At the Speculative Aesthetics conference back in March, Ray Brassier connected ‘the new accelerationism’ (that which functions in a epistemological-political register rather than, in Land, an ontological-political register) to what he dubbed a Prometheanism. This Prometheanism, following in the wake of Lenin and the Cosmists, puts forth the axiom that revolutionary politics requires rigorous post-capitalist planing via technological and more broad scientific exploration and not, we might say, the lightfooted doctrine of neo-liberal development. Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek develop this is their recently posted Accerlerationist Manifesto available here.

The piece is great.  McKenzie Wark has written an interesting response here. I have always been a accelerationst sympathesizer but was perhaps never admitted to the ranks for one reason or another (possibly because I am not a political thinker). One on level, I am not sure how to connect my own Schellingian sympathies to such a project as Schelling appears as a reactionary and non-radical character in the literature (though he has a kind of anarchic character in some ways, something I wrote an essay that will come out here.) That is, while there are certainly ties to Schelling via Peirce and Chatelet (in terms of physics, intuition, and systematicity) technology (and esp any kind of technologically infused politics) is a bit of a stretch.

One way, of trying to explore a ground here is Schelling’s complex relation to the myth of Prometheus (which I concluded this talk briefly with). While several notions of Prometheus swirl around Schelling (particularly in relation to Goethe’s  famous ode) the concept that the Promethean thought as a primordial thought is particularly interesting. For Schelling, the Gods were brought forth in order to move beyond them hence Schelling’s tautegorical concept of myth; the assertion that myth is not fundamentally allegorical but expresses objectivity in more or less clear language. Myth has a kind of redundant utility. Myth becomes myth (rather than say fiction) to the degree which it successfully obfuscates its temporality (myth contains in it the very beginning of time as Cassier discusses). This is related to Schelling’s view of the relation between science and philosophy – that the latter should judge and reconstruct the fictions that guide the practices of the former (and not the practices themselves).

Essentially, Schelling argues that the Promethean impulse is an ancient one, and one that necessitates not only the generation of myths and/or fictions, but ones that break from the stable self-justifying constructs meant only for pleading to the gods. This does not abnegate the sadness of the gods (of knowing the unhappy responsibility that comes from constrained notions of freedom) but threads the speculative and the pragmatic together: the construction of myths (as a practical excersise) engenders particular futures of creation thereby unleashing (or really re-releasing) speculation to bring it back to construction.

It would seem that it is the method of construction that speaks to a possible internal tension within the new accelerationism, a point of contention between Negarestani and Brassier (already suggested by the former in NYC last November). This centers on the normative as opposed to the explorative or, more broadly, the discrete and the continuous. While the continuous gets around the myth of the given in that it doesn’t rely on the acceptance of any kind of ready made concept, it seems that Negarestani’s thought, while acknowledging the local efficacy of the normative and the discrete, has yet to answer to the formation of the normative as a socially, or collectively, mediated formation. For instance, in his recent lectures at PAF this past April Negarestani discussed predator and prey relationships and discussed how sex becomes a solution to the catastrophe of two entities wanting to inhabit the same space.

After the talks I was talking to several others and the question was raised as how this ‘showdown’ model of predator and prey relates to collective hunting or, we might say to follow the Sellarsian line taken by Brandom and other Pittsburgh Hegelians, how the social becomes the naturalizing force of the normative (as second nature), it produces the tools by which we reason. It is unclear to me, how the socially produced tools of reason via language acquisition as the grundsatz of the normative clash with the continuous navigational form of reason that Negarestani is pursuing…as it seems to be a combat of a collective of speakers with a single engine of manipulation. Or, the honest townsfolk reacting to a stranger come to town.

In this sense, game theory meets evolutionary game theory, and meets the formation of myth (the birth of the legend). Whereas game theory relies more heavily on rational decision, evolutionary theory does not need reason but only effective strategy (forged in the teeth of evolution). Social alternatives complicate the single predator versus prey model in that forms of cooperation and alturism can reallocate resources between members of a collective and create complex strategies for avoiding predators etc. We could say that weirder forms engendered by the exploratory powers of reason lead to creation of, and adherence to, myths and fictions. This is obviously a quick jump, but part of the question here is what is the utility of a collective recognition of the myth-form, for example, once the myth of the given is recognized as the myth of the given.

To return to Schelling’s use of the myth of Prometheus as the anti-myth, it is the inadequacy of our constructions in the wake of apparently divine production but a production, the being of identity as being, that is unavoidable. Reason, for Schelling,  operations in a space of indifference which it can never stay in. Thought is always a costly diversion of one’s activity and a cutting out of an object. Thinking as the damage of a frontier navigator is not the enterprise of the violent few, but the mode by which thinking occurs. The construction of myth is not the invitation to imaginative free-for-all, but to judge myth’s by their non-self grounding character tied to a futurity, to celebrate those myths which point towards the ability of human thought to navigate according to its own terms. A properly accelerationist myth requires myths which dare to be proven insufficient, which outline not the insufficiency of reason but of its failed or restricted modes of operation. Prometheus is the oldest thought of ungrounding, where we cannot give up the tools of reason but only better sharpen them with myths, themselves such stolen tools, bent towards the seemingly impossible future. This is more a game of risk then one of utopian range. To quote (somewhat ironically?) the not so honorable Judge Holden from McCarthy’s Blood Meridian:

“And the answer, said the judge. If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes.”

The figure of the frontier (the figure and the frontier as figure) must be cut from the myths which binds capacity to forms of reason decorated with guns (to hat tip to Land ‘if reason is so secure, while all the guns). Reason cum security force is not so reasonable, but neither are crypto-forms of a kind of humanist conservatism which bind all forms of reason to endless violence. Accelerationism recognizes the stakes are not stolen from divinity, nor immutable ones which must always be defended (the vagueness of human souls), but the future demands larger gambles to break through the current game of reorganizing desires.

Next time: Prometheus in Space

A story at i09 a few days ago was about what’s called the centipede’s dilemma also known as the problem of hyper-reflection. The problem comes from a nursery rhyme written in 1871 in which a centipede, following a questioning toad, thinks too much about how it moves all its legs and then forgets how to move at all. Several decades after the rhyme was initially written the British psychologist George Humphrey popularized the phrase ‘the centipede’s dilemma’ and it is also became known as Humphrey’s Law. The dilemma is a low-level or perhaps more physiological version of analysis paralysis, the problem of over-analyzing to the detriment of decision (Hamlet being the privileged example here). To add to the pantheon of animal dilemmas one can also think of Buridan’s Ass or Aesop’s The Fox and the Cat.

Several other versions of the rhyme have appeared over the years some of which replace the toad with the spider (that great animal of cunning) who manipulates the centipede into thinking too much and tripping over itself. A verse of the rhyme appeared in an article by E. Ray Lankester a British zoologist (one of the two scientists present at Karl Marx’s funeral) who discussing the photography of Eadweard Muybridge wondering what it would be like to apply it to the centipede suggesting, albeit playfulling, that it might cause disastrous results.

Over thinking the complexity of movement was part of Lankester’s larger project most notably discussed in his text Degeneration, when he explained that one efficient strategy of Darwinian evolution was to simplify in order to take the most from one’s environment. Lankester discussed parasites as the most obvious example of this.

(An Interesting political aside: Marx saw in Lankester’s concept of degeneration a political weapon against the political connections made between Darwin and Malthus which, of course, were largely a result of Marx’s over-reliance on Malthus’ work in The Origin of Species though in a statistical, and not overly political, mode. Furthermore, to bring things round again to the centipede, a version of the story was written by Gustav Meyrink as The Curse of the Toad…Meyerink being the author of The Golem, a favorite metaphor of Hardt and Negri).

Degeneration and the centipede’s dilemma, suggests collective action (whether at the level of a singular entities’ limbs or a group of swarming insects, or a political collective etc.) while at the same time being a cautionary tale of over thinking. It also praises hive mentality warning against (what can easily be seen as) anything resembling independent thought, thereby combining the supposed virtues and fears of communism or any kind of collective action. Or, to put it another way and bring things to philosophy, there is the extreme inaction of Hamlet envious at the marching of Fortinbrass on the one hand, and the justified paranoia of Caesar looking at Cassius: “He thinks too much, such men are dangerous.”

Pointing back to my last post, it is a question of cunning in relation to simplicty and complexity or, following Berthoz, a question of simplexity – of how living organisms impose rules, as a kind of experiment, in order to simplify the world. Or as Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart put it simplexity is the process whereby a system of rules engender simple features, the emergence of large scale simplicities. This should be thought in conjunction with the exportation of entropy as a fundamental behavior which leads to intelligence that is then accelerated by intelligence. A recent paper by the physicist Alex Wissner-Gross (and discussed here) suggests that instead of worrying about intelligence leading to a cyber-dyne Terminator style take over, that intelligence is the result of a form of life trying to take over the world through a maximization of its degrees of freedom. Or, one could take this as in the spirit of the opening line of Maimon’s Essay on Transcendental Philosophy: if to exist is to persist in one’s being that to be a thinking being means to increase one’s thinking.

One question which arises is: how does one unground and then properly formulate the difference between intellectual and embodied manipulation of others and of oneself? Or what’s the means of understanding the unintentional and the intentional forms of entropic exportation from the swamp in which they are mixed together? These forms become harder and harder to separate over evolutionary time. Tool making becomes an obvious way of exporting and simplying physical labor, followed by chemical practices such as cooking whereby the costly process of digestion is essentially relocated to the camp fire and the pot etc. Of course unconscious behaviors allow us degrees of freedom which we would not recognize till long after the fact. The dogged pursuit that early humans practiced to run their pray to the point of exhaustion, came about due to our bi-pedal nature (which restricted our speed)  that was counterbalanced (however oddly and indrirectly) by our ability to sweat thereby allowing us to heat-regulate on the move better than most.

The real complex knot is how exactly unintentional and intentional manipulations cross, mutate, and breed with known and unknown constraints. Furthermore, manipulations of course create (intentionally and unintentionally) constraints in turn. To either eschew all constraint or to claim (crypto-conservatively) that some core of human existence or being resists constraint. Furthermore, emergences and generations must be de-philosophized and reassesed in terms of physicalism and pragmatism. Local intensifications can speak for the overly romantic ontological capacities still heavily relied upon – immanence and transcendence should become means of describing and translating their philosophical histories into non-philosophical terms. Immanence becomes local manifestations whereas transcendence becomes symmetry breaking generates which generate new grounds, new rule sets. They are descriptive regimes of movement insofar as thought can capture them.

The problem with philosophy, as Laruelle has aptly pointed out, is that it can think about itself endlessly without ever tripping.

At the end of the interview Grant mentions that he is still working on his next text Grounds and Powers which, I believe was previously referred to as Grounds, Powers, and Time. Grant says that he will be testing some of the material at the Duquesne Summer School on Naturphilosophie where Jason Wirth is the other main speaker, which I will be attending and hopefully presenting at the attached conference in August.

Later the same month Grant (along with many others) will descend upon my university for the Second Annual Schelling Society of North America Conference with the theme Futures of Schelling.

I am also currently putting together proposals for two different collections: one is on German Idealism after Zizek and the other is going to be on new realisms and feminism…I’ll post more details once both are a bit more solidified.

A nice Earth Day sentiment here.

One of the major themes which has crept into my dissertation (largely due to Reza’s influence) is that of space and, by connection, motion. The obvious reason for this is the fascinating work of geometrical-cognitive theorists (Bailly, Longo, Berthoz, Magnani, etc) which argues for geometrical articulations of deep natural processes whether mental, biological, physical or otherwise. By tying motion and space to such concepts, one is able to construct speculative theories which avoid over-emphasizing the discretizing regime (again, borrowing from Reza) as the fundamental explanatory engine.

For myself, space and motion discussed in these ways gives better tools for explaining Schelling’s meontological concept of nature (neither strictly being nor strictly becoming) as a asymmetrical dialectic of the churning of space-time. More specifically, since Schelling is always ungrounding and removing the purported ‘necessary’ conditions of any given thing, thinking in terms of space-time as evolution and involution, as a tension between creation and inhibition, allows one operational (or we might say skeptically epistemological) ways of talking about possible grounds.

This is what Gilles Chatelet emphasizes in the last third of Figuring Space (better translated as The Stake of the Mobile) when he states that Schelling invents a radical concept of the virtual as movement and as diagram. Movement, and the perception of movement, is essential to one of Schelling’s more interesting (and most often dismissed concepts) that of productive intuition. This is because the virtual is not a pure potentiality but a potentiality discovered only when a motion is engaged.

Despite it’s largely physical ambit, productive intuition, for Schelling, begins with the problem of the self (a body) perceiving itself as a body. Schelling argues in the The System of Transcendental Idealism that philosophy has been lost in trying to explain the passage from a purely passive or empirical self to the self of activity or intentional action. Schelling argues that the activity of the self, in order to recognize its passivity or limitation, must inhibit its own activity at some point in order to function. That is, it is only through constraint that any activity (mental or otherwise) is capable of sense. One connection which could be made here, via Metzinger and others, is that a self-model or other functional delusion is necessary in order to think at all.

Intuition, if we can wrestle the concept from an overly simplified parochial version as a kind of immediate knowledge, as well as from its massive inflation at the hands of thinkers like Bergson, becomes a form of thinking rooted, however indirectly, in the pre-model swamp of our brain, but that aspires to something like bodily sympathy. As Alain Berthoz discusses in “Watching Dance,” sympathy can be connected to intuition as a kind of pantomime but one filtered through the subject’s own self-model ie ‘I copy you on my own terms.’ Empathy would be the stronger case, of actually putting onself in the place of the performer or object (whatever form of restricted activity). This removal of limitation itself must be limited as, evidence in the following study, the perception of one’s own movement in relation to external movement is paramount for survival.

This marks a departure, or at least a gap, between phenomenological approaches to dance (as the vague capacity of a pre-packaged body) and the ethnographic Mauss inspired concepts of dance as cultural expression. While there is a notable difference in the way orients their body amongst other people as opposed to objects (the latter due to a resonance between visual and vestibular systems) this does not mean that the dancing body among humans is not deeply rooted in pre-conscious activity, but that certain concerns of the self-model, the functional delusion, may feed back into our motions. Several projects have suggested that the much lauded mirror neuron may be responsible for bridging the gap between the visual, pre-conscious, and conscious response.

It’s here that I find dance a particular interesting means of expressing this uncertain bridge. For instance I find Xavier Le Roy’s “Self Unfinished” particularly interesting (thank you Stefan Holscher for sending this my way).

Le Roy’s piece immediately brings forward the tension between the automatic and the intentional, and appears in the vein of a broken form of artificial intelligence trying to figure out the layout of a mostly uninteresting room. What would be interesting (and it may already exist, I am new to this!) is a combination of this kind of performance with the digital in a way that breaks each other. While some interesting ideas are expressed here and elsewhere, what I think would be interesting in terms of performance would a digitalization of performance which attempts to codify its purportedly unbound expression while, on the other hand, the strange attempts such as Le Roy show how a certain intuitively anti-natural approach actually demonstrates the weirdness of the continuity of pre and post-self model thinking about the body.

These broken down dances, where the body is a curious rag-doll, can be combined with the technologically enhanced routines to mark the oddness of the discrete, the very strangeness of measure, in the realm of the broken body.

On the third day I tried to outline what I think Schelling’s project is all about which, essentially, outlines the central concerns of my dissertation:

/1/ – Schelling’s Thought

-For Schelling, Nature is skeptically constructed as a dynamics, an activity that produces the apparently inactive through its own self inhibition. Or, in other words, for Schelling philosophy cannot rely on simple being or becoming.

-This self inhibition of Nature occurs because productivity, as such, cannot be a pure productivity or else it would diffuse into nothing.

-This self-inhibition of nature, can also not be absolute and therefore nothing would happen.

-Nature then is an oscillation between inhibition and production and this oscillation we experience as the world of products.

-Our experience with these things suggests to us that they are active (because we can interact with them at all) and therefore we must always look to their activity or beyond the illusion (or schein) of their apparent inactivity.

-This knowledge, or form of experience which itself is active (as productive intuition) leads us to further deaden the object to the extent that I can then extrapolate its potential dynamic activity as well as investigate its potential effects on me.

-Formally, we can say that Nature is the continuous action of the spatial and temporal; a imperfect synthesis (or perhaps asymetrical dialectic)

-This spatio-temporal tension, as discussed yesterday and the day before, is grappled by us as a kind of flux between ground and unground always revealed both through the discovery, intentionaly and unintentionally, of the grounds and ungrounds beneath us.

Unintentional Ungrounding (revelation of deep time)

We discover that our conceptualizations on which we have been operating have a depth we did not expect

Intentional Ungrounding (Extraction or abductive experimentation)

-External Ungrounding (transcendence, as system collapse)

-Internal Ungrounding (immanence, or exploration)

Grounding (or the navigational apparatus)

-Epistemological model of construction (construction of space in the broadest sense)

Construction of fields, or regimes of immanence (biology, physics, chemistry etc) that have a self-sufficency ie our descriptions of them do not exhaust them but our formalization of a particular field (again as a science or even a system of philosophy) holds together, or does not hold together, depending upon the efficacy of operations based on that theory.

Again, this efficacy (as Reza has repeatedly pointed out) cannot be equated with the system’s unquestionable groundedness.

Speculation (Deep Future)

Whether speculation or imagination, one means of testing the solidity of ground (outside of the purely experimental stage, do these theories ‘do work’ ) one can also look more at ungrounding’s relationship to grounding(s) – that is, or in other words, how impossible (or possible), in terms of current theories, is these speculative dreams of construction.

 [...]

My dissertation is going to try and read Schelling as a realist through these concepts paying particular attention to Schelling’s influence in the hard sciences (esp. physics) in regards to concepts of the continuous. As it progresses I am going to post more and more material up here.

But for now here is an update post of talking commitments:

1-I’ll be in Dublin March 1-3 presenting at “Weaponizing Speculations” organized by D.U.S.T. My talk is on the importance of spatiality in regards to Naturphilosophie as it is articulated by Longo and Bailly, while also dipping a bit into sheaf theory. Speaking of sheaf theory there is a great post on it in relation to continental thought here.

2-Right after Dublin I’ll be hopping over to London to present at the Speculative Aesthetics Roundtable organized by James Trafford. The other presenters are Ray Brassier, Mark Fisher, Robin Mackay, Reza Negerastani, Benedict Singleton, Nick Srnicek. James Trafford, Alex Williams, and Amanda Beech. My presentation is on the difficulty of having a useful aesthetics in relation to ecology as it’s currently dominated by either eco-disaster sublime-ness or cute-animal ‘practices.’ Yes, I’m going to ramble about the evils of cuteness.

3-In early April I’ll be giving a three day seminar for the Performing Arts Forum in northern France. Tristan Garcia and Denise Ferreira are also presenting. The poster will the details is below:

“We have the greatest respect for the profundity of historical investigations, and believe to have shown that the almost universal opinion of man only gradually arose from the dullness of animal instinct to rationality it not our own. Yet we believe the truth lies closer to us, and that we should first look for solutions to the problems stirred up in our day at home, on our own soil, before we wander to such distant sources. The time of mere historical faith is past when the possibility of immediate knowledge is given. We have an older revelation than all written ones-nature. It contains prototypes that no man has yet interpreted, whereas those of written revelations have long since received their fulfillment and interpretation.”

Take also the following quote from Peirce which Lorenzo Magnani uses to open his text on abductive cognition and epistemology:

“How was it that man was ever led to entertain that true theory? You cannot say that it happened by chance, because the possible theories, if not strictly innumerable, at any rate exceed a trillion – or the third power of a million; and therefore the chances are too overwhelmingly against the single true theory in the twenty or thirty thousand years during which man has been a thinking animal, ever having come into any man’s head. Besides, you cannot seriously think that every little chicken, that is hatched, has to rummage through all possible theories until it lights upon the good idea of picking up something and eating it. On the contrary, you think the chicken has an innate idea of doing this; that is to say, that it can think of this, but has no faculty of thinking anything else. The chicken you say pecks by instinct. But if you are going to think every poor chicken endowed with an innate tendency toward a positive truth, why should you think that to man alone this gift is denied?”

Though Peirce’s written comments on Schelling are lukewarm (though often attached to his critic of the use of Schelling and Hegel by British Idealists) Peirce mentions in a letter to William James that he could see himself as a Schellingian transformed in the light of modern physics. Yet in many of his short essays Peirce seems more attracted to Hegel (or at least his triadic notion of classification) than any particular idea or concept of Schelling’s. Yet Peirce’s interest in a radical form of intuition (as suggestive above) holds more in common with Schelling than with Hegel as the former utilizes a constructive intuition that attempts to show the interconnectedness of things. While Hegel’s heterogeneous monism carries some guarantee of a historical whole (though this would change depending on whether one follows Zizek in saying that the subject determines the contingency of history in the whole or whether there is some ‘more objective’ form of totalizable history) Schelling’s monism does not.

While this breakdown of any totality in Schelling is posited as a limit of thought in the wake of temporal stretches (the unprethinkable is at least visually tied to the deep past) Gilles Chatelet in the third section of his remarkable Figuring Space, addresses how Schelling (and other Naturphilosophen) accomplish this in a spatial sense. Taking both Schelling’s Naturphilosophie and his Identity Philosophy together (often written off separate failures), Chatelet takes up Schelling’s focus on the point of indifference as itself the producer of two symmetries (75-76) – an argument which Schelling uses to situate himself between Spinoza and Leibniz in his Essay on Human Freedom. Chatelet places this discussion in the contest of Schelling’s proto-Field theory of polarities which in turn leads to the work of Faraday and Maxwell. Schelling’s constructive intuition is what makes possible, and in turn is made possible by (though on a different scale), the description of the universe as polarities which can only be adequately described in the diagramatic register. Where Schelling’s concept of the Potenz is often dismissed (such as by Beach and Vaughn) as Spinozistic power and nothing more, Chatelet recognizes that it speaks to an original tension of fields in Schelling that exponential produce and spin out of control producing more and more stages of being (stufenfolge). Chatelet’s description of the Naturphilosophical project as “feeding on the specificity of the singular to reach the plane where the intuitive and the discursive are born synchronously”  (101) brings us back to the above epigraphs from Peirce and from the end of Schelling’s Freedom Essay.

Furthermore, there lies a polarity internal to the intuitive itself where a tension lies between thinking according to the object and creating/discovering virtual-real objects through intuition which, again as Chatelet points out, is why Schelling’s articulation of the dialectic is that which deepens difference and functions one step back from reality as opposed to Hegel’s since, for Schelling, the dialectic cannot determine the course of nature or history but can only function as between methods or, in the Sellarsian sense, between scientific and manifest images or between myths. But, as always, the difficult lies in related this continuum of swirling polarities (or Maxwell’s gear-like voritices) which are not bound in absolute space for either Schelling or Peirce but a space which is connective (as the manifold is due to an excessive meshing due to the sheer number of entities) but not simply relative, not produced object to object. This space has a Kantian provenance yet it is a space which Kant never quite fleshed out. Whereas Kant takes the Leibnizian line against Newton in the Metaphysical Foundations of the Natural Sciences, the discussions of space in the Opus Postumum swing towards Spinoza through its use of the connective ether. As Iain Hamilton Grant points out in his essay “Movements of the World,” it is the polarization of the forces within the ether which Schelling takes as the starting point of philosophy. Schelling, according to Grant, the unconditioned as motion, exists prior to the formless form of all forms.

In this sense, intuition (as embodied abduction) participates in the polarization of the actual at the level of the object and the form of intuition. Grant’s assertion that Naturphilosophie pursues morphogenesis at its most basic level (as the formless form of all forms as activity) is a kind of cosmological reinscription of Kant’s transcendental object whereas the intuited object for Schelling, not only has its own form, but that form reshapes the very trajectory of thinking (ie when I think a cube my thinking takes the shape of a cube). The polarization of all fields in this way is not only Naturphilosophie’s contribution to science (against the empty spaces between the atomistic frames dominant in England and France following Lavoisier, Newtwon, Joseph Black and others) but also to the engine of modernity and universality. The punctuated field of the transcendental, which breaks itself into different iterations of polarities (a dialectic but one without human purview) demonstrates that the project of modernity is not always-already failed because it attempts to fly over actualities, but that it is the choice of the actualities utilized which determines the best speculative paths. It is the polarity within certain strands of modern thought itself (as a humanist conservatism and purportedly anti-humanist trajectory) that paints modernity or even reason as short sighted – as if reason could only ever belong to the hands of a few. It is the conglomeration of stratified resources and powers that allow for the colonial juggernaut of reason such as it has been named. Or, as Nick Land once put it, if reason is so secure why all the guns? Reason should not be marked as the curse wrought by the oppressors, but a weapon that has, in many ways, been poorly used.

It started with this quote from Giuseppe Longo:

“In this sense, there are no laws that entail, as in physics, the becoming of the biosphere, and a fortiori, the econosphere, or culture or history, or life in general. In the same sense, geodetic principle mathematically forces physical objects never to go wrong. A falling stone follows exactly the gravitational arrow. A river goes along the shortest path to the sea, it may adjust it by nonlinear well definable interactions as mentioned above, but it will never go wrong. These are all geodetics. Living entities, instead, go wrong most of the time: most organisms are extinct, the majority of fecundations, in mammals, do not lead to a birth, an amoeba does not follows, exactly, a curving gradient — by retention it would first go along the tangent, then correct the trajectory, in a protensive action. In short, life goes wrong most of the time, but it “adjusts” to the environment and changes the environment, if possible. It maintains itself, always within an extend critical interval, whose limits are the edge of death, by changing the observables, the phenotypes, that is the very nature of the living object.”

In the most general sense there is a discussion of spatiality here which is generally lacking in Naturphilosophie (something I have mentioned in a few talks on Schelling) and other Naturphilosophie practitioners generally do not have a good concept of space. This is particularly problematic given the fairly convincing account of German Idealism as functioning as various means of heterogeneous monisms. This difference between Hegel and Schelling in this regard would be that the connectivity of substance is more ideal (what exactly the objects of objective idealism points to numerous conflicting readings) whereas for Schelling objects are the instances of colliding powers.

In the numerous thinkers on which Negarestani pulls from to from his asymptotic thinking (Longo, Chatlet, Oresme, Bertholz, Zalamea) the substantive model is (in so far as I understand it and that’s not very far) is replaced by a continuum. Such a continuum seems a far more agnostic model than the absolute (whether transcendental or an absolute immanence) in that the open or closedness of the continuum takes on a different meaning as ruptures or symmetry breaks happen between fields, in a way quite different from becoming which has at least brings up the image of a continuous ‘left-to-right’ creation, a volitional model skewed towards the temporal (in which the seemingly non-volitional aspects are given over to the mysteries of human experience) whereas the continuum is more like a spatialization of contingency in so far as contingency can be spatialized in terms of the emergence of fields between and within constraints. Futhermore, while it may be immediately tempting to conceive of the continuum in terms of part-whole relations (in terms of mereology) this has limitations for addressing any kind of dynamism (as I think is clear in Negarestani’s “The Militarization of Peace”).

This abstract continuum is discussed by Negarestani as the geodesics of space-time. In cosmological terms Negarestani writes: “Follow the Copernican commune to the Eisensteinian revolution and Weylian continuum-subversion (Hermann Weyl’s introduction of the continuum to the cosmological chasm), gravity is revealed to be the force that weaves the depth of the abyss by unifying the particulate (quantum level) and the galactic (the level of relativity) within one continuum, thus effectively rendering the planetary continuous to the beyond [...] Succinctly speaking, planets are black holes of cosmological contingencies. They are extended phase spaces that condition the possibility of breaking away from the entailing laws of physics, generating environments that cannot be traced back to their physical causes insofar their paths are generically non-optimal (as opposed to optimal paths of pure physical universe) and ultra-contingent.”

Elsewhere Negarestani has defined his alignment of universalism as:

“rather an ancient and somehow forgotten philosophical project extending from Greek philosophy to scholasticism with figures such as Oresme and Villa Nova and then Spinoza, Kant, Peirce, Chatelet and recently Zalamea, Mazzola and Magnani. A philosophical project responsible for engendering both antagonistic and united fronts, diversifying philosophical orientations beyond their local restricted ambit, and in each and every instance anticipating a conception of modernity – or more accurately trans-modernity – irreducible to commonalities and feigned reconciliations: synopticism in building.”

How exactly asymptotic thought operates in between regimes is still unclear to me. I’ve been reading and re-reading Robert Batterman’s The Devil in the Details to try and understand exactly how this is the case. Again, in so far as I understand it, asymptotic thought acknowledges the contingent place of one’s observations but, in order to discover the non-triviality of any particular selection of thought (or one’s own existence as such a selection or bracketing) aysmptotic thinking is a method which involves the approach of two infinities. Faced with the ocean of reason or ocean of chaos one can, to step into the navigational language will Reza has used, either navigate by a dead reckoning – by moving and trying to ascertain one’s location from speed in relation to the original fix of one’s position (an acceleration without too much epistemological strategy it would seem) or by refusing to leave the sight of land (which would seem to be the iterative normative model of Sellars and Brassier?).

The tension between a substantive or even absolute model and thinking the trans-modern continuum is tricky because I think the impulse is to say ‘continuum of what?’ in that it is hard to see a spatio-temporal continuum that is not substantive intuitively (though this is taken for granted in much of the physical sciences especially physics). On the one hand this can buttress the accelerative engine of computational reason in which being = number to varying levels of vulgarity and interestingly Batterman refers to his own theory as a kind of hyper-physicalism. In many ways, and as it seems Negarestani is doing, there is a mesh of the epistemological and ontological that is not correlationst but chaotically mired in complexity. But this begs the question of to what degree the iterative paradigm and other paradigms can be accepted? Does this lead to the so called democracy of Laruelle’s radical immanence?

The central upshot seems to be that connectivity is not enough but those doesn’t necessarily mean that discrete units is the solution to the complexity and difficulty of connection and breakage. It is here I see German Idealism (particularly one that is not overly obsessed with the problem of the subject but focuses on the problem of system) of potential use. As Paul Franks argues, if German Idealism is a response to the Agrippean (or Munchhausen) trilemma that the problem in justifying knowledge claims is avoiding 1-circularity, 2-infinite regress, or 3-pure axiomatic decision, it reveals its use as contemporary thought is cross wiring these justifications in various ways. Given the dominance of philosophies of immanence (following John Mullarkey) it would seem that axiomatic choice has become the weapon of choice. Meillassoux’s philosophy can be taken as a particularly strong form of the third choice as the groundlessness of the axiomatic (its artificiality) is the only ground one can claim to rest on.

The question is whether and how the geometrical/topological model can break out of the logical loop, or perhaps the logical loop as doubly divided from the physics of thought and the thought of physics.

Failure
Feb 14-15, 2013
Keynote: Jack Halberstam
The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference at U of W Milwaukee
300w abstracts by Dec 1, 2012

Labyrinths: Navigating Complexity Across the Humanities
Feb 15-17
Keynote: Cary Wolfe
McGill English Graduate Student Association
150w abstracts by Dec 1, 2012

Duquesne Graduate Conference in Philosophy (Philosophy and Nature)
Feb 23, 2013
Keynote: Adrian Johnston
Duquesne Univerity
3000 word papers due Dec 1, 2012

Fallout: Visions of Apocalypse
March 9, 2013
York University
250 w abstract due Dec 3, 2012

(Re)Actviating Objects
March 15-17, 2013
Western University
300 w abstract due December 5, 2013

Weaponising Speculation
May 2-3, 2013
Independent Colleges Dublin
Abstracts due: January 12, 2013

Translating Realism
May 10-11, 2013
Keynotes: Adrian Johnston, Dorothea Olkowski, Michael Naas
Notre Dame
Papers Due: January 15, 2013

The Return of Speculative Philosophy
April 5-6, 2013
Keynotes: Rebecca Comay
University of Ottawa
Abstracts Due: January 30, 2013

Villanova Philosophy Conference (Apocalyptic Politics)
April 12-13, 2013
Keynotes; Dolar, Zizek, Zupancic
Villanova University
Abstracts or papers of 3500 words due Feb 1, 2013

I am coordinating the next annual North American Schelling Society Conference which will take place at my home base of Western University. The theme of the conference is Futures of Schelling. The CFP is below. Also, if you are a graduate student interested in attending and want to do things on the cheap please let me know and I can try and arrange free places for you to stay with other Western Students.

Conference Website.

Futures of Schelling: The Second Conference of the North American Schelling Society

Western University London, ON Canada – August 29- September 1, 2013

With the recent resurgence of interest in Schelling he is no longer just a “vanishing mediator”
(in Žižek’s phrase) between Idealism and Heideggerian or postHeideggerian thought. Schelling is being read in interesting ways both within this tradition and outside it. The North American Schelling Society’s second annual conference seeks to address the broad theme of the futures that Schelling opens up, in his own work, in the work of contemporaries or predecessors that he helps us to reconceptualize, and in the way his work informs or can inform subsequent and future philosophical, theoretical, and interdisciplinary work. Possible topics might include:

• How Schelling helps us rethink the work of contemporaries (such as Hegel) or predecessors (such as Boehme)
• Schelling and subsequent theorists and philosophers who have taken up his work (such as Habermas, Žižek, Heidegger, Nancy)
• Schelling’s impact on and significance for the style of philosophical thinking and writing
• Schelling as a returning and retreating origin for disciplines other than philosophy (e.g. psychoanalysis, aesthetics, anthropology)
• Trends in Schelling scholarship
• The significance of the analytic utilization of Hegel (by Brandom, McDowell etc.) for Schelling scholarship
• Schelling’s relation to emerging technologies
• How Schelling can help us think about the environmental crisis
• Schelling and the sciences

Good papers that are simply on Schelling are, of course, also welcome. Please send either 1000 word abstracts or completed papers of 3000-5000 words to Tilottama Rajan (trajan@uwo.ca) AND Sean McGrath (sjoseph.mcgrath@gmail.com) by February 1st 2013.

Submissions will be blind-vetted, so please remove all identifying information from the actual paper or abstract.