ON THE IRREDUCIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTS TO SCIENTIFIC CATEGORIES: scientistic reduction vs transversal porting

Very interesting discussion over Deleuze’s views on the relation between philosophical concepts and scientific categories at Footnotes to Plato. I agree with Matt that Deleuze was trying to provide a metaphysics for science and so was criticising the representationalism and the scientism that is not necessarily limited to the “philosophical” talk about science and to their own understanding of their categories and theories (and of their scope), It even has an effect on the content and methods of science, as the opposition between nomad science and state science confirms.

An amusing anecdote comes to mind, dating from 1982, when I attended Deleuze’s seminar on the cinema on Tuesdays, and on Saturdays went to Serres’ class on multiplicities (which gave rise to the books ROME and GENÈSE). On Saturday I would hear an interpretation of the dispute between Bergson and Einstein favorable to Einstein’s position from the point of view of a theory of time (this in Serres class on multiplicities), on Tuesday I would hear a discordant interpretation justifying Bergson’s position (in Deleuze’s class on time and cinema) in the name of the theory of…multiplicities. This difference of interpretation and of evaluation was already amply treated in the previous published work of the two philosophers, without any explicit attempt by one to respond to the arguments of the other. Serres claimed that Bergson was just wrong, siding with a scientistic interpretation in this case (against the tenor of his own work). Deleuze argued that Bergson was misunderstood in the context of the scientism  prevailing at the time of the publication of Bergson’s book DURATION AND SIMULTANEITY. According to Deleuze, Bergson was trying to produce the metaphysics appropriate to the revolutions in physical science.

So I can understand Joe Hughes when he claims to have hidden behind the protective covering of an ambiguous word “metaphor”, that he really intended in a non-dualistic etymological sense of “meta-porting”, in order to defuse useless disputes with the ambient scientism of the late 90s. He raises a very interesting question: given the radical difference between scientific categories and philosophical concepts that the naive naturalist simply (and unkowingly) identifies, which for Deleuze and Guattari  is a form of reductionism (cf. in WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? their insistence on “the irreducibility of concepts to functions”) how in the name of transversality are we going to “blend” them? In avoiding reductionism we seem condemned to maintaining not just their irreducibility but, less comfortably, their separation.

It can be argued that this transversal blending can be seen in the work of Ernst Mach, and is explicitly theorised by him. It is also, according to Paul Feyerabend, at work in the theoretical work of Niels Bohr, and also that of Wolfgang Pauli. An interesting contemporary example is that of the economist Frédéric Lordon who argues for the importation (meta-porting) of Spinozist concepts into economic theory. He explicitly cites WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY and its opposition between philosophy (concepts) and science (extensive functions). He argues that economics can achieve the dignity of a science without conforming to the mathematical model by just such a “blending”:
“to increase in intellectual rigour, and perhaps even in objectivity, against Deleuze’s antinomy, science, and in this case social science, must import concepts”. See video in French, approximately 6min30s to 7min:

Nomads: Space, Solitude, Science

Reblogged from Fractal Ontology:

Royal science is inseparable from a “hylomorphic” model implying both a form that organizes matter, and a matter prepared for the form; it has often been shown that this schema derives less from technology or life than from a society divided into governors and governed, and later, intellectuals and manual laborers. …all matter is assigned to content, while all form passes into expression.

Read more… 741 more words

Very interesting and useful meditation on the interplay between state science and nomad science (or what we could also call synchronic science and diachronic science) by Joseph Weissman. He argues that the two are ontologically isomorphic, and this is true if you take a static snapshot and compare the two at any one moment. But a few moments later or a few kilometers distant diachronic science has already changes, and perhaps even "corrected" state science on some points, or even totally reconfigured its paradigm. Weissman seems to recognise this because he affirms that despite their "ontological unity" their is a very important "epistemological difference". This leads him to argue, following Michel Serres and Deleuze and Guattari, that we must distinguish two states of the world. One state (or dimension) is natura naturata, what he calls "the world-as-object" whose properties are encoded in a closed synchronic structures. The other is natura naturans, "the world-as-experiment" or "the world-as-song" whose properties are decoded into diachronic flows. Both are necessary, and one can only give relative and provisional primacy to one over the other, even if from the Deleuzian point of view deterritorialisation is what one could call "first-in-the-last-instance". Weissman compares this opposition to that of geometry and poetry, and insists that it is in reality a composition of two tendencies. He thus sheds new light on a recent dispute over a fictitious opposition between a synchronic naturalist and a diachronic mytho-poetic approach to the sciences.

THE PULSATION BETWEEN IMAGE AND CONCEPT vs ANALYTIC LITERAL-MINDEDNESS

“Bryant is thrashing within the grips of the ascetic will, as Nietzsche described it” (see comments section here)

I think Jason was making a valid point here, neither dogmatic nor servile nor even lacking in civility. We should distinguish being critical from being uncivil. Jason was using a sort of imagistic conceptual shorthand to situate and qualify a certain problematic. In Continental circles this is done all the time, and you can’t understand a single word of such thinkers if you don’t understand this dance between concept and image. This allows one to say much in a few words.

In the case of Jason’s statement, he manages to say concisely what I tried to express a little long-windedly in response to Levi’s recent pronouncements (http://terenceblake.wordpress.com/2013/05/17/dark-subjectivity-and-an-apodictic-hermeneutics-of-science-on-naturalism-as-nostalgic-pathos/). I think the refence to the ascetic will captures quite nicely the point that Bryant enounces a seemingly objective set of conclusions from science (“the only legitimate conclusions that can be drawn from the state of knowledge today”) but is in fact expressing a very subjective vision of the world and of science.

This pulsation between image and concept is not just decorative but I think it has a quite important function – that of permitting communication across incommensurable paradigms. An analytic approach often insists on commensurability, and feels that remarks coming from a radically different frame of reference are somehow uncivil, aggressive, or even violent and also ridiculous or nonsensical. The Continental approach (but I would argue that this is the case for the pragmatists as well) just does not see such closure of and incommunicability between theories that are semantically very different, precisely because they see another pragmatic dimension that makes communication both possible and potentially fruitful (dare I say enjoyable?).

ANTI-OEDIPUS makes very effective use of this imagistic-conceptual method. It must have seemed very aggressive to closed-minded psychoanalysts, as it treated their profession as a new priesthood submissive to the “ascetic will”. So Jason’s allusion was well-chosen, evoking well-known arguments from Deleuze and Guattari, that they also trace back to Nietzsche. Nietzsche himself uses this same method and was felt to be offensive by the religious-minded of his day and after. I think Jason is quite justified in situating Bryant in this problem-context and even in feeling some amusement at his efforts (thrashing) to escape from its aporia.

LARUELLE: CORRELATION vs PRIMACY

JTH at atheology has given a very fair and open-minded reply to my remarks on the battle for cognitive hegemony (originally a comment to his post on verificationism), expressing his reservations about Deleuze and Guattari’s narrative of the attempt to gain mastery by imposing one’s discipline as “the official language of a pure State”. I too am ambivalent about this  primacy narrative, in the sense that in WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? it still gives philosophy a meta-function of being able to form philosophical concepts based on the functions of science and the percepts of art. However, I think they come closest to undoing the primacy of philosophy, that for example Badiou still maintains. Another problem is that this narrative is demarcationist and excludes the transversality that they defended in earlier works. I do not worry about which of the candidates (ontology, physics,  psychoanalysis, epistemology, linguistics, cognitive science etc.) for hegemony is right, as if we subtract the primacy claim and its reductionism they are all right in that each explains important aspects of the other, and must do so to be complete eg cognitive science must explain, without reduction, scientific cognition and not just error.

I think that Meillassoux’s use of “correlation” leads to a comic book version of the history of philosophy, and in the strict sense very few important philosophers of the last 100 years have been correlationist. They often consider something like correlationism and eliminate it as a mere preliminary to the serious work. Popper’s critique of the bucket theory of knowledge is a good example, as is Althusser’s critique of the “problematic of the subject” (and this is where the normalien Meillassoux probably got the concept, rebaptising it and advertising it as new). I try to give a more extended concept of correlation as a positvie overcoming of subjectalism in 4 posts taking off from Katerina Kolozova’s Laruellian analysis: http://terenceblake.wordpress.com/?s=kolozova. My antipathy about the use of the word “correlation” changed as a result of reading the excellent article by Katerina Kolozova on Laruelle’s non-marxism and on the need for monstrously radical concepts.

““Laruelle, let us note, uses the term “correlation” in a different sense – it is a relation which is not “relationist”, one that remains in the One, one that merely correlates with the Real without mirroring it, within the gesture of relative constitution of both terms. So Meillassoux’s “correlationism” corresponds to the non-philosophical notion of the relative mutual constitution of the Real and the Transcendental, i.e., of Philosophy’s Unity (of the Two) or auto-reflectivity” (p223, footnote 16).

Correlation in this extended sense would be totally compatible with transversality of research and gives “primacy” not to any discipline but under the name of “determination in the last instance” to the Real or to the “source of immanence”.

More Thoughts in Response to Levi Bryant

Reblogged from BillRoseThorn:

This time from his latest God and Mythico-Poetic Thought.

Rather than reject religion outright, how about rejecting the monotheism that requires inward directed souls/subjects to declare their belief in a perfect God? The internalized desire of the believer-subject is reproduced as well in Descartes who then can split himself from the external world of “Nature”, which is then in turn reproduced in the discourse of naturalist science.

Read more… 283 more words

My response: Freud is an outstanding example of mytho-poetic thought, and should be read as such outside his rationalist reductions and disguises. One of these reductions is his own monomyth of the Oedipus complex. Deleuze and Guattari's ANTI-OEDIPUS can easily be seen as a deployment of the pluralist and polytheist mytho-poetic unconscious against Freud's monist reductions. Lacan takes some steps towards de-theologising Freud but stops halfway. Levi Bryant's naturalisation of Lacan is a theological move that neutralises the productive unconscious, placing all productivity on the side of a theological notion of "matter", whose referent is deliberately vague and changing, as are the epithets used to name its components (objects, machines, assemblages, units, etc.). Bryant's problem should be political, not epistemological. It is in the institutionalisation of the mytho-poetic function of "fabulation" (as Deleuze calls it, following Bergson, but giving this term and the reality it conveys a positive valuation). This is of course yet another name for what Deleuze and Guattari called "desire", when their principle interlocutors were those contaminated by psychanalysm. This fabulation is described by Deleuze in the cinema books, which are noteworthy for making virtually no reference to psychoanalysis and its hermeneutics. Bryant actively espouses Lacanian hermeneutics, with which he uses doublethink to maintain it alongside his naive "naturalist" hermeneutic of science. Bryant's pronouncements are religious in the sense of selective synchronic snapshots of the productions of the diachronic mytho-poetic unconscious (one can recall Deleuze and Guattari's diagnosis of psychoanalysis as based on "photos" of desiring production. His "religious" (in the traditional sense) interlocutors can only be fundamentalists as that is all his critical hermeneutic is capable of handling. hence he must exaggerate with not a shred of proof the proportions of Christians who are naive literal-minded believers, as he himself is of such Lacanian nonsense as his mathemes and of a positivism relooked with more modern jargon (Luhmann, Badiou, Bhaskar). It is an exploit to condemn credulous Christians and to pose smirky questions about voodoo priests, when the Lacanian psychoanalyst is one of the closest things we have to a voodoo priest in our society, at least according to Deleuze and Guattari, but also to many others. just as it is an exploit for Bryant to knowingly discuss Latour, and then speaking in his own name to give an ideological picture of the "inevitable consequences" of contemporary science that regress back to prejudices dating from 50 years before Latour began to deconstruct and dissipate them.

DARK SUBJECTIVITY AND AN APODICTIC HERMENEUTICS OF SCIENCE: On Naturalism as Nostalgic Pathos

Levi Bryant has posted some rather dogmatic and reductionistic aphorisms expressing his extrapolations of conclusions taken not from science itself but from his own rather confused hermeneutics of science. Bryant has been through a long intellectual apprenticeship, involving harrowing work on Lacan, Deleuze, Derrida, Badiou and Luhmann. He has at last come to a mature moment of synthesis where he can deploy these sophisticated resources in a concise rejection of fundamentalist Christianity. The man is amazing, he actually asserts that there is no creator God and no plan to history. And this is just the tip of the iceberg! No arguments are advanced, as none are needed – these declarations are presented as “axioms”, that is to say, according to Bryant, “the only legitimate conclusions that can be drawn from the state of knowledge today in the physical sciences, biology, neurology, psychology, etc”. This is of course a rather personal definition of “axiom”, but in fact none of these dogmatic assertions are axioms. All Bryant wants is the apodictic connotations of the word “axiom”. Not only are his rather wordy and repetitious aphorisms not axioms they are in no way conclusions “from science”.

Having been soundly trounced for his puerile version of naturalism, Bryant has decided to dress it up in aphorisms and re-name it “post-nihilism”. It’s true that just as in the case of “axiom” we need a dictionary to read his text correctly. Remembering that Bryant has styled himself a “post-mastery” Lacanian we can be pretty sure that the prefix “post” means “credulous”, so the syntagm “post-nihilist praxis” translates out as “creudulous naturalist theorising”, which does seem an apt description of Bryant’s actual practice.

“There is no meaning” Bryant tells us “darkly”. This is not the conclusion of any science but a piece of  hermeneutic embroidery. Physics does not tell us there is no meaning, nor does biology. They are not about meaning and so have nothing to say on the matter, either for or against. Unless you’re being reductionist and claiming that physics accounts without remainder for “existence” and “anything in the universe”. But it sounds scientific and hard-headed, and more importantly  it sounds “cold”, “bleak”. Disguised as a seemingly objective statement, it functions as an expression of the type of subjectivity that Bryant is both exemplifying and proposing as a model for us all. Not secular subjectivity, which is compatible with a democratic pluralism, but “dark subjectivity” that needs to imose its sombre but “only legitimate” precepts on a world of fundamentalists, who believe in the Rapture or some other Divine plan.

What is worrying about such dogmatic proclamations is not their wilful blindness: any reference to other types of spirituality than Bryant’s model of religion as blind literal belief in institutionalised creeds (this model is based unsurprisingly on no research, it just sounds right to a blind literal objectal naturalist, it sounds “dark”) is dismissed as illegitimate. No, the main problem is that Bryant is proposing this wordy repetitious naive and credulous cartoon synthesis based on nothing as an actual heuristic for science and philosophy. Take his assertion “Life is an accident”. This would rule out reverse engineering the existence of life to come to conclusions about unknown features of physical law or about initial conditions prevailing just after the Big Bang, for example. Such an assertion is either empty windbaggery or has empirical content and consequences for the direction future research could take. A “dark” ontologist in charge of government funding would judge projects in terms of such principles. Luckily Bryant is at pains to specify that even if his axioms are not “self-evident” they are at least apodictic, the “only legitimate conclusions” from current science. Thus he avoids the dogmatism of the fundamentalists, who are not just political adversaries but major intellectual enemies requiring the development of a whole new metaphysics, “darkness” ontology, to reply to their ideological hegemony.

STRUCTURAL CORRELATIONISM AND THE BATTLE FOR COGNITIVE HEGEMONY

Deleuze talks about the struggle for primacy in terms of the aspiration of various discipines to become “the official language of a Pure State” (DIALOGUES, 13). Thus in the French context the ancient supremacy of philosophy has been superseded by new contenders: psychoanalysis, linguistics, and cognitive science (Deleuze doesn’t mention physicalist reductionism because this has far less impact in the visible battle for hegemony in France). In each case we have a new “interiority”, ie the very opposite of the transversality that combines various disciplines on an equal footing to produce new ideas and new explanations. Instead we have the same form of an autonomous discipline (interiority) staking a claim for explanatory primacy over its fellow disciplines. But this self-promotion to primacy and universality is accompanied by a desperate endeavour to formalise and unify the hegemonic discipline, to give it explicit and coherent structure, canonical method, apodictic force. From a fruitful heuristic messiness and multipiplicity (diverse partially incompatible hypotheses producing only partially overlapping results) the hegemonic will imposes a unified paradigm or system of judgement. This unificatory interiorisation then functions as what Deleuze calls a “represser of thought”, a rulebook for producing (politically) correct ideas. No wonder mathematicians and physicists resent the incursions of cognitive science – they are too comfortable with their supposed intellectual primacy and academic prestige. Behind the epistemological babble about disinterested research and objectivity as a bulwark against “irrationalism” and “relativism” there is a combat for power, posts, resources, status and funding.

Personally I do not like to talk in terms of “correlationism” as I believe it to be an ill-formed concept (allying maximum extension with minimum intension). However, if one is going to talk about correlationism in the case of cognitive science’s pretentions to account for science itself, its nature and legitimacy, this can only be the case under an extended acception that I would call “structural correlation”. This nicely captures a little-noticed fact: whenever a physicist leaves off his equations and experiments to declare that everything is made of and reducible to sub-atomic particles (or strings, or spacetime, or whatever) and that all disciplines are ultimately explained by his own he is no longer making a scientific claim inside his discipline, but is himself guilty of structural correlationism.