Deep Thoughts

I’ll have a review of Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound in Polygraph‘s double issue on, fittingly enough, the contemporary importance of St. Augustine.

Basically I read it as a series of critiques of contemporary philosophers with a single MO — determine the philosopher’s version of “anthropocentrism,” draw out its implications for his system, repeat.

Each time a kernel of something is extracted, and by the last chapter each of these fragments is allowed to hang there uncoalesced, outlining a position deferred (at the earliest) to the book’s sequel. The key points are these: anti-anthropocentrism trumps pomo antihumanism, and the only ground remaining is the object, emptied of all metaphysical ‘substance.’ Consequently, objects are not equivalent to their formulation in discourse or even in thought. Philosophical reflection, constantly struggling to approximate itself to the objects that cause it, undermines its own efforts by trying to reverse or at least obscure that causal relation. As Foucault’s “anonymous thinking,” science effectively sidesteps consciousness’s repetitive attempts to situate itself. There’s a footnote (13) where Brassier gives a nod to Lenin’s Materialism and Empirico-Criticism , but it’s hard to tell what his new version of anti-idealism really adds aside from some very sophisticated critiques of continental philosophers. He pretty soundly nails the contemporary heirs of Kant and Hegel, but what about Marx’s reversal of the assumptions of idealism? What is gained by favoring realism over materialism?

Nihilism of the intellect, fundamentalism of the object…Brassier’s denial of the self carries a certain penitential element. Our errant consciousness is restricted to a diet of bread and water and forty lashes a day, permitted to lay claim to nothing as punishment for formerly laying claim to everything. “Everything is dead already,” Brassier asserts against idealism’s endless variations on the subject of “what will have been.” Consciousness demands an encounter with the Real as the guarantee of truth. But if consciousness is literally an afterthought, then all the great themes of philosophy — ‘reality’ as an ontological state, the Real as the trauma of finitude/extinction, and speculation — become meaningless. Only objects are. Since thought is always thought of objects, the commonplace idealist move of granting thought itself a positive role (defended on many a theory blog) is denied in advance.

What I don’t understand about this book’s reception is the widespread feeling that it opens new doors for philosophy. Fredric Jameson argues somewhere that the major problem for culture (and by extension, philosophy) in the era of ‘postmodernism’ is innovation, how to create something new. That ‘new’ for Jameson is something with the potential to build a new society. I could very well be missing the point, but it seems to me Brassier (unlike the other ‘speculative realists,’ especially Harman) radically limits the possibility of strictly philosophical innovation. Once it is established that objects cause thought (and that the real is the suicide of consciousness from within ontology), ‘concept creation’ becomes an entirely superfluous exercise unless it has to do with different instantiations of those objects in different contexts (or, in the case of consciousness, different ways of approaching the fact of its nonexistence).

But again, Lenin already cleared this whole thing up:

This theory of the necessity of “mentally projecting” the human mind to every object and to nature prior to man is given by me in the first paragraph in the words of the “recent positivist,” R. Avenarius, and in the second, in the words of the subjective idealist, J. G. Fichte^. The sophistry of this theory is so manifest that it is embarrassing to analyse it. If we “mentally project” ourselves, our presence will be imaginary—but the existence of the earth prior to man is real. Man could not in practice be an observer, for instance, of the earth in an incandescent state, and to “imagine” his being present at the time is obscurantism, exactly as though I were to endeavour to prove the existence of hell by the argument that if I “mentally projected” myself thither as an observer I could observe hell. The “reconciliation” of empirio-criticism and natural science amounts to this, that Avenarius graciously consents to “mentally project” something the possibility of admitting which is excluded by natural science. No man at all educated or sound-minded doubts that the earth existed at a time when there could not have been any life on it, any sensation or any “central term,” and consequently the whole theory of Mach and Avenarius, from which it follows that the earth is a complex of sensations (“bodies are complexes of sensations”) or “complexes of elements in which the psychical and physical are identical,” or “a counter-term of which the central term can never be equal to zero,” is philosophical obscurantism, the carrying of subjective idealism to absurdity.

And later:

Bogdanov, pretending to argue only against Beltov and cravenly ignoring Engels, is indignant at such definitions, which, don’t you see, “prove to be simple repetitions” (Empirio-Monism, Bk. III, p. xvi) of the “formula” (of Engels, our “Marxist” forgets to add) that for one trend in philosophy matter is primary and spirit secondary, while for the other trend the reverse is the case. All the Russian Machians exultantly echo Bogdanov’s “refutation”! But the slightest reflection could have shown these people that it is impossible, in the very nature of the case, to give any definition of these two ultimate concepts of epistemology save one that indicates which of them is taken as primary. What is meant by giving a “definition”? It means essentially to bring a given concept within a more comprehensive concept. For example, when I give the definition “an ass is an animal,” I am bringing the concept “ass” within a more comprehensive concept. The question then is, are there more comprehensive concepts, with which the theory of knowledge could operate, than those of being and thinking, matter and sensation, physical and mental? No. These are the ultimate concepts, the most comprehensive concepts which epistemology has in point of fact so far not surpassed (apart from changes in nomenclature, which are always possible). One must be a charlatan or an utter blockhead to demand a “definition” of these two “series” of concepts of ultimate comprehensiveness which would not be a “mere repetition”: one or the other must be taken as the primary. Take the three afore-mentioned arguments on matter. What do they all amount to? To this, that these philosophers proceed from the mental or the self, to the physical, or environment, as from the central term to the counter-term—or from sensation to matter, or from sense-perception to matter. Could Avenarius, Mach and Pearson in fact have given any other “definition” of these fundamental concepts, save by pointing to the trend of their philosophical line? Could they have defined in any other way, in any specific way, what the self is, what sensation is, what sense-perception is? One has only to formulate the question clearly to realise what utter non-sense the Machians are talking when they demand that the materialists give a definition of matter which would not amount to a repetition of the proposition that matter, nature, being, the physical—is primary, and spirit, consciousness, sensation, the psychical—is secondary. One expression of the genius of Marx and Engels was that they despised pedantic playing with new words, erudite terms, and subtle “isms,” and said simply and plainly: there is a materialist line and an idealist line in philosophy, and between them there are various shades of agnosticism. The painful quest for a “new” point of view in philosophy betrays the same poverty of mind that is revealed in the painful effort to create a “new” theory of value, or a “new” theory of rent, and so forth.

So when philosophers pronounce with great urgency that “we need a new concept for x,” or “a new way to think x,” we should immediately prepare ourselves for some heavily aestheticized armchair political theorizing. Rethinking the use-value of a given reification can give us little else. For what Lenin dismisses as “pedantic playing with new words” is not innocent unless our analysis is restricted to the psychology of the individual theorist (and often not even then). Rather, it represents the initial fumbling efforts at revising ideology to fit changing circumstances.

With the problem of reification, however, we assume the possibility of thought becoming an object in language. The idea of linguistic strings as second-order objects is mostly left out of Brassier’s book, also typical of the rest of his colleagues — indeed, this is usually what’s considered liberating about their work. Language has fallen back into the realm of frivolity and excessive risk, when for a while it occupied that of tragedy. Jarring that the idea of an ontologically or epistemologically constitutive power of language is more or less dropped rather than refuted, in favor of returning language to its secondary status. This bold move gives speculative realism its rhetorical power. Even though I’m not sure anyone ever explicitly made the hard constructivist argument about language in the first place (of course assertions presupposing that argument abounded). Change — it must have been in the air.

My lightly educated view of the function of consciousness and subjectification is basically evolutionary: something like the social exploitation of trauma. This would likely include animal warning cries, political speeches, orientalism, crying babies, post facto rationalization, love, etc. Brassier’s scorched-earth eliminativism has a utopian austerity that I confess I find appealing. Thought indifferent to the subject, and though not explicitly stated as such, an intellectual ethics of truth rather than desire. The dialectic of being and becoming trumped by the active opening of being-nothing:

“Extinction is real yet not empirical, since it is not of the order of experience. It is transcendental yet not ideal, since it coincides with the external objectification of thought unfolding at a specific historical juncture when the resources of intelligibility, and hence the lexicon of ideality, are being renegotiated. In this regard, it is precisely the extinction of meaning that clears the way for the intelligibility of extinction. Senselessness and purposelessness are not merely privative; they represent a gain in intelligibility. The cancellation of sense, purpose, and possibility marks the point at which the ‘horror’ concomitant with the impossibility of either being or not-being becomes intelligible. Thus, if everything is dead already, this is not only because extinction disables those possibilities which were taken to be constitutive of life and existence, but also because the will to know is driven by the traumatic reality of extinction, and strives to become equal to the trauma of the in-itself whose trace it bears. In becoming equal to it, philosophy achieves a binding of extinction, through which the will to know is finally rendered commensurate with the in-itself. This binding coincides with the objectification of thinking understood as the adequation without correspondence between the objective reality of extinction and the subjective knowledge of the trauma to which it gives rise. It is this adequation that constitutes the truth of extinction. But to acknowledge this truth, the subject of philosophy must also recognize that he or she is already dead, and that philosophy is neither a medium of affirmation nor a source of justification, but rather the organon of extinction.”

But the activity from which this program emerged could only have involved a great deal of solitary confinement, a praxis of (ecstatic?) self-flagellation, possibly accompanied and enhanced by CNN’s bad dreams, and carried out on the therapist’s empty couch…

As If This Were A Very Long-Winded Link Blog

First things first: I’m going to be posting here regularly, and probably much less regularly here (but then anyone who reads this is used to that). It will be a series on cultural representations (read: books and movies) of the future in the 20th century, dealing with things like utopia, dystopia, projection, extrapolation, prediction, etc. and also some half-assed attempts to contextualize them historically and even (gasp) economically and politically. The first few posts are on Thomas More’s Utopia, as a warm-up.

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This article and this post give a sort of remedial reminder that all the talk we’re hearing about ‘change’ in the U.S. elections is so far just that: talk. The Republicans are a joke at this point, as even Rick “Santorum” Santorum is willing to admit. We’ll come back to them when they’ve picked a candidate. The Democrats are the real focus. They have three choices that The Media tells me is really two choices. Each one seems specially designed to catch people like me with our pants down. The one who says the things I want to hear is losing, and in a bizarre twist of fate, is the wrong race and sex by virtue of being a white man from the South. Such things do matter in presidential elections after all, perhaps as much as policy promises, most of which will not pan out (and which, if one does one’s homework, are not terribly different from each other). The one who says the things I wish I wanted to hear is my default favorite in order to prevent another Clinton from becoming president. Domestically the big issues are the recession and health care — no one’s going to end America’s credit addiction, while the health care is something even Republicans claim to want, and in any case we will have to slog through years of debate before anything concrete emerges. Despite the persistence of Al Gore, the environment seems to be a minor issue so far. Not hopeful enough, I guess.

But in terms of foreign policy, one thing the president really does affect strongly, the two frontrunners draw their advisers from the same pool, leading me to believe that the only major difference between them is that one hates Pakistan and the other hates Iran. The balkanization of Pakistan will undoubtedly move forward under both, something similar will probably be attempted in Afghanistan, and we will all be sentenced to many more years of saber-rattling against Iran. There will be differences in the distribution of severity, but either way we are looking at Clinton Redux. Anyway, one picks a personality and a set of thematics when one picks a president, not a list of proposals, and mediatized Americans everywhere are choosing ‘hope’ and ‘change’ over ‘revolution’ or ‘experience.’ Barring some unforeseen gaffe, whoever can properly channel those desires — or scare them away — has the best shot at being the big toothy grin on America’s face.

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A lot of people have been linking to this old rerun by Stanley Fish. The same old anxieties about the humanities, what is their ‘value.’ But the more pressing questions involve economic value, such as this here, and especially this discussion about the corporatization of the university. Related to the crisis this is causing for the humanities is the equally ‘precarious’ future of media-related jobs in the U.S. As some may know, both the Ivory Tower and media Big and small rely more and more on labor that is free or nearly so, i.e. interns, grad students, adjunct lecturers, and freelancers. Those with ‘outside funding’ experience this as the extended nomad childhood you read about in the papers, those without experience it as extended humiliation, and those who are actually poor don’t even bother trying. And people discuss ‘Everything Studies‘ as if the dispersal of the disciplines (which are the sole justification for the doctoral degree) was good for the future of humanistic science and not simply the next logical step in the corporate restructuring of Higher Ed. Why bother with tenured faculty and grad students at all after that? Wouldn’t those designations quickly become redundant? Classes could be taught by limited-contract ‘public intellectuals’ competent in one or two minor subjects, just as easily (and more cheaply) as by a single retained expert. Wouldn’t be much of a change from how things are done already.

I support grad student and adjunct unions, but the fact that they are becoming necessary is a sign that the humanities can’t expect to continue the way they have. They operate off the university’s dwindling largesse, not by serving any specific consumer demand. While it won’t solve any structural problems, what might at least put the humanities on life support is this: first, everyone who can get out should get out — history, for example, can with a little tweaking pass itself off as a social science. For everyone who’s left, link up with the professional writing, film, or fine art programs. A lot of people complain about creative writing MFA programs churning out cookie-cutter writers only capable of writing about what happened to them yesterday. A lot of English programs complain about low enrollment and consequently low resources. Put them together, problem solved. The humanities now teach writing and criticism as a single (‘interdisciplinary’) skill set. A lot of people will get fired, probably, but as long as creative fields remain glamorous enough that people are still willing to shell out large sums of cash for training they are not likely to make much money from, the future of the humanities will be assured.

It’s all about buying time.

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Finally, there’s the series of posts starting with this one, detailing a situation that everyone should be asking questions about. This from the Times Online piece:

A WHISTLEBLOWER has made a series of extraordinary claims about how corrupt government officials allowed Pakistan and other states to steal nuclear weapons secrets.

Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency’s Washington field office.

She approached The Sunday Times last month after reading about an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey.

Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions.

Zizek’s Bottoms

Coming at this late, having just finished looking around, it seems to me that if Zizek’s regular public displays and the regular reactions of blogviators offer any lasting ‘theoretical’ insight it is that nothing is entirely frivolous anymore, if it ever was. Offhand-seeming ‘jokes’ about caudillo clowns, faux-Lacanian analyses of popular TV, ‘Western Buddhists,’ liberal communists and the like do not negate the political argument they are used to make; if anything they produce more discussion than more traditionally fact-based, coherent, ‘transparent’ approaches. Even at Zizek’s masterful level of performance, when the in-jokes, references, and ironic stereotyping come to determine the politics of what is said even more than the propositional content of the statement itself, it does not stop being political, it does not foreclose seriousness.

Though always depressing, one is put in mind of Debord:

One cannot abstractly contrast the spectacle to actual social activity: such a division is itself divided. The spectacle which inverts the real is in fact produced. Lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle while simultaneously absorbing the spectacular order, giving it positive cohesiveness. Objective reality is present on both sides. Every notion fixed this way has no other basis than its passage into the opposite: reality rises up within the spectacle, and the spectacle is real. This reciprocal alienation is the essence and the support of the existing society.

Whatever is produced by the spectacle is still spectacle, there is no absolute split between the assertion and its denunciation, both acts materially function to perpetuate ‘spectacular’ discourse. We would be tempted to slide from ‘spectacle’ to ‘simulacra‘ here, were it not impossible for us to forget, (mostly) conscious spectacle-producers that we are, our active role in this process. It, and our persona within it, is the result of our collective efforts.

At his best, no theorist is better able to remind us of this truth than Slavoj Zizek. And likewise, no bloggers have been more successful in demanding our acknowledgment of it than dejan and jonquille de camembert (aka troll aka new york pervert aka patrick j. mullins) of the parody center.

dejan’s proces of becoming-Zizek began from the very beginning. He demanded that we evict Zizek from the content of our blogs, using his real-life status as an Oppressed Peoples to transform our initial disgust and irritation at his crass disregard for ‘liberal pieties’ like debate etiquette, witty yet inoffensive repartee, and self-respect, into pity. Some, who knew what he was about to teach too well to see what was coming, treated him as almost an equal, even an ally. If we did not evict Zizek, at least we learned how to take him seriously. We finally learned how to read him — either a) as a political agitator or b) as a link blog. We decided individually which was more important to us.

It took the efforts of jonquille to show dejan that in his rabid attempts to erase Zizek’s name from the Internet, he had cleared out a space for himself to occupy (the repetition of the original tragedy as farce). He set out, with jonquille as the Dick Cheney-cum-Leona Helmsley of the blogosphere along for the ride, to follow his old mentor in directly challenging liberal pieties and multiculturalist assumptions with references to pop culture! The new spectacle, same as the old: infinite deferral of the daddy figure. In short, he became a stah:

The celebrity, the spectacular representation of a living human being, embodies this banality by embodying the image of a possible role. Being a star means specializing in the seemingly lived; the star is the object of identification with the shallow seeming life that has to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations which are actually lived. Celebrities exist to act out various styles of living and viewing society unfettered, free to express themselves globally. They embody the inaccessible result of social labor by dramatizing its by-products magically projected above it as its goal: power and vacations, decision and consumption, which are the beginning and end of an undiscussed process. In one case state power personalizes itself as a pseudo-star; in another a star of consumption gets elected as a pseudo-power over the lived. But just as the activities of the star are not really global, they are not really varied.

From his master, he learned how to ingratiate himself to the media by repeating its tropes as shallow and therefore flattering mockeries. From his master he learned how to intersperse flattery with slander, and to embody the stereotypical Orientalist fantasies of a stereotyped version of his audience (aka himself) : racial hatred, hatred of women, the reduction of sociality to sexualized power games, etc. All carried out with the audience expectation but not the performance of irony, and thus experienced as cleverly subversive.

And the result? They love it! Except for those who love it too much and get burned for trying to become part-timers (and who really do deserve all they get), they, we, are ‘in on the joke.’ In truth we are inside the joke. We have been confronted with the ‘fact’ that WE ARE THE JOKE and we have laughed, as if it were ‘just a joke.’ And then go right on discoursing with all the earnestness of a professional academic about ‘politics’ as it happens ‘out there.’

The point of the joke, of course, is our failure to recognize what our actually existing politics are, our refusal to identify politically with anything outside the spectacle. We treat political orientations as if they were abstract theoretical entities, projecting ourselves into them in the manner of video game avatars, switching back and forth repeatedly to ‘get all perspectives.’ When the spectacle spits it all back at us we feel our theories have been confirmed. But dejan and Zizek have a fully realized political desire, appropriate to their perceived interests and advanced by their performances, which are never merely neutral, theoretical, or ‘for laughs.’ Whether or not this desire is rational, ethical, or emotionally balanced is another matter.

What would happen if we took our best self-representation, the ‘multitude’ offered by Hardt & Negri, seriously? Not as a description of something that has actually been realized, but as our virtually inherent vehicle of production.

We have seen that the flesh of the multitude produces in common in a way that is monstrous and always exceeds the measure of any traditional social bodies, but this productive flesh does not create chaos and social disorder. What it produces, in fact, is common, and that common we share serves as the basis for future production, in a spiral, expansive relationship. (Multitude 196-97).

In other words, there is order in blogland, and we are (re)producing it. It’s customary to write off academic/intellectual blogs as ‘hobbies’ no different than a personal diary or notebook. This is a good way to ease the pressure of writing out in the open. In this way we use it as a little mirror for the comfortable obscurity of academia. But if dejan/jonquille should have taught us anything, it is that the blogosphere is politics in miniature. And it is miniature only because we do not get enough hits.

If the world as presented to us by ‘global capitalism’ makes us believe we have no choice but ironic/intellectual detachment, the reality is precisely the opposite. We can either choose to know what our politics are, which involves knowing what tools we have at our disposal (however limited) and how we have been employing them, or we can accept ignorance. The one thing we can’t be is ‘detached.’

Yes, there have been and will always be flamers and ideological blowhards. But Zizek/dejan/jonquille have chosen to become political agents. They cast themselves as foreign jesters and parasites on what for most of us serves primarily as an ethical discourse (of the ‘Big Other’ or otherwise) — Marxism (which gets lumped together with more habituated ethical standards: they’re casually racist, sexist, and all the other things our parents and Bill Clinton should have told us to stay away from) in part to accomplish goals or spread propaganda that most of us don’t bother to understand, even when they ask us to. Zizek’s words derive from Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, dejan/jonquille’s derive from Le Colonel Chabert. Starting from the same function — the production of textual derivatives of European and American intellectuals — their behaviors are exaggerated versions of our own, directed at us. Therefore what comes out of them are problems for us. It’s true, dejan/jonquille are ants next to Zizek, of no real importance. But Zizek is not ‘important’ either; they are united in practice, and the fact that their names appear on our blogs. They invite our condescension, they try to intimidate and impress us through rudeness. What else they will have been depends on us.

UPDATE: THEY PUBLISHED MY NAME ON THEIR BLOG. GO THERE TO FIND OUT WHO I REALLY AM.

The Action is Elsewhere

No posts lately, probably none for a little while longer.

In the meantime, there’s the seeds of what will hopefully blossom into a discussion of the many critiques of Hardt and Negri’s much-hyped manifesto against contemporary global capital, Empire, to be found here at ktismatic’s blog.

Topics to be addressed:

What is the role of the state in ‘globalized’ capitalism?

What does ‘deterritorialization’ mean exactly?

Do the ideals of republican democracy still have any progressive worth?

What to think about the U.S.? If we ignore it, will it go away?

What about Marxism?

Join in the fun.

New culturemonkey post

I have a new one up here.

Go read it.

While waiting for something more substantial to appear here, rest your gaze upon this really beautiful photo blog, Lumpen Orientalism.

American Stranger Has Sold Out

The evidence can be found here

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culturemonkey

I will continue posting on this site (this one that you’re reading), in the usual unregulated format.

Thank you for your attention.