Meillassoux’s Motivation and the Pure Space of Speculation

This is just a quick post regarding a problem that Mike raises of Meillassoux’s motivation and “what Meillassoux’s derailing has to do with politics.” I think the answer is that it has nothing to do with politics and I would go as far as to say that speculative realism is a thoroughly apolitical enterprise (and de-politicizing continental philosophy is, in a sense, the theme of post-continental philosophy).

As far as I can see Meillassoux is trying to get at the ‘real’ in the same way Badiou or Deleuze are trying to get at it. And his hopes rest with mathematics – always a kind of pure potential for philosophy since it is unencumbered by the various ‘mixtures’ we are supposed to be avoiding. If you run through Kant or Hegel or Husserl you will find the word ‘pure’ posited at any moment when one is said to be coming to the question proper. Heidegger even has a word for the non-pure: the ‘mere’ and he attaches it to anything he doesn’t like. Philosophy is at the point, in the post-continental form, of a kind of immanence or intra-philosophical discourse with itself although occasionally there are overtures to the natural or mathematical sciences (arguably one could say it has always been this way so I would add that we are in a particularly self-conscious state of this). I suppose we can even see post-continental thinking as trying to regain something of a ‘lost time’ when philosophy was committed to a rigour that perhaps lost its way sometime in the post-Heideggerian landscape (I would suggest that this is more a case of a deflation of rationalism and modernist goals and that the rigour was simply ‘different’). Having undergone a kind of wayward time philosophy is coming home to its relentless pursuit of ‘thinking’ and what exactly good thinking is – and looks like (looking, seeing and the visible are all themes to be found in Badiou and Henry for example, and it is all rather Platonic in tone). In another way it a reclamation of what is usually derived as ‘representationlist’ forms of thinking. The representation is being reintegrated into the philosophical project.

And the ancestral realm comes to be a kind of ‘pure’ space where representation is necessary in order for one to make sense. Even better it is understand vicariously with mathematical representation that brings the arche-fossil to its fullness as an indicator. The ancestral realm is a pure space of speculation.

Where does Meillassoux stand?

It is a rare work of continental philosophy that slaps you with a bunch of empirical statements as positive evidence. Nonetheless as a statement of thinking and After Finitude is something of a provisional text pointing to a system to come, it is difficult to ascertain what Meillassoux’s thematic or contextual position is. Where is it, one might ask, that Meillassoux stands? And following on from this...does it matter where he stands? Since in many ways speculative realism orbits around the ancestral argument as a kind of shared ‘example’ of what it means to be speculatively realist then I think it does – at least when we are discussing a revolution from within the continental tradition. And speculative realism is a revolution from within. In proper Deleuzian fashion [“the history of philosophy...is philosophy’s own version of the Oedipus complex” – Negotiations] speculative realism is out to slay some masters, and start anew. I think that After Finitude itself is a book that wants to slay the powerful effect of the ancestral argument (the argument that has made hairs stand on end!). And until we find out what lies in store it is hard to know just how provisional our statements about this provisional book are. We will have to wait, if we read French for the next book, or if you are like me you cannot read French, we must wait until Graham Harman’s book on Meillassoux which will, I think, contain a short excerpt from the new book. But this is to get excited about something to come. What can we say about Meillassoux right now – transitionally?

It seems as we enter the book that Meillassoux will be coming down on the side of science, or at least trying to show how correlationists ought to be honest about how their position undercuts some scientific statements, and perhaps even that mathematics will emerge as a kind of access point to the real but we must remember that we need this move only to access the ancestral real and even then just to make realist statements about the ancestral real! In my own reading of Meillassoux (to be raised at Dundee, but also in a paper to come and the first chapter of the book with zero) this promised engagement with science/the real quickly subsides and we find ourselves operating in the coordinates of German idealism (soft correlationism, subjectivist metaphysics, and strong correlationism). The entire undermining of strong correlationism comes about in a discussion revolving around Kant and contemporaneous reactions to Kant. Even the rescue of the absolute comes about via a discussion of the principle of sufficient reason albeit one that leads to a very important discussion of the fideism that contemporary correlationism has committed itself to. Like Critchley, in his short but important review of AF, I think the real target is phenomenology or post-Heideggerian hermeneutics/language obsession that brought continental thinking into disrepute with their anti-science bias leading to a very public mocking via Sokal that continental thinking is only now starting to emerge from.

I think it is fruitful if we think, for a moment, just what a scientist would make of something like the principle of unreason. Does it matter that scientists and we must remember that we are here trying to reach something like their territory, care about a problem that is only a problem if one is a phenomenologist or Kantian? Or is this just the game of acting out a kind of fantasy where philosophers engage in providing a ground for the sciences (even if it is a rather odd ground...)? This is the kind of thing I find problematic about Meillassoux but this is a very small problem since overall I think that, in strictly philosophical terms, Meillassoux holds a consistent set of beliefs and also knows how to reveal inconsistencies that are revealed at the assumptive level of correlationist thinking. Oddly many correlationist positions, and this holds in a lot of belief systems, are internally consistent. Internal consistency can be seen as a proper criterion with which to judge a philosophical system, but in an almost Heideggerian (!) way Meillassoux delves somewhat deeper than this to upset the apple cart. I’ve heard Derrida’s position described as derailing a train that is heading to its destination just a little too well and perhaps this is how we must see Meillassoux’s critique. Correlationism works just a little too well, a little too consistently, and so we ought to be correspondingly suspicious. Just where is correlationism headed and what kind of madman is in the driver’s seat?

Where realism comes from

My philosophy cap is back on and I'm ready to delve into some Meillassoux and further comment upon Prince of Networks. But I just want to pause here--if I can pause before I go (certainly a philosophic question if there ever was one)--and suggest something I thought about as I was going through After Finitude: how different are the places from which Meillassoux's realism and Latour's realism come!

To put it a different way: A lot has been said about how the speculative realist turn has come out of the encounter--at long last--of the "philosophy of the continent" (or whatever you want to call something like this tradition) with science. But when you reflect upon just what about science provokes Latour and Meillassoux, you see that this gets complicated. For Latour the provocation is something like the underlying nature of the things that scientific practice and politics deals with--this is his way into realism. The general sector of science that this comes from is, we could say, the rapid growth (and funding) of biology, especially, alongside the increasing "technologizing" of lab work (I hope I cast a wide enough net here, emphasizing the growth of these areas and the attendant mutations they cause in the linkages between science and society, rather than biology or technology itself--whose intricacies could never keep Latour from moving on to other things). For Meillassoux, what provokes is something like the nature of the scientific statement. And this comes of course by radiation dating and more (astro-)physics-based research. If we look at other thinkers, we see certain realist work emerge out of systems theory or complex self-organization.

This registered, you begin to suspect that it is perhaps the expansion of "Science" into distinct areas able to be addressed in completely different ways--because different aspects of it are provoking different kinds of questions--which is perhaps just as important in facilitating these encounters. In other words, a differentiated "science" (what Latour is right to call "research") brings people differently to realism--while lumped up together it leads to quick dismissal or general ambivalence that Meillassoux is able to characterize so well. Perhaps involved also is the registration of a particular risk, too: the risk that--like in some American philosophy departments--this differentiation of science will produce a set of problems (bio-ethics, say--not to mention philosophers of science) only able to be addressed by specialists (and ignored by scientists). The recognition of the diversity of science by the realist stance would then be some way of countering this, by precisely using everything that spoke against the continental tradition (lots of old, imprecise, metaphysically-connected problems)... Among other things...

Detour

We're taking a detour here. Anticipating the discussion of Meillassoux in Prince of Networks, we're going to focus now on After Finitude. There's still a LOT of the first part of Prince of Networks that we want to get to (I personally want to do several more posts like the one on the dissenter), so expect posts on that to pop up every once and a while in between Meillassoux posts. And we'll be coming back to part two of PoN at some point for a really extensive discussion. Hopefully, we'll then turn that into a launchpad and/or counterpoint to our next wave of reading, which will be all the various realist and speculative thinkers I mentioned a while ago.

Turning to Meillassoux, let me just say that there's a lot in this book I want to cover--not just the ancestrality problem. In that spirit, I'll go over the ancestrality problem soon, when I can be very clear about it all and talk about it in as basic a way as possible, but in my next post (not this one) I'll be turning to that first objection of the correlationist "semiotic character" on page 18-20, and Meillassoux's counterargument--which centers around the difference between the ancestral and the ancient or distant (something I didn't give enough attention in skimming through the book a while ago).

Intention is not structured like a language...

...or, why I'm obsessed with this problem of what I call "immanence." It's cause I think it might be what produces, in a more general way than the ontological issues themselves, a big, big hangup for people when they hit SR and, having been so hit over the head with Derrida and the anti-phenomenological tradition, can't understand how you can actually work beyond correlationism: how do you designate an object and not be epistemologically (as it were) bound up with that designation? It's important to register that Meillassoux is also one of these people. In short, how can you talk about the state of an object without imposing, through the language you're using to describe it, the form of your intention? We can use Kripke to solve this, and Harman has recourse to him. But he also has recourse to other arguments (some negative like the Kripke one--there's a great strange one I'm not recalling now--and some involving a restructuring of intentionality itself), which are just sound--and once you hear them, you see what a weird inversion Continental Philosophy has taken prior to OOP, such that Harman comes along and sets it back on its feet. The problem (the inversion) is we've so thoroughly bound up intentionality with the structure of naming (focused it is on presence and absence of a referent), say, and thereby language, that we have reached the point where it seems as if the reverse relation holds, and each time you use language you intend (and then, only then, through language!), and somehow push this intention onto what you're saying (thus, we end up at Badiou and his odd way of circumventing this, which I see a really negative rather than rich in an object-oriented way--though the negative has serious merit to it, I think). Maybe this is the wrong way to get at the problem, but, regardless it's Latour too that ends up having an unsatisfactory approach at times to the issue, despite his own realist tendencies and indeed post-correlational (probably a really bad term for it) thought, something like the Deleuzian approach (plasma!). So I'm trying to track the tendencies regarding this in a wider frame (of course, less rigorous) than perhaps the SR people would do, with the help of Jameson and his ambivalence regarding anti-substantialist work, setting the stage for Harman. Maybe I'm going in the wrong direction: I'll get more detailed about it soon and we'll see (it's a matter of what language/structuralism did for anti-phenomenological philosophy here), but here I just wanted to mark certain things before we really get there.

Present!

This seems like a useful exercise. I will hopefully get more directed and succinct as we move on to the actual texts, but here's a provisional attempt at self-definition.

I would say our common ground is an interest in academic literary criticism and its history, and also in the ways that literary criticism has been inflected, affected and contested by various other disciplines and styles of thinking and writing. For you, that means primarily philosophy (and, within philosophy, phenomenology and deconstruction); for me, so far, it means sociology and history. And I think both of us are attracted to Latour (correct me if I’m wrong) not just as a theorist to absorb for our own use, but as someone who might help us get a purchase on what actually happens when literary criticism interacts with other disciplines and traditions in this way. In other words, Latour offers us something on a meta-theoretical level: he tries to explain the way science and technology secure allies and translate interests from other fields in order to create some new, solid and durable “reality.” And over the course of time literary criticism has also found new allies, and translated interests, and had its interests translated in return. So Latour might help us understand how this has happened, and how it might continue to happen in the future. (Perhaps this is what you mean by “taking criticism in a new direction”; the question is whether Latour’s work can provide that direction or just help us describe it.)

But other theories — like, say, Foucault’s — could help us understand interdisciplinarity, and still others — like Jameson’s — could help us understand the effect of social environment on criticism. What Latour adds is this interest in solidity and durability — a practical emphasis we’d be less likely to find in, say, Foucault or the New Historicists, who do sometimes speak as if it were only human beliefs and ideologies that kept reality in place (making them “correlationists,” to use Quentin Meillassoux’s term, I hope correctly).* So it seems to me that Latour’s method would be most useful to describe those critical movements and tendencies that have themselves been most durable and influential: e.g., Aristotelianism, the New Criticism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, etc. Latour allows us to think that these movements might be durable for a reason — that is, there is indeed some reality to them — without us necessarily having to choose one superior reality to explain all the others.

What I am hoping for from Latour is a way of reading sociologically — “externally,” in your terms — without falling into materialist reductionism on one side or correlationist idealism on the other. That is, I don’t want to see things like value judgments or interpretations as mere reflections of social conditions, but I also don’t want to see them as free acts of subjectivity that heroically transcend their historical context. I want to see how critics and schools of criticism have interacted, and why some triumph over others, without reaching for the familiar explanations derived from Kant and Marx. In other words, I don't feel like I need Latour to help me construct interpretations or make judgments, but I may need him to help me see why some judgments and interpretations have lasted, while others have fallen by the wayside.

Also, I must admit that I’m seduced by Latour’s prose style: so straightforward and so rhetorically ambitious at the same time, and with such great examples (many of which I hope to catalogue here). I can’t help but hope a little of that mojo will rub off on me.

*This interest in durability is also found in Pierre Bourdieu, my own previous theoretical hero, but he attributes everything lasting to the habitus: a durable set of dispositions inculcated in the body. This, not some "reality," is what leads us to view the world in the same way over and over again, as well as accounting for the incredible homogeneity among class fractions. All of which makes him, I would say, a realist w/r/t the physical world (the body is indisputably there, and gets impressed upon/marked up by powerful forces) and something like a correlationist w/r/t the social world (the world is nothing but will and representation). He accepts, in other words, the Enlightenment split between nature and society that Latour does away with in We Have Never Been Modern: he just doesn’t have anything much to say about the “natural” side. But we can return to this issue later, maybe.