From ‘The Nintendo Wii, Virtualisation and Gestural Analogics‘, by Patrick Crogan, on the latest issue of Culture Machine.
I am not completely convinced by the ‘Wii as enframing tool’ argument, but the article is highly enjoyable, as I find any discussion of ‘worlding the virtual’ extremely interesting.
I love the idea behind this movie, and I am quite sure Dreyfus is largely responsible for it (apparently the director graduated from Berkeley and surely was attending his classes). Speaking of which, look how cool good old Bert looks with his antique car…
Heidegger himself does not get mentioned in this trailer (nor in the film description on the website) I wonder if they decided to keep him in the background (no pun intended), because of possible ‘bad press’ associated with his name among the general public?
Some time ago I found a paper by Meillassoux on Speculative Heresy’s resources page, titled ‘Contingence et Absolutisation de l’Un‘ which he (probably) delivered at a symposium on “Métaphysique, ontologie, hénologie”, in Paris.
At first sight it looked like just another presentation of his main themes as we find them in After Finitude and in the short Middlesex’s paper ‘Time Without Becoming‘. However, the very last section goes towards a possible resolution of the problem that he indicated was still open in After Finitude, that is, the relationship between the absolute possibility of mathematical statements and the principle of factiality.
[Before getting to that, I just wanted to mention that, in the paragraph just before this last section --five-- Meillassoux comes up with the interesting thesis that --according to him-- the 'most radical and unrecognized disciple 'of Parmenides is Pyrrho of Elis, the founder of Greek scepticism, since he represents the 'culmination ironique de la métaphysique grecque et de sa recherche de l’Immuable pur'].
So I thought it wouldn’t hurt to translate it for everyone to read it.
I am not sure how new this thing is. The paper is definitely after After Finitude, but I have no idea how new it is. In the Collapse transcript of the Goldsmith conference Brassier seems to hint towards the solution proposed in this paper, so maybe he had read it? Or maybe he had just talked with him? I’d say the latter because in ‘Time Without Becoming’ (1st May 2008) he still says nothing about the solution to this problem, while the Goldsmiths conference was in April 2007…
Either way, here it is. Note that my French is fairly basic, so the translation is not perfect (specifically, there is a whole sentence which I did not really manage to figure out), also because often, on the way between French and English, I somewhat filter through Italian. But I guess better than nothing. If any of you out there is better than me in French and wants to propose changes, please do. You can find the .doc version of it here.
——————————————-
5) Two Ones
Let us return now to the question of the one. The problem has thus far consisted, I want to remind you, in determining the existence of a possible procedure for justifying the realist—therefore non-correlationist—character of a mathematical description of the world. This problem for me takes now the following form: can we derive from the principle of factiality the absolute validity of mathematical descriptions of the real? I certainly cannot resolve here this massive problem in which I still am involved. I would simply like to present the first move for this investigation, which leads precisely to the nature of the one, and in particular to the difference within the unity of a thing, and the unity of a sign: what I shall call the difference between the ontic one and a semiotic one [l'un ontique et l'un sémiotique]
What relationship is there, between this question regarding two types of unities and the question of the realist capacity of mathematics?
In order to resolve the problem of the absolute scope of mathematics, I began by trying to identify a minimum requirement of any formal writing—logical or mathematical—that distinguishes it from natural languages [langues naturelles]. I tried to reach a precise and determinative point of difference, capable of distinguishing a symbolic, or formal, language from a natural language. It was necessary to find a characteristic which is minimal enough to be present in all formal languages and precise enough never to be present in a natural language. Indeed, I had an idea about this characteristic, and I had the intuition that it had precisely to do with the ability of thought to access the eternity of contingency. This minimum requirement actually seems to me to consist in a remarkable usage— a systematic and precise usage—of the sign devoid of significance [dépourvu de sense].
The hypothesis that I adopted, roughly, is the following: if the question of the reference [referent?] of mathematics—what does mathematics talk about?—is a piercing question, it is because mathematics consists of a sequence of operations applied to signs which, ultimately, mean nothing. Therefore, in all mathematical writing—at least in its most fundamental forms, such as Set Theory or Category Theory—there would be two kind of signs: the signs signifying operations—which I call operational-signs [signes-opérateurs]—and those signs on which ultimately these operations bear—which I call base-signs [signes-bases] and that have the express function of not signifying anything, and thereby of avoiding any parasitism of operational meaning from another regime of meaning. What we find in formal writings of signs without meaning is, therefore, not a failure of these writings, but what allows for their own singularity and richness.
A simple example is given by the so-called standard axiomatics of Set Theory. To put it very crudely, in this axiomatic one begins from signs—a, b, c— which are usually called ’sets’. But actually, Set Theory never defines what a set is. These signs, in themselves, don’t mean anything, because they specifically have to—in my terms—provide operational-signs with a base devoid of meaning on which to operate. These signs begin to ‘resemble’ sets, in that they are subject to an operator—the operator of belonging [l’opérateur d’appartenance]. It is this operator, and not the signs of the sets, that carries upon itself the charge of signification: thus, the signs a, b, c will be called sets in that they may be subject to the operator of belonging and allow statements such as ‘a belongs to b’ or ‘b belongs to a’. A set is that which can belong to another set, or what may contain another set: a circular definition which shows that one never really defines a set, i.e., the base-sign, but only the operations that it supports.
My strategy is then as follows: I posit that the minimum requirement for the possibility of mathematical writing (I cannot show here that it is the only condition, but I posit that it is at least one condition) is the possibility to conceive and thematise signs devoid of meaning. Far from being identifiable as a nothing or a nonsense (meant as an absurdity) the sign devoid of meaning is posited as the eminent condition for mathematico-rational thought (and I think we could say the same about logic). The question that I ask is therefore the following: how can we think of the sign devoid of meaning? And the answer that I give to this question consists in showing that the condition for the thinkability of the sign devoid of meaning is the access (whether thematized or not) to the eternal contingency of everything. In short, I attempt to derive from the principle of factiality our ability to produce signs empty of meaning, therefore showing that mathematical discourse moves within a sphere of thought ‘closely associated’ with the absoluteness of contingency. I have so far demonstrated the absolute capability of mathematical descriptions; now I shall, at least, work out the first and necessary step of such an absolutization.
There is perhaps some strangeness in the question: how do we produce signs devoid of meaning? Because the signs devoid of meaning are mainly perceived as the manifestation of failure, an inability to produce meaning, rather than as the manifestation of a capacity. What sense is there to
ask how we manage to produce the insignificant? And again, what does it all have to do with the question of the one?
A story will allow me to answer these two questions at once.
Imagine, without any concern about verisimilitude, that an archaeologist—working among the ruins of a largely unknown civilization without knowing if it possessed writing— partially unearths, during his research, a tablet on which there is a series of symbols [motifs], like for example:
# # # # # # # #
Suppose that his first reaction is to assume that this line is a frieze, an engraved design on the edges of the tablet. However, a moment later, he modifies his hypothesis and says, with excitement, that it could be a line of writing, like a schoolboy would write the same letter in his notebook in order to learn how to write. Then, going on digging up the tablet, he realizes that it does not contain other lines made of other characters—which would confirm his hypothesis—but a design that convinces him that the first hypothesis was correct: he was indeed dealing with a frieze rather than a line of writing.
The question that can be posed is therefore the following: what shift in vision occurred in our archaeologist, seeing in the very same pattern, respectively, similar symbols as parts of the same frieze, and as occurrences of the same sign? In both cases, the engraved marks were seen in their singular unity and in their collective arrangement: but in what consists the difference for which the symbols have become occurrences of the same sign, a token of the same type?
To explain this difference will lead us to the heart of the question of the one.
When the archaeologist saw the series as a frieze, he saw it as an entity susceptible to aesthetic appreciation in a broad sense: a singular decorative pattern, composed by a determined number of symbols—for example, eight—and whose configuration (shape of the symbols + number of these symbols) could be judged as more or less accomplished, as more or less pleasurable to the eye. In this judgment, the number of these symbols is not indifferent: seven or five symbols could have been less pleasurable than a series of eight—or, on the contrary, more so. In other words, the frieze holds what could be called an effect of monotony, or again what I more generally call an effect of repetition: an effect for which the symbols cease to be the same even though they are supposed to perfectly resemble each other (I say, be similar). To understand this point clearly, we must make a comparison with a melody: it is well known since Bergson that two similar notes (two phonetically indiscernible ‘Dohs’) are understood in different ways if they conclude distinct melodic sequences. Thus a melody—say eight DOHs played in sequence—will produce a final DOH distinct from the initial DOH, because the final one is charged with a melodic past that the initial one does not possess. There is, here, a differential effect of repetition, a melodic effect, which is an effect of monotony regarding time, homologous to that which is presented, regarding space, in the frieze. For I believe, unlike Bergson, that space is as responsible for melodic differences as time is, and that our frieze affects its symbols with a differential effect that makes each of them differ from others even if they are, empirically, rigorously similar.
Why mention this? Because I believe that the monotony effect affects every vision of empirical reality: everything that is seen as one—as an empirical, ontic unit—unfolds itself in a space and in a time that produce differences amongst these things/ones [choses-unes] themselves that, empirically, are not distinguished. Now the enigma, the mystery of the sign is, I believe, that this differential effect inherent in space-time, disappears when we see similar marks not as symbols of the same frieze but as occurrences of the same type. For then we have the right to say that these occurrences are absolutely identical, with no differential effect (neither empirical nor spatio-temporal), i.e., repetitive. It is absolutely the same sign, as a type, that is found in each of its instances: and this type will never vary, regardless of the number of occurrences, so that this time our series (########) could be extended with an ‘etc.’, which denotes the radical indifference of the identity of the type regarding the multiplicity of its occurrences. An ‘etc.’ which would be meaningless for the frieze, since the frieze is a concrete aesthetic reality, and therefore inseparable from the specific and finite number of its symbols.
There is something absolutely non-differential and therefore non-spatio-temporal, something eternal, in the sign as such, and I say in the sign as in the sign devoid of meaning. Here the meaning of our story will emerge: it generally addresses the immaterial character of language through the question of the eventual ideality of meaning [l’idéalité éventuelle du sens]—of its resistance, for example, to historicity and context—and of its possible identity in the minds of two readers of a same text in two different epochs. But here, this is the point that I wanted to highlight, our archaeologist had, I think, the experience of an eternity, of a pure identicality—an eternity in kind and not in meaning [du type et non du sens], that resists the differential effect of the empirical marks—and this experience of eternality is an experience of the sign and not of meaning: it is these signs devoid of meaning that prompted this experience, rather than meaningful signs. And these signs have indeed proved to be devoid of meaning, as they were not really signs [signes], but symbols [motifs]: our archaeologist has therefore experienced a vision capable of seizing, within an empirical mark, something eternal—a mode of unification of the marks not subject to the effect of spatio-temporal repetition—starting from a single semiotic unity, a unity for which each mark has become a one-occurrence of an identical type and, as such, indefinitely reproducible.
It is the eternal unity of the sign-type [signe-type] that allows access to the thinkability of its unlimited iteration of the same: to the ‘etc.’ that follows the series of occurrences, and that did not exist for the aesthetic vision of the frieze. In other words, the eternal is directly present as that which differentiates the sign from the mark [différencie le signe de la marque], and therefore as the meaning, (since?) neither the reference nor the essence are—a fortiori—present. [Autrement dit, l’éternel est présent à même ce qui différencie le signe de la marque, et alors que le sens, ni a fortiori la référence ou l’essence ne sont présents].
So, to have access to the sign devoid of meaning as such requires access to something eternal within the occurrence, that is its kind. Hence the question: what is the nature of this eternity?
My thesis is as follows: the eternity engaged in the grasping of the semiotic unit has its source in the grasping of the contingency of the occurrence of the sign.
Let me explain this point, to conclude. When I perceive some thing, or an empirical mark, I perceive this mark with its empirical determinations, and I perceive it as a fact. But the perception of the mark, and of its ontic unity, makes its empirical determinations come into focus first, and then, in second place, its facticity: I perceive a mark, and moreover a factual one. On the other hand, if I see the facticity of this mark as such—if I bring it to the forefront—then I know that this mark is identical in the whole of reality, and it does not vary in space nor in time. Then I will operate a unification of the mark that is of another kind than the ontico-empirical one for which I shall precisely see the eternal contingency present in that mark. I unify the mark around its contingency, and not around its empirical determinations. I can then see, in a multitude of similar marks, a kind of eternal unity, and as such not subject to the differential effect of repetition.
Now, going back to the vision of the mark-one [marque-une] as the occurrence-one [occurrence-une] of a sign-type [signe-type]. What do I do precisely, when I see a sign as a sign: when I stop considering a mark as a thing, in order to consider it as a sign? Well, I am making of this mark an essentially arbitrary entity, i.e., contingent in its being a sign. That is, I can not thematize the idea of a sign—cannot think the sign as a sign—without letting the contingency of its determinations come to the fore. What does this mean? As a thing, the mark can be thought as the necessary effect of a certain number of causes: possibly related to erosion, to a shock, to a constrained human action, etc. Even if this necessitarianism is illusory, it shows that the mark-thing [marque-chose] doesn’t require that its contingency be thematised to be grasped. Therefore even if I am a Spinozist, the same mark, now become sign, must be necessarily posited as arbitrary, since a sign has the characteristic of not having in itself any necessary determinations. Certainly there are structural constraints in a language (the signs for distinct things must be separate), but the characteristic of a sign, or of a system of signs must be capable of being encoded—transcribed—into another, structurally identical, system of signs. A sign therefore exhibits its contingency ‘on its front line’, so to speak—at least when I grasp it as a sign, one that I thematize as such.
Now, when I deal with a sign devoid of meaning, I am dealing with a sign which does not refer to a sense, a reference, but only to itself as a sign: to think a sign devoid of meaning is necessarily to thematize the sign as a sign, hence to think its own arbitrariness—by letting its eternal contingency come to the fore—to unify it around its contingency, and finally to let it proliferate in accordance with a succession of occurrences released from the differential effect of repetition.
Therefore, it seems to me that there is a possibility to derive the possibility of mathematical discourse—i.e., a discourse structured around the sign devoid of meaning—starting from the principle of factiality, by ontologically basing the difference between the ontic one and the semiotic one. Here there is the first step, I believe, towards a possible absolutization of the mathematical descriptions of the real.
——————————————-
Let me remind you that this is a translation of Quentin Meillassoux’s work, not mine. This translation is purely for informative use. I’m sure he won’t mind.
In the comments section of a previous post of mine, Amarilla wrote:
About your statement: I have never been (and never harboured sympathy for) someone inclined to hippie-like celebrations of ‘eastern wisdom’ (the most repellent form of orientalism)
I’ve run into this anti-orientalism before recently and while I suppose it reacts to a certain superficiality about “eastern wisdom” I’m suspicious of the dismissive attitude I’ve noticed among philosphy bloggers towards those who appreciate eastern traditions. Are proponents of this attitude saying that it’s inauthentic for a westerner to become a Buddhist or Taoist? Was Emerson a douchebag when he had Hafiz translated into English? Isn’t there a hint of cultural miscegation in this occidental anti-orientalism? Is there something wrong with appreciating diverse traditions, not simpely because of the exoticism and novelty but because something beautiful is being offered? Help here. Most likely I have it all wrong.
Funny, the last person who I came across launching accusations of orientalism at another philospher just set sail for Thailand. Good for him. Mix it up.
I promised the detailed answer this question requires, as it touches themes that are dear to me, so here we go.
The issue at stake is to be able to approach non-Western philosophy avoiding both kind of Orientalism: the ‘romantic’ one that idealizes the ‘intellectual beauty’, the ‘gracious wisdom’ and serenity of these systems and the ‘rationalist’ one on the other, which –after having ascertained the excessive connivance of these systems with concerns of a ‘religious’ nature– dismisses them as uninteresting for serious philosophy.
Why is this so hard to do in the first place? The reasons are historical.
First reason: the 19th-century orientalists (those scholars that called themselves so) in the Anglophone tradition that studied and translated texts into European languages were rarely philosophers (this was not the case with German scholars who adopted a more romantic form of orientalism): until very recently someone dealing with, say, Chinese philosophy in a University was primarily a historian and a philologist, and did not, therefore, approach these texts qua philosophical texts to be brought into dialogue with western thought. Comparisons were frequent (Nagarjuna is a good example, who, in the history of secondary literature, has been compared with thinkers and currents as different from each other as Kant, Kant again, Wittgenstein , Pragmatism, and Derrida) but work of good comparative philosophy has been lacking.
Second, many of those ‘native informants’ that since the late 1800s started to bring their traditions to the West (as in the case of the famous first Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago in 1893 — note, of religions, not of philosophies), have often done so according to a precise political agenda, coming mostly from countries under colonial rule and desiring to –at the same time– package their tradition in a way that would be comprehensible and acceptable by the Westerners and to present it as a noble carrier of a meaning and wisdom that the West lacked, hence accepting the role of ‘eastern sages’ as a weapon in the struggle against political subalternity (see for example the whole ‘Buddhism is congruent with [quantum] physics’ issue, which arose between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, the same period when quantum physics was dawning and taking over the classical picture. For an acutely skeptical take on this topic see Lopez’s excellent recent book, and on the general modernization of Buddhism see McMahan’s The Making of Buddhist Modernism). Alternatively, others desired to promote and, in the same movement, renew a philosophical tradition because of ideological reasons of nationalistic pride and reform, as in the case of D.T.Suzuki, perhaps the greatest popularizer of Zen in the west, and whose work effectively caused the whole fusion between the Beat Generation and Eastern Wisdom (for a sharp critical assessment of Suzuki’s work and political agenda, check out a dedicated chapter in Bernard Faure’s Chan Insights and Oversights)
Third: that pervasive presupposition that only the West had operated an efficient division between theology and philosophy, so that only in the West (as opposed to ‘eastern’ countries) rational speculation was decoupled from ‘religious’ concerns, such as soteriological ones (to what degree this is actually the case, is an excellent question, and one that I intend to try and answer using Latour in a near future). How many departments of Philosophy in the West have experts in –say– Indian Philosophy? Not so many at all. If you were looking for someone like that, you’d look in a department of Study of Religions. (Here, another question could be ’so are “religious” themes universal?’ I have spent some time on this issue, and that will also come back to it in my paper on Latour/Philosophy/Religion).
So what is the situation now? There are a small number of scholars that are engaged in proper comparative work (that is, not merely exegetical, but aimed at bringing non-western systems to bear a relevance on contemporary western philosophy) notably Mark Siderits (with his insistence on the analytic tradition, a great primer on Buddhist Philosophy for an analytically minded philosopher is this one), the aforementioned Bernard Faure (see in particular this book) and Jay Garfield (whose work of translation and interpretation is aimed at injecting classical Sanskrit and Tibetan texts with a terminology familiar to Western philosophers, without doing violence to the text itself. His translation and comment to Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamikakarika is just fantastic). Also, let me mention the wonderful work that the logician Graham Priest did with Garfield on Nagarjuna’s paradoxes, in the last chapter of this neat book of his. And there are some others (Robert Magliola) that keep uttering complete nonsense like ‘without Derrida it is difficult for a “moderner” to understand Nagarjuna!’. These are all Westerners (I don’t even try to touch here the issue of the representation of non-western scholars in the academia) that, mostly, started by studying the Eastern traditions and who are now attempting the extremely delicate task of bringing them into contemporary philosophical debate, avoiding the two orientalisms that I mentioned above. It is a recent enterprise, not more than 30 or 40 years old, and so it is only natural that we are only at a larval stage.
What is almost completely lacking –as indeed Amarilla noted– is the will (or even interest perhaps) from American and European philosophers (analytics and continentals alike) to engage with non-western thought. To confront the arguments of a Greek philosopher who lived 2500 years ago is ok (because he ostensibly belongs to our ‘own’ tradition), but to read and comment a Nagarjuna, a Dignaga or a Dogen would, to be a bit brutal, slightly ridiculous. Imagine Badiou (just to name a very popular thinker nowadays) publishing, next year, a book either dedicated to (like the St.Paul one), –or even only partially dealing with– a Chinese or Tibetan 6th-century logician, or metaphysician. Most people would start thinking of the guy having become senile, or jumping on the ’spiritual’ bandwagon. These are prejudices that are hard to erase. And even to plan a way to do so, one fully conscious of the implicit political meaning of this work of cultural translation (which after Said’s work and after postcolonial theory we just cannot ignore), is a difficult enterprise.
I am not sure if I have fully answered the question, but I think that the issue of finding a dimension for ‘comparative philosophy’ in today’s academia is historically complex, intellectually problematic and politically delicate. And yet (or, for this very reasons) extremely timely and important.
I was reading Ian’s latest post about his appearance on a magazine as a Nerd Mafioso, and I started to wonder about my own identity, and on the identity of people out there that are like me (I just assume that you are out there guys).
I grew up as an avid gamer (and I still am) since my very first Commodore 16 (and my best friend’s NES), and watching Japanese Robot/Mech cartoons. In my teenage years I was mainly reading north-American Sci-fi (not the ‘cool’ one that came with cyberpunk; I got into that much later on, but the classics of the Golden Age: A.E. Van Vogt is still my favourite writer in that field), followed by Lovecraft (and all his ‘entourage‘) and R.E.Howard (who started me on fantasy, so Moorcock all the way to G.R.R. Martin). I am a Star Trek fan (ok, not Convention-level fan), and I have seen most of the sci-fi related TV series and movies around (from Babylon5 to Battlestar Galactica). I used to be an enthusiast of RPGs (and I mean Role-Playing Game, not Rocket Propelled Grenade), and I was somewhat of an outcast in my late teens given that I became a metalhead in an environment and school where there was no place for any, and hence spent way too much time on my own, on mIRC chatrooms and online games. I could go on with other details, or mention my lack of particular ability –or deep interest really– in sports (which I enjoy, but I could never be bothered spending too much time onto), but I think that the general picture is clear. I am a geek.
Or am I?
I have a keen interest in science, I am an astrophysics enthusiast (and I love The Big Bang Theory) but I am no professional astronomer, and my maths is poor. I know pretty well my way around a PC and I usually fix other people’s problems, yet I cannot code nor I have any sort of cool hacking skill.
So I see people like Ian, who probably grew up more or less like me (yes, we are not the same age, but I assume we are in the same generation) but that actually made their being geeks into something professionally and intellecually valuable. Today the question ‘do geeks rule the business world?’ is not funny nor provocative anymore, since in many instances is it simply true, and it’s no breaking news. And I am certaily not ruling any world.
Indeed, instead of doing the ‘geeky’ academic choices, I started reading philosophy around age 17 and I spent the last 6+ years of my life studying it ‘for a living’. Does philosophy produce geeks? Is there something like a philosophical geek? Is it a new species? Once upon a time geeks were geeks because they were pioneers in a technological world none really ventured into before. Now many of those habits have gone mainstream. It’s not geeky anymore to have an iPhone (or to run a blog), now it’s hip — or even, for some, necessary. So are we the ‘third culture’ geeks, at the intersection of technology and philsophy?
What are we, blogging away about metaphysical problems, creating online journals and Wikipedia pages about the latest ontological trend? People happy about finding old footage of some dead German philosopher on YouTube or excited to sit into a crowded lecture hall, waiting to hear a sweaty and agitated Slovenian with a lisp? (actually, now that I think about it, Zizek is somewhat of a symptom of this new form of philosophical geekiness, isn’t he?). What I mean is: we have our canonical geeky traits, but we are too much of a ‘humanist’ to be a full-blown geek (so all my respect to Ian, who manages to be a geek and a philosopher).
Then again, perhaps I am illegitimately extending the first person to the plural. Maybe it is really just me. Or maybe it is really not that interesting new a phenomenon (I’d say that in his peculiar 18th century way, Kant was one über-geek). Maybe I should just go to sleep and put my identity crisis to an end.
Thanks to Paul Reid-Bowen and his idea of a paper regarding the (overdue) encounter between OOP and feminist theory (particularly feminist science studies), and the issue of masculinity and metaphysics, there has been some talk around about the role of Donna Haraway for OOP, and her connections with Latour.
So yesterday I picked up from my bookshelf Joseph Schneider’s Donna Haraway: Live Theory, to read the concluding long interview with Haraway. I quote here some relevant passages. Hope it is useful.
Joseph: So, I would like to talk a little bit about your own sense of, how should we call it, origins; the way that you began to get into this work before you found out about Latour, because he’s the one with whom you are often juxtaposed.
Donna: I know…it’s both legitimate and comical. Bruno and I are good friends. We are really appreciative and critical of each other. There are things we hate about each other and love about each other [a footnote here reminds the reader that Pandora's Hope is dedicated also too Haraway]….In 1979, when I was still working at Hopkins, I was given Laboratory Life to review for Isis. That’s the first time I found out about Latour and Steve Woolgar. I thought it was a really fabulous book. I loved it. The most exciting thing I read since Kuhn in terms of making me re-think how to think about science. It was wonderful. And i reviewed it very positively.
(126)
I get very angry at the lineages that foreground science studies as the boys and their places. I got interested because I thought they were doing neat stuff. And of course they taught me huge amounts at that point. They were reading me pretty much at that point too, at least Bruno was, very quickly. Part of the difference between Bruno and me on this stuff is citation practice. Part is national difference, the American customs around citation practice–much more exhaustive–and part is personal. I make it a point to try to foreground all sorts of networks that a conversation came out of, and Bruno is more spare.
(127)
Joseph: All right, the last question. This is about social constructionist argument. Both you and Latour in different moments in your writing embrace of appreciate social construction, and then more recently you both talk about what might be called a too-facile social constructionism.
Donna: It gets to be orthodox….[S]ocial constructionism got foregrounded; the volume got turned way up and it got developed in all kinds of creative ways. but then it becomes sclerotic. It becomes an orthodoxy. It becomes ‘ANT’. It becomes an acronym. It loses its vitality and becomes an ortodoxy. Also, ’social’ construction misleads people to think only of humans. First, Bruno drops the word social from the title of the re-issue of Laboratory Life. Right? So it’s the construction of a scientific fact, not the social construction. And the constructionism…that kind of constructionism foregrounds non-human actors, who are, which are, engaged in the kind of sociality, but non-hominid kind. Constructionism starts being ontologically more heterogeneous. And then pretty soon the word constructionism gets in the way. So it is like turning up and down the volume on the different possibilities, because they become faddish. They get in the way. They aren’t doing the work anymore [here a reference to Latour's 'The Promises of Constructivism', in 'Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for Materiality'].
(155)
The link above is to the Google Books page, where you can read almost the whole thing.
The need is: to preserve the truth of Being no matter what may happen to man and everything that ‘is.’ Freed from all constraint, because born of the abyss of freedom, this sacrifice is the expense of our human being for the preservation of the truth of Being in respect of what-is.
From Meister Eckhart’s sixth of his Counsels on Discernment (ca. 1290)
Non-correlationist theology?
[Note - Windows' Snipping Tool is a fantastic research tool to save quotes on-the-fly when reading stuff on Google Books]
So well, after some six months of relatively anonymous blogging, I thought it would do no harm to clarify a bit about who I am and, mainly, what this blog is meant to be. It is something I am arguably doing more for myself than to inform the readers about my biographical events and my academic interests. Being the relatively shy, introverted and somewhat misanthropic person that I am, it is only with some hesitation that I push myself to this therapeutic ‘coming out’. Should you not be interested in what follows, be charitable.
I’m a PhD student in London, precisely in the School of Oriental and African Studies. It is a place which I have come to love with time, but that unfortunately has a big lack for my academic interests: for historical reasons that would be too long to explain, SOAS lacks a department of philosophy. However, this was no problem for me and when I first came to it for my MA, and I merrily joined the department of Study of Religions, where I currently –slightly less merrily– am. After my undergraduate studies in Philosophy, in Rome, I was burdened by a dissatisfaction with what academic philosophy seemed to me to be. I was, from my standpoint, correct at the time, given the particular context in which I had spent my previous 3-4 years, surrounded as I was by philosophical fanboys and by a research tradition oriented towards the sublime recapitulation of the Great Masters more than to the production of any kind of original thought. Without going into details, in Italy the academic environment in general, and the philosopical one in particular are, to say the least, all but stimulating and engaging for a young student (not to mention the bleak general intellectual, cultural bankrupcy of the country as a whole, don’t get me started on that). Indeed I graduated with, as a sort of respectful farewell, a dissertation on the work of Pierre Hadot, on his reading of ancient philosphy as a way of life and his focus on the degradation of the practice of philosophy since the early Greek days of the discipline. I felt I owed a lot to his work, especially regarding the cultivation of my first philosophical passions: Seneca, Plotinus and, later, Origen and Augustine.
So, the fool that I was, I thought it was time for me to move on, physically and intellectually, and dedicate myself to the study of alternative traditions of thought. I have never been (and never harboured sympathy for) someone inclined to hippie-like celebrations of ‘eastern wisdom’ (the most repellent form of orientalism): it seemed to me only fair to get to know something different, especially given my feeling of stalemate regarding the philosophical developments (or lack thereof) that my academic experience saturated me with. It is not without some shame, however, that I must recall a certain ’spiritual’, or anti-intellectual element in my choice; one perhaps already present in my neoplatonic/early Christian interests.
So, I packed my bags and I moved to London, a move that was to a large extent an escape. Yet my philosophical interests were to chase me. If I started out with the idea of learning about ‘other traditions’ with a practical (maybe job-related) edge to it, funnily enough I soon found myself reading buddhist philosophy with a heavily comparative eye, writing essays on Zen mysticism and Wittgenstein and on Buddhist phenomenology and analytic philosophy of perception (the analytic tradition being the ‘new thing’ for someone like me who was newly arrived on the anglo-american academic scene). As a climax of irony, I ended up writing an MA dissertation on Nagarjuna (a second-century Indian buddhist philosopher) and Derrida, the same Derrida that, after an encounter with his work the very first semester of my first undergraduate year, I had told myself to stay henceforth away from (this dissertation was later turned into an article, which has been now for 10 months under review by a known journal of comparative philosophy. I’m sure they are reading it word by word. Probably twice, to be extra sure).
[Of course, in all of this I am willingly omitting several minor and major events of a more personal nature that, in one way or the other, made me choose the path I did.]
The effects this year had on me were considerable: on the one side my spiritual interests quickly vanished, under the conjoined impulse of philosophical analysis and of my growing interests for the ‘hard sciences’, hence replaced by a naturalisitc and atheist view on reality, and on the other, my ideas and plans about my own future crystallized into an academic one, in philosophy. Therefore, it seemed only obvious to me to enrol for a PhD. At the beginning, my research was supposed to be entirely focused on the issues surronding the academic (and non-academic) discourse around ’science and religion’, as seen from the perspective of a cross-cultural analysis, something that would have made it possible to reconcile my work with non-Western philosophy and my parallel, personally cultivated interest in astronomy and physical cosmology, and that would seem to give me some sort of coherence regarding the department of SoR in which I was, making me feel like I could somehow ‘fit in’. So I spent my first year researching in this direction, looking at recent work in, on the one hand, the study of religion and on the other, the sociology of science (where I first ‘met’ Latour), and feminist and postcolonial analyses and critiques of science/scientific rationality. The first fruit of that (on the theories of religion side) is an article that will be imminently published in the first 2010 issue of Method and Theory in the Study of Religion.
[The keen reader of this blog (?) might observe at this point the hypocrisy of my frequent propagandistic statements about Open Access scholarship. I pledge guilty. In my defense, I can say that I do not think that OA scholarship is mature enough to grant the level of 'prestige factor' that, like it or not, a young researcher/academic has no choice but to submit to. By the end of my PhD I'll be covered in debts, and I do need a 'paper trail' in order to hope for a job. My admiration goes to those 'affirmed' scholars who, once made their name known, switch back to OA]
Then, more or less at the same time when this blog was created, I started to focus my philosophical interests in a more organized way, trying to plan my subsequent stages of research. It was in this period that I fortuitously came into contact with a vast network of philosophy blogs loosely bound by an interest in a new philosophical movement known as speculative realism, and I discovered, with surpise, an uncanny similarity between the themes that such a movement had displaced in its relatively sudden rise and my own personal theoretical interests (and our keen reader will here already know that I still find this uncanniness, this surprising convergence of fundamental, inner interests among this variety of individuals not a coincidence, but an extremely interesting and under-scrutinized manifestation of specific set of social historical and intellectual circumstances). Ever since, my interests and readings have exploded, if in a controlled way, creating lines of thought which I am currently trying to tie up in a coherent fashion, in order to respond to the constraints of a doctoral thesis.
The issues which are dear to me, or better the lenses through which I reorganize the material I am coming in contact with, are a product of my training: I still belive that in order to understand the basic issues of Western thought one must take seriously early Christian thought as much as the Greek sources; I still feel the urgent necessity to break open a space for a newly concieved cross-cultural, comparative philosophical work capable of leaving behind colonial approaches and of responding to the questions of our time (and creating new ones); and I still am interested in examining what philosophical stakes are at play in the (Western-generated) ’science and religion’ debate, especially in terms of the tension between realism and antirealism. What will probably occupy my mind in the coming future are the interplay of these interests with, mainly, the work of Meillassoux and of Latour and some of the pivotal points of ’speculative realism’ (or what is left of it), first of all its anti-correlationist ambitions. On top of that, I am fundamentally a geek, which means that I have a compulsive interest in all the ways in which technology (the Internet in the first place) allows us new ways of thinking/writing/interacting with the world, hence my occasional flirts with AI, AR, hyperlink theory, videogames etc.
More generally, I have been trained to believe that no intellectual tradition can be examined in isolation, both in terms of its historical placing and in terms of the cultural context in which it flourished, and I believe (with Hadot and Heidegger/Foucault) that the first task of a philosopher is to look at the present with historical eyes, trying to discern the ’style’ of our times (call it ‘episteme’, call it ‘Zeitgeist’, call it ‘mode of revealing’). In the West we cannot ignore how the history of Christianity influences our every step (and on this point, I find extremely telling the constant subtle interest of extremely timely ‘radical thinkers’ such as Badiou and Zizek with Christianity, not to mention of course Meillassoux own polemic against fideism and yet his confrontation with theological, or divinological, issues), without, for this reason, be tied to piety or devotion. Anyway, if all goes well these motifs will shape up into something concrete and coherent, in the form of my PhD thesis. Fingers crossed. (I intended to write a paper about religious themes into contemporary realism/materialism for the forthcoming Dundee conference, but, to be honest, I could not bring myself to conjure up anything smart enough. Too bad. I’ll be there, as auditor).
I deeply agree with Levi’s recent arguments on the evaluation of philosophical currents based on their ability to stimulate the creation a research program. In a way what interests me about some forms of SR is to research both their baggage of tacit knowledges (looking back) and to pick them up as examples of a philosophical stance that offers fertile ground –in its rejection of some core features of the history of Western thought…and its retention of others– for an opening up of a confrontation with non-Western metaphysics. Not for a sort of ‘I am so open-minded and politically correct’ public statement, but for a consistent and constructive (looking forward) encounter capable of engendering a larger philosophical network (see here my crude future plan to employ Latour’s arguments to promote the necessity of philosophically filling the West-Rest divide).
On the more practical level, I am fighting a subtle PR campaign, among my fellow students, regarding the necessity for SOAS to establish a department or a centre of philosophy (a small paper of mine that will soon be published on the SOAS Research journal is nominally on Heidegger and East/West regionality, but actually a rhetorical apology for the use of philosophy in the context of area studies). I feel quite assertive regarding this issue: an institution that proudly defines itself as ‘the world’s leading centre for the study of a highly diverse range of subjects concerned with Asia, Africa and the Middle East’ simply cannot afford to lack a place for up-to-date research in comparative philosophy. Over and above the internal benefits, it would be, I believe, an asset for the philosophical scene of the UK as a whole. Unfortunately, as it is well known, the issue is not so much what the School thinks is right (even if ‘it’ gets convinced that it is) but what the School can economically afford to do. A new department means heaps of money, money which, in these days, is nowhere to be found (reader, should you be a billionaire interested in comparative philosophy, please consider a donation to my cause).
That’s all. As any blog, the rest will be archive.
Fabio Cunctator