Again to think the cosmological cascade of Dark Vitallism in these terms we start with the following: Real – Immanence – Sense – Transcendence and translate it for the realm of thinking (and to borrow from Zizek: )

unknown unknowns -  known unknowns – known knowns – unKnown knowns

Previously I designated the following operators:

Real—(Matter)—Immanence—(Life)—Sense—(Pathology)—Transcendence

This schema is from an embodied or phenomenological point of view. This might also be taken to be a flattened ontology taken from an materialist (and not realist) point of view. To take a step back, to take a particularly realist point of view a different set of operators is required. From an epistemological point we could set up the following operators:

Real—(Concept)—Immanence—(Process)—Sense—(Object)—Transcendence

The unknown unknowns are what lie before the bare minimum of conceptualization following from the void of the Real, what could be designated as (borrowing from Badiou) being qua being. The inconsistency of any sense of being lies not in any particular formulation (of any specific grasp on the Real) but the inconsistency in formulation itself. To place conceptualization prior to process is not a chronological emergence but of the way in which a philosophical program must function retroactively.  In other words, conceptualization does not proceed immanence or process chronologically but only philosophically.

For immanence we must immediately distance ourselves from the livel pure immanence of Deleuuze and work towards something more in the vein of Mark Fisher’s Gothic materialism. The inseparability of the organic and inorganic in the field of immanence remains a particularly thorny issue in the work of Meillassoux. This problem of immanence I hope to adress in my next entry.

Michael ends a post partially in response  to my last post that nature isn’t terrifying. Many of my posts here would seem to assert exactly the opposite – that a darkly vitalistic nature is a horrible monstrousity – but this darkness is a darkness for us and not in itself. This was suggested in comments to two posts.

In the first post Alex suggested here some time ago, that Eliminativism, once taken to its full extent, effectively eliminates the horrific experience of nature. If we know that something merely is an epiphenomenon with ontological machinery beneath it (machinery that to some extent remains unthinkable/unknowable) then is the horror of life abnegated?

In the second post Anthony Paul Smith commented here that the unknowability of certain mechanisms and the certainty of threats (entropy)  does not impose a necessarily dark world view, or dark phenomenology.

The usefulness of the term vitalism here and of dark vitalism as an inorganic vitalism points to the problem of thinking life (life that thinks and trying to think life) in a nature which is a non-totalizable set of processes. Nature as an open system (seemingly boundless and inviting an attitude of cosmicism or indifference) yet phenomenon such as life shows us unbearable closeness or bottlenecking – where particular systems need to borrow from one another.

The eponymous creatures of Metroid are particularly interesting in that they are parasitic creatures which suck the life force (or elan vital) from other creatures – the counterpart to indifferent cosmicism is, as Lovecraft knew, proximal values – the fact that things in proximity affect one another and form ecologies. That is the deeper mechanics of nature can be severely mutated by spatial and temporal proximity. The very possibility of the parasitic thriving assumes spatial limitations.

The issue here is the ideality versus the reality of relations. As Levi has formulated in several posts most notably here, a significant issue in the various factions of SR is the status of relations and the status of difference. The difficulty lies in remaining steadfast on the highly processural nature of nature while being able to explain individuation.

Another connection to Levi’s flat ontology and what I am attempting to work out is the use of ecologies and localities in terms of process and individuation. To swing back to the metroidic – the discourse of sci-fi embodies the tension of the cosmic and the proximal – where despite the fact that space is vast horrors conglomerate. Life is essentially a form of nature which fights itself for vitalistic superiority over the contingencies of space/time. Nature is terrifying in its potentiality cross referenced with its proximity – this is the two darknesses – the ontological and the epistemological.

Zizek’s Unbehagen In Der Nature addresses current discussions surrounding ecology and nature. Right off the bat however Zizek’s conceptualization of nature is limited – seeming to be nature as it appears to us, nature as we can manipulate it. The anxieity or uneasiness that Zizek discusses seems more to be more about the loss of a certain concept of nature or the natural and not the loss of nature itself.

Zizek writes:

“It is this horror at the unforeseen results of our own acts that causes shock and awe, not the power of nature over which we have no control; it is this horror that religion tries to domesticate. What is new today is the short-circuit between these two senses of ‘second nature’: ‘second nature’, in the sense of objective Fate, of the autonomized social process, generates ‘second nature’ in the sense of artificially created nature, of natural monsters.”

The disasters that Zizek warns about are all human-caused natural disasters and not the destructive capacity of nature itself. Furthermore while Zizek denounces an ecology of fear he also connects a view of nature in which are finitude is asserted to viewing nature as sacred and so forth. I find this connection troubling since nature as sacred allows for a separation and comfortable return to nature (in a pre-Oedipal sense) and the dominant ideological use of  nature (if it is negative) is not about nature over us but nature as a problem for our future – we must save the environment for our children etc.

Zizek continues with the following:

“‘terror’ means accepting the fact of the utter groundlessness of our existence: there is no firm foundation, a place of retreat, on which one can safely count. It means fully accepting that ‘nature’ does not exist. It means fully consummating the gap that separates the life-world notion of nature and the scientific notion of natural reality: ‘nature’ qua the domain of balanced reproduction, of organic deployment into which humanity intervenes with its hubris, brutally throwing off the rails its circular motion is man’s fantasy; nature is already in itself ‘second nature’. Its balance is always secondary, an attempt to negotiate a ‘habit’ that would restore some order after catastrophic interruptions.”

For Zizek nature must be non-all or barred, but this nature never goes beyond the range of the earth. Zizek those go on to argue that the appearence of the whole in nature, that the very possibility of nature-in-itself is merely a result of subjective experience, an argument he ties to the experience of the sublime. Zizek then argues for ecology without nature thereby following Timothy Morton’s Ecology without Nature.  I have unfortunately not yet read his text of the same name. From what I have read it seems that what he attacks as the concept of nature is a dominant mode of nature – one stemming from the rationalist tradition where is an immense but separate entity. Zizek writes: “what we need is ecology without nature: the ultimate obstacle to protecting nature is the very notion of nature we rely on.”

Here my largest issue (which seems to come up with many commentators on nature and ecology) is that the ecology of concepts of nature is severally narrowed for the sake of argument. Zizek seems to make a reversal when discussing the films of Tarkovsky and in particular Stalker but then shifts back to focus on transcendental subjectivity.

The ontological priviledge of the subject remains a serious stumbling block for any approach to nature that is not too shallow or too obfuscated. The finitude of the subject has become increasingly transcendentalized at the expense of nature, nature becomes merely an elaborate background. Nature goes right through the subject.

Guy de Maupassant’s short horror tale The Horla (the out there) is excellent ground for darkly vitalistic speculations. The gothic tale, one of the many celebrated in Lovecraft’s “Supernatural Horror in Literature” is told in a series of diary entries. The author who at the start revels in the wonders of nature (the stream, the flowers etc) soon falls ill and writes:

“Whence come those mysterious influences which change our happiness into discouragement, and our self-confidence into diffidence? One might almost say that the air, the invisible air, is full of unknowable Forces, whose mysterious presence we have to endure.”

The narrator then goes on to discuss the phenomenological bankruptcy of existence, of the lingering problem of the invisible. The narrator attempts to stroll through nature in order to revitalize himself but he is repeatedly struck by shivers. The trees begin to dance around him, the earth heaves and a horrible solitude takes him. The man has a discussion with a monk about local superstitions, about a murmuring often heard in the sand:

“How is it that I have not seen them?”

He replied: “Do we see the hundred-thousandth part of what exists? Look here; there is the wind, which is the strongest force in nature. It knocks down men, and blows down buildings, uproots trees, raises the sea into mountains of water, destroys cliffs and casts great ships on to the breakers; it kills, it whistles, it sighs, it roars. But have you ever seen it, and can you see it? Yet it exists for all that.”

I was silent before this simple reasoning. That man was a philosopher, or perhaps a fool; I could not say which exactly, so I held my tongue. What he had said had often been in my own thoughts.”

Further in the text:

“Ever since man has thought, since he has been able to express and write down his thoughts, he has felt himself close to a mystery which is impenetrable to his coarse and imperfect senses, and he endeavors to supplement the feeble penetration of his organs by the efforts of his intellect. As long as that intellect remained in its elementary stage, this intercourse with invisible spirits assumed forms which were commonplace though terrifying. Thence sprang the popular belief in the supernatural, the legends of wandering spirits, of fairies, of gnomes, of ghosts, I might even say the conception of God, for our ideas of the Workman-Creator, from whatever religion they may have come down to us, are certainly the most mediocre, the stupidest, and the most unacceptable inventions that ever sprang from the frightened brain of any human creature.”

The narrator slips into the mad rationalism of cosmicism: “We are so weak, so powerless, so ignorant, so small — we who live on this particle of mud which revolves in liquid air.”

Maupassant’s tale ends with the narrator contemplating suicide – unable to deal with the indestructable horror of the invisible.

Levi has an interesting post about quantum mechanics and Speculative Realism. A whole slew of issues arises surrounding epistemological versus ontological realism particularly in regards to the issue of observation and the uncertainty principle. As the Dailykos post he references makes clear, decoherence does not assert that everything depends on observation, but that at some point quantum phenomenon appears as macroscopic reality.  While decoherence does not explain this transition it does not justify, as Gabriel Catren makes clear in his contribution to Collapse V, a mathematized transcendental couplet comprised of observer and experience (or correlationism).

Catren describes physics as a theory of objects made of a formalism (mechanics) and many kinds of objects (such as fields, particles, systems and so forth). The bulk of the essay is dedicated to showing how QM demonstrates objects and qualities as self synthesizing without the need to appeal to a transcendental subject. Objects are then defined as “a set of invariant objective properties that manifests itself through a phenomenological multiplicity of phases.”

But the source of objective or invariant components becomes problematic if objects only ever become other objects ad infinitum. Catren’s response to this is the utilization of universal operators which he likens to Whitehead’s eternal objects also refering to them as universal ideas.  These ideas which make ingressions into nature are discussed in terms of mathematics – any given object is an expression of certain universal measurements or other physical properties.

What I cant grasp is how the universal ideas (if they are to avoid anthrocentrism) can be separated from being a thinkable potentiality such as Deluze’s category of the virtual. Steven Shaviro made this connection some time ago here. It seems that there can be no guarantee as to the contours of conceptualization (via Brassier) or of transformation (against Meillassoux’s logical access to chaos).  This is the crucial importance of identity in the Laruelleian sense. Yet even in Laruelle there is the tension between the object and the point (the object being the zero-point of being).

The issue remains that the object (at least as it is used by Harman and Bryant) is a relocation and shrinkage of being (or ground in the Schellingnian sense) whereas the point (functioning in place of the object) is a formalization of an epistemological limit regarding becoming. For OOO/OOP it seems that being becomes de-humanized (flattened) whereas for tm/neo-vitalism it is the ignorance surrounding the absolute which is flattened or annihilated. The function of thinking in the former remains an enigma.

Also, see Michael’s excellent post here.

The limit or non-limit of darkness is its terrifying feature – if  the darkness is expansive and not invasive (oil or plague like, creeping inside organisms) then it is its formalized bound that must be decided which also allows for the possibility of a darkness within darkness. Take the following from Ligotti’s “Flowers of the Abyss”:

“With the darkness I saw the darkness. And it was immensity without end around me, and I believe within me. It was unbroken expansion, dark horizon meeting dark horizon. But there were also things within the darkness, within me and outside of me, so that if I reached out to touch them across a universe of darkness, I also reached deep inside of this body.”

The most common bound darkness would be that of the used; the ashen, the rotten, etc.  This dead darkness is the pools of dark putrescence in science fictive and ancient horror.  This can quickly lead to alchemical nigredo.  Deleuze’s dark precursor or the distant past and absolute of Schelling.

Potentiated darkness (shadows and abysses) such as the well known slander against Schelling’s absolute as the night in which all the cows are black which attempts to turn the potentiated darkness back into cold, sterile darkness.  This full but indiscernable darkness is perhaps the clotted darkness of Ligotti’s “Night School”:

“an undiluted darkness, a darkness far greater than the night itself, a consolidated darkness, something clotted with its own density.”

Darknesses within darknesses signals two significant points of engagement within dark vitalism: the darkness in the relation of ontology and epistemology, and the object (or subject) versus flow issue – or the plasma/polyp problem.  In process philosophies the latter issue is only addressed through a de facto anthrocentricism which allows for eternal objects, quasi objects, multiplicities and the like. A strong understanding of space-time (or what we call space-time) will hopefully allow for deeper understanding of formal distinctions in the darkness.  Dark vitalism is the name for this fundamental problem/avenue.  From Ligotti’s “The Shadow, The Darkness”:

“This activating force is something like a shadow that is not on the outside of all the bodies of this world but is inside of everything and thoroughly pervades everything–an all-moving darkness that has no substance in itself but that moves all the objects of this world, including those objects which we call our bodies.”

Drugs in Milk makes a few notes on my Lady Gaga post which points out LG’s articulation of the monstrousness of fame-as-drive. The strange repetitious motion of the drive (the pleasure of the mouth moving and not the food within it, not the object within it following Zupancic) describes the function of fame and yet its ubiquity seems to signal something even more troubling.  Referring to fame as ‘the fame’ acknowledges the fact that fame appears as an objectless object (a process – becoming famous) which itself is representable as a collection of objects (the contentment of wealth).  Fame functions as the running together of the scopic and invocatory drives (sight and sound) as a doubly partial relation (and only partial relation) to the big Other.

As Zizek concludes in “The Big Other doesn’t Exist”:

“Thus, the fact that “the big Other doesn’t exist” (as the efficient symbolic fiction) has two interconnected, although opposed, consequences: on the one hand, the failure of symbolic fiction induces the subject to cling more and more to imaginary simulacra, to sensual spectacles which bombard us today from all sides; while on the other, it triggers the need for violence in the Real of the body itself (cutting and piercing the flesh, or inserting prosthetic objects into the body).”

The inexistent of the big other becomes ‘anyone can be famous’ where fame is accidental yet deserved.  The inability to achieve fame is one side of its cruelty whereas its consumptive capability is on the other side.  I would say that the pursuit of fame itself has become visceral – where the dominant alternative is not the real of the body but the imaginary-real of attitude – the non-belonging sense of belonging where one participates in the big Other of fame by ‘being oneself’ or ‘just being who you are’

The most interesting/troubling aspect of LG’s performances is her futurism – which constanly repeats the past just enough to actually seem oddly futuristic. This asserts that culture, technology, and fame are smashed together in a way which they can never be redeemed but only grossly enjoyed.

In a recent post Reid writes:

“If the difference between nature and artifice is itself artifice, then it seems in vain to probe into uncontaminated nature, which itself exists in its distinction only on behalf of artifice, and as itself artifice.”

Reid writes that this does not lead to social constructivism but instead that:

“Nature, rather, means necessary or of necessity, whereas artificial means unnecessary or contingent. The ‘nature of being’ speaks of what is necessary or essential in being, whereas ontical artifices could either be or not, without affecting being itself.”

The central question of nature still remains what is nature (as Iain puts it what is the ground of ground) and what exactly is the nature of the relation between thinking and being while vitating any appeal to the natural.

Reid goes on:

“The distinction between ground and grounded, nature and artifice, is preserved, with the simple adjustment of emptying the former of any content – the ground is not some metaphysical thing (God, Nature, World, etc), but rather only groundlessness or facticity itself.”

The issue then is dividing nature from the natural where the natural takes nature as what is and transforms it into what is supposed to be. This also seems to be the essential problem with politics in relation to nature and ontology. Calling something unnatural is a political move – queer politics is an obvious examples where forms of desire/identity. Reid’s connection of nature to groundlessness advocates, I would argue, a process philosophy emptied of anthrocentric guarantee via the virtual, the eternal, the logical. Meillassoux’s weakness in regards to nature is that, as Martin Hagglund pointed out, he relies on a transcendental skyhook or thinkability of nature which approaches, or perhaps even emulates, virtuality.

Paradoxically then politics is unnatural but is not unaffected by the processes of nature itself. As Mark states here, a return to nature is a naive political gesture (following Zizek) since nature is not a thing (or state) to  return to – any purported return to nature is actually a return to the natural – an arrestation of progressive nature that transmogrifies nature in itself to nature as such which sneaks in a thinkability of nature in with it.

Over at Infinite Thought, Nina has a post critiquing a ‘race to the bottom’ in contemporary philosophy; a trend in thought which purportedly draws politics from the laws of nature and asserts the meaninglessness of nature and philosophy.  The post makes a number of statements which need to be addressed.  Nick has addressed some of them here already.

1 – Nature as a theoretical object cannot be neatly meshed with the ‘laws of nature.’  Nature is either reduced to what can be discerned from the laws (following from Bacon, Boyle and arguably Leibniz) or exalted in an obscure form (Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche).  Both of these gestures severely limit the ontological weight of nature particularly, as Iain Hamilton Grant has shown, as a productive entity.

2 – Presuming that a feeling of dread or negativity or that any focus on nature leads directly due  a phenomenological account or that everything is ontological is faulty.  The necessity of articulating nature leads to the process of separating the ontic and the ontological.  This is the two philosophies project of the late Schelling.

3 – Following Nick, the two philosophies or what we could call the division of ontology and politics is a strength and not a weakness of many variants of Speculative Realism.  This does not raise ontology above politics but questions the inhumanness of nature and highlights the artificiality or decisionality of politics contra ontology.  Nature should be taken away as a political standing stone.

4 – Pessimism and/or realism is not the same as defeatism – something fairly clear in a number of marxist and post-marxist texts.  This pessimism is often disregarded as apathy, solipsism and the like instead of addressing the unacknowledged positivity of a politics or ontology which must disavow its humanist underpinnings.

5 – The point where many of these issues coincide is that of process philosophy where an ontological positivity hides behind a supposedly realist take on nature.  This positivity however, manifests itself as a pre-thinkability of nature, where categories of the virtual, or the whole or reason necessarily place nature in an intellectual containment field.  This is similar to Meillassoux’s critique of Hegel yet Meillassoux himself (as Hagglund and others have shown) relies on a virtuality (or logical accessibility) which is undermining.

To say that articulating a dark or doomful nature is throwing in the towel politically appears oblivious to the fact that the spirit of positive philosophy has been over endorsed. To say for instance that the ecological movement is without a (erroneous) metaphysics of nature is no different then saying that it is post-ideological.  Nature requires despiritualization, re-contamination and an unbearable bringing-closer of a nature which is faulty purported as ‘out-there’ when really it is passing through us, under us, and above us.

“It was something black and twisted into the form of a man, something that seemed to have come up from the earth and grown over the wooden planks like a dark fungus, consuming the structure. There were now black legs that hung as if charred and withered; there was a head that sagged like a sack of ashes upon a meager body of blackness; and there were thin arms stretched out like knobby branches from a lightning-scorched tree. All of this was supported by a thick dark stalk which rose out of the earth and reached into the effigy like a hand into a puppet.” – Thomas Ligotti, The Shadow at the Bottom of the World

In The Grounding of Positive Philosophy Schelling argues that at the bottom of an issue is not being but potentiality, the inner organism of potentiality which is the cause of reason itself (p 142). Politics must acknowledge this generative yet obscure darkness of nature.

“It was the age of everlasting night. The sunset of man had long since gone by, and the last few millions who still dwelt on earth in those far future days took refuge in the mighty pyramid of imperishable metal that was the last of all men’s cities and would ere long become his tomb” – Nightland, William Hope Hodgson

“Then will appear the man who, as the first of all, has dared strip his soul naked and submit it alive to the outmost thought of the lineage, the very idea of doom. A man who has fathomed life and its cosmic ground, and whose pain is the Earth’s collective pain. With what furious screams shall not mobs of all nations cry out for his thousandfold death, when like a cloth his voice encloses the globe, and the strange message has resounded for the first and last time:

“- The life of the worlds is a roaring river, but Earth’s is a pond and a backwater.
- The sign of doom is written on your brows- how long will ye kick against the pin-pricks?
- But there is one conquest and one crown, one redemption and one solution.
- Know yourselves- be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.

And when he has spoken, they will pour themselves over him, led by the pacifier makers and the midwives, and bury him in their fingernails.” – Peter Zapffe, The Last Messiah

In Iain Grant’s Philosophies of Nature after Schelling Grant notes that one of the major problems that his text set out to address was that of naturalism’s relation to reason.  It is also on this point that Grant and Brassier differ most – with my own Dark Vitalism being largely a combination of Grant and Brassier’s work (with elements from others as well) the issue of thought’s connection to nature is a constant problem.

As I understand it, the difference between Grant and Brassier is the transcendent quality of thought – whereas for Grant nature thinks just as nature mountains or rivers whereas for Brassier thought must be transcendentally separate.  The epigraphs above (the first relating to Brassier and the second to Grant) illustrate the stubbornness of thought or the possible opening of its own self-destruction.

The place of thought can also be developed in terms of interiority versus exteriority.  Where elsewhere I have argued that the process of grounding and ungrounding creates interiorities and exteriorities but for Grant the interior is not a concern.  The limiting factor of thinking is the regionality of  the particular identity (unstable subject-object) attempting to grasp nature’s infinitude.

Brassier is concerned with cleansing the dyad of being and thinking of meaning while clarifying the work of the concept.  Furthermore, Brassier’s call to distinguish between objects and concepts (against Latour) asserts that scientific statements give us reason to believe that we can still determine when thought tracts and misses nature.

The alienness of thought collides with the possibility of the unnatural, of whether a human production can be against nature.  As Lovecraft writes in the beginning of “The Call of Cthulhu”:

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability f the human mind to correlate all its contents.  We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.  The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age” (Lovecraft, p 355).

Lovecraft’s statement addresses the limitation of our knowledge (“island of ignorance”) as well as the danger of its speculative possibility (“terrifying vistas” and “deadly light”) as they are anchored in the uncertain real (“black seas” and “frightful position therein”).  One dimension that Lovecraft does not mention, the dimension which his own work embodies, is that of thought’s capacity to produce the horrible and not merely reveal it.  The question is whether the worst aspects of thought, of the deepest power of speculation, is a capacity divorced from nature, simultaneously questioning the ontological and epistemological status of the unnatural.

Lovecraft writes in “The Unnameable”: “[...] if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?” (Lovecraft, 260).

The tale which begins with “speculating about the unnameable” (Lovecraft, 256) nominates the very mode of Lovecraft’s story telling; the rampancy of the imagination and that which falls out of psychic classification (Lovecraft, 257).  The problem is the productive capacity of  imagination and philosophy (System, 10-13) in relation to the discernability of the thinker.

As Grant clarifies, the self can only grasp the productivity of its thinking by making itself into an object but this process of objectifying the self is itself an ongoing process (Philosophies of Nature, 176-177).  Being, or objectivity is the temporary limit of productivity (Philosophies of Nature, 181).

The unnameable then, is the inability of thinking to capture being in the flow of its production, not because, in the Kantian sense, that being as such is inaccessible ontologically, as noumenon, but because being is in motion and thought, as an interruption of this trajectory, is just as transient.  That is, the question of an approaching horror raises questions of the limits of being (what is that in terms of its being) and the limits of epistemology (what is that in terms of the perceivers thinking).