Infinite Immaterial Actants

From Graham:

“The more sophisticated move is to say that ultimate reality is not made of objects at all, but of some “heterogeneous yet continuous” realm of pre-objectivity. While increasingly popular among today’s avant garde, it doesn’t seem to me to be a coherent theory. (I made a post about this in January.) You can’t say that ultimate reality is both heterogeneous and continuous, because these two qualities work against one another. If ultimate reality is continuous, it will slide toward an unarticulated apeiron unless artificial corollaries are introduced to prevent this disaster. If you say instead that ultimate reality is heterogeneous, it cannot be thus unless entities are partly withdrawn from any relational expression, and then you have object-oriented philosophy. And this is the ultimate choice, as I see it… you can have monism, or you can have objects, and monism is inadequate as a philosophy of our world.”

I think I qualify as someone who takes ultimate reality to be “heterogeneous yet continuous,” as if the early Schelling. It’s probably just Schelling that I’m going to talk about here, but we’ll see (as I’ve said many times lately, my own position is only just emerging and so there are many gaps I have yet to fill as I feel my way through the problems I want to account for). I think this will serve to show the novelty of Schelling’s position on Nature, and maybe even shed some light on Grant, since I know Graham is working on a piece on Grant (and thus on Grant’s Schelling).

Schelling begins his First Outline for a Philosophy of Nature (1799) by stating simply that what the philosopher seeks is the unconditioned, that is, the starting point of all reality. What he seeks is the unconditioned in Nature (he will seek it in the Subject in The System of Transcendental Idealism, thus forming his Philosophy of Identity, or, the organic relationship between Spirit and Nature).

“The unconditioned cannot be sought in any individual “thing” nor in anything of which one can say that it “is.” For what “is” only partakes of being, and is only an individual form or kind of being. — Conversely, one can never say of the unconditioned that it “is.” For it is BEING ITSELF, and as such, it does not exhibit itself entirely in any finite product, and every individual is, as it were, a particular expression of it.” (Schelling, First Outline, 13)

We are not seeking a particular thing, but that in which all particular things participate.

“If, according to these very principles, everything that exists is a construction of the spirit, then being itself is nothing other than the constructing itself, or since construction is thinkable at all only as activity, being itself is nothing other than the highest constructing activity, which, although never itself an object, is the principle of everything objective.” (Schelling, First Outline, 13-14)

The unconditioned in Nature is to be thought of as nothing more than the constructing of Nature itself. Graham recently described Grant’s position as Spinoza having too much to drink, and I think that’s actually pretty accurate for Schelling as well. Schelling accepts the Spinozist view of natura naturans and natura naturata. For Schelling, all is Nature, but there is a difference between the productive activity itself and the products of that activity:

Nature as productivity = Nature as Subject = Natura naturans (Naturing nature).
Nature as product = Nature as Object = Natura naturata (Natured nature).

This is why he will say that the products of Nature are ephemeral, that they are the retardations of the infinite process of Nature. Things come to be accidentally, at the points of inhibition where the process of Nature acts against itself. Nature is not to be thought of ultimately as the things we experience, but the struggle (conatus) beneath the surface. This strife is itself the struggle for infinity:

“Evidently every (finite) product is only a seeming product, if again infinity lies in it, i.e., if it is itself again capable of an infinite development. If it engages in this development, then it would have no permanent existence at all; every product that now appears fixed in Nature would exist only for a moment, gripped in continuous evolution, always changeable, appearing only to fade away again. The answer given above to the question, “how could Nature be viewed as absolutely active?”, is now reduced to the following PRINCIPLE:
Nature is absolutely active if the drive to an infinite development lies in each of its products.” (Schelling, First Outline, 18)

And to a footnote on the same page, which I think is one of the greatest passages Schelling ever wrote, containing his whole early system in a simple metaphor:

“A stream flows in a straight line forward as long as it encounters no resistance. Where there is resistance—a whirlpool forms. Every original product of Nature is such a vortex, every organized being. E.g., the whirlpool is not something immobilized, it is rather something constantly transforming—but reproduced anew at each moment. Thus no product in Nature is fixed, but it is reproduced at each instant through the force of Nature entire. (We do not really see the subsistence of Nature’s products, just their continually being-reproduced.) Nature as a whole co-operates in every product.” (Schelling, First Outline, 18f)

So what does this mean for Graham’s problem with a “heterogeneous yet continuous” monism? What is the “stuff” at the root of Schelling’s early system that makes it a monism? Nothing. Literally, no-thing. There is no substance at the base of this system, but an infinite set of powers, forces, and drives which he calls “actants” (Schelling, First Outline, 5). He has already said that the unconditioned cannot be a thing, but must be that which allows for things. This means that the unconditioned is an activity, so the active processes cannot themselves be things, but must be non-objects. In short, the processes of Nature, the substrate of reality, must be drives or forces. Some of the examples he gives of actants are gravity, the sexual drive, and the drive of combination. These are forces of repulsion (expansion) and attraction, which create matter (and substance!). He explains the birth of the universe as the result of a series of explosions (Schelling, First Outline, 31) which are of course nothing but attraction at extreme velocity resulting in expansion, resulting ultimately in the universe as we know it.

“The whole of Nature, not just a part of it, should be equalivalent to an ever-becoming product. Nature as a whole must be conceived in constant formation, and everything must engage in that universal process of formation.” (Schelling, First Outline, 28)

Graham concluded that if you have a continuous reality, it results in incoherent immateriality, or if you have a heterogeneous reality, it results in OOP. What Schelling says is that you have have both if what is continuous is itself immaterial but results in materiality. That is, if reality is a continuous process of infinite productivity (immateriality!) that impedes itself, resulting in, what he’ll call in his System of Transcendental Idealism, abortive objects, or, a system of accidental objects. Nature is itself nothing more than the infinite construction of infinite objects, and I think this complicates Graham’s dichotomy.

Addendum: Compare all of this with the following from Schelling’s Ages of the World, I think there’s a tremendous amount of continuity here:

“A true beginning is that which is the ground of a steady progression, not of an alternating advancing and retreating movement. Likewise, there is only a veritable end in which a being persists that does not need to retreat from itself back to the beginning. Hence, we [230] can also explain this first blind life as one that can find neither its beginning nor its end. In this respect we can say that it is without (veritable) beginning and without (veritable) end.

Since it did not begin sometime but began since all eternity in order never (veritably) to end, and ended since all eternity, in order always to begin again, it is clear that that first nature was since all eternity and hence, equiprimordially a movement circulating within itself, and that this is its true, living concept.

These are the forces of that inner life that incessantly gives birth to itself and again consumes itself that the person must intimate, not without terror, as what is concealed in everything, even though it is now covered up and from the outside has adopted peaceful qualities. Through that constant retreat to the
beginning and the eternal recommencement, it makes itself into substance in the real sense of the word (id quod substat), into the always abiding. It is the constant inner mechanism and clockwork, time, eternally commencing, eternally becoming, always devouring itself and always again giving birth to itself.” (Schelling, Ages of the World, 20)

Life beyond life

Both Levi and Ben have written more on vitalism. Who knew it was such a hot topic? It is comforting to actually have these discussions with people I read and like and not with some weirdo who doesn’t know what they’re talking about (see YouTube for that).

What I’m especially happy about is that the connection I asked about before between Zizek and vitalism is becoming more clear. I’m glad that it seems other people are maybe starting to see the same thing. I have this problem where some times I see connections between things and assume it to be obvious and then find out that people have no idea what I’m talking about and because the connection is obvious to me, I don’t even know how to explain beyond comic pointing.

Johneffay posted the following quote from Deleuze over at Larval Subjects, and I think it’s quite helpful for seeing this connection:

There’s a profound link between signs, life, and vitalism: the power of nonorganic life that can be found in a line that’s drawn, a line of writing, a line of music. It’s organisms that die, not life. Any work of art points a way through for life, finds a way through the cracks. Everything I’ve written is vitalistic, and least I hope it is. (Deleuze, Negotiations, Columbia UP, 1995, p. 143).

Now, I wanted to talk briefly about my use of the term vitalism. I think I defined it fairly well in my last post, but I feel like there’s still some confusion. Levi said:

“I have an immediate negative reaction whenever vitalism is evoked as I think the accomplishments of biology in the last fifty or so years have been monumental and have been accomplished through a departure from occult vitalistic hypotheses about the nature of life and its processes… At least under my reading. Certainly Deleuze is deeply indebted to Bergson, but I wonder if the claim that Deleuze draws heavily from Bergson is equivalent to the claim that Deleuze advocates Bergson’s concept of elan vital?”

Now, I don’t have that negative reaction, but I also view vitalism differently. I’m not talking about the old biological theory, but of a metaphysical one which states that the proper name of Being is Becoming (or Life). I also think one of the conditions of a vitalist philosophy is the self-organization of matter, or fluid in Schelling, or really whatever is taken as the bottom of the metaphysical reality (even if it’s an endless string of objects). Essentially, what I mean by vitalism is that causality arises in some sense from within the stuff that we’re talking about, that there is some element of freedom inherent in reality itself and that this freedom (or life) exists beyond the things which we commonly say “live.” I want to say that the Lacano-Zizekian lamella is the quintessential ‘thing’ of my metaphysics, so long as it is understood to be in some sense incomplete or imperfect, that is, existing also as a spectre, and and therefore frail or evanescent. So the lamella can go on “living” in that it can exist without body, but without a body it no longer lives as we know living, but rather, it haunts. Or rather, nothing lives and everything haunts. So when an object is destroyed, what I would say happens is that the ghost remains, that there is always a remainder and that the things which “are” are degrading, fading out, to eventually fade in anew. It is this persistence that is vitalistic, this idea that while the things of reality fade away, reality itself allows for them to fade back in, to live, to haunt.

Reviving Vitalism: Definitions and the Difference between ‘Cold’ and ‘Spectral’

The Speculative Realist end of the blogosphere is a flutter with intellectual butterflies thanks to a comment from Graham. Party lines have been drawn as to the possible future of SR:

“There would be the eliminativist wing with a heavy cog.-sci. bent. There would be a Meillassouxian wing generating fascinating philosophical proofs out of a radicalized correlate (and with Zizekians, Lacanians, and Badiouians in the vicnity). There would be a Grantian wing with a more vitalist/materialist approach and more of a Deleuzian flavor than the others. And then there would be an object-oriented wing, with Latour as a key patron saint and a flat ontology as the price of admission.”

I’ve thought about this for some time (although excluding Brassier as I’ve never read any of his work…) As I’m sure must be painfully obvious based on my blogging history, I would fall in line with the Vitalists. Fortunately, I’m not alone as Ben over at Naught Thought also claims to be in the same camp.

Ben points out something else I’ve noticed people blogging about in terms of vitalism, that is, the possibility of a “cold vitalism.” Some are even using the term “mechanistic” (which, based on the history of vitalism sounds ridiculous; vitalism is diametrically opposed to mechanistic science and philosophy). I see no problem with having a cold vitalism, however, the claim that this new vitalism would be non-biological seems odd. I wouldn’t say that vitalism is biological per se, but that both vitalism and biology are (and must be) organic. Ben seems to champion a more pessimistic view than Deleuze, and that’s fine, I do too. I think a marriage between Lovecraft and the early Schelling may be ideal. I would say the problem arises in vitalist thought when human beings become the apex of Nature, as Schelling claims (I would argue) as a result of his Christian turn (which as I have said before, has taken place by 1802 at the latest).

What do I view as the essential qualities of vitalism? I wrote a paper recently on Schelling and vitalism, and this is how I defined it then (I won’t post the complete paper, I’m no longer happy with it):

“To understand exactly what I mean by Vitalism, we turn first to Scott Lash’s essay “Life (Vitalism),” written as an encyclopedia entry for Theory, Culture, & Society. It is perhaps best to understand Vitalism in terms of what it is opposed to: Vitalism is first and foremost essentially anti-mechanistic, typically anti-dualistic, and largely anti-humanistic. While mechanistic systems view causality as purely external (matter impacting matter for example), one of the principles of Vitalism is “self-organization” (Lash 2006: 324), that is, “life” is irreducible to purely mechanistic properties and must be understood as the principle force of self-organizing material bodies: causality arises from within. There is also an important element of indeterminacy in Vitalism, as life is not predictable in the way a mechanistic determinism is. There are varying degrees of self-organization, as Lash explains:

Inorganic matter has the lowest level of self-organization, though it also is partly self-organizing. Organic matter in plants has higher levels of self-organization; animals still higher; human beings still higher; and immortals the highest. . . . in vitalism, the power of self-organization is extended from humans to all sorts of matter (Lash 2006: 324).

Dualism often has the problem of juggling between a mechanistic world and an immaterial self or soul. This dates back to the problem of form and matter of the Greeks, but continued to be a problem that Schelling saw in thinkers such as Descartes. Vitalism attempts to solve this problem by proposing a form of Emergentism, that is, that form exists but emerges from the natural self-organization of matter (Bergson describes this as life creating form for itself to fit different circumstances, that is, adapting). Since all matter possesses some sort of self-organization, human beings are no longer to be thought of as unique or “special,” leading Vitalism to the aforementioned “anti-humanism.” Perhaps most important for our study of Schelling’s metaphysics of nature is that Vitalism claims that Being is not static, but that it’s proper name is Life (or at least Becoming) and that it is creative. What this means is that metaphysics is not a study of fixed forms or concepts, but that just like organisms, all is changing and adapting over time. One of the greats in the Vitalist tradition, Henri Bergson, tells us that “life is. . . a tendency to act on inert matter. The direction of this action is not predetermined; hence the unforeseeable variety of forms which life, in evolving, sows along its path” (Bergson 1913: 96).”

(Here are the sources as well:
Bergson, Henri. 1913. Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Henry Holt.
Lash, Scott. 2006. “Life (Vitalism)” in Theory, Culture, & Society (SAGE Publications) Vol. 23 (2-3): 323-349.)

So what does this mean for a new or a cold vitalism? Nothing really, so long as it adheres to these simple principles (anti-mechanistic, anti-dualistic, and anti-humanistic), I would consider it comfortably within vitalism. My own position is perhaps stranger than a cold vitalism, being a spectral vitalism, emphasizing the significance of quasi-beings, memories (which are not strictly human), and ghosts as opposed to the usual vitalistic emphasis on the strong, the dominant, the powerful. I’m more interested in the fact that there is often no clear/clean distinction between Being and Non-Being, and that that which “does not exist” in some sense still goes on living.

Addendum: In the comments, Ben also suggests a relation between vitalism and existentialism. I think this is spot on; I think vitalism needs to be an existentialism for the non-human, including the non-existent!