose rate of decay provides an index of the age of distant stars. Natural science produces ancestral statements, such as that the universe is roughly 13.7 billion years old, that the earth formed roughly 4.5 billion years ago, that life developed on earth approximately 3.5 billion years ago, and that the earliest ancestors of the genus <span style="font-style: italic;">Homo </span>emerged about 2 million years ago." Brassier privileges natural science here in being able to index an <span style="font-style: italic;">arche-history</span> where nothing can be said of it except factual observations where we happen to be included in an approximation of our historical duration (2 million years). These statements aren't based on <span style="font-style: italic;">pure reason. </span>We can't sit around and speculate to the fact that the genus <span style="font-style: italic;">Homo </span>emerged approximately 2 million years ago. We can come to know this through scientific discovery, in this case the dating of a variety of fossils. Not only can we know what happened prior to human existence, but we can know protentive facts like the earth being incinerated in approximately 4 billion years, and that "eventually, one trillion, trillion, trillion years from now, all matter in the cosmos will disintegrate into unbound elementary particles." This is interesting stuff for Brassier and wonders why philosophers aren't more interested in these scientific discovery's (why don't philosophers watch Carl Sagan's<span style="font-style: italic;"> Cosmos</span> seriously?) "Philosophers should be more astonished by such statements than they seem to be, for they present a serious problem for post-Kantian philosophy. Yet strangely, the latter seems to remain entirely oblivious to it." Generally speaking, philosophy understood through Kant wants to understand the conceptual intelligibility of existence, but how can conceptual intelligibility account for something that wasn't conceptual? On top of this, why do these scientific discoveries not press on the philosopher to understand himself independent of himself at the "places" of the arche-fossil? "For all their various differences, post-Kantian philosophers can be said to share one fundamental conviction: that the idea of a world-in-itself, subsisting independently of our relation to it, is an absurdity." Again, Brassier labels Kant and philosophy that has followed Kant as the philosophy of the manifest image, and rightly so. It's Kant in his <span style="font-style: italic;">Critique of Pure Reason</span> who sets out to understand the possibility of experience by ascribing transcendental categories to consciousness. For Kant, the transcendental aesthetic isn't space and time understood independent of us, the observers, but it's understood precisely as the cognitive preconditions for experience at all. In other words, space and time exist in so far as we experience a world<span style="font-style: italic;"> as </span>space and time. Kant doesn't say that space and time exist independent of us, and in this sense he's faithful to what he can and cannot<span style="font-style: italic;"> say</span>, but his intention on the other hand is just that, an intention. More specifically, it's an intention to privilege human consciousness as something that must be understood if we are to understand experience. What we infer from Kant's project is that he's concerned with how he can know, and not merely with how things happen independent of the fact that he can know. Kant isn't settled with the fact that he is a<span style="font-style: italic;"> knower</span>, but further wants to prop the<span style="font-style: italic;"> knowledge status</span> to a transcendental level by understanding how knowledge is possible in the first place by laying down preconditions for his knowing. In modernity (20th and 21st century "continental" philosophy), these transcendental categories become aggrandized into much more absolute and less specific categories as our "pre-theoretical relation to the world, whether characterized as <span style="font-style: italic;">Dasein</span> or 'Life', which provides the ontological precondition for the intelligibility of the scientific claims listed above." The project of Ontology in general doesn't become one of understanding phenomena in general, but of <span style="font-style: italic;">our being</span> in general. It's these pre-theoretical relations to the world that make it possible for theory to be possible in the first place. It's not difficult to understand Heidegger as a mystical/secular-religious thinker with his emphasis on <span style="font-style: italic;">Dasein </span>that takes on a transcendental connotation of its own by signifying something that can't be put into words, yet is put into one word that signifies that it can't signify (this is a religious gesture). It's this attitude that makes Brassier incensed. "No wonder, then, that post-Kantian philosophers routinely patronize these and other scientific assertions about the world as impoverished abstractions whose meaning supervenes on this more fundamental sub-representational or pre-theoretical relation to phenomena." One obvious example of this is when Heidegger refers to scientific time as a "vulgar" conception of time. Instead, Heidegger wants to see time as referring to our finitude. Time is specifically <span style="font-style: italic;">our</span> finitude. It doesn't exist outside of <span style="font-style: italic;">us</span>. In this sense, he is squarely in the spot of post-Kantian philosophy. More specifically, Heidegger religiousizes death over life in order to make "Life" more mythological since it is finite. This is only possible through <span style="font-style: italic;">our</span> time. Throughout all this, the focus is always on the idea that <span style="font-style: italic;">we</span> die, that <span style="font-style: italic;">we</span> are alive, that time is here for <span style="font-style: italic;">us</span> to die. If Heidegger's nostalagizing instincts were to be truly faithful, it would have nostalagized not thinking about <span style="font-style: italic;">being towards death </span>(the negation of the thought), but an alterity to our existence isn't in the purview of mawkish instincts. For Brassier, this post-Kantian attitude that we have just described through Heidegger can be found in what Meillassoux calls "correlationism." "Correlationism affirms the indissoluble primacy of the relation between thought and its correlation over the metaphysical hypostatization or representationalist reification of either term of the relation." In other words, we have "Life-World" and "thought." Neither of these terms are to be privileged over one another. We live in a reciprocal "co-propriation" where <span style="font-style: italic;">thinking</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">being</span> exist together. It's here where we have the cosmopolitan sloganeering of "living alongside the world" that has become the money-marketers bread for green-technology. Correlationism affirms the absolute connection between <span style="font-style: italic;">us</span> and everything else that can possibly be outside of us. Out of all the infinite contingent possibilities that can happen in the universe, <span style="font-style: italic;">they have to be in reference to us</span>. It's this idea that Brassier will take to task in the name of anti-correlationism in the following pages of <span style="font-style: italic;">Enlightenment and Extinction</span>. For now though, we get a sense that the philosopher (generally speaking) is scared of what's other than himself not being relative to himself. For however much this "pre-theoretical" realm would like to dazzle the reader with a sense of something larger than himself that he will never be able to understand, this bedazzlement may have a much more vulnerable center than what is initially understood. This secularized belief of "the world being larger than me" easily makes the subject satisfied as much as the evangelical who can forever forgive their sins. If anything, it's much easier to be satisfied in the transcendental concept of <span style="font-style: italic;">Dasein</span> than the evangelical belief system because one has to do nothing except <span style="font-style: italic;">feel</span> that they are part of something bigger than themselves. The religious believer had to go to church. The secular believer just has to think that he's smarter than religious believers. In this sense, the secular believer extends the sphere of pride 10 fold.<br /><br />These final thoughts though were made on a sociological basis which is getting away from the strict thought that Brassier is conveying. Brassier stays within the limitations of the empirico-reality when critiquing post-Kantian philosophy. For him, "we cannot extend the chain of possible perceptions back prior to the emergence of nervous systems, which provide the material conditions for the possibility of perceptual experience." In other words, we can't perceive what was before the nervous system. Scientific discourse then operates not in reference to ourselves, but reference to itself, a philosophy that is not a philosophy if you will. It can borrow terminology it makes up for itself and apply it to its own studies without having to ask where this terminology "first came from." Spontaneous creation and and study happen all the time and is applicable to something that has nothing to do with us and no one is <span style="font-style: italic;">feeling guilty </span>for the fact that we don't <span style="font-style: italic;">first</span> have an understanding of consciousness because no one cares that we are <span style="font-style: italic;">thinking beings</span>. We use what comes to us spontaneously to witness the <span style="font-style: italic;">arche-fossil</span> in scientific terms. The axioms need no axioms. No descriptive science is first needed to "work from the bottom in order to get to the top." "Getting to the bottom of things" doesn't matter. To take place anywhere at anytime is the experience of science. It's the experience that anti-correlationism will hope to establish by decentering something called "the subject" of consciousness not in order to establish it's contradictory alterity, but to do what it does, independent of the hardened philosophical dialectic that have solidified contradiction as the absolute. Where Hegel combines contradiction into the absolute, anti-correlationism will show how contradiction is not an absolute because it's not possible in the first place because the predicate of alterity is already assumed in the concept of contradiction (making an opposite not something that is "other" than what is "now"). This nuanced logic of Meillassoux we will go into in the next post. For the time being, Carl Sagan is calling with that badass German ambient music as the background theme to <span style="font-style: italic;">the Cosmos</span>. For the self-identified philosophers, there's hot tea to be sipped on and life experiences to be discussed amongst each other where no one actually listens and everyone simply talks.<br /></span></span></div></div>Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06496620812252728998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9023023321170051666.post-17440443171365620692010-12-28T10:45:00.000-08:002010-12-28T11:46:09.244-08:00Being Quirky and Being Smart<div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_KUimPH_5PHU/TRoxCkTErJI/AAAAAAAAAR0/BLIMaTqxnVs/s1600/quirky-idiot.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_KUimPH_5PHU/TRoxCkTErJI/AAAAAAAAAR0/BLIMaTqxnVs/s320/quirky-idiot.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5555807010488102034" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">This is what happens when you score less than an 1100 on your GRE's. You become Zooey Deschanel</span>.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">As a one off to the analysis of Brassier's <span style="font-style: italic;">Enlightenment and Extinction</span>, I felt a compulsion to distinguish between the quirky disposition and an intelligent person (notice I felt no need to refer to the intelligent person as the "intelligent disposition"). As the surrounding socio-cultural spectrum accepts the new year, an observation needs to be made distinguishing the quirky person from the intelligent person. To put it simply, when someone is not as smart as they think they are, they tend to rely on images of themselves where they appear smart. This confusion is irritating. The scientist and the engineer for example (generally speaking) live out their lives and appearance with a lack of recognition for either. The chemist for example mixes chemicals to create a solvent which is used to clean printing plates. They go back home and don't think of themselves. They may be sparked with a passing interest in a field independent of themselves but there's a sense of limitation of what they don't know (this we can call<span style="font-style: italic;"> intelligence</span>). A passive interest is just that compared to what they do all day. These intelligent people we can say fall under the category of "interest in some trades, master of one." On the other hand, the self-consciously quirky <span style="font-style: italic;">personality </span>makes large efforts to appear intelligent by looking peculiar into cameras. Because someone looks weird, doesn't make them intelligent. It just makes them look dumb and unaware of their own limitations. While we are using Zooey Deschanel as an example of this phenomena, we can look at Scarlett Johansson as the opposite of Deschanel. From watching the films that Johansson has starred in, it's fairly obvious she's not the sharpest tool in the shed nor a great actress (she does what she does in her limited roles and limited lines given to her). All that being said, there's a feeling that Johansson knows her limitations by the fact that she hasn't allowed herself to be commercialized as the "weird intelligent" type. The images of Johansson are straight up sexy, albeit lacking in the subtle intelligent appearance that belongs to Sharon Stone for example (who's not afraid to give a wide open soft smile). The salient point I'm trying to make is very simply that "appearances can be deceiving," and in this case, the appearance of looking intelligent can be very deceiving. In the future, for anyone who would like to be around people where trusting what they say is a premium (not simply on factual grounds, but on ethical grounds), then staying clear of these quirky looking, odd dressing, attention seeking image seekers is a place to start. Of course this is a generalization, and you can never judge a book by its cover. But maybe you can. Maybe this ideal of "not judging a book by its cover" needs to be examined more closely. Maybe the line between physical appearance and mental aptitude is more thin than once thought. Ultimately though, this isn't a call to making everyone "intelligent," 1. because the idea of "intelligence" is fairly relative (someone who can build a house from scratch is certainly as intelligent as someone who can publish a book) and 2. there maybe some people who are quite fine in their intellectual limitations. It's here in the second point where the idea of intelligence can manifest a somewhat universal concept; <span style="font-style: italic;">know your limitations</span>. And those who don't know their limitations may end up looking like Zooey Deschanel allowing cameras to make her<span style="font-style: italic;"> appear smart</span>, not <span style="font-style: italic;">be smart</span>. Of course, it's not just the cameras; it's what she<span style="font-style: italic;"> shows</span> to the camera.<br /></div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div>Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06496620812252728998noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9023023321170051666.post-69548729904441350412010-12-24T07:44:00.000-08:002010-12-24T09:39:16.864-08:00Loving love being talked about<div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_KUimPH_5PHU/TRTBdXhbTfI/AAAAAAAAARg/JUsCDF6ctmQ/s1600/castration_and_love.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_KUimPH_5PHU/TRTBdXhbTfI/AAAAAAAAARg/JUsCDF6ctmQ/s400/castration_and_love.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5554276950729248242" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">Les gens n'aurait jamais tomber dans l'amour s'ils n'avait pas entendu l'amour a parle. - La Rochefoucauld<br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><span style="font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;"></span><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;">People would never fall in love</span><br /><span style="font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;"> if they had not heard love being talked about. </span><br /></div>Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06496620812252728998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9023023321170051666.post-36116265242248581002010-12-22T10:01:00.000-08:002010-12-22T12:45:49.783-08:00The Virtues of Neuroscience; Enlightenment and Extinction, Part 2<div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_KUimPH_5PHU/TRI98OGPncI/AAAAAAAAARY/0Bxfamms0NI/s1600/virtuous_brain.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 277px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_KUimPH_5PHU/TRI98OGPncI/AAAAAAAAARY/0Bxfamms0NI/s320/virtuous_brain.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5553569395286973890" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">The Virtuous Brain</span> <span style="font-size:85%;">(<span style="font-style: italic;">always working for the benefit of itself?</span>)</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">In the beginning of<span style="font-style: italic;"> Enlightenment and Extinction</span>, Brassier weighs neuroscience against the manifest image. Brassier finds the manifest image as a subtle theoretical construct that we can understand as our original pre-scientific understanding of the world<span style="font-style: italic;"> always and already</span>. We can understand the manifest image more specifically in the Heideggerian concept of<span style="font-style: italic;"> Being</span>, and Derrida's insistence of asking what the <span style="font-style: italic;">question of the question</span> is. Both of these gestures are theoretical constructs that put the ontological question in the hands of a sphere that can't be accounted for. We rely on our original "seeing of the world" when trying to understand this pre-scientific sphere. In phenomenology, we rely on our first-person perspective to understand the world independent of the scientific understanding of the world that this manifest image would like to discredit for not understanding an ostensible wholly other that always and already happens to <span style="font-style: italic;">being</span>. Brassier follows the argument of Paul Churchland that attempts to annex the manifest image to the scientific image. Instead of seeing the pre-scientific world as something that precedes science's understanding of the world, the pre-scientific world can be accounted for in the 3rd person by the observational disposition of scientific work. Both Brassier and Churchland are critical of the <span style="font-style: italic;">mysterious realm</span> that post-Kantian philosophy would like to ascribe to this experience. Instead they find a less mystical, and more specific understanding of <span style="font-style: italic;">being before being </span>in the neurocomputational alternative where we observe the kinematics of cognition through brain activation patterns and the synaptic structure that permits neurons to pass on electrical signals to other cells or neurons. In the last post we discussed Brassier relying on and privileging this "hard science" over the mystical proclivities of philosophers. While Brassier commends Churchland's work of eliminative materialism for showing that our common sense conception of psychological phenomena is wrong and naive (folk psychology), he finds problems with the metaphysical descriptions (virtues) he gives to brain patterns that were to annex the manifest image of consciousness. Brassier commends the reductionist gestures of eliminative materialism for showing that folk psychology is incapable of understanding "meaning" and "pre-scientific intuitions," but wonders if these ideas of "meaning" and "meaningfulness" are concepts that need to be called into question in the first place. Where Churchland will find cognitive science as being able to answer these questions, Brassier wonders if these are questions to even ask in the first places because they're at an absolute distance from <span style="font-style: italic;">knowledge</span>. With Churchland's enthusiasm for the vector activation understanding (PVA) of consciousness comes an idealism. Churchland ascribes virtues to the brain and how it functions ostensibly independent of our linguistic formulations about ourselves as<span style="font-style: italic;"> beings of consciousness</span> without realizing that he's borrowing the terminology of folk psychology to make these claims. Brassier will take him to task for this in order to humble the hypostatic gesture of neuroscience that doesn't realize its <span style="font-style: italic;">borrowing gestures</span>. Brassier wants to take Churchland's eliminative materialism further than Churchland took it to de-representationalize the neurocomputational model away from this hypostasis, or metaphysics of consciousness if you will. The virtues of the brain that Churchland thinks represent brain processes aren't virtues, but something below the linguistic and representative realm. To "understand" this, we first need to understand what the brain is not doing; being a virtuous substance. <br /><br />"Churchland is perfectly explicit in explaining why he considers the PVA paradigm of cognition to be 'better' than its folk-psychological rivals, and he proposes a precise formula for gauging theoretical excellence. Global excellence of theory is measured by straightforwardly pragmatic virtues: maximal explanatory cohesiveness vis-a-vis maximal empirical heterogeneity purchased via minimal conceptual expenditure." For Churchland, there is a "better" way for understanding consciousness than others, specifically the PVA neurocomputational model instead of the manifest image which we talked about in regards to Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. Churchland asks us to move in the direction of pragmatism instead of trying to look for some universal truth in cognitive activity. In other words, he wants us to use a pragmatic theoretical model when explaining the brain. The put it more simply, the brain for Churchland is to be explained via the basic principle of <span style="font-style: italic;">Occam's razor</span>; pragmatism's venerable grandchild. Now, what are these pragmatic virtues that are found in <span style="font-style: italic;">Occam's razor</span> that define the ambitions of neuroscience (broadly speaking of course)? "In what sense precisely are theoretical virtues such as simplicity, unity, and coherence necessarily concomitant at the neurological level with an organism's reproductively advantageous behavior? Churchland simply stipulates that the aforementioned virtues are already a constitutive feature of the brain's functional architecture without offering anything in the way of argument regarding how and why it is that neural network's learned configuration in synaptic weight space is necessarily constrained by the imperative of unity, cohesion, and simplicity." The pragmatic virtues we are referring to then are "simplicity, unity, and coherence." To be as straightforward as possible, the brain is simple, coherent and unified because its behavior is in the service of advantageous reproduction. We will see later on that the idea of consciousness as reproductively advantageous is problematic. This will crumble the idea of the structure of consciousness being pragmatic because we will see it having no <span style="font-style: italic;">end,</span> making our imputations of virtues upon its phenomena null. Churchland simply asks us to follow a pragmatic model with the idea in mind that this is more "beneficial" towards understanding consciousness. Essentially it's more beneficial to see consciousness as beneficial. But where do these beneficial pro-reproductive concepts come from? If they don't come from folk-psychology alone, they belong to a history of metaphysics that would like to see things simply and in a unified manner. But is this not a predilection of the ontology of literature? This is what Brassier takes Churchland to task on. "In order to make a case for the neurocomputational necessity of superempirical virtues, Churchland would need to demonstrate that the latter are indeed strictly information theoretic constraints intrinsic to the vector coding process, as opposed to extrinsic regulatory considerations contingently imposed on the network in the course of its ongoing interaction with the environment." How's it possible to <span style="font-style: italic;">say</span> that the superempirical virtues of pragmatism operate in the brain without having a lexicon of pragmatic concepts to be able to execute this <span style="font-style: italic;">description</span>? This lexicon of pragmatic concepts are the luxury of a historical world already developed. If Churchland were to play Hegel and find these specific pragmatic virtues as the development of the world into the recognition of itself (as a pragmatic one), then he would somehow have to contend with the fact that folk-psychological concepts for instance are more prevalent than pragmatic ones which he finds inferior to the nuerocomputational explanation. The problem is not in the neurocomputational explanation of consciousness itself. The problem is in attaching virtues to this model. The problem is really in saying "this model is better than this model," not because the neurocomputational model may be a superior model for understanding consciousness, but because many different descriptions and methods are available to an explanation of consciousness regardless of which model's enthusiasts think their model is "true." Brassier will want to lead science into<span style="font-style: italic;"> not saying</span> that it's a better model than a folk-psychological model of consciousness for example. It doesn't matter for the science of consciousness that there are other approaches towards the understanding of consciousness. Once it feels that it's in competition with something it ought to already knows it's not in competition with, then it will apply virtues to its method in order the strengthen its legitimacy. This justification of course ought not to be in the mind of the pure observational scientist. The question of this ever being possible needs to be asked (Derrida would be an obvious reference as someone who would say this is absolutely not possible). The more we move on in this text, the more we will gain a sense in which Brassier can or cannot operate as a pure observer. For now, "The trouble then is that in arguing that simplicity, unity, and coherence are constitutive functional features of the brain's neuroanatomy, Churchland is but one slippery step away from claiming that brains represent the world correctly as a matter of evolutionary necessity, i.e. that they necessarily have 'true' representations. Unfortunately, this is precisely the sort of claim that Churchland had swore to abjure: 'Natural selection does not care whether a brain has or tends towards true beliefs, so long as the organism reliably exhibits reproductively advantageous behavior.'" The problem again is in finding the brain as a "reproductively advantageous" organ. This is a true <span style="font-style: italic;">belief</span>. What Churchland is erroneously saying is that natural selection does not care if a brain has true beliefs, as long as it has <span style="font-style: italic;">one</span> true belief in being reproductively advantageous. So then, natural selection does care towards the belief in reproduction. There will be ample time in the next post to show how this is not the case (the belief in "Nature" being "reproductively advantageous"). The problem now is imputing <span style="font-style: italic;">belief</span> to an organism that doesn't operate in beliefs <span style="font-style: italic;">a contrario </span>to<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>the human being who has developed beliefs in the manifest image in order to describe phenomena on its<span style="font-style: italic;"> own terms</span>. As we stated in the past post though, Brassier will need to explain how consciousness is able to come up with something like the manifest image instead of consciousness operating under the auspices of the neurocomputational model. In other words, how does the figurative explanation of phenomena (via lingustic formation through western philosophy through German idealism) happen by way of observation of the neurocomputational model? Is this a question that can be answered by the neurocomputational model? Is this a question to be answered at all? To be clear though, Brassier isn't saying that it's not possible to give a linguistic formulation pertaining to neuro-phenomenal experience. "That successful networks do indeed tend to exhibit these superempirical characteristics as a matter of empirical fact is uncontroversial, but it is a fact about cognitive ethology..." For <span style="font-style: italic;">us, </span>we understand the microbiological structure of the brain in terms of superempirical characteristics which is to say it "makes sense only within the macrophysical purview of evolutionary biology." In other words, what happens in the brain is at an absolute independence from what we casually observe to be happening in the brain based on our macro-beliefs in evolution. "...it seems that the the superempirical virtues Churchland invokes in order to discriminate between theories must remain extra-neurological characteristics, characteristics which reveal themselves only in the course of an ethological analysis of the organism's cognitive behavior within the world, rather than via a neurological analysis of the brain's microstructure." In other words, our analysis through language of other organisms using our own lexicon of beliefs are beyond what happens on a neurological level. How the neurological level is to be understood at all remains to be seen, but applying pragmatic and evolutionary adjectives to its function is reasoning on the side of extrinsic considerations, those extrinsic considerations plainly being <span style="font-style: italic;">what's good for us </span>(<span style="font-style: italic;">being</span>). <br /><br />The problem with phenomenology was always its own premise; philosophy as a descriptive science. The problem with this is a sense that there was a lack of rigor in understanding phenomena in our own terms. There was always the fact of having to borrow concepts from a developed language to try to describe something that happened independent of this historically developed language. If phenomenology exhausted one thing, it was the idea of how much linguistic description could be made of phenomena. Husserl's work is an archive of figurative descriptions of phenomena. Regardless of how extensive Husserl's work was though, there was the sense that linguistic expression couldn't "show" the micophysiology of consciousness. As we stated in the last post though, Husserl was without the luxury of modern cognitive technology, and so relied on <span style="font-style: italic;">pure reason </span>as the method for science. As cognitive science develops though, it would help to have a reading of these basic readings to see how extensive the descriptive sphere could be exhausted when pertaining to consciousness. This would help in the fact that thinkers would be much less apt to apply "superempirical" terminology to something that was happening independent of it. While phenomenology acted as a descriptive science, it made sure not to act as a teleological science and Husserl took great pains to introduce much of his work with a Cartesian reduction so the reader could operate without the reader <span style="font-style: italic;">wanting to apply presuppositions to the work at hand</span>, regardless of how innocuous these presuppositions may have been (pragmatic presuppositions). This much neuroscience could learn from phenomenology. It's this much that Brassier understands and how he is able to work within the extensive space of Heidegger and Churchland. He's able to see the benefits of a "pure science" when observing phenomena but also able to criticize a scientific method if it isn't aware of itself as relying on metaphor or applying a naive teleological presupposition to its work. His work on Paul Churchland thus far has proven Brassier as a faithful thinker in this regard. The question will be how he will be able to understand consciousness scientifically independent of metaphor, i.e language, or whether this is even possible. If not, the understanding of something called "consciousness" will have to be obviated when "seeing" anything in general pertaining to an "understanding of consciousness." It's here where a nuanced, subtle, but clear nihilistic disposition will pave the way for some very interesting thoughts. How to reconcile this nihilistic disposition with any "understanding" in general will be very interesting. As a preliminary question, what is the relation between nihilism and science? <br /></div></div>Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06496620812252728998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9023023321170051666.post-1698294297218241982010-12-15T15:59:00.001-08:002010-12-16T09:52:04.946-08:00Introduction to Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction<div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_KUimPH_5PHU/TQlWkazD3NI/AAAAAAAAARQ/uD1-6bg2Hbs/s1600/Enlightenment_Extinction.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 202px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_KUimPH_5PHU/TQlWkazD3NI/AAAAAAAAARQ/uD1-6bg2Hbs/s320/Enlightenment_Extinction.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5551063199379610834" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">These captions under pictures are getting really boring. </span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">At the end of D&G's <span style="font-style: italic;">Anti-Oedipus</span>, we learn about the idea of "rupturing causality." We see causality manifesting itself from an interested party (an interested personality). "So this then that" is the semantical operation of<span style="font-style: italic;"> being</span>. <span style="font-style: italic;">Something happens, therefore it means this</span>. In the last post I discussed wanting to move into the anti-correlationist theory of speculative realism to get a deeper understanding of this possibility of obviating causality. The first text to take on regarding this possibility is Ray Brassier's <span style="font-style: italic;">Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction</span>. While this is the first text we will take on, Ray Brassier doesn't start this anti-correlationist thought. If it finds its "historical place," it's in a discussion between Francios Laruelle and Derrida in 1988 (This discussion can be read here: <a href="http://blog.urbanomic.com/dread/archives/laruelle-derrida.pdf">http://blog.urbanomic.com/dread/archives/laruelle-derrida.pdf</a>). This discussion I will want to do a close read on in at least 2 parts after the analysis of <span style="font-style: italic;">Enlightenment and Extinction</span>. The reason for choosing <span style="font-style: italic;">Enlightenment and Extinction</span> first is from an instinct of it being a good general overview of the basics of speculative realism. As it was published in 2007, it's relatively recent. It will be the first text I do a close analysis of from an author who isn't dead yet. This is also exciting. How many times does one read an author and think to themselves, "man, I wish they were still alive to see what they think today?" In this sense, the reading of the history of philosophy is a constant catching up to writers who aren't dead yet. You will be able to address them while they're alive and you have the basic grounds of western conceptual thought under your belt to understand the concepts and verbiage from their text (if one has done somewhat of a detailed reading of western philosophy). For better or worse, without historical perspective, neither I, nor Brassier can refer to the proper name of "Hegel" without a reading of "Hegel." I say "for better or worse" because the impulse to obviate the historical perspective from experience in speculative realism is so obvious that a mere skimming over the basic texts scream this at you. This impulse of course is not new and doesn't become vogue with the "officiality" of speculative realism. The critique of the historical perspective defining experience comes in its "formal form" as early as Lyotard's <span style="font-style: italic;">The Postmodern Condition</span> as far as the 20th century is concerned. This will be a topic to be addressed throughout our acquaintance with speculative realism; the usage of the historical perspective when trying to <span style="font-style: italic;">become</span> a non-historical perspective. It's this idea that the Derrida-Laruelle discussion illuminates very well. With Ray Brassier though, we hope to gain a general overview of speculative realism in order to go deeper into its other authors and other works by Brassier himself. This post then will be a very basic introduction to what<span style="font-style: italic;"> Enlightenment and Extinction</span> is trying to explain. When we get further and deeper into the text we will uncover the substance behind the preface and the introduction (as always with a book of this conceptual magnitude). We will see from the beginning that Brassier is not simply speaking on behalf of anti-correlationsism, but nihilism. The connection between the two will become obvious through the reading of this text. To start off though, lets try to understand the basics of the title of the text and let Brassier speak for himself.<br /><br />Firstly, lets take a close look at the title of this book. <span style="font-style: italic;">Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction</span>. <span style="font-style: italic;">Nihil </span>is latin for "nothing." "Unbound" is not being bound. From this we can understand <span style="font-style: italic;">Nihil Unbound</span> conceptually as a <span style="font-style: italic;">nothingness that is not bound</span>. We gain the sense that the nothingness being conveyed by Brassier is not going to have a meaning. It's not going to be<span style="font-style: italic;"> bound by meaning</span>. Its nothingness is boundless. <span style="font-style: italic;">Enlightenment and Extinction</span>. Enlightenment is reason's understanding of an experience that happened previous to "itself." One becomes enlightened when a thought comes to one's head. Classically understood, enlightenment happens from a realization from a past experience. This realization gives meaning to "something that happened." The meaning is an <span style="font-style: italic;">extra</span> of something that always happens. Enlightenment in this title is connected to <span style="font-style: italic;">Extinction</span>. Extinction of course is death and an end. We can infer from this part of the title that there is something combining <span style="font-style: italic;">realization and death</span>. When we realize something, we die. The amount of ways of reading this is too vast to try to elaborate on now. This will speak for itself throughout the text. For now though, we have a <span style="font-style: italic;">nothingness that is not bound that is tied to a realization that brings about death</span>. At the very least, we can infer that when one realizes themselves, they are supposed to die into a nothingness that has no meaning <span style="font-style: italic;">a contrario</span> to the Hegelian supposition of the <span style="font-style: italic;">nothing that is still something</span>. At the very least we can infer that man (<span style="font-style: italic;">being</span>) sees himself in a relationship to something outside of himself and defines himself as such, rather than understanding the fact that what is outside of itself is <span style="font-style: italic;">not a matter of understanding</span>. Whether these characterizations of inference will be brought out through this text remains to be seen. A general guess at the title is a good start to throwing oneself into the text though. Now that we have taken our guesses at the text, lets let Brassier speak for himself from the very beginning. "This term 'nihilism' has a hackneyed quality. Too much has been written on the topic , and any sense of urgency that the word might once has communicated has been dulled by overexposure. The result is a vocable tainted by dreary over-familiarity and nebulous indeterminacy. Nevertheless, few other topics of philosophical debate exert such an immediate grip on people with little or no interest in the problems of philosophy as the claim of nihilism in its most 'naive' acceptation: existence is worthless." From this we understand that Brassier takes nihilism seriously. Anybody who is passionate about anything in experience will be frustrated by the over-popularization of what's considered an important concept by that thinker. Brassier sees no sense of urgency in the term. He sees no one having a grasp of nihilism beyond its hackneyed connotation of "existence is worthless." Brassier asks us not to jump out of our seats at this hackneyed meaning. Brassier's compulsion is to take nihilism seriously as an opportunity, not as a system of personal identification which would be its absolute worst function and form. He admits this to himself at the beginning of of <span style="font-style: italic;">Enlightenment and Extinction</span>. "This book was spurred by the conviction that this apparently banal assertion harbors hidden depths which have yet to be sounded by philosophers..." For Brassier, there are hidden depths beyond nihilism's popularized connotations of "existence is meaningless." These depths we will explore through this text. To start off, it would be good to say what nihilism is not. This negative impulse will serve us in understanding its affirmative and opportunistic function. "First and foremost, it does not treat nihilism as a disease, requiring diagnosis and the recommendation of an antidote. But neither does it extol the pathos of finitude as a bulwark against metaphysical hubris..." At the very least, the concept of nihilism is not to be understood as <span style="font-style: italic;">a problem</span>. This nihilistic concept is an explanation and an opportunity, not a psychological disease that needs to be "cured." On the other hand, this concept is not to be understood as a <span style="font-style: italic;">social call to experiential relativism</span> regardless of how much the latter may be observed in the concept when it's fleshed out. There's a sense that Brassier is aiming at general Heideggerianism when he sees nihilism not as something to be understood in terms of privileging finitude against classical metaphysics. We can sense that finitude becomes a transcendental concept for Brassier and hence lacks the substance of nihilism's "quality" by this transcendence, regardless of how secular the concept of "finitude" may be. A transcendental concept need not be simply religious to give the thinker a sense of well-being. Giving myself the luxury of generalization, I would say that right now (culturally speaking) is a heightened time of situating <span style="font-style: italic;">secularized idols</span>, whether this be passive pantheism (E.G. tarot cards) or hyper-aware environmentalism. As we learn from Nietzsche, the Christian God can be dead while God(s) still remain (literally, Nietzsche's impulse to call his text <span style="font-style: italic;">Twilight of the Idols</span>). Brassier wants to warn the reader from nostalagizing finitude in hopes of curtailing the self-satisfied nature that <span style="font-style: italic;">being in general</span> takes. It's this self-satisfied quality to <span style="font-style: italic;">being </span>that will make <span style="font-style: italic;">being</span> not understand the depths of nihilism, and instead where shirts with skulls on the front as a grand finale to ones <span style="font-style: italic;">identity finding</span>. As was stated above, this would be the opposite of nihilism's impulse, and really any thinking that could be called <span style="font-style: italic;">philosophical</span>. In general, the protection of a concept from a stabilized identity is a conspicuous philosophical gesture. This loyalty is large with Brassier's desire of understanding nihilism. Nihilism is neither a problem nor a solution. Death as God is not a solution when there's no problem to begin with. Instead of seeing nihilism as a problem or a transcendental solution, Brassier sees nihilism as "an achievement of intellectual maturity." As we watch the<span style="font-style: italic;"> Twilight of the Idols</span>, we are growing up. Also, what nihilism is not, is "a pathological exacerbation of subjectivism, which annuls the world and reduces reality to a correlate of the absolute ego, but on the contrary is the unavoidable corollary of the realist conviction that there is a mind-independent reality, which, despite the presumptions of human narcissism, is indifferent to our existence and oblivious to the 'values' and 'meanings' which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable. Nature is not our or anyone's 'home,' nor a particularly beneficent progenitor. Philosophers would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. Philosophy should be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem." I let Brassier speak here beyond the point I wanted to intend to give the reader a more direct gateway to Brassier's impulse. Certainly, seeing the possibility of Philosophy as a "pathetic twinge of human self-esteem" speaks loudly. Much like Husserl, Brassier sees Philosophy as a mature opportunity for <span style="font-style: italic;">being</span>, not a subjective identification of topical "meaningfulness." If the mind tells us anything for the realist, it's that this mind-reality happens regardless of our presupposition of "human freedom." The mind happens regardless of what we think of as "valuable" and "meaningful" which for Brassier are expressions to make what we call "nature" more hospitable. It will be interesting to understand how Brassier explains this phenomena of the "belief in human freedom." It will be interesting to see how Brassier explains "belief" in general. But to our point, the mind independent reality for the realist is a mind that happens without the figurative explanations of language. With this in mind, we can understand Brassier as relying on cognitive science and "hard science." If the "hard science" of the mind should rely on metaphors itself, it will be closer to the realist conception that offers no <span style="font-style: italic;">end</span> to its investigations. Scientific metaphor will be more faithful to philosophical inquiry than <span style="font-style: italic;">freedom speak</span>, so to speak. With a closer look at the scientific nature of "Nature," we will see that "Nature" is not our home nor a particularly beneficent progenitor. "Nature" is not here to help us out. "Nature" can certainly harm us and this can be seen not only in natural disasters but more specific and interesting examples like the self-cannibalism of leaf-insects which Brassier goes into later in the text. It's with this in mind that Philosophy should not provide itself an end and meaning ahead of time in its investigations if its to be a rigorous science that acts "despite the presumptions of human narcissism." Again, it will be interesting to understand the nihilistic-realist understanding of the "presumptions of human narcissism" that Brassier realizes exists.<br /><br />For Brassier, "nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity." "Thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of living; indeed, they can and have been pitted against the latter." It's with this in mind that as readers we need to be thinkers first and foremost rather than "living beings" with this text if we are to read it faithfully. We can't see nihilism as a "problem" that needs to be solved, and even a "problem that can't be solved" as we eternally sulk in despair at the obvious connotation belonging to nihilism. We are to take the concept of nihilism as something much deeper than "happy being sad." It is neither an existential problem nor a psychological problem which basically mean the same things. We have an intellectual opportunity to see things exactly how they are without seeing them "as is," and "for us." This thinking will not know whether it coincides with the benefit of man. It will not know whether it coincides with anything. This thinking starts very much in the same place as the phenomenological epoch but flows into different places than phenomenology, mainly I think because Brassier's nihilism has the luxury of technology on his side (cognitive and ethological technology and discovery). To Brassier's credit though, he has no problem not having a problem with technology. He takes Adorno and Horkheimer to task for nostalogizing a pre-industrial world much like he took Heideggerian finitude to task for nostalogizing a secularized idol of death which we spoke on above. It will be important to understand Brassier's criticism of Adorno and Horkheimer coming up in this text to fully grasp the realist attitude in not mythologizing anything. As readers of D&G's <span style="font-style: italic;">Anti-Oedipus</span> we already have a strong start to de-mythologizing existence. We hope that Brassier will take us further. His criticism of Adorno and Horheimer's purist proclivities will show Brassier as someone faithful to realism. At this very preliminary stage, we can understand Brassier as someone not only faithful to realism and nihilism, but to the task of Philosophy itself. <br /></div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div>Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06496620812252728998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9023023321170051666.post-61971355606319470452010-12-01T13:33:00.000-08:002010-12-01T13:35:10.298-08:00Final Quotes from Anti-Oedipus<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_KUimPH_5PHU/TOvsieO5kPI/AAAAAAAAARA/HizGe-liSHE/s1600/namib-desert-air-.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 268px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_KUimPH_5PHU/TOvsieO5kPI/AAAAAAAAARA/HizGe-liSHE/s400/namib-desert-air-.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5542783843384791282" border="0" /></a><br />"<span style="font-style: italic;">You weren't born Oedipus, you caused it to grow in yourself; and you aim to get out of it through fantasy, through castration, but this in turn you have caused to grow in Oedipus - namely, in yourself: the horrible circle. Shit on your whole mortifying, imaginary, and symbolic theater. What does schizoanalysis ask? Nothing more than a bit of a relation to the outside, a little real reality. And we claim the right to a radical laxity, a radical incompetence - the right to enter the analyst's office and say it smells bad there. It reeks of the great death and the little ego.</span>"<br /><br />"<span style="font-style: italic;">To confess, to whine, to complain, to commiserate, always demands a toll. To sing it doesn't cost you a penny.</span>"<br /><br />"<span style="font-style: italic;">To those who say that escaping is not courageous, we answer: ...Courage consists, however, in agreeing to flee rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges. Values, morals, homelands, religions, and these private certitudes that our vanity and our complacency bestow generously on us, have as many deceptive sojourns as the world arranges for those who think they are stranding straight and at ease, among stable things. They know nothing of the immense flight that transports them, ignorant of themselves, in the monotonous buzzing of their ever quickening steps that lead them impersonally in a great immobile movement. Consider the example of one who having had the revelation of the mysterious drift, is no longer able to stand living in the false pretenses of residence.</span>"<br /><br />"<span style="font-style: italic;">Let us consider for a moment the motivations that lead someone to be psychoanalyzed: it involves a situation of economic dependence that has become unbearable for desire, or full of conflicts for the investment of desire. The psychoanalyst, who says so many things about the necessity for money in the cure, remains supremely indifferent to the questions of who is footing the bill. For example, the analysis reveals the unconscious conflicts of a woman with her husband, but the husband is paying for his wife's analysis.</span>"<br /><br />"<span style="font-style: italic;">For the unconscious of schizoanalysis is unaware of persons, aggregates, and laws, and of images, structures, and symbols. It is an orphan...It is not an orphan in the sense that the father's name would designate an absence, but in the sense that the unconscious reproduces itself wherever the names of history designate present intensities ('the sea of proper names'). The unconscious is not figurative, since its figural is abstract, the figure-schiz. It is not structural, nor is it symbolic, for its reality is that of the Real in its very production, in its very inorganization. It is not representative, but solely machinic, and productive.</span>"<br /><br />"<span style="font-style: italic;">What makes the schizophrenic ill, since the cause of the illness is not schizophrenia as a process? What transforms the breakthrough into a breakdown? It is the constrained arrest of the process, or its continuation in the void, or the way in which it is forced to take itself as a goal.</span>"<br /><br />"<span style="font-style: italic;">Psychoanalysis ought to be a song of live, or else be worth nothing at all. It ought, practically, to teach us to sing life. And see how the most defeated, sad song of emanates from it: eiapopeia</span>."<br /><br />"<span style="font-style: italic;">...the product of analysis should be a free and joyous person, a carrier of the life flows, capable of carrying them all the way into the desert and decoding them - even if this idea necessarily took on the appearance of a crazy idea, given what had become of analysis.</span>"<br /><br />"<span style="font-style: italic;">There is no need to tell all over how psychoanalysis culminates in a theory of culture that takes up again the age-old task of the ascetic ideal, Nirvana, the cultural extract, judging life, belittling life, measuring life against death, and only retaining from life what the death of death wants very much to leave us with - a sublime resignation. As Reich says, when psychoanalysis began to speak of Eros, the whole world breathed a sign of relief: one knew what this meant, and that everything was going to unfold within a mortified life, since Thanatos was now the partner of Eros, for worse but also for better.</span>"<br /><br />"<span style="font-style: italic;">No 'gay liberation movement' is possible as long as homosexuality is caught up in a relation of exclusive disjunction with heterosexuality, a relation that ascribes both to a common Oedipal and castrating stock, charged with ensuring only their differentiation in two non-communicating series, instead of bringing to light their reciprocal inclusion and their transverse communication in the decoded flows of desire.</span>"Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06496620812252728998noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9023023321170051666.post-38041214347794468642010-11-25T07:20:00.000-08:002010-11-29T14:21:35.244-08:00Rupturing Causality; Anti-Oedipus, Conclusion<div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_KUimPH_5PHU/TO6Bb4hOrOI/AAAAAAAAARI/XZuiu1Q01cc/s1600/Butterfly-Flap.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 299px; height: 169px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_KUimPH_5PHU/TO6Bb4hOrOI/AAAAAAAAARI/XZuiu1Q01cc/s400/Butterfly-Flap.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5543510507367869666" border="0" /></a>"<span style="font-size:85%;">When a butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the world, it can cause a hurricane in another part of the world." Why do some people get off on this shit?</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">There has been one consistent theme throughout <span style="font-style: italic;">Anti-Oedipus, </span>and that's been the extrication of <span style="font-style: italic;">the personality </span>which can synonymously be understood as<span style="font-style: italic;"> ideology</span>. The incessant criticisms of psychoanalysis have been instinctively grounded in the idea that there are people who want <span style="font-style: italic;">you to be you</span>, without tracing the phenomena of the personality to places like Platonic substantiality, and places much prior to that in the filiative structures of primitive civilization which D&G elaborate on in chapter three of <span style="font-style: italic;">Anti-Oedipus</span>. Schizoanalysis as an attack on psychoanalysis can be summed up as criticizing the goal of analysis: to find <span style="font-style: italic;">your</span> place within the social structure (Oedipus). Time and time again, D&G will state that psychoanalysis will make itself into its own truth without recognizing its own development and own metaphysics (even to the point of not recognizing who "Freud" really was, or wrote). To make it even more plain, analysis is really ignorant. Schizoanalysis will form itself by knocking out psychoanalysis as a truth unto itself. D&G's insistence on the disjunctive molecular aspects to vital life are directly opposed to the molar aggregate that sums things up, that<span style="font-style: italic;"> sums up the body as a you</span>. In psychoanalysis this "molar-gesture" is the process of "finding yourself." When taken to a phenomenological level, which D&G do without recognizing it (it's somewhat obvious that D&G have never really read the primary texts of phenomenology, and that their language would gain a clarity with this type of reading), they find <span style="font-style: italic;">causality</span> as the sort of metaphysical operation that causes the <span style="font-style: italic;">personality as goal</span>. This is an important step because it doesn't simply trace the aims of psychoanalysis to Plato, aggrandized mythology, or even surplus-value, but to a much more fundamental level of <span style="font-style: italic;">being</span> in <span style="font-style: italic;">causality</span>. With that being said, I think it's time to move onto anti-correlationist theory in my own reading with Speculative Realism. After this text, I will be taking on Brassier's <span style="font-style: italic;">Nihil Unbound</span> to become acquainted with this thought. D&G get to this at the end of <span style="font-style: italic;">Anti-Oedipus</span> but only after their focal interest is put in place (Schizoanalysis instead of psychoanalysis). This isn't because of a "lack" on their part (Deleuze wrote <span style="font-style: italic;">Difference and Repetition</span> before his works with Guattari), but because of a "sociological move" in their thought and writing, the sociological move that Husserl implicitly warned against for philosophy in his <span style="font-style: italic;">Crises</span>. In the end, Anti-Oedipus is one book that was influenced by sociology (Guatarri) as much as philosophy (Deleuze). It's an important book because sometimes theory without any examples in the<span style="font-style: italic;"> socius </span>is very difficult to understand. But make no mistake, <span style="font-style: italic;">Anti-Oedipus</span> is <span style="font-style: italic;">proclaiming a way of being that is better off for being</span>, in other words, it's being sociological. We can have fun with this book in its criticism of <span style="font-style: italic;">modern modes of being</span>, but it's always important to realize that things will always phenomenally happen on their own regardless of a persons critique of anything. It's here where I stand faithful to phenomenology regardless of how powerful a book <span style="font-style: italic;">Anti-Oedipus</span> was. The pure observation of the phenomenologist still stands as the most faithful to experience <span style="font-style: italic;">as is</span>, even if it's obviously figurative in it's mode of expressing experience <span style="font-style: italic;">as is</span>. Nonetheless, we can certainly learn much for ourselves as living beings<span style="font-style: italic;"> living now </span>with <span style="font-style: italic;">Anti-Oedipus. </span>This book can help us avoid some pretty nasty traps while we have to live. For this, I respect this text and would easily recommend it. Lets move onto D&G finding their way into causality as the metaphysical grounds for <span style="font-style: italic;">personal interests</span> and the <span style="font-style: italic;">personality</span> in general.<br /><br />"On the one hand, in fact, the investment of interest fundamentally conceals the paranoiac investment of desire, and reinforces it as much as it conceals it: it covers over the irrational character of the paranoiac investment under an existing order of interests, of causes and means, of aims and reasons; or else the investment of interest itself gives rise to and creates those interests that rationalize the paranoiac investment; or yet again, an effectively revolutionary preconscious investment fully maintains a paranoiac investment at the level of the libido, to the extent that the new socius continues to subordinate the entire production of desire in the name of the higher interest of the revolution and the inevitable sequences of causality." Something to understand right off the bat is the synonymous nature between "preconscious investment" and <span style="font-style: italic;">personal interest</span>. The preconscious is a Freudian term signifying an archive of things that we can remember. It may be something that is in the back of our minds that we aren't consciously thinking of right now. One can take a personal interest into something, forget about it, but it still remains in their mind somewhere. This place where it remains and where it can be recalled is refereed to as the preconscious level. For D&G, when one invests themselves with a personal interest, they are concealing their natural desire. When one gives oneself a goal, something to specifically be interested in (in differentiation from others), this is opposed to the unconscious desire that has no interest, but simply has intensities. This <span style="font-style: italic;">irrationality</span> becomes repressed under <span style="font-style: italic;">personality interests</span>; <span style="font-style: italic;">things that you would like to see yourself doing</span>. <span style="font-style: italic;">You</span> have reason to <span style="font-style: italic;">believe</span> that this is the proper course of action to take. <span style="font-style: italic;">You</span> have <span style="font-style: italic;">means</span> for achieving your goals. There are certain events that have caused <span style="font-style: italic;">you</span> to have aims. For example, I had a dream (an "epiphany") of someone playing guitar. I think to myself that this<span style="font-style: italic;"> must mean something</span>. This epiphany <span style="font-style: italic;">causes</span> me to aim towards being this epiphany. This sign showed the way. <span style="font-style: italic;">This sign signified my existence</span>. This interest that I invested in <span style="font-style: italic;">myself </span>by the cause of a random "meaning sequence" (please recognize the irony) can rationalize the unconscious intensity that happens to my body and this is easy to understand. Instead of seeing my body as going through a process of neuro-physiological intensity in the moment where things happened because of spontaneous breaks within a flow, I break with the break and stop the flow. I invest interest in that break where I stop <span style="font-style: italic;">to see what's going on</span>. I don't break and continue on flowing. <span style="font-style: italic;"> I like the break</span>. <span style="font-style: italic;">I settle in the break</span>. <span style="font-style: italic;">I am the break</span>. I invest in the break and aggrandize the break. The break becomes an interest. I see it <span style="font-style: italic;">as something</span>. At this point, the unconscious desire (desiring-machines) moves into preconscious desire. I remember the break because it satisfied me. It had value. I will add more value to it (surplus-value) by making a memory of the break. Again, I am the break. I will be the ideology of this break. The preconscious is a memory attached to <span style="font-style: italic;">the personality</span> during a process of unconscious desire. Actually the personality happens because of this attachment. How the process of this attachment happens is a question put towards phenomenology. This new ideology, this new<span style="font-style: italic;"> socius </span>will continue to "subordinate the entire production of desire." Desire will be subordinated to ideology and revolutionary interests. Now, "revolutionary interests" does not simply have to have Marxian connotations. To be sure it can, but "revolutionary interests" can simply be taken as any preconscious interest at all, in other words, <span style="font-style: italic;">ideology</span>. Anything that I take to be <span style="font-style: italic;">me</span> and I solidify as<span style="font-style: italic;"> me</span> is a "revolutionary interest" in the sense that the unconscious break had enough power to create a personality. This is revolutionary on a purely physiological level; essentially <span style="font-style: italic;">the creation of the personality</span>. On the other hand, we can take "revolutionary interests" literally and have it mean a personal ideology that wants to create a sociological revolution where the person thinks it would be "liberating the masses" for X,Y,Z, etc reasons (you fill in the blank of all the boring reasons that there could possibly be). Either way and in each case, we have something called "interested parties." Heidegger's ontology in <span style="font-style: italic;">Being and Time </span>would strikingly understand this under the category of "<span style="font-style: italic;">looking around for something to do.</span>" We dive deeper into the foundations of the subordination of desire though when we understand the "revolution" in the first instance where what happens unconsciously becomes ideology in the most general sense. This will need to be addressed later on in other texts (again, phenomenology does this figuratively). This preconscious investment that manifests "interested parties," "subordinates the entire production of desire in the name of the higher interest of the revolution and the inevitable sequences of causality." The higher interest of the revolution and the inevitable sequences of causality. What does this mean? Again, the interest of the revolution is just that, an interest, <span style="font-style: italic;">not a desire</span>. It's something that somebody <span style="font-style: italic;">thinks that they have to do</span>, not what they love to do (<span style="font-style: italic;">eros</span>). The break happened, the flow stopped, and revolution became idealized. Now what are the "inevitable sequences of causality?" These inevitable sequences of causality are everything that happens after desire becomes idealized into an interest. <span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>Desire becomes <span style="font-style: italic;">this</span>. Because I think this way, I have to do this. Because I had this epiphany about this, I have to do these things. Because I see people earning a lesser wage than they're entitled to whom I never met, I have to protest on behalf of their struggle that I never experienced for myself. My life is devoted to a cause <span style="font-style: italic;">because</span> its<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>my sole interest in life. <span style="font-style: italic;">I am coded</span>. <span style="font-style: italic;">I believe in this, so therefore I do this </span>(I believe therefore I am: Ideology). After I do this, I do something else to further the cause. When I become ideology, pure causality follows in things that have to happen because of my personality. I'm coded to do things because I clinged onto a <span style="font-style: italic;">break</span> in pure desire. D&G ask us, the preconsciously invested, to do something different. They ask us to "discover the necessity for a different sort of investment." They ask us to "perform a kind of rupture with causality as well as a calling in question of aims and interests." When we are preconsciously invested, we have shown that we are "interested parties." We are ideologies. We are <span style="font-style: italic;">personalities</span>. But when we recognize this, we can discover a new way of investment. This investment is rupturing causality. What does this mean? <span style="font-style: italic;">This precisely means to break the break that has caused us to break and go back into the flow</span>. Instead of finding "what to do next" after we are in a break that we somehow become satisfied in (value), we don't find what this ideology causes in is. Instead, we break with the ideology and let no cause happen to us in the name of the ideology that has broken us. We defer back to unconscious desire. What we do here is preconsciously invest into unconscious desire itself so we enter back into unconscious desire, in other words; enter back into the flow instead of breaking at the break. D&G aren't saying that one can't<span style="font-style: italic;"> take a break</span>. D&G aren't saying that the unconscious doesn't break in the flow. It's quite the opposite for D&G. There are breaks in the <span style="font-style: italic;">break-flow</span> of unconscious desire. All of <span style="font-style: italic;">Anti-Oedipus</span> has been grounded in the theory of the schizophrenic break-flow, but it must be noted that they have been using the flow against the breaks for obvious reasons. The breaks become satisfied (ideology is like taking a vacation from the unconscious). The flows keep moving while the breaks stop moving. When the breaks become <span style="font-style: italic;">anthropomorphized</span>, it's here where <span style="font-style: italic;">being </span>needs to invest back into itself, back into its unconscious desire. "This cannot be achieved except at the cost of, and by means of a rupture with, causality. Desire is an exile, desire is a desert that traverses the body without organs and makes us pass from one of its faces to the other." D&G refer back to the subject-group in distinction to the subjugated-group (which we discussed in the last post) where the subjugated-group is defined by "an order of causes and aims, and itself weaves a whole system of macroscopic relations that determined the large aggregates under a formation of sovereignty." This is in distinction to the subject-group who "have as their sole cause a rupture with causality." Certainly, this subject-group will have its own "objective factors" that can be traced in a causal series where we can find out how the rupture of causality was possible in the first place, but this account is for the "reality this rupture assumes at a given moment, in a given place." In other words, the "memory-traces" being done by the schizophrenic subject-group will be the task of finding out where and how intensities happen to the body. It won't investigate how a personality is formed. It will recognize where the <span style="font-style: italic;">body trembled. </span>It won't idealize this trembling, but will simply mark it out as <span style="font-style: italic;">something that happened </span>and move on. The subject group will find where desire has happened to itself. It will see where it happened and when it happened. It will constantly discover the intensity of unconscious desires and move onto other places. This "constant discovering" will be the <span style="font-style: italic;">breaks</span> in the subject group. <span style="font-style: italic;">Discovering is breaking</span>. When not discovering, it will be flowing. <span style="font-style: italic;">Being</span> will be the unconscious desire of the schizophrenic break-flow in the subject-group. This is what Schizoanalysis would "look like." It will find things that are happening to "itself" and forget about them as quickly as them came. It won't ask "what do we do next with this?" There is nothing next to do. Something happened, and that's it. It would be an amnesiatic "work." For the unconscious doesn't have a memory. It simply reacts to an environment outside of itself...all together as a body without organs.<br /><br />This is obviously a massive leap that D&G want us to take in<span style="font-style: italic;"> Anti-Oedipus</span>. They don't ask us to accomplish the Schizoanalytical task all in one time. It's obvious that they wouldn't ask this of the reader becomes it's not a task to be accomplished but a preconscious investment that will happen all the time. If it could be classified as a "task," it would be eternal much like phenomenology. As phenomenology never ends as a descriptive science of phenomena, schizoanalysis would never end as an understanding of momentary breaks within a flow. The key movement in schizoanalysis that is somewhat of a "radical" gesture is this modification of "preconscious investment." Instead of remembering something and storing phenomena for recall, the preconscious would invest into not remembering anything at all, except forgetting something that it may remember. It would literally invest into forgetting. Implied in forgetfulness is a motive to forget, meaning something was remembered. Something in phenomena happened to a body at a certain intense degree that had enough of an impact to be invested into a preconscious. In schizoanalysis though, the subject realizes this impact, opens itself up to it in its entirety, and then forgets it flowing back into phenomena. Schizoanalysis then could be understood as a different attempt at negating repression. While psychoanalysis tends to harbor on a "repressed feeling" by continually following the chain of this "repressed feeling" to a father-mother complex or an archaic mythology, schizoanalysis wouldn't harbor the "repression" or even call it a "repression." Instead it would say that an intensity happened to the body and would open itself up to that intensity. That intensity somehow was invested into the preconscious, but in schizoanalysis, the preconscious is programmed to forget the intensity to move on in the flow, instead of breaking in the break, which would define <span style="font-style: italic;">you as you</span>. There is no "a-ha" moment in schizoanalysis. There is no "so this is what that meant!" in schizoanalysis. There is something that happened to a body which the body realizes and soon forgets once it's enlightened by this realization. It breaks, then flows, then breaks again, and flows again...on and on. As a final note, the last passage of <span style="font-style: italic;">Anti-Oedipus </span>will fully clarify the "task" for D&G and schizoanalysis.<br />"<span style="font-style: italic;">The task of schizoanalysis is ultimately that of discovering for every case the nature of the libidinal investments of the social field, their possible internal conflicts, their relationships with the preconscious investments of the same field, their possible conflicts with these - in short, the entire interplay of the desiring-machines and the repressing of desire. Completing this process and not arresting it, not making it turn about in the void, not assigning it a goal. We'll never go too far with the deterritorialization, the decoding of flows. For the new earth is not to be found in the neurotic or perverse reterritorializations that arrest the process or assign it goals; it is no more behind than ahead, it coincides with the completion of the process of desiring-production, this process that is always and already complete as it proceeds, and as long as it proceeds. It therefore remains for us to see how, effectively, simultaneously, these various tasks of schizoanalysis proceed.</span>"<br /><br /></div></div>Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06496620812252728998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9023023321170051666.post-2280364579055308972010-11-18T14:43:00.001-08:002010-11-29T14:03:26.088-08:00Revolutionary Repression; Anti-Oedipus, Part 11<div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_KUimPH_5PHU/TOWsJH9zZ7I/AAAAAAAAAQo/amPIG4XqPks/s1600/bad_hobbies.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 214px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_KUimPH_5PHU/TOWsJH9zZ7I/AAAAAAAAAQo/amPIG4XqPks/s320/bad_hobbies.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5541024189306333106" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">La Chinoise</span>. When you have nothing to do and no imagination, you come up with shit hobbies.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">As we are just about at the conclusion of <span style="font-style: italic;">Anti-Oedipus, </span>we find D&G charmingly berating all forms of the Oedipus complex at the greatest distances that would seem <span style="font-style: italic;">protected</span> under "social critique." Luckily for us as readers of D&G, we are warmed by the aggression of the Schizoanalytical tactic. It reaches everywhere. Wherever the despotic complex is formed in a territory, D&G move to unmask it. To their credit, they do this at a time when this would seem <span style="font-style: italic;">unfashionable</span> (Paris: 1968-1972). Undoing the limits of Oedipus would have its limits for most people, those limits being fashion-sense (understood in the most abstract sense possible; <span style="font-style: italic;">ideology</span>). For D&G though, they're sort of having an immense satirical laugh at the <span style="font-style: italic;">card carriers</span>, much like the spectators we talked about in the last post who watch people in the ring throwing phantom punches at each other who didn't know that there was a small audience outside of them, laughing at them. Luckily for us, we get to join in the laughter if we're honest enough with ourselves like D&G have been able to accomplish. Yes, we are more alienated than ever before, but we are laughing like we've never laughed before. Almost at the end of <span style="font-style: italic;">Anti-Oedipus</span>, D&G distinguish between the <span style="font-style: italic;">subject-group</span> and the <span style="font-style: italic;">revolutionary-group</span>. This will be a strong step forward for the idea of Schizoanalysis because it will negate the <span style="font-style: italic;">negative style</span> that one thinks<span style="font-style: italic;"> is being outside of Oedipus</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">opposed to Oedipus</span>. In general, the opposing force will be someone in the ring we laugh at. Instead of Ivan Drago, it will be Glass Joe (<span style="font-style: italic;">Rock IV</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Punchout!</span>). It won't be the machine that destroys ("Whatever he is, He destroys!"), it will be the fighter who really doesn't know how to fight ("Watch the jaw!! Don't hit my jaw!"). A key to understanding this distinction made by D&G is the distinction between<span style="font-style: italic;"> interest </span>and <span style="font-style: italic;">unconscious desire</span>. More specifically, it will be the area where unconscious desire trails off into an <span style="font-style: italic;">interest </span>of any sort. Its most hilarious manifestation will be in the <span style="font-style: italic;">class-warrior </span>who really has nothing to do (which actually isn't what's funny), and no imagination to go along with it (this is the funny part). It's here where<span style="font-style: italic;"> interest as negation</span> manifests. It's here where students pretend to empathize with labor unions. The laborers will labor for untold amounts of time unconsciously trying to grasp their <span style="font-style: italic;">sisyphean </span>predicament while students have their summers off doing nothing but sitting around criticizing circumstances they aren't part of, in other words, people with bad hobbies (This phenomena was not just stationary to late 60's Paris, but is evident today in many different political structures). D&G go into this phenomena in a more appropriate and abstract way for the sake of Schizoanalysis. It would be easy to do what I just did, but it at least serves as a setup to what D&G want to describe in the<span style="font-style: italic;"> interest-consciousness, </span>and how it's most inconspicuous forms must be midwifed. With that being said, D&G are very trustworthy authors. They owe no allegiance to anything, and in turn do the "work" of Schizoanalysis faithfully.<br /><br />"It is understandable, therefore, that a group can be revolutionary from the standpoint of class interest and its preconscious investments, but not be so - and even remain fascist and police-like - from the standpoint of its libidinal investment. Truly revolutionary preconscious interests do not necessarily imply unconscious investments of the same nature; an apparatus of interest never takes the place of a machine of desire." The investment into a<span style="font-style: italic;"> class interest </span>can remain fascist and police-like. The investment into any interest is an invested interest that breaks with a flow and <span style="font-style: italic;">stays in the break</span> (there are plenty plenty plenty examples of this in modern <span style="font-style: italic;">feminist theory</span>. Some of these thinkers are the exact definition of <span style="font-style: italic;">despotic</span>). What at first seems like an opening of a flow that will break and flow on its own can quickly become a police-state dialogue where if one doesn't follow the <span style="font-style: italic;">codes</span>, they will be shown how <span style="font-style: italic;">things are still backwards after all this time of thinking that "things have moved forward." </span>This <span style="font-style: italic;">forcing forward </span>(<span style="font-style: italic;">forced progression</span>) is a code that doesn't flow, but breaks at an<span style="font-style: italic;"> ideology of the marginalized</span>, the ideology of the slave, <span style="font-style: italic;">the loser</span>. What an unconscious investment would "be" is not this investment manifested into an <span style="font-style: italic;">interest</span>. The machine of desire that flows and breaks forever is at a distance from an investment into a social field,<span style="font-style: italic;"> the social field with interested parties</span>. <span style="font-style: italic;">The unconscious desire, the desiring machine is not interested</span>. It happens on its own without conception, without goal. When one has an interested goal, this is not to be taken as a molecular desire that happens at a schizophrenic "pace." It's to be taken as a molar aggregate of ideas trying to be accomplished, in other words, <span style="font-style: italic;">ideology</span>. This apparatus of interest won't take the place of the eternal movement of the molecular desiring machines that flow and break at their own "pace." Certainly, pure desire can manifest into ideology, and this is how ideology is possible in the first place, but this <span style="font-style: italic;">unchecked ideology</span> isn't the "purity" that one seeks when one is trying to find the<span style="font-style: italic;"> naked body</span>. It's a <span style="font-style: italic;">style </span>that will clothe the nakedness that one was initially seeking. One takes off the pants, doesn't like what they see, so puts on thrift-store jeans. Again, having your cake and eating it to without knowing that you're as full as someone who regularly eats at Applebees. The question is checking the ideology when it becomes just that, and <span style="font-style: italic;">breaking right there</span>, and flowing again wherever the unconscious desire takes it. "A revolutionary group at the preconscious level remains a subjugated group, even in seizing power, as long as this power itself refers to a form of force that continues to enslave and crush desiring-production. The moment it is preconsciously revolutionary, such a group already presents all the unconscious characteristics of a subjugated group: the subordination to a socius as a fixed support that attributes to itself the productive forces, extracting and absorbing the surplus value therefrom...the phenomena of group 'superegoization,' narcissism, and hierarchy - the mechanisms for the repression of desire." The group who seizes power<span style="font-style: italic;"> for the betterment of what's already going on </span>(the implicit logic of a group who wants to <span style="font-style: italic;">seize power</span>) is subjugated under its own weight of<span style="font-style: italic;"> wanting something different</span>. The <span style="font-style: italic;">desire for difference </span>(<span style="font-style: italic;">the interest for difference</span>) is the opposite pole of unconscious desire, which may just appear the same to an outside perspective. When desiring-production becomes ideology, the agents are enslaved to their own ideology for the reason of being satisfied in the creativity found in their unconscious desiring-production. What they felt in that one moment, what they felt in that one <span style="font-style: italic;">break</span>, was <span style="font-style: italic;">enough</span>. The agents are full (they are fat). These revolutionary agents won't diet from their full feeling of being creative <span style="font-style: italic;">once</span>. Instead, this spontaneous creativity of unconscious production will become an ideology trying to create that<span style="font-style: italic;"> one moment</span> as a <span style="font-style: italic;">memory</span> that they hope will never cease. It will relive a moment in memory that will never be the same as the moment that wants to be created again. This privileged memory is ideology. This unchecked creativity is ideology. <span style="font-style: italic;">Ideology is fat</span>. The unconscious desire that flowed is subjugated to the <span style="font-style: italic;">socius</span> where it becomes a "fixed support." This "fixed support" is <span style="font-style: italic;">personal satisfaction</span>. In the <span style="font-style: italic;">socius</span>, the revolutionary memory is <span style="font-style: italic;">at home</span>. It's at home in the negation of something that's ostensibly outside of itself. It defines itself in marginalization. It meets others who define themselves in marginalization. It becomes a power group of self-defined marginalized people (anyone who would tell you that they listen to <span style="font-style: italic;">indie music</span>). The surplus-value that is gained in this <span style="font-style: italic;">revolutionary manifestation </span>will have its own market. It's not just the kids who go to the clothing stores that sell the razor blade bracelets. It's the adults who are noticeably satisfied when eating a tomato from Whole Foods. The marginalized find their home in the surplus-market, the surplus-market that they thought was opposed to their unconscious desire. When did it happen that one man or one woman became satisfied in <span style="font-style: italic;">one</span> creative act? When did they let ideology take the place of their unconscious desire? The satisfied personality: how did it happen? The satisfied marginalized group are coded to the degree of superegoization. If you don't like this band, you don't get the raw emotion of music! If you don't eat this organic egg from a chickens ass then you're eating bad food that's eating away at your soul! Don't do that! Don't do this! You should be doing this! You should be doing that! Ok....Mommy. Ok....Daddy. Or you could just get pregnant already and get it over with. Or you could just let the semen go, if you had the balls. How amazingly unnoticeable narcissism can be! How unnoticeable the mommy-daddy complex can be. You don't actually have to be mommy or daddy. You can be the super-mommy and daddy. You can be the infertile judge. The pride of abstinence and infertility, this hyper-mommy and daddy, this hyper-law and territory. <span style="font-style: italic;">The superego, the secret narcissism of the revolutionary...the salient repression of desire</span>. Those who are prideful enough to take the position of the <span style="font-style: italic;">forward-movers </span>are Oedipus. They know the way forward. They look into the sun in pictures. They look over the horizon. <span style="font-style: italic;">They run at the moment of real intensity</span>. "A <span style="font-style: italic;">subject-group</span>, on the contrary, is a group whose libidinal investments are themselves revolutionary; it causes desire to penetrate into the social field, and subordinates the socius or the form of power to desiring-production; productive of desire and a desire that produces, the subject-group invents always mortal formations that exorcise the effusion in it of a death instinct; it opposes real coefficients of transversality to the symbolic determinations of subjugation, coefficients without a hierarchy or a group superego." D&G define the subject-group contrary to the revolutionary-group. Think of it literally. What is a subject group? It's a group of subjects. Nothing more can be said of it. It's a group of people that have no reason for being in a group in the first place, yet, they're in a group. The revolutionary-group on the other hand has a very specific reason for their group. To create ideological revolution! The subject-group though without a formal definition have libidinal investments. They are vital, not ideological. They have energy. <span style="font-style: italic;">This vital energy is revolutionary</span>. What manifests from this vital energy is not revolutionary. Nonetheless, this unconscious libidinal vital energy penetrates into the social field, <span style="font-style: italic;">but subordinates it's object to it's own desire</span>. The social field is at the guidance of unconscious desiring production. The social field doesn't even exist. It's a byproduct of a molecular process. This molecular process, these disjunctions at the molecular level are ignorant of the molar aggregate (the <span style="font-style: italic;">socius</span>). Desiring-production happens on a <span style="font-style: italic;">body without organs, </span>and the production keeps producing and flowing while breaking at spots to flow other ways. This is the subject-group that goes on its own. It invents <span style="font-style: italic;">mortal formations</span>, meaning that what it spontaneously creates doesn't become aggrandized into ideology. It doesn't become satisfied in <span style="font-style: italic;">one</span> creative moment where it would create its own memory as an ideology. Instead, it moves away from its <span style="font-style: italic;">creative form</span> no matter how "satisfied it felt" into something else that would happen ignorant of any <span style="font-style: italic;">personal satisfaction </span>that would happen to it. It's forms are always mortal. They will always die because they will always break from points and flow to new places<span style="font-style: italic;"> without recognition </span>of a temporality (this subject-group is really schizophrenic in the fact that it would be without temporality). The subject-group will cross over multiple stable lines it doesn't know are horizontal at unknown multiplicities. The lines, the horizontal lines of symbolic determination can only watch in ignorance at the transversal nature of the subject/schizo-group. It can only watch in amazement, and then eventually in marginalization. Ideology and the horizontal watch things pass by. They watch phenomena pass by as unmovable rocks themselves. There's light speed, and then there's no speed. The subject-group has no hierarchy or a superego. There is no territory. There is no "frontier." There are places always crossed and creations always left behind with no trace of memory for those places. This schizo flows, breaks, creates, and never stops in some place called <span style="font-style: italic;">home</span>, some territory that had always been waiting for <span style="font-style: italic;">me</span>.<br /><br />D&G are faithful to their anti-psychiatry instincts in Schizoanalysis by taking the <span style="font-style: italic;">revolutionary style</span> to task. It's here where they find ideology at its most pervasive, and it's most perverted. It's here where they find <span style="font-style: italic;">the cult of negativity, the cult of misanthropy. </span>The <span style="font-style: italic;">marginalized style </span>always finds its <span style="font-style: italic;">home</span>. It has its territory. It has it's law. It has its mother and father for however much it thinks it would like to displace these archetypes. It's in this<span style="font-style: italic;"> marginalized style </span>where repression is most prideful. It's where the marginalized style will never admit to being prideful while at the same time thinking it knows exactly what the world's woes are. Always a woe. Never a yes. Always <span style="font-style: italic;">something that needs to be changed</span>. Never a placid and passing observation at something that will always pass. <span style="font-style: italic;">The pride in difference</span>...<span style="font-style: italic;">the fascist personality</span>. The mask of "purity" that can so easily be interpreted from another party fuels this repression. This repression of unconscious desire is hidden under the sunshine and lollipop <span style="font-style: italic;">image</span> under the sun. "Images, nothing but images." Look at <span style="font-style: italic;">me</span> being free. I am here, and you are there. You are at the center, and I am at the outside, but I can still have everything that you have, but I can do <span style="font-style: italic;">more</span>! My surplus-existence is greater than yours! You see? I'm ahead of the game. You are behind. I was one of the chosen few amongst others in a group. You know when you see one of those people and think to yourself, "they just <span style="font-style: italic;">know</span>." I have this instinct, and you don't. I am an angel. I am an angel brought down to the earth to save it from all its iniquities. I am the <span style="font-style: italic;">image</span> of where things need to progress, and you, you are not the image of where things need to progress, and little do I know this is what makes me who I am. This is what gives me my angelic pride. This is what represses my unconscious desire; the fact that you are there and I am here, the fact that I think of you as a lowly being who should be more like <span style="font-style: italic;">me</span>, but don't come to close to <span style="font-style: italic;">me</span>, or there will no longer be a marginalized group of us angels anymore. I will have no <span style="font-style: italic;">outside</span> to stand in. There will be no center to differentiate myself from. <span style="font-style: italic;">I won't be special</span>. Actually, I'm not a sign of "purity" where you <span style="font-style: italic;">need</span> to progress to. I am a forced difference in order to show you where you can't get to. <span style="font-style: italic;">You can't be me</span>.<br /></div></div>Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06496620812252728998noreply@blogger.com0