September 2011

Over at An Un-canny ontology, Nathan Gale has written a fascinating post comparing the rhetoric of Graham’s object-oriented philosophy with the rhetoric of my onticology with respect to the theme of the uncanny. In many respects, OOO is the perfect choice of philosophy to explore the rhetoric of the uncanny. If we go back to the German sense of the word, the unheimlich signifies that which is “un-homely”. As Freud writes:

The German word ‘unheimlich’ is obviously the opposite of ‘heimlich’ [‘homely’], … the opposite of what is familiar; and we are tempted to conclude that what is ‘uncanny’ is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar. Naturally not everything that is new and unfamiliar is frightening, however; the relation is not capable of inversion. … Something has to be added to what is novel and unfamiliar in order to make it uncanny.

This is precisely what OOO pursues or seeks under the name of “object” or “thing”. The heimlich or homely/familiar would be 1) in Heideggerian terms, the worldhood of the world or the system of significance/meaning described so magnificently in division I of Being and Time, or 2) the object reduced to the status of being a carrier for human meanings, representations, or ends as in the case of a dollar bill as the material vehicle (in Peirce’s language) of value such that value is not an intrinsic property of the dollar bill, but rather “projected” onto the paper and ink by the social. In both cases, the heimlich is characterized by relationality, and this in two ways: first, there is the obvious relationality of the heimlich involved in its relationship to the person as what is familiar. Second, the heimlich consists of relations between entities or relations between meanings. Heidegger taught us to see how the “as-structure” of a hammer is not an intrinsic feature of its present-at-hand being, but rather the result of the manner in which it belongs to a network of relations to other entities (nails, boards, etc.), and a system of ends and aims. By contrast, the structuralists and post-structuralists– not to mention late Wittgenstein –taught us to see how meaning is not an intrinsic feature of a signifier, a concept that lies behind the signifier, but is rather an effect of differential relations between signifiers. No signifier signifies alone, but rather signifiers only signify in relations between signifiers. It is these relational networks that constitute the heimlich or the network of “worldhood” or the familiar. To be at home is to be related.

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I realize this is not a popular view, but I think there’s something deeply amiss with Continental “philosophy” as it’s practiced in the United States. In my view, much of what passes as philosophy is really intellectual history. We are suffocating in a culture of commentary. Europe provides the thinkers (Heidegger, Merleue-Ponty, Derrida, Deleuze, Doucault, Husserl, Levinas, Badiou, etc.), and we provide the exegesis. The major American Continental conferences are, in this respect, little more than hagiography. I find this state of affairs quite perplexing. The analytic, Anglo-Americans seem to have little problem owning their own voices, so why is this so difficult for the American Continentalists?

Whenever I express views like this people get quite defensive and the straw men begin to fly. No I am not suggesting that we should ignore the history of philosophy or that the culture of commentary should cease. I do, however, believe that philosophy departments should strongly discourage graduate students from writing dissertations on other philosophers and that presses, journals, and conference committees should follow suit. The criteria for a dissertation on another thinker (and please note that I wrote a dissertation on another thinker and would not meet this criteria) should either be a) that the dissertation shows the highest level of historical scholarly rigor, or b) is an incredibly unique and original reading of the thinker. Examples of a) for me would be works lkke Kiesel’s study of the genesis of Heidegger’s thought, Allison’s work on Kant, or Gasche’s work on Derrida. Examples of b) would be texts like Derrida’s Speech and Phenomena, Deleuze’s study of Foucault, Hagglund’s book on Derrida, Zizek’s work on Lacan, and the work of some of my colleagues that I won’t mention as it would look slavish. In other words, the bar should, in my view, be incredibly high for those seeking to do dissertations, or publish works or give presentations on other thinkers. It should be more difficult to do such work than to do work on a question or a problem.

I have sometimes said that the real work of philosophy is generally done outside of philosophy. Here I have in mind work by people like Jussi Parikka or Ian Bogost in media studies and game studies respectively, work by people like Judith Butler or Donna Haraway in queer theory and theory of science, and so on. People such as this are the ones broaching fields of phenomenality and constructing the basic concepts necessary for the investigation of these domains of phenomenality. They are asking questions, posing problems, and generating the concepts required as a function of the questions the ask and the problems they pose. Give me a page from Blanchot next to a page of the average commentator on Heidegger anyday. These thinkers have an object other than the history of theory that enables them to produce theory. Unfortunately, philosophy, making a Faustian wager to support “philosophers“, ended up with only the history of philosophy as its object. It thereby became sterile. Is it a mistake that our greatest philosophers, until the 19th century, were never professional philosophers, but always physicists, wanderers, chemists, alchemists, statesmen, etc? Is there something about this absence of an institutional place for philosophy that is a necessary condition for philosophy?

It’s here that the straw men emerge. We first get the voices that defend the importance of commentary (I don’t disagree!) who seem to believe I’m suggestingthat this practice should be avoided (I’m not), all the while failing to recognize that we’ve created an institutional space in university training, journals, and conferences that is extremely Oedipal and where commentary enjoys a hegemonic status (philosophers, it seems, have a hard time recognizing the institutional dispotifs of their own practices even as they write about Foucault). Next we get those tiresome souls that make charges of re-inventing the wheel, as if a de-emphasis on writing about father-figures– whoops, I mean philosophers –entails the disappearance of critical and careful engagement with other thinkers. Somehow we forget how Aristotle did it in the first book of the Metaphysics or how Deleuze does it in the first chapter of Difference and Repetition. Isn’t this kind of response a massive symptom, indicative of the swerve of the Imaginary Lacan discusses when talking about how we draw on formations in the Imaginary to avoid unpleasant betrayals of our desire?

We’ve created this massive dispotif that hinders philosophy even as it claims to promote and preserve it. Many of us are neither good historians nor are we philosophers. We are, instead, those doing all we can to prevent philosophy from taking place or happening. I hope this is a temporary historicial bottleneck that arose momentarily to preserve something precious that was in danger of being destroyed. I hope this is now beginning to change.










read on!

Over at Philosophy in a Time of Error Gratton has a post up about the recent Wall Street protests. Gratton writes:

And if no one covered it, does it exist?

It turns out I get better access to news about it (or we all do, via the Intertubes), four days in, with scores of arrests, in the media capital of the world (TM). I got alerted that Keith Olberman had a piece about the lack of coverage on his still-little-watched nightly news program on Current. In any case, given the number of unemployed (or “underemployed and overeducated”) just in the tri-state New York region, it will be interesting to see if these protests grow as the days go on.

This is a perfect example of the importance of Luhmannian sociological autopoietic systems theory for political practice. Luhmann is a grim and pessimistic thinker when it comes to questions of political change. I would not go to him seeking a theory of political change. He does, however, allow us to identify salient features of social systems that might allow us to develop better emancipatory political practice.

read on!

One of the things I noticed during the extraordinary events that took place in New York was that there seems to be a sort of antipathy/insecurity in other disciplines with respect to philosophy. In discussions– and I must say that this was the finest set of events I’ve ever attended and I’ve attended some pretty damn good events –people would often preface their remarks with statements like “I’m not a philosopher, but…” or, coming from the more political crowd I would hear something like “philosophy is detached from such and such an engagement, but…” This is something I’ve encountered in a number of venues and which I have a difficult time understanding.

I suspect that my lack of understanding on this issue has something to do with my own background. I failed my second year of high school through a combination of our school burning down through arson and the total chaos that ensued, lost love, and substance abuse. I was even homeless for a somewhat lengthy time during this period– during which I learned the importance of objects due to a prolonged experience of Heidegger’s famous broken tool, i.e., I experienced the infrastructure required to sustain a life such as simple things like washer machines to wash my laundry so as to work to make the money to pay my rent and buy food –and was, in many respects, simultaneously discovered and created by a teacher to whom I’m infinitely indebted today. I had never been a good student and this teacher was the first person in my life that recognized that I might have a talent at writing– I’m still skeptical on that score –and that perhaps I should pursue advanced courses. Although, as a child, I had dreamed of writing (fantasy/sci-fi novels and “modules” for gaming), I had never seen it as a real possibility. I had expected to be dead by the time I was 18… Mostly, no doubt, because adulthood looked so miserable and hopeless to me (the grind of the factory or corporation).

read on!

The clip below is an example of macro-level phenomena that remarkably resembles the quantum strangeness that led to the Copenhagen, correlationist interpretation of quantum mechanics. If something like thisnis going on at the quantum level then 1) it would indicate that the quantum level obeys laws of physics familiar at the macro-level of existence, and 2) would allow for a realist interpretation of quantum mechanics.

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