Transcendental Dynamism I: A note

Transcendental Dynamism breaks and re-integrates Real-Materiality-Sense-Intelligence with transcendence and immanence modalities and trans-modalities between the different regimes of being. Immanence, as a mode of philosophy, explores thought and materiality on one plane, whereas transcendence admits the artificiality of separating thought and being. In order to understand the various uses of transcendence and immanence – I believe that Laruelle (and Brassier’s reading of Laruelle) are the most helpful in this sense.

In his excellent post from some time back Reid introduced several key concepts of non-philosophy. In regards to the problem of realist thinking Reid writes:

“The two options open to such a philosopher are not good ones: 1) either thought, and hence philosophical activity are not of this world, transcendent to it, and therefore fall beyond explanation of the world (and this has never been a comfortable philosophical position), or 2) thought, and hence philosophical activity, are of this world, they are objects like any other, and therefore a meta-philosophical theory that takes philosophy as object is possible, or even required.”

The relation between immanence and transcendence is complicated by the transcendence utilized or absorbed by immanence as well as whether or not transcendence is de-transcendentalized by being constitutive. Or as Reid puts it: “we must distinguish between the a priori conditions that are thought by concepts as immanent transcendentals, and the transcendental immanence that synthesizes concept and object.” The philosophical decision is that which separates an artificial unity (posing as the One or the unified real) and then recombines it through mental synthesis. For Laruelle the One is a radical immanence that cannot be divided or decided against in any way.

Leibniz’s strange two headed philosophy emerges – the two heads being that of mental substance and physical substance which emanate from God being kept together, or at least harmonized, by divine acts. But if the divine is excised then what becomes of the harmony, and if nature replaces god, how can the mental and the physical be reconciled – or must they me addressed in terms of Schelling’s double series, in terms of the manifest and the scientific? Is any sense of unity, any kind of traction in the flow of the emanating One merely synthetic? Can one have an intensive topology or a universal spatium in which singularities can operate?

De Landa struggles this as well as in his realist accounts of science he attempts to erase metaphor without given a strong account of the place of metaphysical speculation, one that is hard to square with Deleuze’s empiricism without things becoming too close to a kind of human exceptionalism. I think Schelling’s actants from the First Outline (and perhaps Whitehead’s Actual Occasions) are what one should look to here.

A Note: Partitions/Swarming objects

I was quite unable to keep up with the exchanges between Jussi Parika, the commenters on his blog, and the OOO folks (Harman, Bogost, Bryant, Paul Caplan, and Robert Jackson).

It’s always hard in such situations to separate the critique from the shit talking as argumentative strategy falls right in the middle. Part of the rhetorical mess is that many Deleuzians still see themselves as occupying a minority position (a position which OOO may see itself in as well and rightly so). The former generally overlooks the longevity of its time in the spotlight while the latter generally overlooks the effect its fast rise has on those outside it. Anyways, these attitudes are problematic and muddy the arguments being made.

Jason Hills has said many things which I agree with here. The problem, as he put it in another post, really has to do with the idea of objects as ready-made, that there does not seem to be a good sense of generation or change. I think Michael Austin addressed this well in his essay in the first issue of Speculations. Though we disagree about the reach of phenomenology, the fact that there is some capacity or conatus or vitality (organic or inorganic) that is not reducibly to thought nor to strictly eliminative means seems important.

Both in drawing battle lines and in separating the epistemological from the non-epistemological, it becomes difficult to separate the partitions from the clouds of swarming objects.

Mediated Nostalgia, The Dispersed Past, and the Flat Buzz

When Facebook’s new Timeline look was announced a few months back a brilliantly funny video lampooned it by taking a clip from Mad Men where Don Draper is doing a presentation on Kodak’s new photograph slide show device. In the episode the Eastman-Kodak execs want to call the device the wheel harping on the fact that it’s an exciting and revolutionary new invention. Don counters by arguing that while newness is powerful, nostalgia can be just as effective although it is far more delicate. Here is the speech he gives:

“Well, technology is a glittering lure. But, uh, there’s the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash if they have a sentimental bond with the product. My first job, I was in house at a fur company with this old pro copywriter, Greek, named Teddy. And Teddy told me the most important idea in advertising is ‘new’. Creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion. But he also talked about a deeper bond with the product, ‘nostalgia’. It’s delicate, but potent.  Teddy told me that in Greek nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound. It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel, it’s called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels. Round and around and back home again to a place where we know we are loved.”

The video replaces the photographs of Don and his family with a Timeline version of his life – in effect the video makes fun of our desire for Timeline in the same way Don is trying to convince the execs to turn away from newness, or flash. So much of allure of new forms of media seem to be based on their newness, or difference from another version or another form. Constant changes to social media platforms generally cause spastic excitement on the one hand and groans of ‘if it isn’t broke don’t fix it’ on the other. It’s also ridiculous because facebook on a projector is out of place but not anymore out of place than Mad Men is on our television.

But indirectly the video says quite a bit about Timeline and ‘new media’ in general. It suggests, on the one hand, that nostalgia is part of Timeline and that as media and connectivity is disrupted in ‘the cloud’ (whatever that means exatcly’ we at the same time have developed a new (or re-found) form of digital homesickness. And, in an even more diagonal sort of way, it suggests (as much work in media archeology has done) that everything old is new again, that any so called new technology is one that simply didn’t catch on or was forgotten. As Siegfried Zielinski’s Deep Time of the Media shows, this not only reconfigures the thought of invention but also questions the meaning of media (particularly in a pre-electronic era). This is also to say nothing of the forgotten or overlooked inventor in the wake of corporatized manufacturing (Edison vs Tesla) or one need hardly mention the central drama of David Fincher’s Facebook focused The Social Network…

PostDeleuze? pt II

Responses to my last post are here and here at Agent Swarm.

Iain Hamilton Grant recently gave a talk in London where he pseudo-jokingly stated that we are merely coffee drinking carbon molecules. This kind of statement which deterritorializes (or more in the Schellingian sense ungrounds) what human beings are is central to the posthuman (particularly in regards to whether this post- is temporal or not (it usually has more of a temporal connotation when skewed with transhumanism coming singularity etc.). That human beings are not human, or are only roughly bound up in meat sacks that we can call people, is a point that’s become fairly prevalent whether its due to our being meshworks (DeLanda or Morton with a non-Deleuzian emphasis), being bounded light (Bergson) or any other energetic flow bounded up or functioning as some kind of aggregate.

This atlas of the human microbinome is helpful in illustrating this on a biological level.

That being said the ‘?’ following PostDeleuze is meant to be as uncertain as it seems if not a little provacative because of the way Deleuze is used as an odd metaphysical (but perhaps not purely metaphysical) backdrop for quite a bit of work done in New Materialisms and Posthumanism. As I mentioned in my last post, Cyberfeminism occupies a sort of forgotten place inbetween these bodies of theory and takes on another interesting twist given Sadie Plant and Luciana Parisi as part of the CCRU (Speculative Realism’s prehistory).

In terms of post- and time, on the one hand it seems like we’ve never gotten to Deleuze in that, at least how he is often utilized in the aforementioned backdrop kind of way, he’s often introduced as if he’s had no impact on theory but enacted as if everyone should already understand him. Maybe this would put a smile on Deleuze’s face as it puts his work in a kind of weird pregnant present, in a capsule of virtual time.

This kind of temporality is at odds and also supports the ungrounding/deterritorializing model as it on the one had seems necessary to always hold thought on the side as it digs up what is human to reveal that it’s far less human than it seemed but also always runs the risk of poisoning the well with anthrocentrism. Luciana Parisi’s Abstract Sex is a very useful use of Deleuze particularly as it applies to biology and, particularly towards the end, shares much in common with N. Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman. Both texts assert that the post- in posthuman is really a marker of shift in understanding of the human and not temporal – the issue being of course how deep that transformation goes, whether turning humans into bundles of information makes them less than human (especially in a humanist sense of human or liberal humanist subject) – what is human about humans?

I’m still running through several post human texts but what’s left of the human (without circling around the subject) troubles Thierry Bardini (Junkware) and perhaps Parika (Insect Media) but to a lesser extent. With the temporal dimension taken out, or without posthumanism simply meaning transhuman (in the hyper cybernetic sense) and then the task becomes how the posthuman is different (or not) from the inhuman or nonhuman. The issue is how inhuman is the human after Deleuze – how inhuman can thought be and still be philosophy as he constructs it?

Post-Deleuze? or New Materialisms, Post-Humanism, and Speculative Realism

I’ve made some comments on the reception of Deleuze in the past which seemed to trouble some. In so many of the developments of SR and related movements (though OOO is openly critical of Deleuze on the whole) Deleuze is a central figure (implicitly or explicitly) usually cited alongside Guattari, Whitehead, Spinoza, James, and Stengers. Such a citation is usually a broad positional move  – to set the text against stability or sedentary thinking, set against idealism or against essences. However, it is more recently that this has been turned against some of the more privileged terms such as subject or language. But such positioning is still done as if it had the same weight it did 20 years ago which in a sense weakens the very name of Deleuze (and Guattari). In many ways I believe this stems from an uneasiness in regards to Deleuze as a metaphysician and the lingering discomfort with that word. This seems particular evident in the posthumanities and in works of new materialism such as that of Jane Bennett and William Connolly. While work such as Braidotti seems to hang onto the language of the subject perhaps a bit much work such as Bennett’s seems more willingly to let that go yet she remains close to pseudo-phenomenological narratives of enchantment/fascination (particularly evident in her recent focus on hoarding).

On the one hand this could merely be seen as being unwilling to let go (to shift from the who to the it that thinks) but it messily also invokes the problem of how the speculative turn, or realist turn, or materialist, turn deals with decidedly less-real or less material things (this is one of the concerns listed towards the end of the introduction to The Speculative Turn). This also feeds into, and is fed by, the ongoing concern about affect.

Many of these (if not all of them) can be led back to the metaphysical fuzziness of Deleuze – between Deleuze as feeling like he is a pure metaphysician and Francois Zourabichivili’s statement that ‘there is no ontology of Deleuze.’ This strange tension is clear in the approaches of Deleuzians who have made the most waves – Manuel De Landa and Brian Massumi as well as in the effects of Nick Land and other CCRU thinkers (such as Luciana Parisi and Sadie Plant) appearing in altered forms in SR and SR related thinkers. That is, Deleuze’s materialism seems to require a level of desaturation (De Landa) or libdinal resaturation (Land, Parisi, Massumi) where there is a tug of war between the virtual and the affective. Many of the solutions to this issue, or at least the approach to this tension, is to invoke a methodological parallelism but this seems to simply step around the demands of realism.

The starting-to-be-forgotten thrust of cyberfeminism rests in the gap here – the crisis of the materialization or dematerialization of the body (a large part of posthumanism as well – particularly Hayles’ book) as was pointed out in regard to Haraway’s cyborg, Butler’s materiality (‘what about the body Judy?’),and the becomings of Grosz and Braidotti. As Parisi notes in her Abstract Sex, it is the work of Irigaray that is continually under appreciated here – a nervousness over the body reinscribing essence causes a lean back towards dematerialization, discursivity, and so on. In effect, the parallel processes of actual and virtual maintain a destabilization of the procession of actualities, of the productivity of materiality which requires a middle ground between virtual and actual than is non-reductive but also non-magical, that is not too quick to jump into panpsychism or radical emergence. The only wide spread middle ground has been transcendental disjunction. It might be time to turn back to the cyborg and the hybrid. A self-critical, negativity embracing, cyborg. The it that thinks is an it that participates in actualization that is not the result of unbound thought nor already thinking materiality but trapped in ontological disjunctions/resistances that curb the dispositional nature of thought that is not different in kind from other powers and processes. The cyborg is the walking slide between grounds of powers.

Recent Creations

The videos from the recent Black Metal Theory event P.E.S.T. are available here.

Here is the video of my talk as I could not attend in person. The pdf is available here.

Zachary Price’s video “Destroy Your Life for Satan” from the same event is available here.

A discussion of (and the audiofiles of) the response I gave to JJ Cohen back in September at Speculative Medievalisms 2 is available here.

Some Notes on Bataille

I am currently in the middle of writing a final paper for a course on death and desire on Bataille and economies of death or on the scalability of Bataille’s concepts of expenditure and sacrifice as they apply or don’t apply to death and extinction. Basically, I’m wondering if the relation between death and extinction is scalable in the same way restricted and universal (or general) economy are especially given the fact that Bataille (as Reza has pointed out) stays within a solar economy.

This stems from rereading Brassier’s critiques of how death is taken up by Heidegger (and by Levinas and Blanchot by association) and how Bataille’s absence there relates to Brassier’s expansion of death into extinction via Freud and Lyotard’s solar catastrophe. Eugene Thacker in The Dust of this Earth seems to side with Heidegger (or at least more with Heidegger in this instance) in arguing that there is a kind of thinkable disjunction between death and extinction or perishing (no matter how widespread. One point in which the relation of thought to extinction seems odd in Brassier’s closing chapter of Nihil is that it is somewhat unclear what non-human extinction events mean for thought or what the extinction of thought would mean for other thinking beings. Perhaps this uncertainty or distance is due to his critique of Meillassoux’s use of the arche fossil as over privileging the temporal and in particular the past as signifying different times, or a time of life.

Brining this back to Bataille – the related tension is between continuity and discontinuity by way of the unclear relation death has to formalism. In several of his texts Bataille seems to connect the continuity of humans (which the experience of actually being a human disrupts with discontinuity) to a species continuity or a kind of flow of base matter of which we are all made but which we experience only (following Nick Land) as chance, entropy, disaster and so on. But Bataille’s insistence on the experience of transgression, of a self-that-dies seems to pull at the phantom coat tails of Heidegger’s being-towards-death. That is there is a void of a self but a self as experience standing above that void and laughing at its voidal nature as we approach death. Sacrifice and expenditure (which the sun does simultaneously as expenditure is heat, sacrifice is expenditure etc) seem to deformalize death and that which is dying but Bataille never seems to get to the dead as, from inner experience, we experience the dead of others as cannibal feast, waste, shit, and so forth. It becomes unclear whether, in this sense, Bataille gets past what Adrian Johnston has called Death and the Euthanasia of Reason in Kant – we can only think the death of others. Death, and death as extinction, is always caught in a refugium (to borrow from the biologies of extinction) our species-being (in a different sense or not from the Marxist sense) cant think its unthinking.

But then Bataille is not Heidegger when it comes to death and he is not Deleuze when it comes to flow.

P.E.S.T. (updated)

Live stream is up.

Here is the video of my talk. I will post the written paper shortly once it’s a bit cleaned up.

CFP: First Annual Meeting of the Schelling Society of North America

CALL FOR PAPERS for the FIRST ANNUAL MEETING OF THE SCHELLING SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA (SSNA)

AUGUST 31 – SEPTEMBER 1, 2012
SEATTLE UNIVERSITY (SEATTLE, WASHINGTON USA)

The SSNA is open to anyone who conducts research on Schelling and Schellingian philosophy in the English language. The SSNA mission is to (1) further research in English, both historical and systematic, on Schelling and related figures (eg., Boehme, Oetinger, Baader, Fichte, Novalis, Hölderlin, Schubert, early Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Oken, Fechner, Coleridge, Bradley, Peirce); (2) organize a stand-alone Schelling conference every other year at a North American University, with proceedings published online, and the best papers published every four years with an academic press; (3) gather data concerning current graduate research in English on Schelling; (4) coordinate translation projects of Schelling into English.

PLEASE SEND ABSTRACTS (500 WORDS) TO JASON WIRTH (wirthj@seattleu.edu) AND SEAN McGRATH (sjoseph.mcgrath@gmail.com) by 15 JANUARY 2012.

The Red Tower or Weirding Wall street

As I leaving the Public School Lecture in NYC I gave on Geophilosophy and Horror I shared part of my subway ride with one of the audience members. As our conversation was winding down he asked me where I was going and so I asked him the same. He said he was off to Wallstreet because he had heard about an Ad Busters event going on down there, he wasn’t sure anyone would show up. Of course that was September 17th.

I am not a political thinker, it is not one of my strong suits. But let’s try something weird:

The place is a thin line, overrun by ghosts of mud walls and ramparts and Dutch business men. A place fueled by train tracks and the Eerie Canal. After an infamous 1920 bombing which left the place tomb like: “It was as though some gigantic force had overturned the building and then placed it upright again, leaving the framework uninjured but scrambling everything inside” Too bad the headless horseman wasn’t around.

But it appears as a place always scrambled, that practically collapsed due to a wandering thought – is the money there safe? Littered with anti-bomb sculpture and drug fueled traders doing less than writing reports with their soft machines but instead feeding panic and anxiety about patterns and behaviors already handed over to algorithms. In a sense its a horror like Ligotti’s The Red Tower – where a factory produces worthless, semi-living novelty items and delivers them into peoples homes. It’s been discussed here and here. There’s something horrible that there’s awful production and a gray landscape – a kind of thinking that’s the horror within capitalism itself, one too often deployed, you’re either working or your not. There’s no discussion of the monstrosities being produced it is work, work to be done, production in and for itself. But there needs to be a horror beyond the factory, a post Fordist-Horror, algorithmic and financial horror.

As Harvey discusses here the central problem is that capital simply shifts problems globally (though he doesn’t discuss the technological aspects of this) and that place, the economic disintegration of place becomes more and more alien, more and more distant. Yet, complexities rely on nodes, there are places like wall street, certain aspects of the frame remain undamaged after the bomb-scrambling. Buildings are hollowed out and massive trenches dynamited to slightly increase the speed of data for brokers, to shave hundredths of seconds off for trades.

The physicalities of capital can still be haunted but it is increasingly difficult to think the causes, spewed outwards, from those places. Zombies don’t quite fit metaphorically anymore. This is different type of swarm. “At this third level, these rumors maintain, the factory’s schedule of production is being carried out in some new and strange manner, representing its most ambitious venture in the output of putrid creations [..] I myself have never seen the Red Tower – no one ever has.”

For something actually substantial read this.

Addendum

Zachary responds to my post here. He is right about the zombie comment – I guess the question is whether the zombies are read as the insatiably desire of people codified by capital (think of the iconic scene from Dawn of the Dead where the characters are staring down at the zombies from the rooftop of the mall and state ‘they’re us’) or whether the zombie is read as the return of the dead worker who has no labor and begins to feast on the others. This later meaning is more like the role of the zombies in Romero’s Land of the Dead where the zombies invade the rich community of Fiddler’s Green and learn to use tools to fight their once and future oppressors.