Tim Richardson’s remarks responding to my post on myth this afternoon strangely have me thinking about a-theism and the end of analysis (and in the name of full disclosure, the two of us are very old friends and co-founded the Dallas Society for Structuralist and Post-Structuralist thought that hosts a reading group at University of Texas Arlington). The hyphen in the term a-theism is very important. Ordinarily atheism is taken to mean “without god” and to refer to any discourse that rejects all forms of the supernatural. Understood in this way you get discourses such as those found in Hitchens, Dawkin, and Dennett debunking the supernatural. I think this way of understanding a-theism simultaneously says too little and too much. On the one hand, I think it says too much because I think there are ways of thinking the divine and supernatural that are, paradoxically, perfectly consistent with a-theism. Episcopal minister Jack Spong’s theology, for example, would fit very well with a-theism in this sense. It is not Bishop Spong’s siding with science that makes his theology consistent with a-theism (though kudos for him!), but rather his thesis that transcendent God (the myth) literally dies with Jesus. The Jesus-event, under this reading, becomes the assertion of a theology of immanence, a rejection of transcendence, and the resurrection and ascension refer not to something literal, but rather to the emergence of a new kind of community no longer based on an essence stemming from kinship relations and without identity: a queer community not unlike the show Heroes. Jesus’s “resurrection” would lie in the work of this purely immanent community with no criteria for membership and no signifier or membership that could define it. It would be a community of fragments without law, kinship, or national guarantee. Paradoxically, the least Christian thing one could do under this reading would be to call oneself a Christian or join a Christian community as that would immediately set up a logic of membership defining an in-group and an out-group. Many variants of Buddhism, I think, fit with what I call a-theism. While I don’t throw in with theological variants of a-theism because they still posit the supernatural and I think the world is enough, it’s nonetheless the case that these theologies are consistent with a-theism as I’ll define it in a moment. On the other hand, this conception of a-theism says too little because it restricts a-theism to considerations of the supernatural, ignoring the fact that a-theism, to be thorough-going, refers to a particular structure of thought, not the content of a particular form of thought. In other words, a thorough-going a-theism would reject forms of thought that come in both secular and religious variants.
As I argued in my previous post– and in chapter six of The Democracy of Objects, this form of thought is that of transcendence:
Likewise, in the case of myth, it is not whether or not something has a supernatural dimension, but rather whether or not something possesses a particular structure. I have argued that all myths, whether pertaining to religion or secular systems, share the same structure of positing one term as transcendent to all others. I use the term “transcendence” in a very specific way: the transcendent, as I use the term, does not mean “to go beyond”, but rather refers to the postulation of any entity that is unconditioned and that conditions other things without itself being conditioned by other things.
When we think in terms of structures rather than content, any number of terms can therefore be theistic, regardless of whether the discourse is secular or religious. Transcendent terms can be Platonic forms, unchanging Aristotlean essences defining a species, the way we venerate a particular leader, party, or intellectual movement, transcendental signifiers, sovereignty, God as most commonly conceived in the monotheistic traditions, Laplace’s demon that is able to survey the entire universe and the position of all particles from perspective outside the universe, the subject conceived as an absolute origin of will, the neoliberal subject as thoroughly self-made, etc. This structure has many different variants at the level of content, just like the sentences “Jack kicks the ball”, “the dog eats the bone”, “Levi cooks split pea soup”, etc., have the same grammatical structure while nonetheless having different contents. Theism is the belief in an absolute and transcendent ground that conditions without itself being conditioned. As Nietzsche said, we have not really killed “God” (the transcendent) if were merely replace him with Man. The content has changed, but the structure remains the same. Likewise, we have not really replaced patriarchy if we simply take a biological man out of the position of power and fill in that position with a biological woman (ergo the reason that many contemporary Goddess religions are thoroughly patriarchal). It’s the structure that is patriarchal, not the organ between the person’s legs (assuming we can even speak in a clear cut way about male and female).
read on!
A thoroughgoing a-theism, a genuine ontology of immanence– where immanence is not immanence to anything but itself or the world(s) is all there is –is a form of thought that strives to reject all forms of theism or transcendence, whether in the domain of ontology, epistemology, ethics, or politics. It is for this reason, necessarily an-archic. It is a position that rejects any ultimate or absolute grounds, any unconditioned grounds that condition all else, for social formations (even kings only get their authority from the masses), ethics (all norms are invented, not beings that reside in Platonic heaven and fall from the sky; that’s why they’re so fragile and we must fight for them), and even where people think that the social world in which they find themselves is an absolute which they must obey, it is the beings of the world that create these structures. The ultimate truth of this a-theism and an-archism is the contingency of everything. There is no “natural” social arrangement (where “nature” is here used in the sense of divinely ordained or Platonically dictated) and there is no form of life that cannot be otherwise.
In this regard, the ultimate truth of Lacanian psychoanalysis is a-theism and an-archism. Here I think that philosophy is yet to catch up with Lacan, still pervaded as it is by various versions of ontotheology or theism, though it’s gotten much closer with thinkers such as Deleuze, Badiou and his critique of the various figures of the One, and, I would argue, the object-oriented ontologists. For Lacan the end of analysis consists in traversing the fantasm. The fantasm is what covers over the fissures and incompleteness of being, giving rise to the idea that the big Other exists. The beyond of the fantasm is the discovery that the big Other does not exist, that there is no master-plan, that there is no master that knows, that there are no transcendent formations, but that it was the subject’s belief that created the illusion of these things. The discovery that the big Other does not exist is the discovery that there is no leader that is uncastrated, that there is no ultimate answer, that there are no transcendent terms, and that there is no being that knows. The film Melancholia depicts this in a devastating way. As Kirsten Dunst’s character remarks, “we won’t be missed.” Her sister responds, “what do you mean?” Dunst, “we’re alone, completely alone, there is no other life in the universe.” The secret is that there is no secret and that there is no plan to all of this. It was only ever the belief in the secret that gave the king his power in the first place. Traversing the fantasm is a horrifying, devastating, but also emancipatory experience.
The late Lacan, starting with Seminar 22, RSI, distinguishes between two trajectories analysis can take. The first trajectory, that of a failed analysis, consists in believing in your symptom. Belief in your symptom is a phallic structure of subjectivity, which is to say that it refers not to the penis, but to a particular signifier, a transcendental signifier, that would ultimately ground and guarantee meaning. Belief in the symptom thus consists in belief that finally, some day, the secret of the symptom will be revealed once and for all through some grand narrative that stitches the idiotic repetition of the symptom together (Lacan speaks of the repetition of the symptom as “idiotic”, though I won’t get into the reasons for that here), thereby dissolving the symptom. Put in terms of Peircian semiotics, belief in the symptom is belief that there is a final interpretant, rather than an endless process of semiosis without end. Thus, for example, belief in the symptom might consist in the idea that someday the analysand will find the ultimate origin of the symptom in some childhood trauma that would finally explain it once and for all (the trauma theory of neurosis).
Within the Freudo-Lacanian framework, this belief in the origin of the symptom is always mythological. Rather, trauma is a structural feature of our being (closely bound up with what the object-oriented ontologists call “withdrawal”) and not an accident of history. All of Lacan’s gymnastics with topology, set theory, knots, symbolic logic, etc., are designed to draw attention to this structural being of the symptom: of a symptom without origin or final phallic signifier. This leaves identification with the symptom. Identification with the symptom consists in finally coming to that point where the symptom as the subject’s unique source of jouissance that functions like a sort of perpetual motion machine endlessly creating formations of the unconscious is recognized. The subject does not abandon the symptom, or eradicate the symptom– though, topologically, through analysis, the symptom can undergo significant mutations and our relation to this jouissance can become more direct and less painful –but rather changes his relation to the symptom. The symptom is no longer experienced as an impediment, but as a solution and source of satisfaction. This beyond of the fantasy found in the discovery that the big Other does not exist and in identification with the symptom is also the discovery that there is no solution to life. It is the beyond of all teleology (eschatology) and nostalgia (stories of the pure origin and the fall).
We have not yet really seen a form of philosophy organized around identification with the symptom, yet the history of philosophy is replete with examples of belief in the symptom. These philosophies are what Derrida refers to as “Ontotheology” (or what I call “phallosophy” because of their necessarily patriarchal structure), and always consist in the search for a pure transcendent ground as origin of all else. The challenge, I think, is to think a genuine and thorough-going a-theism that does not believe in the symptom, but that rather identifies with the symptom and that is able to find a way to live even if, as Dunst’s character in Melancholia suggests, the ultimate truth of existence is extinction, and there is no ultimate purpose to it all.
Larval Subjects . 
November 22, 2011 at 12:52 am
Fascinating post. I have some unformed thoughts towards a defence of polytheism, but I’ll need marshall those before I launch in. Meanwhile, the bit about (contemporary) “Goddess” religions remaining patriarchal in structure reminds me of a similar critique in ‘The Coming Insurrection’ – describing how systems of power survive potentially emancipatory change through co-option, specifically by sacrificing their content (e.g. an entirely male-dominated political class) to retain their form (e.g. Thatcher).
I have had similar melancholy thoughts about the identity-politics issues of American politics in the recent past – gay marriage, repealing don’t ask, don’t tell, etc – while it is of course bad that gay people in the military are victimised, that’s a pretty lame conversation to be having when the real problem is what the military is doing. The question is “why can’t gay American soldiers kill Arabs just like their straight compatriots can” seems like a weird obscure debate to be having.
I wonder, have you read ‘Hermeneutic Communism’, Levi? I think you would enjoy it.
http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-15802-2/hermeneutic-communism
November 22, 2011 at 1:15 am
Thanks Joshua! I haven’t read it, but I look forward to doing so. I don’t think all contemporary goddess religions are like this, but I do think some preserve one and the same structure, just as Soviet Socialism ended up preserving the structure of authoritarianism and exploitation under a different name. I probably shouldn’t say this publicly as people will think I’m a new age flake, but I’m pretty sympathetic to the neo-paganisms. I don’t think of religion primarily as a relation to the divine, but as a set of practices forming certain social relations between people, punctuating daily life with the wondrous and marking that worth preserving, cultivating regard for the world, and generating certain forms of affectivity. Rituals are about relations between people and the earth, not relations to the divine (even where folks think otherwise). I find a number of the pagan rituals I’ve witnessed appealing in the affects and communal relations they seek to cultivate, even while not believing in the supernatural, talk of forces, etc., etc., etc. There’s something to be said for making love outside in the wilderness to celebrate the Winter Solstice.
November 22, 2011 at 1:40 am
The secret is that there is no secret and that there is no plan to all of this. It was only ever the belief in the secret that gave the king his power in the first place. Traversing the fantasm is a horrifying, devastating, but also emancipatory experience.
Dr Sinthome the way you describe the film, it´s only hopeless and negative. But I was struck by totally the opposite – in the midst of unimaginable hopelessness, where all life ends, suddenly, there is (underline: not transcendent!) positiveness, and relief. It´s as though this horrible void were filled with a new, alien experience (alien in the sense that the characters discover new emotions, such as Justine´s sister becoming panicked, or Justine finding herself calm in the midst of mayhem). And it seems this encounter with the new causes the characters to finally exit their narcissistic selves.
Even the last hopeless shot is visually constructed as a portal, a door opening to something new, like an icon. It surprised me little to read in his interview that von Trier is now dabbling in Byzantine religion. It is precisely this (anti-Platonic) mingling of destruction and creation, in the body of Christ, in earthly life, that Eastern Orthodoxy wants to address.
November 22, 2011 at 1:47 am
Dejan,
The film hit me quite hard (I was literally naseous from anxiety and despair afterwards), but I think you’re right. In the end they find a way to face all of this through the game they create and their immediacy with each other. The idea being, I suppose, that that’s all we have when facing the void. You’re much better at film analysis than me, though.
November 22, 2011 at 1:52 am
Claire’s character deeply needed to believe in the big Other (her husband even moreso), which is why she falls apart at the end. Dunst’s character increasingly becomes stronger and more radiant as events progress. Oddly, while Claire’s character lives in the grip of myth (in the idea that everything is ordered and that there’s a sort of mastery of knowledge; tho she doubts), Dunst’s character resorts to myth at the end, weaving myth as a ritual to bring them together and face the end, knowing full well that it is myth.
November 22, 2011 at 2:12 am
You’re much better at film analysis than me, though.
No no no, this is not about some specialized film knowledge. Simple semiotic analysis of the visuals will do. The last shot is a ´´portal´´ in the sense that the fire of Melancholia bursts through Justine and into the audience. Clearly the screen is a tunnel, a passageway, that goes through the body (Justine sits with her back turned against Melancholia):
Translated in psychoanalytic lingo, this would mean that in her traversal of the fantasy, Justine learned that she is an empty vessel through which divine energies may flow.
I am not insisting on a mystical or religious explanation of this, but have to admit that the movie shook me from the ground up and downwards again with the feelings and sensations that this image conjured up. I recognized them as being profoundly true, on some as yet untheorized level.
Dunst’s character resorts to myth at the end, weaving myth as a ritual to bring them together and face the end, knowing full well that it is myth.
Well that´s what I meant with my other comment on the myth thread. That myths are destructive and dangerous is only one part of the story. Like Melancholia´s trajectory: on the one hand you can say it´s completely random and meaningless. On the other hand, Melancholia is inevitable. It´s always been hiding behind the Sun,and it was just a matter of time before it would hit.
November 22, 2011 at 3:13 am
Dr Sinthome I needn´t stress that I was completely floored by Melancholia and that I can barely control my enthusiasm in this regard, even if this means spilling it all over other people´s blogs.
Researching, I bumped into the concept of ´´docetism´´:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docetism
docetism (from the Greek δοκέω dokeō, “to seem”) is the belief that Jesus’ physical body was an illusion, as was his crucifixion; that is, Jesus only seemed to have a physical body and to physically die, but in reality he was incorporeal, a pure spirit, and hence could not physically die. This belief treats the sentence “the Word was made Flesh” (John 1:14) as merely figurative. Docetism has historically been regarded as heretical by most Christian theologians.[1][2]
This belief is most commonly attributed to the Gnostics, many of whom believed that matter was evil, and as a result God would not take on a material body. This statement is rooted in the idea that a divine spark is imprisoned within the material body, and that the material body is in itself an obstacle, deliberately created by an evil, lesser god (the demiurge) to prevent man from seeing his divine origin.
Docetism can be further explained as the view that since the human body is temporary and the spirit is eternal, the body of Jesus must have been an illusion and, likewise, his crucifixion. Even so, saying that the human body is temporary has a tendency to undercut the importance of the belief in resurrection of the dead and the goodness of created matter, and is in opposition to this orthodox view.
All mystical-religious debates aside, I find that concepts like ´´material God´´ or ´´the body of God´´ or ´´eternal body´´ or ´´the goodness of matter´´ are terribly important in this day and age precisely for the same reasons that you find your objectology important as a debunking of anthropocentrism.
November 22, 2011 at 3:53 am
All I mean is that generally I find your film analysis to be more sensitive and profound than my own. You’re perceptive across the board that way, often uncomfortably so. Of course, I’m partial as despite how you’ve always asatirized me you’ve always done so in a way that’s true and kind. You’re also crass, but that’s why I appreciate you. You’re right. As you might have seen on twitter, this film shook this self-congratulatory, self-fashioned a-theist deeply. The erasure of all our species has suffered, of all the great things we’ve created, and the injustice that erasure would imply is difficult (for me) to bear. From a materialist perspective this is completely irrational. After all, I’ll be dead so why should I care? But I do, and that’s what the film brought home so forcefully. I’m not worried about ***me*** dying, but all of this being erased, Primo Levi and Shakespeare being forgotten, now that’s hard. I’m not sure why I care, but I do. This caring isnwhat makes the clip you provide sublime and profound.
November 22, 2011 at 4:24 am
Dr Sinthome, let me return the compliment – only a very select group of visionary minds DESERVE to be in my parodies!!!
It sounds like in your imagination you have fashioned me into this fervent believer. But really, I am not. I will never declare myself a Christian. I only speak about my sensations, and feelings, which are sometimes so strong that I think of them as visions.
And I think in this case we have felt the same thing ,which we express in differing languages: that MATTER is infused with something ´´divine´´ – it doesn´t matter whether you define it in religious terms, or in the terms of nanotechnology. That this feeling causes stomach cramps only means that you actually believe in it!
November 22, 2011 at 5:07 pm
http://www.fourdirectionsteachings.com/cree_learning_activities_int.html
A ceremony is followed when erecting a teepee, with tobacco given to Mother Earth by a woman in thanks for the use of all the materials to make the teepee, and the doorway facing east. The teepee is symbolic of the sacredness of womanhood as it stands with dignity; it provides warmth, comfort and shelter, and love and care to the family. With the control flaps up, the teepee resembles an old woman standing with her arms extended out in thanks. Women are named after the fire that is built in the centre of the teepee.
Dr Sinthome, another thing that haunts me from this scene is that it is NOT the nuclear heterosexual family that is facing the Apocalypse, but two women and a fairly androgynous child. The Phallus had previously completely collapsed, its only remnant perhaps being the Nietzschean horse Abraham, who semi-comically reappears grazing in the fields as if to remind people that there might still be a man around. This is where I see parallels with – not the END of analysis, but the BEYOND of analysis – with female jouissance taking center stage. Especially because in a sense, Justine invites Melancholia, and Melancholia is a ”perverse” kind of an immaculate conception, where the woman sort of inseminates herself by involution. I think there is a very strong argument here for a reconfiguration of the sexuation graph!
November 22, 2011 at 7:18 pm
And dr. Sinthome I expect no less from you than to ENTIRELY reconfigure it!
November 22, 2011 at 7:57 pm
Isn’t atheism also trying to suture the wound suffered by confronting the lack of big Other? We confront the horrifying abyss (horizon) of the wilderness by deciding not to believe. I think living in the presence of melancholia means knowing that extinctions is the truth of existence but letting go of all final decisions for the sake of a immanent agnosticism. The Absolute is a fantasy, an attempted closure, but the pure possibility of the world – that it exists as differance (materially or otherwise) – is a structure that has consequence, and therefore feeling and meaning, no matter how local it is. We should neither reject nor affirm this gaping abyss, but rather love, live and explore it in spite of everything.
November 23, 2011 at 1:53 am
We should neither reject nor affirm this gaping abyss, but rather love, live and explore it in spite of everything.
Michael, ”love live and explore” is straight offa the Discovery channel; I want to BURN.
November 23, 2011 at 2:32 pm
“Theism is the belief in an absolute and transcendent ground that conditions without itself being conditioned.”
“…the transcendent, as I use the term, does not mean “to go beyond”, but rather refers to the postulation of any entity that is unconditioned and that conditions other things without itself being conditioned by other things.”
Is this tantamount to saying that there is or can be no such transcendent ground (without necessarily limiting the signified as a “thing” or “entity”) but only a belief in a transcendent ground?
November 23, 2011 at 3:38 pm
Yes, Lol. This position is committed to the thesis that there are no transcendent grounds.
November 23, 2011 at 4:19 pm
Dejan,
Your desire to “burn” is indicative of the human death-wish, i suppose. Yet, Charlie Bronson aside, what other choice to we really have but to make our way in the wilderness? Belief or rejection in/of “transcendent grounds” is merely a habit one decides (more or less) to rest in. My point is that theism and atheism are both decisions – conceptual closures that modify our experience in particular ways. I think we would be better off negating the negation and adopting an open attitude (cosmic agnosticism?) towards a cosmos/wilderness that is filled with so much possibility, danger and meaning.
November 23, 2011 at 7:12 pm
Would it be fair to say that your position is committed to the thesis, not that there is a transcendent ground, but that there are an uncountable number of transcendent objects — withdrawn, unreached by and existing beyond all relations? Which would be a multiplication and a ‘democratization’ of the transcendent ground, perhaps even an odd kind of polytheism?
I expect this characterization might not be quite accurate, because you mean something rather specific by transcendent: unconditioned in itself, while conditioning all else. But if we posit objects that withdraw from (transcend?) all relation, then we are positing objects that, once they emerge, simply are what they are — where the vacuum-seal around each object appears also to suggest an unconditionality, an in-itself-ness beyond conditioning, since to be conditioned is to be in relation. At least, this is how I understand the point of the withdrawal of objects, that objects as objects in some way elude (transcend) relational determination (conditioning).
November 23, 2011 at 8:44 pm
Bruce,
For me wothdrawal doesn’t mean that objects are unconditioned and eternal, only that they never directly relate. All objects come-to-be and pass-away within this fraemwork and none can overdetermine all the rest.
November 23, 2011 at 8:57 pm
Yes, I understand that objects, in your model, are not eternal. What is not clear to me, in both your and Harman’s approaches, is what exactly you mean by objects being withdrawn from all relations, however. An object that is withdrawn from ALL relations (endo- and exo-) would be, in that state, unconditioned, because there would be nothing that could ‘reach’ it to condition it. On my website, we’ve been discussing your book and other OOO-related topics for the past several weeks, and this has been a question that has perplexed several of us there. (My own ontological understanding derives primarily from living systems theory, Varela & Maturana’s enactive paradigm, and the Buddhist notion of pratitya-samutpada). Is the claim that objects are withdrawn from ALL relations hyperbolic?
November 23, 2011 at 9:05 pm
I think we would be better off negating the negation and adopting an open attitude (cosmic agnosticism?) towards a cosmos/wilderness that is filled with so much possibility, danger and meaning.
Michael, that’s always been my personal problem with stuff like speculative realism – although I embrace fully the idea of living or vibrant matter, withdrawn or not, related or semi-related, I can’t do anything with the fact that there’s no all-loving, infinitely forgiving, BREATHTAKING God (preferably with supernatural powers) to get me the fuck out of this world in the end.
As dr. Sinthome said above, a hardboiled materialist only really faces – a very short life. Which isn’t much. I think I deserve more.
I have countless times tried to force myself to accept dr. Harman’s catehism, but all I see is Chutulu sneering at me from Lovecraft’s horrifying Beyond. That doesn’t quite do it for me either.
I grew up in an Eastern Orthodox culture (Serbia is one of its major recipients next to Russia) and now that I’m getting a bit older I find myself increasingly returning to its messages. But my own wrestling with faith isn’t really the subject of this discussion.
What I find currently fascinating is the obvious parallels (which I had sensed long before, but it wasn’t until dr. Sinthome appeared that I could put a finger on them) between Orthodoxy and the object-oriented philosophy. I really think that the message about living matter, whether religious or scientific, is possibly the most important one for this century.
And in this movie ”Melancholia” it’s all captured so well, so piercingly: it is primarily the VANITY of the rich that could lead to an ecological-political catastrophe, the belief that we are better, smarter, more beautiful than rocks. And we need to WITHDRAW – into meditation, or at least humility – so that we may once again experience that the world deserves to be loved, because it was made by a good God.
This is approximately what I wanted to say. But the thing is, it doesn’t happen without passion, without fire, without a struggle, the death drive, whatever. This is again where I find Orthodoxy’s message more important than those of other religions, because it is such an antithesis of this New Age frivolity about easy redemption.
November 23, 2011 at 9:05 pm
[…] on myth. I’ve pasted some of our discussion over on Larval Subjects below. Bryant also recently posted on what he calls “a-theism,” and I’m more inclined to follow him at least part way in what he suggests. I have a few […]
November 23, 2011 at 9:09 pm
I think you’re maybe running my position together with Harman’s. For me objects are autopoitic and allopoietic systems. They enter into relations all the time and often sustain themselves through relations. What’s important for me is that their relations can be severed and broken. This, however, is often catastrophic for the object. If I’m placed in a vacuum I continue to exist, but I’m also dead as my relation to oxygen is severed. When I say an object is withdrawn, I only mean that it never encounters another object as that object is. It always transforms perturbations from other objects into information based on its own structure. For hArman objects are literally withdrawn from all relations. I’m not sure how thisnworks because he says that real objects experience other real objects as sensual objects, but how is that possible if the object is not entering into some sort of relation with that other object?
Paradoxically, my entire ontological framework is geared towards developing a nuanced framework for investigating relations. For me, what’s interesting is not so much objects in isolation, but what happens when objects enter into relations and when they break from relations.
November 23, 2011 at 9:28 pm
Bryant: “When I say an object is withdrawn, I only mean that it never encounters another object as that object is. It always transforms perturbations from other objects into information based on its own structure.”
Thank you; that is clarifying for me, and perhaps I *have* been running your position together with Harman’s. This notion that an object never encounters another object as it is, but rather transforms perturbations from other objects into information based on its own structure, is of course central to Varela’s notions of autopoiesis and enaction: an autopoietic system is organizationally closed but structurally open (never fully withdrawn from ALL relations). I see autopoietic closure as sufficient in itself to conceptualize the withdrawal (or partial withdrawal) of objects, allowing them to elude over-determination by exo-relations. If this is what you mean by withdrawal, then I don’t have any objections to that. It is the notion that objects are withdrawn from ALL relations that seems incoherent to me. (I believe I understand Harman’s claim that a fully relational view, without withdrawal of some kind, is unable to explain change. But in some ways, this is the opposite from Nagarjuna’s pratitya-samutpada: an entity withdrawn from ALL relation would itself have no reason at all to change.)
November 23, 2011 at 9:31 pm
Sorry Michael I completely forgot to include the crucial word – EXPERIENCE. I don’t think there’s a way to get all hot and sweaty about a subject such as vibrant matter or the salvation of the world if you don’t have any EXPERIENCE of it. For me, this experience is most often aesthetic, coming from an encounter with Great Art, but it can also be an encounter with Great Science, there are so many paths to granny’s house.
(Who knows maybe someone even gets such an experience from reading Dr. Harman, but that’s definitely not – me; the rest you can follow in the continuation of the Dr. Sinthome and the Object saga, SINTHOSIS or Dr. Sinthome’s Theosis, next week)
November 23, 2011 at 9:39 pm
Bruce,
Yes, I have a lengthy discussion of autopoietic theory in chapter 4 of The Democracy of Objects. I do think it’s metaphysically possible for an object to be severed from all relations (I call such objects “dark objects”), but we wouldn’t know anything about them.
November 23, 2011 at 9:47 pm
I see autopoietic closure as sufficient in itself to conceptualize the withdrawal (or partial withdrawal) of objects, allowing them to elude over-determination by exo-relations. If this is what you mean by withdrawal, then I don’t have any objections to that.
‘scuse me for interrupting, but it’s completely astonishing that Eastern Orthodoxy allows for both positions – as John Doyle alerted me yesterday, God has an ”essence” (equivalent to Harman’s absolute withdrawal) and ”divine energies” which are related to the world (equivalent to dr. Sinthome’s autopoi… damn…) however these kinds of relations with divine energies never allow you to experience God as He really is, only to become somewhat more like Him (in this way both you and God remain semi-withdrawn).
November 23, 2011 at 9:49 pm
I doubt such objects exist — even neutrinos ‘participate’ in the cosmos to some degree, or we would never have detected them — and I also don’t find any theoretical justification to posit them, but that discussion is probably a tangent here … though, on second thought, I suppose such dark objects would be an example of absolute transcendence, since they would exist necessarily outside of all worldspaces whatsoever, and (on Nagarjuna’s logic) would probably be eternal as well….
November 23, 2011 at 10:18 pm
…I meant to say: … would probably be eternal and unconditioned as well. After all, what would it mean to say that an object that is totally severed from all relations is nevertheless conditioned? Conditioned by what?
November 24, 2011 at 12:01 am
Bruce,
I didn’t assert that they do exist (there’s no way we could know because they’d be completely unrelated and knowledge is a relation). I said that they’re a metaphysical possibility. The theoretical justication for this thesis is very simple: if it belongs to the essence of objects that they are detachabpe from relations, it follows that there is the possibility of an object that is severed from all relations. That would be a dark object.
November 24, 2011 at 12:38 am
Center of Parody: Thanks for that comment. I am attracted to Raimon Panikkar’s theology, which rejects an ‘external’ God or transcendent ground, instead seeing the divine as the depth of creatures, and symbolizes divine existence as Trinitarian perichoresis …a radical relationality (akin to nonduality or emptiness) which nevertheless sees each particular participant in such ‘dancing-around’ as irreducible to the other(s), as there is an uncanny, unknowable, and inexhaustible quality to all things (posited as an ontological fact, not an epistemological problem). Panikkar’s overall model, however, may still be subject to critique as correlationist (in that he sees ‘man’ or ‘anthropos’ as equally central to existence as ‘theos’ and ‘cosmos’).
November 24, 2011 at 12:44 am
Levi, thank you for your response. (I apologize for so many serial posts today! Your work has caught my interest and I’ve built up a number of questions as I’ve engaged with it over the past several weeks). Regarding the detachability of objects from ALL relations, I suppose I remain unconvinced that this is a possibility or that this is necessarily intrinsic to the nature of objects. Related to this, I have a question regarding your definition of objects as ‘systems’ (whether auto- or allopoietic): Is it consistent or coherent to define objects in systems terms and nevertheless also conceive of them as detachable from ALL relations? I ask because it seems to me that ‘system’ itself is a relational term.
November 24, 2011 at 1:39 am
hich rejects an ‘external’ God or transcendent ground, instead seeing the divine as the depth of creatures, and symbolizes divine existence as Trinitarian perichoresis
For me the transcendent God is only a problem actually if He imposes himself on the world. But since in Orthodoxy, the (withdrawn) transcendent God can never force you to accept Him, as you retain free will at all times, this is not a problem. The ”transcendence” debate is therefore relevant if we talk about the Western transcendent God, who is separated from the material world and expects people to climb up to Him – over dead bodies.
I just looked up perichoresis, but I don’t quite understand its implications.
As for the correlationism, what I’m saying is that this bit of Orth. mysticism actually reconciles this somewhat overintellectualized aporium (between withdrawal and relation); unfortunately, though, it is considered mystic knowledge which humans cannot access, so dr. Sinthome will have to get divinized first before he can solve this one!
November 24, 2011 at 11:49 am
Levi,
I feel to apologise for asking you questions after only a rather minimal (to-date at least) reading of your ideas. That said, and if I may ask further, you say “Many variants of Buddhism, I think, fit with what I call a-theism.” Could you say which particular variants of Buddhism, and why you think they fit with a-theism?
And from how you define a-theism, does it follow that you think these variants of Buddhism, in (should I say if?) not affirming *transcendence*, do not postulate “any entity that is unconditioned and that conditions other things without itself being conditioned by other things”?
November 24, 2011 at 8:17 pm
Perichoresis (and fungibility);
‘Perichoresis is a Greek term used to describe the triune relationship between each person of the Godhead. It can be defined as co-indwelling, co-inhering, and mutual interpenetration. Alister McGrath writes that it “allows the individuality of the persons to be maintained, while insisting that each person shares in the life of the other two.’
Strange that this term should crop up. I have been reading some of the work of the argentine/german school of neurobiology which specifically denies this relationship:
‘Psychisms are *found* in nature reciprocally extrinsic, existentially disassociated and, constitutively, not taking part in each other: constrained discrete finitudes, each fully exterior to the others without any circumincession or perichoresis; consequently, isolable (‘separable’ and ‘separability’ are synonymous with ‘local’ and ‘locality’ in an experience-situating context), each noticing different happenings and working different deeds. Further, they are eclosions. That is, psychisms are *primarily*, or constitutively, disjunctive or parcellated. Not *secondarily* disjunctive or parcellated, as many fungible resources are, whose parcellation often arises as a mere matter of descriptive scale; nor *unparcellated*, as it is just descriptively imposed by the probabilistic treaments.
(from A. Avila and M. Crocco, ‘Sensing: A New Fundamental Action of Nature’, Inst. for Advanced Study, Buenos Aires, 1996, page 85; italics twixt asterisks).
and a few notes from Mariela szirko which would not follow any ‘materialist flat ontology: http://www.kjf.ca/15-C38SZ.htm
The gist of materialism is fungibility. It consists in resorting to some paste, whether an eidetic, sensual, action-like, aethereal or condensate ‘material’, any portion of which may be indifferently taken to form realities.
Like in banks money articulates accounts, idealist materialism articulates ideas into persons while materialist materialism articulates less-subtle materials to the same effect. And likewise amiss.
Materialism is thus established once anybody takes anything to work as a material –namely, not mattering which portion of it is being taken — to build further realities. In particular, minds.
Why the mere taking any resource as indifferently partitionable incurs in materialism? Does perchance not matter if the resource posited as fungible is one (or a special combination) of essences, quidditates, Bose-Einstein condensates, atoms or dust? No, it does not matter.
So it is, because, beyond any coarseness or subtleness of what is posited to work as a material, what is neglected is the irrepeatability of the singular result. Therefore, building a wall with bricks and mortar, and building a text with concepts and expressions, legitimately may be described materialistically, as an ‘in-formative alteration’. But such materialistic description is ilegitimate to depict psychisms in full, because albeit Herbert and Mariela may ‘share’ some noema –say, ‘the’ sensation of a lazuline blue — never each of us will avail of the noema actually availed by the other. Because we are finite, this is so.
This distinction, which may seem indiscernible and platitudinous as regards such a detached sensation of some blue hue, is notorious and momentous when sensations, covariant under the frustrability of a sedimentable semovience, do build our biographies. To build a person, it is in no way indifferent if the blue noema taken to enter in his or her constitution is the concrete lazuline blue available in Herbert, or either in Mariela. Circumstances are not just circumstantial, but as regards finite psychisms they are constitutive.
This constitutivity of circumstantiation, very much stressed in our tradition, is why the contemporaneous hylozoism, which is eclosionalist (that is to say, which describes psychisms as eclosional: defined by their cadacualtez, which is the determination of a different eclosion for their existentiality in each case) can never be materialist. Eclosionalism precludes all materialisms, whether idealist or materialist materialisms.
November 24, 2011 at 8:24 pm
Lol,
I have in mind, in particular, the common Buddhist doctrines of the imperminence of all things and the causal interdependence of all things. Those are twp doctrines staunchly opposed to the existence of transcendent terms such as Platonic forms or the God of the various monotheisms. Within this framework there are no unconditioned terms.
November 24, 2011 at 9:04 pm
for a concise intro to the argentine school’s understanding of consciousness/psyche check this kno:
http://knol.google.com/k/consciousness-definition-and-concept#
e.g.:
I think this tradition would support the ‘withdrawn’ nature of pscyhes but would not be a flat ontology.
November 26, 2011 at 2:30 pm
Levi said:
“When I say an object is withdrawn, I only mean that it never encounters another object as that object is. It always transforms perturbations from other objects into information based on its own structure.”
Plus it seems an object never sees itself “as it is,” since it never enters into full presence and remains withdrawn from itself. This has long been a deconstructive criticism of any metaphysics of presence. This is Spencer-Brown’s unmarked space to which any object remains oblivious. It might have some relation to Habermas’ lifeworld background and Lakoff & Johnson’s cognitive unconscious, as well as Derrida’s khora.
Relations can only be discerned within the marked space, with what is present to awareness or structural translation. And the unmarked space of khora never enters into presence–nor is it ever merely absent–and hence is without relation. We assume its (non)existence via a transcendental deduction but such a (non)concept only leaves the most ephemeral of traces. It is like Heidegger’s crossed-out Being. Maybe correlationism has to do with the anthropocentric fixation on presence (being)?
November 27, 2011 at 8:10 am
http://orthodoxinfo.com/inquirers/hierotheos_difference.aspx
Orthodox spirituality differs distinctly from any other “spirituality” of an eastern or western type. There can be no confusion among the various spiritualities, because Orthodox spirituality is God-centered, whereas all others are man-centered.
Since Orthodox spirituality differs distinctly from the “spiritualities” of other confessions, so much the more does it differ from the “spirituality” of eastern religions, which do not believe in the Theanthropic nature of Christ and the Holy Spirit. They are influenced by the philosophical dialectic, which has been surpassed by the Revelation of God. These traditions are unaware of the notion of personhood and thus the hypostatic principle. And love, as a fundamental teaching, is totally absent. One may find, of course, in these eastern religions an effort on the part of their followers to divest themselves of images and rational thoughts, but this is in fact a movement towards nothingness, to non-existence. There is no path leading their “disciples” to theosis-divinisation (see the note below) of the whole man.
This is why a vast and chaotic gap exists between Orthodox spirituality and the eastern religions, in spite of certain external similarities in terminology. For example, eastern religions may employ terms like ecstasy, dispassion, illumination, noetic energy, etc. but they are impregnated with a content different from corresponding terms in Orthodox spirituality.
November 28, 2011 at 12:39 am
Dr Sithome, I’ve been tormented like the fires of Hell by this Orthodox exclusivity claim, that is to say ”we are the right religion” (and all of you others are wrong) precisely because it can lead to exactly the kind of bigotry and warfare that Christianity should be pitted AGAINST
I won’t even mention (though it’s certainly relevant) how many right-winged bigots have beat up gays at Pride festivities in the name of Orthodoxy’s sticking to certain traditional cannons, eg the holiness of heterosexual marriage and the ”sin” of homosexuality – the only saving grace of the church is that it never condoned, organized or praised such actions. But the church as an institution is proving itself highly ineffectual in not addressing these kinds of issues properly.
What has stuck with me regardless, and continues to stick with me, is that 1) only a God-centered religion would allow man to humble himself beyond vanity, to come outside of himself and 2) if there is an ontological distance between man and God, so that man can never be God, then getting closer to God implies a conscious, willing struggle, to cross that distance.
The way thus that salvation is premised on a kind of a ”positive absence”, or as Shaviro said of ”Melancholia”, ”the Romantic Anti-Sublime”, or maybe, ”enlightened negativity”, is most remarkable, most fascinating.
December 11, 2011 at 8:32 am
Levi,
I was working through Plato’s Parmenides and a particular passage reminded me of this post and your posts about myth, more generally. Forgive me if this is already familiar territory, but I don’t believe I’ve seen it mentioned in either your work or Graham’s, and the implications for OOO and correlationism seem very interesting to me.
The passage I have in mind is 133b-134e, a particular rebuttal of Platonic forms by Parmenides. What Parmenides proposes here is a radical split between the objects and the forms:
”Take an example,” said Parmenides. “If one of us is somebody’s master
or somebody’s slave, he is surely not a slave of master itself-of just what a
master is-nor is the master a master of slave itself-of just what a slave is. e
On the contrary, being a human being, he is a master or slave of a human
being. Mastery itself, on the other hand, is what it is of slavery itself; and,
in the same way, slavery itself is slavery of mastery itself. Things in us do
not have their power in relation to the forms, nor do they have theirs in
relation to us; but, I repeat, the forms are what they are of themselves and
in relation to themselves, and things that belong to us are, in the same way,
what they are in relation to themselves. You do understand what I mean?”
The dual implication of this which Parmenides raises seems doubly interesting and useful both to OOO and moving beyond transcendentalism: not only can we not make any appeal to the transcendental, but the transcendental cannot truly be said to have an influence on us. It cannot provide a “cover” to justify otherwise questionable acts.
A few tentative implications:
1. This shows the absurdity of positing something “beyond” reality. If it is truly beyond reality, it has to be unreachable – for If it is reachable, it is a part of reality and not “beyond” it.
2. This inverts the question of access – if access to reality must be justified, why not access to the transcendental realm?
3. This defeats the correlationist gesture of characterizing itself as “beyond” the realism/anti-realism divide, by showing that positing a transcendental realm also requires positing a transcendental subject.
4. This also allows a gesture parallel to what you propose in The Democracy of Objects – moving beyond the epistemological. Should we not also move beyond the transcendental, say “so what?” A transcendental realm can exist, but its existence is irrelevant to the reality of objects. Appeals to the transcendental matter only in terms of their manifestation in terms of objects.
My initial hesitation is that this is framed too much in terms of access, and it seems possible to interpret it as running counter to the thesis of withdrawal. Perhaps that is just a reason that questions of access are self-defeating, and, once again, we should move from epistemology to ontology?