Sectarian Realism

This is in response to the news regarding Speculations and is taken from an email I sent to Paul last night when asked about my thoughts going forward with the journal.

I’m not sure what I think the plan should be going forward. I think an SR journal would be appreciated and useful. One thing that worries me is the prospect of (for lack of a better term) “crowding the market.” SR is young. I’m not sure I understand the benefit of every “club” within it having its own journal. That’s how orthodoxies are formed and dialogue avoided. I work in psychoanalytic theory and you see the same thing there; they all begin with the basic assumption that there is something called an unconscious but other than that Freudians, Kleinians, Jungians and Lacanians have nothing to do with each other. They don’t even want to talk to each other. They certainly don’t learn from one another. There is no room for conversation or disagreement or debate but only for exegesis of the master or adherence to their principles. I don’t like the idea of Collapse devolving into a love of neuroscience (and I’m not saying it is necessarily, though that’s clearly how Graham sees it and I’m sure he’s not alone; I haven’t read the last volume but am anticipating the next one), with the vitalists setting up their own little clubhouse before certain people decide we’re all politically naive (or dangerous!) and start their own journal for contemporary Marxism, etc, etc. Pretty soon each of us end up in isolation running our own little journal and we might as well have just started blogs (which we all already have anyway).

I guess I had always hoped that there would be a general journal for SR all along. The important thing is to be excited about the work being done. I don’t like the unnecessary emotion brought in to intellectual work, with one group sneering at another. Frankly it seems stupid and arrogant. I’m not going to go to Anthony or Reid and tell them Laruelle isn’t worthwhile just because I happen to disagree with his understanding of science or his treatment of Deleuze or whatever, just as I wouldn’t tell Nick he’s wasting his time with politics or Ben that there’s no point in grappling with the concept of slime or the work of Lovecraft. Just because we disagree with each other about things (and I’m not saying I disagree with the aforementioned examples at all!) doesn’t mean I am not genuinely excited about their work or the future of philosophy. I disagree with Graham for example on things related to causality, possibility, and will, which is exactly what I was writing about for the journal, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like him or his work. It’s invigorating to read someone you disagree with on things and understand why and talk it out. I don’t see any merit in walling ourselves off from each other anymore than I see the merit in imagining some grand break in the history of thought. We’re always in dialogue, we might as well be honest about it and open to it.

To put it simply, I’d rather be park of a big tent full of excitement and conversation than a little tent where nothing happens.

What Late Night Television Says About Media Today

Jay’s 2004 Announcement – watch more funny videos

I love this clip. I don’t watch late night television because I don’t find any of them funny. I was excited when Michael Ian Black was competing to take over for Craig Kilborn on CBS but lost interest when Craig Ferguson beat him out. I have however been unusually interested this whole late night fiasco. I think it’s the same reason I’m interested in the effect that comedy shows have had on politics. As I’m sure people have noticed, politicians are far more likely to be taken less seriously. We see this with The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, but it has been far more apparent in Canadian comedy.

What’s the joke here? Harper is often accused of being cold and antagonistic towards the media (as well as his own cabinet) and in the above video he acts the opposite to this, with an accompanied laugh track so we all know it’s a joke. Nudge nudge wink wink. Oh that Harper! Rick Mercer also took Prime Minister Paul Martin out to Canadian Tire to help him fix his windows and took Jean Chretien out for burgers. What are we to make of this? Isn’t it just another way for politicians to show us that deep down they’re people too and they can goof off and be silly? Isn’t it the equivalent of when Zizek (in the documentary Zizek!) says that he is a monster who plays that he is human? The whole “deep down I’m just like you, I love kittens and chocolate cake” is the utmost of ideology today, the idea that deep down even political monsters (not that Harper is the equivalent of a Hitler or whoever) have these soft sensitive centers. The criticism is appropriated, it’s a joke now. If a politician wants a scandal to go away, they shouldn’t argue against the claims or deny it, they should make a joke in public. Poof! I suppose the joke then is really on us, the joke being that we elected him in the first place.

So what does this have to do with the late night shenanigans of late? All of the late night programs (with the exception of Jimmy Fallon as far as I can tell; he’s just happy to have a job) have been making jokes about the whole thing. What is the consequent of this? A tremendous increase in ratings. These are the highest ratings they’ve seen in a long time! What’s fascinating is that all it took was self-referentiality. Television talking about television. The substance has become identical to the form, with all of the jokes being about television. So the ratings go up. People start “supporting” Conan by watching his show and posting on Twitter that they love him (though clearly not enough to have been watching his show for the past several months). Who wins in this? NBC. NBC wins the day: they have a public feud between Leno and Conan so millions tune in to watch the feud, increasing the ratings of both shows. Yet, the people “supporting” Conan are anti-NBC and are angered by their decision. The whole situation is amazing to me.

What does this self-referentiality ultimately mean for media? For one thing we can expect no change from the establishment. NBC will not claim fault for this whole thing. Why would they? They’ve appropriated the antagonism of the situation and profited from it. Job well done, they’ll say. Leno will go back to his old time slot having once again survived a public battle for late night. In the clip below we can see the end result: jokes will be made, people will laugh, all will be forgotten.

[EDIT: I realize that some background might be helpful. Here is the original announcement about moving the whole NBC lineup and here is Conan's public letter about the whole thing.]

January Update / a new body, a new blog

Something I don’t talk about on here because I’m never sure how personal I want this blog to be (I waiver between wanting it to be fairly academic to being simply the personal blog of an academic) is that I suffer from depression. I have for a number of years now (twelve in fact) and it’s just something I have to deal with. I’ve been in something of a funk since classes ended last month and besides that, editing duties have kept me from writing anything substantial. I know I owe a couple of people emails and I’ll get back to them soon.

I have however decided I should talk about another blog I’m running now. I started a Tumblr a while ago basically just for myself as a way to keep track of things I like or thought were interesting but for one reason or another didn’t want to post on here. I always feel somehow guilty when I post something like a video or a work of art on here without commentary, whereas the Tumblr is something of a dumping place for anything and everything that interests me. I’m considering it something of an aesthetic experiment since it is largely filled with pictures and video, almost as if I am deriving my own aesthetic through collecting. I really like the idea of balancing out my interests, saving this space for texts and the Tumblr for collections and fragments. So if you’re interested, that is, if you share my aesthetic for the nostalgic, for the fragmented, etc, then drop by a new body, whose title comes from a work of fiction I wrote and destroyed some time ago, but whose title I always liked. It’s got a fairly substantial archive at this point and should take someone a while to work through. I’ve begun adding to it regularly.

On Method (Part One): The College of the Proletariat / The Counterfeit University / The Invisible College

I quite enjoyed Nina’s string of posts on the idea of a proletarian university. It reminded me of this great post over at BLDGBLOG (consistently one of the best blogs, more on this later) where a “counterfeit university” was formed in order to plan and develop an event on the concept of ‘quarantine.’ I love this idea, this model. As Geoff Manaugh put it:

But you need nothing more than a structure, a common topic, a place to meet up, a backpack full of the most basic office supplies, perhaps a bottle opener, and the will-power to see it through; with any luck, in other words, more “counterfeit universities” will be popping up here and there, their research published independently on blogs, their meetings hosted in apartments, offices, restaurants, bars, and other spaces in their after-hours, bringing more and more people into productive conversation.

As some of you know I sat in on a reading course with someone doing their PhD on the history of magic. We read some texts from the Corpus Hermetica and some historical texts concerned with people like Marsilo Ficino, Giordano Bruno, Cornelius Agrippa, and Pico della Mirandola. It was three of us going over the same texts for different reasons and bringing different elements to the table. It was great getting to read such things in an academic setting and we’ve decided to carry the idea further.

We already have a group called the Jockey Club that gets together on Friday evenings at a pub downtown to talk philosophy. Basically what happens is every week a text is assigned and introduced by someone and we get together to talk about it. In theory this is open to anyone and everyone in the city. What ends up happening most of the time however is the same people bring up the same issues and it can be tiring. There are certain people who really just want to show off how smart they are or how clever they can be and they really aren’t there to understand the text or learn anything from it.

In contrast to the Jockey Club, we’re going to try a different model. This will be an invitation-only affair, to exclude those who don’t actually have an interest in such topics but would only come to “score points.” We’ll be reading largely esoteric texts after all, and I’m sure many of the natural science minded individuals would love to come and kick some dead horses. We’re not going to meet on campus either (the MUN campus is not a great place for casual meetings at all).

I have proposed that we call the group the Invisible College. There is something very interesting about the exchange of ideas that occurred in the original Invisible College and I think it lies in the methodology. It seems that much of the discussion around Nina’s blog concerns essentially the same methodology as the standard university: experts lecture and students learn, showing their acquisition of knowledge somehow (receiving some sort of degree). There is something else going on in the methodology of the Invisible College; members would exchange books and communicate by writing in the margins of the texts. The education would happen within the text. This strikes me as an incredible hermeneutic model of education. Those of us involved also have a broad understanding of what ‘hermeneutics’ means (link will open a PDF). I think this “learning within the text” is exactly what we are striving for, albeit not in a secretive way as was necessary for the Invisible College. What we are planning is closer to something like Bible Study than a typical academic setting and maybe that’s fitting. After all, no one will be there because that have to be there, whether it’s for needing the credits, needing it on their transcript, or because it was the only thing that fit in their schedule. This is entirely extracurricular, also perhaps significant.

Part Two soon.

This one time…

This one time… from nelson boles on Vimeo.

Félix Ravaisson’s Of Habit

I just read Ravaisson’s Of Habit. It is really a great little book. There is so much more in this essay than I expected and it really shows just how indebted 19th-20th Century French Metaphysics are to Schelling. Ravaisson of course attended Schelling’s lectures in Munich and was apparently set to translate some of Schelling’s works into French though it never panned out. Bergson sounds so much less “out there” when read in the context of Ravaisson. Not only are the roots of Bergsonism in there (by way of the virtual, the focus on memory and repetition, “secret vital forces” at the heart of the organism, etc.), but also the carnal phenomenology that largely separates the French phenomenologists (Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Henry, Marion, etc.) from the Heideggerian tradition. There’s also a form of the unconscious, which he calls an “unreflective spontaneity” that “breaks into [...] the organism, and increasingly establishes itself there, beyond, beneath the region of will, personality and consciousness” (53). He also speaks of it in terms of “effort,” which the translators use to translate both “effort” and “puissance” [power]. The latter term of course becomes important in Deleuze and his reading of Nietzsche. It also proves important in Foucault’s later writings on the Self. Deleuze distinguishes “puissance” (as power-to, possibility) from “pouvoir” (as power-over, domination) when he discusses Nietzsche’s Will to Power. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Ravaisson talks of “puissance” in relation to an unconscious drive (connected with “instinct” and “tendency”), as the ground of possibility at the centre of the organism, much in the same way that the psychoanalytic and vitalist traditions see it. There must be a connection between this early 19th Century Naturphilosophie and the later French psychology tradition (Janet). Besides that, it shows the biologization of Schellingian speculative metaphysics, grounding Schelling in much the same way that thinkers like Lorenz Oken did. Anyone interested in either the Schellingian or 20th Century French tradition owes it to themselves to read this brief essay.

Nature and its Discontents

Ben has some thoughts up on Zizek’s “Unbehangen in der Natur.” I was talking about this for Jockey Club on Friday so I thought I’d just make a couple of comments. Like Ben, I have some serious problems with Zizek’s piece as well as his conception of nature. For Ben this seems to be the imposition of a transcendental subjectivity but for me it is the concepts of alienation and rupture.

There is a clear connection between this piece and Freud’s “Unbehagen in der Kultur” (“Civilization and its Discontents”, uneasiness in culture). It is not the case that fro Freud most of us socialize normally but some people “don’t quite make it” and so must be normalized. It is rather that culture as such, in order to appear normal, ordered, etc., involves a whole series of distortions, manipulations, and pathologies. We are then “uneasy” in culture as such. One of the goals of Zizek’s work on ecology is to show this as true for nature as well, that we are uneasy, homesick, in nature itself.

This is the alienation of subjectivity, which is essential to Lacanianism. The subject only exists as alienated, through alienation. But is it the case that the human being is fundamentally alienated from nature-as-such? Part of Zizek’s structuralist narrative that he inherits from Lacan, Levi-Strauss, Rousseau, etc., is the dichotomy of nature and culture, that there was some sort of transcendental rupture in reality when human beings developed the capacity for language and suddenly we went from being apes to human beings. In this process we began instantly to supplant nature with culture, imposing ourselves on the chaos of nature, ordering it. Is this the case? Isn’t it rather that the human being, and human culture, developed slowly out of nature? Zizek wants us to believe that either there is a radical break with culture or we are New Age obscurantists who want to naively go “back to nature.” There is surely a middle ground to this ridiculous dichotomy, one that will say that culture is thoroughly “natural,” while still being (clearly) different, in the same way that both animals and minerals are natural but different.

Where does this supposed alienation from nature come from? Zizek doesn’t tell us. He wants us to think that nature is terrifying and horrible, and certainly it can be though isn’t always, that we are fundamentally afraid of it. Now, I didn’t grow up in an industrial centre or a big city; I grew up in the woods of south eastern New Brunswick, we had deer and wolves and bears in the area, sometimes in our backyard. As a child, I was never “alienated” from my surroundings, I was at home. I’m reminded of Erazim Kohak’s Embers and the Stars, one of the few works of phenomenology that I really truly like. Kohak abandons his life in Boston to live in the woods and essentially writes a phenomenology of nature. He doesn’t feel alienated either, but at home in the wilderness. Of course, he isn’t living in a cave or anything, he builds a cabin, but still. He lives with the rhythms of nature, he feels a kinship to a family of porcupines who live down river. Nature is not terrifying.

MUTO by BLU

This is so well made I can’t believe it.

Lovecraft the spectral realist

Lovecraft has one again become bedside reading for me. I found this quote the other night in “The Shadow Out of Time” and thought I’d share:

Had something been groping blindly through time from some unsuspected abyss in Nature?

I love it.

On Vicarious Head-Scratching

I’ve been seeing a lot on Harman and capitalism and his model of causation as “nonsense” and whatnot and thought I’d try my hand at an explanation. For one, I don’t see why Harman’s model of causation is so hard to grasp but maybe its because I have a different background than most of those involved in the theory-corner of the blogosphere. I also want to stress that I’m not an object-oriented philosopher. I have serious misgivings about OOP which will be evident from my paper for Speculations. In fact, my paper will be on the subject of change and causality. That doesn’t mean however that I don’t think highly of the theory or that Harman should be insulted or attacked. Disagreements happen, we’re all adults here.

There are essentially two modes to understanding Vicarious Causation. The first is Aristotelian, the second is Kantian. It should be noted that both of these give us different versions of Occasionalism, that is, a mediated model of causality. I think the main problem people have with Harman’s theory is that they approach it strictly from the perspective of Heidegger’s tool-analysis, which while foundational for Harman’s thought has been overshadowed by a newer model of OOP over the past year. I think this this clear from lectures he’s given recently where the tool-analysis is explained but not foundational. He’s found new, better ways to ground the theory which makes it much more historically relevant and probably much easier to grasp by those without the Heideggerian or even phenomenological baggage.