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 Thus in the French context the ancient supremacy of philosophy has been superseded by new contenders: psychoanalysis, linguistics, and cognitive science (Deleuze doesn’t mention physicalist reductionism because this has far less impact in the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.

DUNE AND INDIVIDUATION

I am toying with the idea that if you take the idea of SF as cognitive estrangement you get to a vision somewhere in between sf and fantasy. If the “estrangement” is not just at the level of specific devices and inventions but at the more englobing level of world-building then we can see bridges between the two genres, and hybrid cases. Further I think this estrangement goes even to the formal level of the “deconstruction” of the hero and the monomyth, as Bob Bogle shows with Dune and its sequels. And all of this is tied in my mind to a sort of freestyle Jungianism, conscious in Herbert’s case but also underlying I would argue Roger Zelazny’s work.

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.

The Priority of Ethics and the Relevance of Subjectivity

Reblogged from The Kindly Ones:

Emmanuel Levinas directly challenges the predominant philosophical thinking (certainly as it has evolved in the West) when he insists upon ethics as first philosophy;1 when he maintains that ethics is prior to, has priority over, is ultimately more important than ontology; when he asserts that “ethics is … more ontological than ontology”.2

By ethics, Levinas does not mean the formal branch of philosophy designated by that same word; he does not mean those attempts at systematizing relational and behavioral prescriptions and proscriptions into moral theories and guidelines or theories of justice.

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Harman in fact privileges subjectivity in various key aspects of his philosophy: while trying desperately to contain it within his conceptual reductions it seeps out and contaminates the whole with a geeko-esthetic compound subjectivity fusing cold intellectual manipulation and warm sensual enjoyment and thus proscribing the ethical encounter which can be neither merely conceptual nor merely esthetic nor some conflicted hybrid of the two.

HARMAN’S SPLIT HERMENEUTICS: Why the objectal conversion produces a threefold subjectivity

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.

 

 

Graham Harman on objects & the neo-liberal table: a response to Terence Blake

Reblogged from Wetwiring:

I am responding here to some of the comments made by Terence Blake to the second part of my review of Graham Harman's The Quadruple Object here. In my post, I bemoaned the fact that Harman very often talks about how his philosophy can cope with actual objects, but to my mind he more often than not simply dances around objects in the abstract.

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Graham Harman " is not providing us with a model of considering the object, but rather a vast and damaging oversimplification of what any such consideration may be" according to Andrew Gibson. He goes on to argue, as I have, that Harman gives a vast and damaging oversimplification of science itself, ignoring the incommensurable levels described by our scientific theories. Harman's homogeneous reality (it's all objects) leads him to see scientific theory as more homogeneous than it is, even attributing a homogenising tendency (reductionism, "undermining" in Harmanspeak) that is yet another figment of his imagination. If sensual objects are "utter shams" as Harman claims, then Gibson concludes that we ourselves are unknowing impotent "wraiths". This denial of real knowledge and real agency to the human is inseparable from the constitution of a passive neo-liberal subjectivity condemned to repeat structures it can neither know nor act on.

ARGUING BACK AND FORTH (backer and forwarder): ON BAKKER’S BBT (assembled text)

I have gathered together and slightly updated a few things. This is a first draft, and any help or comments will be appreciated.

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ON BAKKER’S BBT: Selective Summary

What are the consequences of taking seriously the idea that “cognition is heuristic all the way down”? I take R.S.Bakker to task on what I feel is an incomplete assimilation of this idea, that he explicitly espouses. Plunging into the ocean of immanence, where all is heuristics, is still a revolutionary experience. More revolutionary than Bakker in his vaticinations about the dire consequences of the general adoption of his BBT seems to realize. I compare Bakker’s take on immanence with that of epistemologist Paul Feyerabend and that of post-structuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze. I find that unlike these philosphers Bakker retains some residues of scientism, ie a position that gives cognitive primacy to science.

I argue that not all cognition is scientific, nor even intellectual in the sense of proceeding by abstractions. Practical know-how and coping skills are cognition too. Science is no exception, it in fact includes much tacit knowledge and know-how. Research is a part of our individual and collective individuation, and can give rise to what Bernard Stiegler calls processes of transindividuation that heuristically synthesize and stabilize our interpretations and practices provisionally. In scientific research these partial, provisional points of view constitute paradigms, and there is no reason to believe that a particular science functions, or should function, with only one paradigm at any one time. Bakker’s BBT is in fact less a theory than the sketch of a possible paradigm, based on his own personal selection and combination of various scientific threads. It is part of his own individuation, but he wants it to be more than that (which is OK by me, I thank him for sharing) but this “more” tends in his texts to become too much, ie an implicit claim to unicity and apodicticity.

I further argue that not only do we cognize adequately (ie to a degree of approximation adapted to our tasks) a lot of the time, but that we meta-cognize adequately too, including our own brain. This metacognizing of the brain does not proceed uniquely via scientific research but occurs in artistic and self-transformative processes. Bakker does not take this into account in his synthesis, and thus at the meta-level gives primacy to scientific cognition, even if he denies this at the content-level.

Bakker and I seem to be talking past each other. The problem in communication may lie more in a difference in attitude, than in any great difference in the explicit claims we make. Scott claims that he already says what I accuse him of not saying, I reply that he may say it sometimes, but that at other times he proceeds as if he had never said it. Such talking at cross-purposes is the sign that there is no substantive difference between our philosophical visions and that a mere nuance in noetic attitude is all that separates us.