Non-linearity and Momentum

02Jun08

Following Nick of The Accursed Share’s brilliant remarks on Brassier’s reading of Deleuze, I wish to return to the following passage from Nihil Unbound:

“In Zizek’s Hegelianism, the subject achieves its autonomy by retroactively positing/reintegrating its own contingent material determinants: freedom is the subjective necessity of objective contingency. But by dissolving the idea of a necessary connection between cause and effect, Meillassoux’s absolutization of contingency not only destroys materialist ‘determinism’ understood as the exceptionless continuity of the casual nexus, but also the idealist conception of subjective ‘freedom’ understood in terms of the second-order reflexive causality described by Zizek. The subject cannot ‘choose’ or determine its own objective determination when the contingency of all determination implies the equal arbitrariness of every choice, effectively erasing the distinction between forced and unforced choice. Thus it becomes impossible to distinguish between objective compulsion and subjective reflexion, phenomenal heteronomy and noumenal autonomy. The principle of factuality collapses the distinction between first and second order levels of determination, thereby undermining any attempt to distinguish between objective heteronomy and subjective autonomy” (Nihil Unbound, p. 247 n15).

The above quote has, for several weeks now, has plagued me and I do not believe simply because it is a serious challenge to transcendental Materialism – the philosophical doctrine to which I have been bound to for almost half a decade. The above is indicative of several issues in Speculative Realism that have been bothering me, particularly that of narrative and momentum.

In the above quote Brassier makes several assumptions:

1 – Brassier assumes that Zizek ontologizies the transcendental subject a la Kant and that a transcendental subject is necessary in order to retroactively assume/assert one’s freedom.

2 – Following the subject’s purported transcendentalism, that the subject chooses its objective status (and not its subjective status since, for Brassier, it must always already be transcendental) due to the fact that the absolutization of contingency nulls such a possibility. This is how Brassier concludes that all choice is arbitrary.

First let us engage the first point:

As is clear in his more recent works, Zizek’s use of the transcendental subject is an affirmative positioning and does not bear a necessarily ontological status. For instance, Zizek points out that the transcendental can be a useful political position such as when Mao, in response to the USA’s position of atomic weapons, quipped that it would make little difference to the universe if the entire Chinese race was wiped off the face of the planet. In a vein similar to Lacan’s use of the line from Jarry’s Ubu Roi that ‘Imagine there’s no Poland,’ the idea is that poles would exist even if Poland no longer did.
We might immediately assume that the above reeks of transcendental idealism, but does it necessarily? If the Real is that which guarantees the possibility of consistency, that is, it is that which forces all things to be self limiting to maintain their consistency, doesn’t this fall close to Meillassoux’s concept of factuality, the concept of unreason? The Real is, in essence, the consistency of the failure of things to corrupt one another completely – the guarantee that something, outside of difference, allows for difference as such.

Thus, just because the subject can place itself in a noetic position, does not mean that it is no longer an object. As Zizek argues apropos Daniel Dennet, the subject is caught in the very nexus of determinism. Now let us move on to the second point.

Brassier points out that Meillassoux’s principle of unreason negates the very concept of material determinism. But doesn’t this, as Nick points out, purport a rather odd conception of temporality? Doesn’t Brassier’s comment above collapse the thought that ‘things happened for a, or due to reason’ and ‘things happened the way they did because that is what happened?’ Both Brassier and Meillassoux seem to argue that, because anything can happen due to hyper chaos, then the way things did happen has no bearing on the present. Nick’s mention of Quantum Entanglement is very apt here as is Einstein’s response to it. Einstein referred to the theory as ‘spooky action at a distance’ which, to him, seemed to invalidate physics. Brassier and Meillassoux then are implicit proponents of the principle of locality, that only the present changes the present. But, as many experiments, though controversial, have shown, objects at a distance can and do affect one another. Taking a quantum reading of action at a distance into affect, one might be able to recapitulate Zizek’s forced choice.

Via experiments in quantum teleportation, it has been shown that entangled particles can have an immediate affect on one another but such an effect can only be registered after the experiment has taken place. The collision of these particles brings us to the famous Heisenberg principle and back to Meillassoux and Hume’s billiard balls. As Anton Zeilinger notes, information is smeared across the two particles making it unclear how the first was able to affect the second. Taking into account then that the transcendental position is just a position, if the force of the forced choice can be taken as material, not because of a complete determinism as Brassier suggests (although we may perceive it as such), but because of the speed of influence, because of the incompleteness of objects and that this incompleteness is spread from object to object. There is then, no ‘noumenal/subjective autonomy but only an unconsciousness registering of the collision, taking down on the ‘other scene’ of the brain. Zizek’s mistake then is in regards to the term reflection which, instead, should be articulated as a kind of registration.

The aforementioned Zeilinger has discussed ‘two freedoms’ due to the fact that the choice of instrument to locate the particle effects the result of the outcome but does not completely determine it (because of unpredictability – hyper chaos) hence the freedom of the researcher and that of nature. Zeilinger goes on, in terms similar to Meillassoux’s, to argue for things in and of themselves exist and we can only access them indirectly.  The instrumental arrestation of any particle is inaccurate because the measurement affects the outcome but this does not negate the impossibility of a perception-independent reality.

Have we then swung back to correlationism, that the existence of the in itself is, in fact, dependent on our observation? Clearly not – while our thoughts can reshape matter, it cannot disregard it, nor would the inexistence of our thoughts have any consequence on existence itself. For Meillassoux, our ability to think a time (and following Brassier a place) where there is no thought, is a uniquely human characteristic. But any sort of indirect thinking, that is having thought hypostasized in any way is automatically correlationist. Again, as Nick points out, Brassier’s reading of Deleuze slides between time being contracted by thought and time being reduced to a brute matter, a kind of Schellingesque unground – time as a pulsation of matter itself.

The unconscious disjunction between being and thinking disrupts our relation to time not in a way that we simply spatialize it, but in that we imperfectly experience it and register it in ways that are not chronological. Again, this does not mean that time is merely subjective but neither does it mean that we can have no relation to the past or to the future that is merely imaginary. Choice, then, cannot be reduced to mere compulsion as Brassier would have it – not because we can remove ourselves from the realm of objects affecting objects, but because there are non-local entities affecting our movement and our objective status. The unconscious is not purely noumenal in this sense but simply non-linear.

It would seem that a Speculative Realist theory of representation would have much to learn from psychoanalysis and that Manuel Delanda has much to say in regards to Meillassoux’s issues with the appearence of chaos.

Filed under: Brassier, Deleuze, Freud, Lacan, Meillassoux, ontology, psychoanalysis, Speculative Realism, transcendental materialism, Zizek   |  11 Comments
Tags: continental philosophy, Free Will, quantum physics, quentin meillassoux, ray brassier, Speculative Realism, transcendental materialism, Zizek