Introduction to the Real; Enlightenment and Extinction, Part 7

As real as it gets...really.

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 Critiques. 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 being's 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 being that is there, 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."

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 Difference and Repetition.). 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 beings. If we allow Heidegger to call being the being that is there, 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 Dasein. 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 Being and Time. 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, sense 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.

The Decision; Enlightenment and Extinction, Part 6

Lacan's constipation in trying to understand the real; 6:10 - 7:15

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 being 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 as a state of being within. The "real" of what is happening within 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 Critique. 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 Critique 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 Critique 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 for us, 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 knowledge for us. 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 in itself. Certainly all experience can't be accounted for as a reference for us. We certainly only see experience for us, 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.'"

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 our possibility, 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.

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.

Thinking and Being; Enlightenment and Extinction, Part 4

Thinking about being....and botox. (Picture has nothing to do with the post)

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 self-identical in being-other 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 say 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 being what's not. With that being said, the absolute envelopes the possibility of any contradiction by understanding that everything is always identified. 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 principles of factiality 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.

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 A Treatise of Human Nature, 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 position of contiguity (proximity), 2. that they are in a position of priority meaning that one ball is before 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? We 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 desire to create laws 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 beings 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 perceptual beings is a natural argument in favor of idealism. In other words, being 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 being will see things in high or low probabilities and instinctively react to these probabilities. But for Brassier and Meillassoux, these are all our presumptions, 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 (being) 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 being. 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 everything in reference to us (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 (being) 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 (being) as "merely" contingent. The "merely" speaks for itself and instinctively guides the desire to wedge being from the arch-fossil.

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 being 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 being independent of thought that Meillassoux wants to overturn in his perception of philosophy's Ptolemaism? To be more poignant, what is being without thought? If we refer to an arche-time, that's fine, but why then rely on a concept of ontology (being) in general? While we can understand the desire for a Ptolemaic counter-revolution in philosophy, what's more difficult to understand is maintaining a concept of being 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 being can't happen without a separation from the concept being. Being is thought because it's a concept. 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 guarantor ("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 being (thinking being). "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 say 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 "being," then the guarantor is simply a thought linguistically expressed, like every other philosophy that would like to establish a reality for a mind-independent reality. At the end of Part 1 in Enlightenment and Extinction, 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 published book for example?


(At the very least, the concept of being shouldn't pertain to an arche-time. This arche-time wasn't "being.")

Oblivious Philosophers; Enlightenment and Extinction, Part 3

Assholes

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 ideal of pragmatism. This paved the way for the concept of anti-correlationism where Brassier wants to rigorously dismantle conceptual thought from Philosophy, and any sort of being in general. Later on, he gives a much more concrete example of this anti-correlationist gesture in the concept of the arche-fossil 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 us. 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 being, 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 being seen as having laws for us. But this can't be said for Brassier. We can't freely ascribe our laws 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 par excellence. This lack of understanding by the philosopher will further establish the nature of man to attribute everything outside of himself to himself (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.

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 Homo emerged about 2 million years ago." Brassier privileges natural science here in being able to index an arche-history 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 pure reason. We can't sit around and speculate to the fact that the genus Homo 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 Cosmos 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 Critique of Pure Reason 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 as 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 say, 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 knower, but further wants to prop the knowledge status 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 Dasein 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 our being 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 Dasein 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 our finitude. It doesn't exist outside of us. 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 our time. Throughout all this, the focus is always on the idea that we die, that we are alive, that time is here for us to die. If Heidegger's nostalagizing instincts were to be truly faithful, it would have nostalagized not thinking about being towards death (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 thinking and being 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 us and everything else that can possibly be outside of us. Out of all the infinite contingent possibilities that can happen in the universe, they have to be in reference to us. It's this idea that Brassier will take to task in the name of anti-correlationism in the following pages of Enlightenment and Extinction. 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 Dasein than the evangelical belief system because one has to do nothing except feel 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.

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 feeling guilty for the fact that we don't first have an understanding of consciousness because no one cares that we are thinking beings. We use what comes to us spontaneously to witness the arche-fossil 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 the Cosmos. 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.

The Virtues of Neuroscience; Enlightenment and Extinction, Part 2

The Virtuous Brain (always working for the benefit of itself?)

In the beginning of Enlightenment and Extinction, 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 always and already. We can understand the manifest image more specifically in the Heideggerian concept of Being, and Derrida's insistence of asking what the question of the question 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 being. 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 mysterious realm that post-Kantian philosophy would like to ascribe to this experience. Instead they find a less mystical, and more specific understanding of being before being 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 knowledge. 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 beings of consciousness 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 borrowing gestures. 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.

"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 Occam's razor; pragmatism's venerable grandchild. Now, what are these pragmatic virtues that are found in Occam's razor 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 end, 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 say that the superempirical virtues of pragmatism operate in the brain without having a lexicon of pragmatic concepts to be able to execute this description? 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 not saying 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 belief. What Churchland is erroneously saying is that natural selection does not care if a brain has true beliefs, as long as it has one 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 belief to an organism that doesn't operate in beliefs a contrario to the human being who has developed beliefs in the manifest image in order to describe phenomena on its own terms. 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 us, 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 what's good for us (being).

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 pure reason 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 wanting to apply presuppositions to the work at hand, 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?

Myth to Infinity; Anti-Oedipus, Part 10

The desire to be the myth of desire (not illustrated: the future anxiety that happens when feeling one has to play the role of the hero).

The negation of psychoanalytical methodology as the starting point of Schizoanalysis will continue throughout the last chapter of Anti-Oedipus. Each negation serves as a movement away from classical psychoanalysis. A formal theory may not come to us. A formal theory of Schizoanalysis may be implicit in the repudiation of psychoanalysis by D&G. It may be so simple that it requires no formal methodology expect for understanding the methodology of psychoanalysis (the understanding negates its "axiomatic" premise). Myth as an objective material entity takes its final blow in the last chapter of Anti-Oedipus. We will find Myth as the privileged entity of psychoanalysis, and capitalize it in this post to point towards its privileged place in analysis. It will be important to understand Myth as the guiding factor of psychoanalysis and the analytical session between patient and analyst (slave and master). When this is understood, we will find D&G putting Myth in contrast to desiring-production in order to open up Schizoanalysis. Myth will be the stable entity in which man looks to understand its nature through the auspices of psychoanalysis. D&G will find this more than problematic. The myth is the image. It is the fantasy as opposed to spontaneous reality. This "stable signifier" will point all dreams towards a represented interpretation. This interpretation, this "dream book," will always be the case without knowing why one interpretation of a dream is stable. One privileges the archaic symbolism of Medusa for example and consigns their life and random dream-sequences to this representation without understanding the myth of Medusa. The Gods are alive in psychoanalysis. They are alive and well. The believer of interpretation will find this as a nuanced position after-Christianity. Why one God? How about many Gods (but only so many Gods that are able to fit in one book, in one analyst's mind, so as to put a limitation in this nuanced position in order to get to the eventual goal, the personality)? Pantheism will represent a new age of thinking, the old way of thinking; A nuanced position of a nostalgia no longer condemned to its previous history, but separated by a length of time whereby the subject is unaware of their nostalgic personality in general. What at once was antiquated becomes nuanced, and the inverse operation will happen over time. The dialectical slug fest will happen without anyone watching outside the ring for the dialectical personality. The Myth will reign supreme for the sake of the surplus-personality (the never ending enjoyment at looking to symbols of the past to see what one is like). This post then will attempt to dismantle Myth from being through the work of D&G in this last chapter of Anti-Oedipus. On the way, the implicit "idea" of Schizoanalysis will become more apparent. Schizoanalysis may always be implicit, but just because something is always implicit, doesn't mean that it won't be apparent.

"The ambiguity of psychoanalysis in relation to myth or tragedy has the following explanation: psychoanalysis undoes them as objective representations, and discovers in them the figures of a universal libido; but it reanimates them, and promotes them as subjective representations that extend the mythic and tragic content to infinity. Psychoanalysis does treat myth and tragedy, but it treats them as the dreams and the fantasies of private man, Homo familia..." For D&G, the Myth simply gets privileged over the materialist-reality that they see in desiring-machines partial objects. Myth is no longer simply a representation that has become an object for us. We no longer see Thanatos as a fun image of death that one happens to represent, but in turn don't take seriously because we are having fun with images; instead we see this figure through the analyst as a figure of a universal libido, a transcendental signifier that will give you an exact meaning to your life in this exact presence. Invested in these images is the energy of the world rather than a relative historical period with its own Gods, heroes, and villains. We will look back to these images to define ourselves and will pay the analyst to help us identify ourselves with antique images. These ultimate "subjective representations" go on infinitely. The content of these representations are infinitely meaningful, in other words, irreducible. The absolute limit of the Myth serves as its own infinite meaning. When I realize that I have Thanatos in me, I know who I am. I am Thanatos; a relative symbol of an age that had it's own way of interpreting phenomena. But for me, the symbol isn't relative; it's infinite and irreducible. I have found myself! I am Thanatos and nothing else. The personality has become fulfilled. I know now how to act, dress, and talk in the ostensible image of Thanatos. I'm settled. I have a dark vision of the world. Don't come near me! You don't want to feel my dark power! I am the power (masters of the universe)! But I may find someone like me. Another Thanatos. Male and female Thanatoses. I have my friends who are like me and my marriage with someone else who understands me (There was a time where we explored our myths more carefully, but only so much as to solidify and satisfy the personality). We are all settled together in distinction from others who have their own Myths who don't match ours. We're all having kids and visiting the psychoanalyst though. This we can share in common. Oedipus we can share in common. We can all be our own little Myths (our own little cartoons), and be in a slug fest in the dialectical ring where phantom punches are thrown without knowing who the spectators of the event are. Just throw another myth in the ring and we will keep talking on behalf of ourselves not knowing how or why we're talking on behalf of ourselves to other mythologies. At no point do either of us no who's outside the ring (the non-personality can imagine a crowd of laughter witnessing people throwing phantom punches at each other). Psychoanalysis won't show us other ways of being for D&G. Instead, myth and tragedy will become transferred to the "private person" as we have showed above. What am I personally? I am an irreducible myth from the past. As a personality, I dream of a myth. I dream to be a myth. I dream to be a tragedy. I fantasize about being the death desire incarnate no matter how shitty this feels, as long as I am this. No matter what happens to me, I am first and foremost a representation, a personality. I am of the same family, the same symbol, the same myth. How do I find out who I am? I learn about symbols from the past and ask nothing about their own development, their own myths. I don't see the infinite displacement of myths to previous myths, but rather find the myth that I like, and stay put. I find my territory in a symbolic past figure. The mother in me is satisfied in the home of Thantos's fatherly law. I will lay down the absolute nature of finitude and death, but only insofar as there's a feminine place for this to happen, over and over again...in the same place, over and over again. I am in the territorial law. Death is my life. Who's out there who thinks that there's always only life? C'mon in the ring and lets argue about it. All the while we are getting roasted by people outside the ring at our over zealous enthusiasm for our personalities. I belong to a family in distinction from other families. We are each are our own private families in distinction from other families. We are all families. We are the myth of the family. "What acts in myth and tragedy at the level of objective elements is therefore reappropriated and raised to a higher level by psychoanalysis, but as an unconscious dimension of subjective representation (myth as humanity's dream)." Psychoanalysts aren't even aware of their own myth that they created. The representation of the Myth as the signifier of all vital life is lifted to that level while no longer recognizing this privileged level. Subjective representation is a myth. The subject can be stated simply as some sort of Myth that's irreducible. The unconscious has been given its substance for the subject. It's a stable symbol from the past. It's not a constant flow that always changes to different surroundings, contexts, and environments, but a stable personality that influences everything outside of itself. This is the dream of humanity; the stable personality. To be more precise; it's the myth of the stable personality. The unconscious desire that breaks with one "event" then flows to another is not the unconscious of being. The unconscious is always invested with representations that want to satisfy a settlement. The investments will be different settlements, but they will always be settlements (they will always be territories). I may be different from you, but I am just like you, so we're really the same. Horray! We're all settled in our differences. Now, lets make sure everyone stays put in their differences so we have an equal amount of different people making the world as flattened and horizontal as possible. Everyone gets the candy. Everyone has their cake and eats it too. Everyone hates and loves each other, and believes this is how phenomena has always happened! The belief of life and death. The grand judge believes in these things. The Hegelian judge watches the spectacle and mythologizes the spectacle. The observational myth; the scientist. The scientist who makes sure to let others know that they don't believe in anything without realizing they believe in their science and their disbelief (already two beliefs in one "non-believer"!). As D&G say, "the condition of a denial that preserves belief without believing in it." Psychoanalysis would like to free the subject from a "problem," but doesn't realize that this benevolent utilitarianism depends on an already written and unexplored book of myths and tragedies. The dreams and fantasies of the patient are understood in terms of Myth by the analyst. Is psychoanalysis that much different from dream interpretation? Dream interpretation is more sly with injecting a sense of "well-being" in the client by grounding it's practice in not letting the client know ahead of time that there will be "positive results" (even though this is the intention of the dream interpreter). The analyst on the other hand lets you know from the start that there is a problem and they are going to try to fix it (to be fair though, the patient, the slave, first finds a problem for themselves before seeking out a "cure" for the problem that they found for themselves). In general, what would happen to psychoanalysis if it didn't have an archive of myths to rely on (an archive of myths that it has no intention of tracing for itself)? But it does have any archive of myths, an archive of representations. "Images, nothing but images. What is left in the end is an intimate familial theater, the theater of private man, which is no longer either desiring-production or objective representation. The unconscious as a stage. A whole theater put in the place of production, a theater that disfigures this production even more than could tragedy and myth when reduced to their meager ancient resources." The patient is left with images. They are Medusa OR Thanatos. If the patient doesn't understand archaic images like the nuanced pantheist then these archaic images will simply be displaced to a more simple book of familial bonds. They all represent. They all create images for one who needs a satisfied personality as their "cure." Whether one likes understanding themselves by familial bonds or by archaic representation, it's all the same. It's all an investment in the unconscious of symbols in place of production. Instead of the break-flows of pure production, the theater takes its place in which there are roles that the patient needs to play in order to be "cured" of their own sicknesses. On the stage, one is the Father or Mother. One is the "bad child." One is the "good child." The "bad child" can find its archaic representation in Thanatos if it wanted to (if the patient wasn't satisfied so the analyst conferred to their internal myth book to ground familial relationships in Myth). One is never not nothing. One is always somewhere in Oedipus. The relative myth will confirm this. The analyst doesn't dive into the details of the Myth and the patient doesn't either because the patient trusts the analyst is under the assurance of an archaism (the long time that has separated the present from the past that gives the past an irreducible authority because it has been remembered). No one explores the authority of history. History will ground the "cure." History will find the "problem." Oedipus as image will be the unconscious as it displaces the pure production of breaks and flows that always happen to it.

D&G remark on how Nietzsche broke with The Birth of Tragedy when he stopped believing in tragic representation. Nietzsche who actually became sick when witnessing Wagner's anthemic and nationalistic operas in distinction to his tragedies knew that tragic representation was still representation. It was still raising an object to the Mother-Father status. It was still raising an idol to a place where a certain code is the law which we stated in this post. The idol would not "go away" after idealized tragedy though, it would move into non-belief. Non-belief becomes the idol of alienated modern man. The image of alienation becomes represented as the girl out in the street acting as if she were impoverished, and as the boy who understands her "troubles" who also attends protests for the sake of it. The myth of alienation would seem to be the final myth. It seems close towards there being no more representation. But how commercial can nothingness be! This still will be seen. And if the logic of representation is circular, then it could just as easily be the case that a more tangible idol will take the place of alienation eventually. If Myth finds its grounds in the nuance of pantheism (synonymous with proud ecology), then everything is just becoming more Greek and Egyptian. Where and when will representation no longer happen? When will the unconscious simply produce and flow? It's that simple. It is nothing; the nothingness that produces and flows and that's it. This production and flow as nothing is no longer a character. D&G will throw away their ladder to the unconscious as production. The unconscious will be somewhere with no center. It will happen on its own in a way that's passive to the point of there being no representation. There will be no theater. No one will be watching. No one will know that their unconscious is performing for an audience. No one will be clapping, and no one will be throwing phantom punches looking for approval for these phantoms (without knowing it: the Oedipus unconscious). The theater as the myth and grounds of the human unconscious; this is the case for the human all too human. The question is for how long? Forever? And if it's at one time not the case, will it be a question? Production will no longer be a question. There will be no answer, there will be no problem, and there will be no "cure." The unconscious will flow and break at its own speed with no concept applied to it. Conceptual existence as representative being will be something else that's not this dialect. It will happen on its own. There is no need to throw anything away, or to oppose anything, or to be anything.

Introduction to Schizoanalysis; Anti-Oedipus, Part 6

Human computers on a picnic look much like regular humans on a picnic

The disfiguring of what was normally understood as unconscious material in classical psychoanalysis, and which we hopefully clarified to some degree in past posts has been done for the sake of a movement towards what D&G in Anti-Oedipus call "Schizoanalysis." They will devote the entire final chapter of the book to this "practice." We are not there yet but the hints are starting to pop up in their chapter before on the nature of colonization as it pertains to an always and already social investment into a territoriality that slowly becomes coded by the axis of desire and the socius. This theory is heavy and deserves it's own time. Ultimately it deserves to be read on its own in the primary source. As we are in this theory though, we can see obvious hints at what schizoanalysis will be; as an absolute distinction from psychoanalysis. We will see how important it was for D&G to distinguish between the Ethnologist and the Psychoanalyst, between the person who asks about the use of a certain civilizations practices and the person who asks about the meaning of those practices respectively. The psychoanalyst who asks about the meaning of a ritual for example adds a code to something that's happening in a "present," meaning that something is happening in which they observe and are then able to understand. This function of the psychoanalyst at first glance isn't different from the Ethnologist. The styles are different though. The Ethnologist isn't looking to record a supplement to the event, rather it sees how something is functioning. This difference is crucial; the difference between seeing how something functions and giving meaning to an event. It's on these grounds that Schizoanalysis will find much in common with the Ethnologist in distinction from the Psychoanalyst. The unconscious will gain it's ostensible disfigured flow back from the structure of meaning placed upon it by the phenomena of Oedipus, and advanced further by the psychoanalyst (Oedipus believed in by the analyst). We will introduce this "method" now. "Method" is put into quotations because Schizoanalysis is obviously not a method, if by method we understand a structure in which we are consciously trying to make something of something; more specifically, practicing a psychoanalytical method at the benefit of the patient. It's somewhat accurate to refer to the picture above and see it as providing a program. It's like the insertion of a new chip into something that was previously called "consciousness." It's not dialectical. It's not metaphysical. It's not psychoanalytical. It's an abrupt change as quick as tectonic plates shift during earthquakes. It's not necessarily hospitable. It's volcanic without knowing it's a volcanic action. It's a disjunctive unconsciousness that nonetheless all happens in a space, as a body without organs.

"Shizoanalysis foregoes all interpretation because it forgoes discovering an unconscious material: the unconscious does not mean anything. On the other hand the unconscious constructs machines, which are machines of desire, whose use and function schizoanalysis discovers in their immanent relationship with social machines. The unconscious does not speak, it engineers. It is not expressive or representative, but productive. A symbol is nothing other than a social machine that functions as a desiring-machine, a desiring-machine that functions within the social machine, an investment of the social machine by desire." Not only does Schizoanalysis differentiate itself from psychoanalysis in the content of the unconscious, but doesn't find any content in the unconscious at all. For the Schizoanalyst, there is no meaning behind anything. We don't pear behind a human to find the paternal repressions that manifest themselves in mental sicknesses. We don't pear behind a human to find archetypes of a primordial civilization that give universal significance to us, a universal significance that's fat (weights a lot). We don't search behind the human for something that's called it's meaning. On the other hand, the unconscious does have a function for D&G; A function, not a meaning. The function of the unconscious creates other functions purely understood. These are processes that simply happen regardless of their appearance and representation to others (A reading of a Speculative Realist text will help immensely when trying to understand this. By the same token, Husserl's Cartesian Meditations would put one in this state of pure nothingness. For my own thinking, it will be important to see how Brassier offers this differently in his Nihil Unbound from Husserl. This text will be next). The unconscious functions to create other functions. It's an infinite multiplicity of functions never absorbed into the Parmendiean "one" where we would have something called a general "functionality." The function machine that has been laid out by D&G is the desiring-machine; the machine that looks to move it's way outwards (to be sure, a start for Oedipus). Desire though can't be seen in itself. Desire is seen as we learned from prior posts in it's connection to the socius. We see desire in the person apologizing to another person in order to be in good faith with the other person. We see desire in wanting to publish a book because one thinks that what one is saying is worth someones else's time. These are very modern examples, but we see how desire can't be seen in itself, but only with it's attachment towards "social machines," meaning, the function of communication, of people encountering other people. Schizoanalysis finds desire operating here in the socius. It discovers the relationship between desire and the socius and doesn't feign to see desire in itself, not attached to anything in something called "pure reason." This unconscious that attaches itself to social machines doesn't speak but engineers. In a strong sense, it's despotic in it's own right. It doesn't create dialogue with another in order to come to a resolution of a problem it never had. It operates independent of the voice, of the voice of the other, of the voice of you. It moves in it's own way and supplants its existence independent of the voice that may comment on it's movement. If it had a voice, it would be Heraclitean. It would be submissive to the disjunctive flow of the non-vocal space of Being. This unconscious does not need to express the fact of it's own existence, it doesn't even know it exists or that something like existence is actually happening. There is no need to represent the phenomena in the voice or the pictograph, even if we come to see that there has been a function within the desire of the unconscious to represent itself. This desire to represent itself understood most perfectly by Hegel is being as representation. The function that happens inside this and outside of our understanding functions on its own. The functional unconscious produces. It may even produce representation but it doesn't speak about representation. We speak about representation. If we see something that happens whereby in real time something is being carved out into space, this vision is ours of an unconscious doing what's doing without vision. We see the carving, the unconscious carves. Again, we, as the socius, see desire. The unconscious as desire does not happen to nothing, it happens to the socius whereby the socius sees something in it, and adds a meaning to it (coding). If one can be in a place where they are always producing without knowing they're producing, or reflecting back to their production, this would be the unconscious in itself. In other words, it would be nothing. When desire attaches itself to the social machine, a symbol gets put out. This is representation. Representation is manifested from pure desire where it expresses desire (not in order to express desire, but where it expresses desire). This spatial creation is a function without meaning. The Symbol is in the socius already. The Symbol is being understood and exchanged amongst being. Desire has moved into the socius where desire becomes the supplementation of representation. Desire is in fact representation for a time, the time that only we see. Unconscious desire is always attached to this time that we see (the socius). "Large molar machines presuppose pre-established connections that are not explained by their functioning, since the latter results from them. Only desiring-machines produce connections according to which they function, and function by improvising and forming the connections." The key to this statement lies in the specific words. "The large molar machine," for example, social formation, happen already at a micro-unconscious level. These micro-connections don't explain themselves. The explanation of their functioning is a result of the very fact of their functioning. Here we posit a correlation between the unconscious and consciousness for consciousness, not for micro-level functioning. The molar machine feels the desire to explain the function of it's manifestation. The unconscious desire creates improvised connections which function in ways we see. We apply the category of "functionality" to the unconscious. The "function" though happens on its own. The desiring-machine produces, it doesn't explain. Schizoanalysis doesn't ask about what the production means. It sees coding happening, it even sees meaning happening, but sees all this as a production. "A magical chain brings together plant life, pieces of organs, a shred of clothing, an image of daddy, formulas and words: we shall not ask what it means, but what kind of machine is assembled in this manner - what kind of flows and breaks in the flows, in relation to other breaks and other flows." What does this machine do? This is the question to the person that was once a patient in psychoanalysis. What do you do, not what's the matter with you? Representations are certainly assembled, but what kind of machine makes this happen? How's it possible for you to have representations? Not why is it possible for you to have representations, but "how did this happen?" What kind of machine functions? How does it produce representations? How does it produce Oedipus? How does Oedipus function? Where did the connection happen where you desired your mother in another affiliate branch? How did something become a mother (How was something represented)? How does this all function. Schizoanalysis is the exploration of functionality, not the meaning of you.

Why this is an introduction to Schizoanalysis is first and foremost because the actual chapter on Schizoanalysis has not been read yet. A second reason why is because it still functioned at the expense of psychoanalysis that one suspects it may do for awhile. A third reason is because this introduction didn't go into specific microcosmic "flows and breaks in the flows, in relation to other breaks and other flows." These specific break-flows is where Schizoanalysis operates, meaning it operates in different places all the time depending on where a current flow is going. And whenever a break occurs, the flow changes course. The flow doesn't continue on in one direction. The flow isn't Oedipal (until it becomes Oedipus by repressing unconscious breaks in flows). An analysis of break-flows isn't one where there is a paternal analyst who's satisfied in curing a patient from a sickness. It's not a duality between two people under the omnipotence of master-slave morality. It's any numbered and differently placed. In the observation of production, what happens is an observation. When I see a river pass by me in it's flow, I see the fact that I see myself seeing the river as a flow (the Husserlian noema). I'm a production of seeing and judging. In Schizoanalysis I desire to see how what's outside of me responds to me and how I respond to it. Desire attaches itself to the socius. Social-machines see the desire that produces them, and desire sees the social-machines that it attaches itself to. In Schizoanalysis, things are seen. Things are seen as happening at one time, and at another time as not happening. Time loses it's time-consciousness in the sense of it's being-in-fear-towards-death (historicity). Instead, it finds it's internal-time-consciousness in the melody where one note just passed by that happens to be connected to another note, that breaks into a different mode, but somehow still felt connected to what happened priorly. As descriptive experience of how a production functions, it's not very far from Husserlian phenomenology. But we will get a closer look when we enter the actual chapter.