I don’t publish much, mainly because I write slowly, but a new essay has just come out. It’s entitled ‘Sorcery, thought and the ghosts of departed quantities’ and is a discussion of various types of knowledge, largely prompted (as is much of the work in this collection) by the work of Quentin Meillasoux. It’s part of a really interesting collection of work and is accompanied by an image from a great artist, Residue, who agreed to let me include his work alongside the essay. It’s available from Amazon.
Category: speculative realism
-
New essay published
-
Knower-known relations (alien and intimate knowledge)
The problem of access that is central to the critique of correlationism depends on the epistemological gap between knower and known. This gap, almost inherent to and therefore inevitably inextricable from the concept of knowledge itself, depends upon the sense of the known as a product alien from the producer. That which I know is known in so far as it does not depend on me. I own the known but as something outside myself that I have access to, in the form of property rights, in the same way I have – or can have – access to land. I have certain rights to the known, it seems, providing I can fulfill criteria of ownership. For example, it might be said that I can know something in so far as I possess a belief that is true about the world together with a justification for the belief. I can then have my belief checked, the justification validated and if my papers are in order I can demand recognition and communication rights so that this knowledge is acknowledged. Yet this whole concept of the known as a product outside myself that I own, which underpins the problems of access, is a wholly bizarre and curious concept of knowledge. It exists not as a concept of knowledge but as a means of justified exchange value. It exists to enable rights of recognition but the rights of recognition assume a lack of recognition as their basic starting point. The whole story of knowledge as a product is a story of dispossession, a story of enclosure. It represents a naturalisation of a shift in power from inalienable capacities to alienated products. -
After Finitude, notes #3
Meillassoux expresses the problem that the correlationist has with the arche-fossil via the concept of ‘the given’. For the correlationist the arche-fossil is quite straight-forwardly a self-contradictory concept because it suggests that there is a ‘givenness of being anterior to givenness’. The correlationist points out that what we should do is conceptualise the scientific quantitative facts that the arche-fossil is aimed at as modes of ‘given-ness’. For the correlationist, “being is not anterior to givenness, it gives itself as anterior to givenness” (AF:14). The presentation of this argument is close to the bizarre notion that somehow God placed dinosaur fossils in the rocks in order to ‘test our faith’, a curious convoluted manoeuvre that is blatantly designed to maintain some sort of ‘biblical consistency’ in the face of science.
In once sense the argument is curiously distorted by the idea of givenness, because if we begin by accepting that ‘the given’ is the starting point from which we know the world then we are already inside the determinative framework which leads to correlationism. Think of this in terms of the analogy with the argument about God and the dinosaur bones. If the existence of god as outlined in the Bible is already axiomatic then any empirical fact must be determined within the determinative framework of the biblical frame. If I find geological evidence of timespans that appear inconsistent with such a framework, if I find fossils that appear to be located in geological layers older than is seemingly possible within the biblical axiomatic, then the appearance must be deceptive. The axiomatic determines the range of possible solutions. This is the crux of Meillassoux’s argument – the axiomatic of the given determines the range of possible solutions available to us in terms of knowledge of the world.
-
After Finitude, notes #2
In the first of these notes on After Finitude the focus was on the initial move in the book, the retrieval of the concept of primary properties. Even though this is the first move it is still vital to realise that it is the starting point for a more prolonged attack on the dominant contemporary philosophical mode of thinking. This contemporary mode of thinking is what Meillassoux calls correlationism. Correlationism begins with the ‘transcendental revolution’, which finds its origin in Kant. If we have no access to the in-itself then what we are left with are different types of subjective representation. It is no longer the case, the correlationist thinks, that we distinguish between representations which are correct because they adequately represent the object and representations which are distorted by subjective influence (primary properties fulfilling the formal role and secondary properties the latter). We should now distinguish between representations that we must all agree upon and representations that do not demand universal consent. “From this point on, intersubjectivity, the consensus of the community, supplants the adequation between the representations of a solitary subject and the thing itself as the veritable criterion of objectivity, and of scientific objectivity more particularly.” (AF:4). (more…)
-
After Finitude, notes #1
This is part of a series of notes, intended primarily to work through the arguments in Quentin Meillassoux’s book After Finitude.The first move made in Meillassoux’s book is to attempt to retrieve the viability of ‘primary properties’ as a philosophical concept that can do serious lifting. The origin of the explicit ‘primary’ versus ‘secondary’ properties distinction is in Locke – although he uses the term ‘qualities’ rather than properties – and it’s core problem is perhaps found in Berkeley. Locke posits primary properties of an object as those which, we might say, are in the object itself and secondary properties as those which are in the perception of the object 1. The former might be extension, solidity and motion whilst the latter might be colour, taste and smell. Berkeley’s objection to the distinction is to the primary property as being ‘in the object itself’ – for Berkeley all we have are ideas and even if there is a distinction among our ideas of an object that matches the ‘primary/secondary distinction, this is still a distinction only amongst ideas and has no necessary bearing or connection on anything outside the mind.
There has been debate over what exactly might be listed under the category of ‘primary property’ but in the initial outlining of the distinction the primary properties are those that are divisible. “Take a grain of Wheat, divide it into two parts, each part still has Solidity, Extension, Figure and Mobility; divide it again, and it retains still the same qualities; and so divide it on, till the parts become insensible, they must retain still each of them all those qualities.” The crucial move here – ‘and so divide it on, till the parts become insensible, they must retain still …’ – indicates the presence of a non-empirical principle. The necessity that these particular qualities must exist in any object whatsoever, no matter how large or small, is not something that we extract from experience but something with which we organise or understand experience. Primary properties, then, are what belong to the objects themselves as objects not as perceived objects. The existence of these properties does not depend on any subject, any observer, discovering them – they are properties in the object itself.
-
Objects and all that…
The blog here has been a little quiet as I’ve become more and more immersed in my research. I took a years unpaid sabbatical from the University of Greenwich where I work as a part-time philosophy lecturer in order to work on a book tentatively titled ‘Necessary Matter’. Things are progressing with that project and hopefully there will be some concrete output fairly soon from this long process of immersion in texts and thoughts. In the course of the research, which initially began from a curious encounter between my interests in Leibniz, Deleuze and Brandom, I have engaged more and more with the interest in objects that has arisen over the last few years. The work of Harman and Bryant, coming out of the speculative realist current and drawing on Bruno Latour, strikes me as interesting if unsatisyfing. This, I find, is often the most productive type of encounter. The uninteresting simply passes by, whereas the satisfying offers a kind of succour that might be ill-advised but is often rapidly consumed. Satisfaction leads to passivity, not usually a good thing in terms of thought, although no doubt it is necessary at times.
-
Branding thought
A new speculative realist journal is about to begin and has issued a cfp, details over here. The new journal seems to be only an online journal, although I’m not entirely sure about that. No details of a print version are mentioned. Unfortunately it’s not very imaginatively titled, simply called ‘Speculations’, although I suppose this is kind of a ‘it does exactly what it says on the tin‘ name.The new speccy movement has a large number of virtues no doubt, although I’ve never been that comfortable with the whole ‘branding’ attitude. Mark Fisher reports Graham Harman talking about branding in a positive light, claiming that it is a ‘universally recognised method of of conveying information while cutting through information clutter‘. The claim is, as seems quite common, both provocative, far-reaching and seemingly ‘against the orthodoxy’, although I’m afraid I don’t quite buy it. Easily able to be hidden inside the ‘conveying information’ phrase is a major assumption, namely that information is neutral. This would then miss the point of those who might criticise branding as a problematic device, something that is deployed to manipulate information flows rather than merely convey. It connects, however, with something I read Harman saying on another website, which is that he specifically envisages the creation of a philosophical movement as a project. There is something intensely interesting here in the way the speccies, with the force of Harman at their centre, create a series of alliances, devices and connections. Just as in the case of the pasteurisation of France, a kind of alliance of associations is underway, with the explicit ‘naming’ (branding) of the movement as a form of ‘fulcrum point’. Harman has, no doubt, learnt the lessons of Latour. Under this assumption I take it that the point of speculative realism is to create an asymetrical moment, to win a battle and shift the terrain of forces.
Obviously this idea of asymmetry, a form of ‘breaking history in two’, has some resonance with Nietzschean attitudes to forces, though there is something uniquely ‘human’ in the way the speccies are going about the job. Rather than the thinker engaging in time, valiantly trying to carry out the heroic task of untimeliness (some latent transcendent existentialism no doubt), the speccies offer up a movement. Now sometimes this is not quite so obvious. I get the sense that speculative realists are often taken to be offering a new argument. For example, Steven Shaviro comments that ‘what’s so energizing about Harman’s “object-oriented philosophy,” or about “speculative realism” more generally, is that it refuses to subordinate its arguments about the nature of the world (or about anything, really) to (second-order) arguments about how we can know whether such (first-order) arguments are correct.’ Now, of course, there are always new arguments and all of the speccies, in one form or another, bring forward new arguments. The ‘new’ here is not yet the New (whatever that would be, if indeed it is at all). The idea, for example, that philosophy should make first-order arguments about the world is not that uncommon. The point, presumably, is that it’s uncommon in our current philosophical conjuncture. It is not so much, I feel, the arguments that are crucial (not that they’re unimportant by any means) since they seem to be unable to be discussed without being located within the movement that is speculative realism.
The slight problem I have, however, is that this notion of a movement that attempts to re-invigorate philosophical first-order arguments under the banner of ‘speculative philosophy’ seems aimed specifically at philosophy. The content, of course, still comes forward as first order arguments, but the structure or dynamic of the movement looks on this account to be second-order (a kind of ‘metaphilosophical’ movement). That may or may not be a positive thing, I’m not sure, although I’m certainly uncertain. What is clear, however, is that a new fashion is on the rise and at the centre of it is a brand name rather than a ‘proper name’. Despite any misgivings – and a terribly old-fashioned dislike of fashions on my part – it will be interesting to see how this movement continues to develop and what possibilities for thought it opens up.
Speculations journal details over here
razorsmile :: philosophy//magic //revolution 