“Bryant is thrashing within the grips of the ascetic will, as Nietzsche described it”.

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.

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”.

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

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.

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.

Autobiographical note: I read and loved many of Zelazny’s works, and I was particularly taken with CREATURES OF LIGHT AND DARKNESS. I even met and interviewed him 35 years ago. I was very much into Jung when I met him, and I remember asking him why he had so many mythical immortal heroes. I was quite disappointed when he replied that “immortality” was a very practical novelistic device allowing him to have characters encounter many different sorts of situations. He did not reply on the myth part of the question but I got the idea that he wanted to maintain a deflationary attitude to my question. My overarching impression was one of generosity – he kindly accepted an hour long interview when I was just a scruffy university student representing an unknown magazine. He was a very attentive listener, and totally unpretentious.

What I am calling “freestyle Jungianism” is an attitude that treats Jung’s works as metaphorical rather than believing in them as expressing literal dogma. This is the argument of James Hillman, a post-jungian analyst. He argues that Jung’s ideas are not literally true, and were never really meant to be, once he broke with Freud and went through his own descent into the unconscious resulting in THE RED BOOK. This would mean that individuation needs something like the monomyth and needs to break it as well. Using Hillman I think that individuation breaks with the monomyth not just at the end, but all the way through in little ways too.

I think that one aspect of consciousness that receives much attention in Dune is attention, and the management of attention. If we take a symbolic view of the Butlerian Jihad we can see Herbert is a precursor in the critique of what nowadays is viewed as the destruction of attention that is being effectuated by the misuse of digital technologies. The Bene Gesserit, amongst others, are a school of attention, and schools its members in the practice of deep attention.

This practice of attention provides the Bene Gesserit with a criterion to distinguish between mere men and women, governed by their pulsions, and human beings capable of sublimating these pulsions, binding their energy, and acceding to the life of desire. This is achieved by the discipline of attention, which is not a continuous presence, but rather manifests itself in sparks of awareness and flashes of insight. A good example isthe test of Paul with the gom jabbar to see if he is human. If the monomyth defines, as Bogle says what it is like to be an organic human being, the sporadic flash of awareness characterises what it is to be a noetic human being. As Bernard Stiegler emphasises, only a God is noetically conscious all the time (Stiegler gets that from Aristotle), an ordinary human is noetic only in flashes. These flashes constitute moments of attention and choice on the path of our individuation. We must distinguish here individuation from being an individual different from others, which is a banal “organic” phenomenon. I am thinking of the Jungian idea of individuation as a noetic process of differentiation and complexification, cultivating the sparks of consciousness so as not to be programmed by our surroundings.

The problem is that we are constantly in danger of disindividuation: we sink into habit and let ourselves be guided by clichés and stereotypes, we accept and repeat other people’s opinions and perceptions, uttering standardised words and phrases and playing pre-defined roles. “Noetic” does not mean just conscious, but rather becoming conscious of a fork in the path, of alternatives, taking stock of the situation and inventing one’s own solution instead of just going along with the majority flow.

Reblogged from The Kindly Ones:

I think that Andrew Gibson is right to emphasise that the concept of hermeneutics is crucial. Harman is in denial of hermeneutics, and as with his denegation of epistemology, ends up doing bad hermeneutics. His hermeneutics of Eddington’s text is quite inadequate and erroneous as is his hermeneutics of the history of philosophy. “Correlationism” and “epistemology of access” are ill-formed hermeneutical concepts, giving a grotesque simplification and deformation of the history of philosophy and of contemporary rival philosophies. Feyerabend argues that the sciences are not abstract cognition only, but have a constitutive, and thus necessary, hermeneutic dimension. This is why even the sciences provide some resistance against neo-liberal neo-leibnizian abstraction and speculative modeling and manipulation. The model, as you say, is not enough to account for knowledge, and it is Harman who is being reductionist with his real objects and their supposed sensual instanciations. This philosophy splits hermeneutic, ie participative, exploration into objective speculation (an absolutised and thus “withdrawn” context of justification and sensual or subjective encounter (an absolutised, and thus “sham”, context of discovery). This splitting demotes the subject to the world of shams, which leads to a “reurn of the repressed”, in the form of an implied subjectivity, but one that he is either unaware of or unwilling to endorse explicitly, adapted to the neo-liberal order. Thus far from eliminating subjectivity from the world of objects Harman’s OOO is subtended by an all-pervasive degraded subjectivity masquerading as its opposite. Harman then proceeds to re-subjectify his philosophical vision with expressions connoting a subjectivity that is ruled out by the strict application of that philosophy. He talks of how we must love the object: “The real is something that cannot be known, only loved” (THE THIRD TABLE, 12); thinking must be indirect, “its approach to objects can only be oblique” (12), and “allude to objects that cannot quite be made present” (14). All this talk of loving and hunting and approaching and alluding to, all these expressions are strictly ill-formed. A sensual subject cannot love, hunt, approach, or even allude to a real object. It’s not that objects cannot quite be made present, they cannot be made present at all. Withdrawal is all or none, it does not admit of degrees. Yet to give appeal to the theory Harman has need of descriptors of the subjective attitude of those who endorse it. Hence the constant talk of objects that redounds in unthematised subjective participation in the theory as vision of the world. The objectal conversion as the passage to the constructed “naiveté” that sees objects everywhere is thus a subjective conversion to a hard-headed noetic asceticism of intelligible objects coupled with a soft-hearted sensual exoticism of the aesthetic play of the simulacra. You can be a geek and an esthete at the same time, with the contradiction being covered up by the medial subjectivity of loving indirectness, hunterly obliquity, and diaphonous allusion.

Reblogged from Wetwiring: