In response to my last post, some good discussion has emerged as to just what materialism is and when we can identify a genuine materialism. The tradition of materialism I claim arises out of Democritus, the Greek Epicureans, Lucretius, and thinkers such as Diderot. Where the version of materialism we get in Contemporary continental theory seems to equate materialism with a focus on practices and institutions, this materialism focuses on the existence of physical beings independent of humans (minerals, plants, nervous systems, fiber optic cables, particles, animals, features of geography, and so on). I think it’s hard to deny that what’s generally called “materialism” today is really a form of discursivism. The debate surrounding idealism and materialism as it arose between Hegel and Marx was a debate between conceptuality and practices. It was the question “do ideas/concepts structure social reality (Hegel) or do practices structure social reality?” In Marx’s own work, we can still glimpse something like robust materialism. In his work, it makes sense to call a focus on practices “materialist” because in practice, after all, we’re talking about biological bodies working on non-human material stuffs, and Marx has exquisite analyses of calories required for work, the physical properties of technologies, the features of natural geography, and so on. The problem is that much of this largely gets erased as this theoretical trajectory develops in the Althusserian and Frankfurt school versions of Marxism. Ideology and discursivity begin to take center stage, and we increasingly seem to lose the materiality of matter. Matter becomes largely conceived as a vehicle for human meanings and significations. In other words, we’re back to Hegel and Marx gets turned upside down. Given that the Marxist heritage is largely preserved in the humanities, this isn’t a surprise as those working in the humanities largely work with texts and meanings. As a consequence, just as the cobbler is likely to see all other things in the world in terms of footwear, those working in the humanities have a tendency to comprehend everything in the world in terms of meaning and text.
What I’m trying to do with borromean critical theory is open a space for thinking materiality as materiality that doesn’t physical beings to being mere carriers of signification, while also preserving what we’ve discovered through phenomenology and semiotics. The imaginary now corresponds to the domain of descriptive phenomenological analysis, the symbolic the domain of semiotic analysis, while the real corresponds to materiality in the sense of physicality. The real, taken for itself, therefore doesn’t correspond to “practices”, but rather biological processes, physiology, mountain ranges, weather patterns, the behavior of particles, the properties of minerals and metals, animals, the chemical features of foods and air, and so on.
read on!
However, it’s not simply a question of opening a circle where we note the existence of nonhuman things that would exist without us rather than refusing to reduce these entities to vehicles for signification or noematic correlates of phenomenological experience. In social assemblages the three orders are intertwined. Part of understanding that the domains of the symbolic and imaginary are intertwined with the the circle of the real consists in understanding that we have to reconceptualize our understanding of the symbolic and imaginary in light of the real. For example, if the symbolic is necessarily intertwined with the real or materiality, this entails that we have to develop a materialist understanding of the symbolic. We can’t any longer treat signifiers as diaphanous entities that are everywhere and nowhere. No, we have to remember that like any other entity that exists in the material world, signifiers have to obey the laws of physics. This means that they must be physically transported from person to person, group to group, institution to institution in order to proliferate throughout the social sphere. This requires that signifiers require physical mediums of transportation: sound-waves for speech (you can’t speak in a vacuum), bits of paper for text, fiber optic cables, servers, satellites, and so on. Certainly different mediums of transport are going to make a difference as to what kinds of societies are possible and we should attend to this, no? Similarly, like good disease epidemiologists, shouldn’t we attend to where ideologies are geographically? Because of how they’ve been transported, won’t ideologies be among some populations and not others?
Similarly, taking materialism seriously means that we can’t afford to ignore neurology and cognitive science. Different mediums of transmission will interact with nervous systems in different ways and we should be attentive to that. If– as thinkers such as McLuhan, Ong, and Havlock have taught us –societies based on speech tend towards the mythological, rhyme, and cyclical repetitions in their transfer of cultural knowledge, isn’t this because cognitively and neurologically information structured in this way has the right rhythm and pattern to be neurologically and cognitively retained where only speech is available. Matters change once you get writing and paper, because now the paper can itself retain the information. We no longer require meat-memory to retain information. New things also become possible with written inscription and different writing systems (“III” and “3” both signify the same thing, but it’s difficult to imagine complex mathematics using Roman numerals). What are the cognitive and neurological challenges in a society such as ours where we are saturated with information and where the act of reading can no longer be careful and leisurely because we are compelled to act and respond quickly?
Taking materialism seriously means attending to our understanding of the symbolic and imaginary are transformed as a result of what we learn about the real. It means that we can no longer fully divorce these realms from one another, but have to attend to how they’re entangled. And, of course, our idea of materiality is also transformed as a result of our understanding of the symbolic and the imaginary or the semiotic and the phenomenological. Of course, at this point in history, I also feel that we need to attend a bit more to materiality than to the symbolic and imaginary. For decades cultural analysis has been dominated by semiotics and phenomenology. It doesn’t hurt to spend a little time bringing technology, physics, geography, neurology, biology, and so on a bit to the forefront given what little attention they’ve received in our circles. Moreover, as we live in the midst of global catastrophe wrought by climate change, it doesn’t hurt to attend to the fact that all experience and semiotic activity requires work, burns energy, and produces waste. Finally, it doesn’t hurt to explore the ways in which time structuration during the working day, fatigue, and so on are political forms of power in addition to ideologies. Don’t many oppressive power relations sustain themselves simply because people are too tired to do anything else, because their time is so structured that they’re left with little time to become aware of the mechanisms of power structuring their life, and because they’re dependent on certain institutions like corporations for the calories and fuels they need to live and run their lives?
February 25, 2013 at 11:57 pm
Dr Sinthome I’m much more extreme than you in this line of thought and I feel that this disgusted or panicked attitude towards the body established the Western mindframe since the dawn of time, since the Great Schism. By the way Lars von Trier is making a movie about the Great Schism, I can’t wait.
Every day that I spend in my new unwanted homeland, I am oppressed by the way spiky Dutch cathedrals, beautiful as they are, proudly touch the skies, while underneath society is individualising…and not pleasant anymore. Paradoxically the desire to conquer the material, to rise above it, alienates us from our very core, makes us lesser human beings.
February 26, 2013 at 12:11 am
OK it would be silly to say Eastern hedonism is BETTER, it has its own downsides, but in those historic times when the East wasn;t raped by Western capitalism, socialism DID develop, which at least proves that a more ”materialistic” approach to the body creates better social conditions.
February 26, 2013 at 1:54 am
I keep trying to figure out where my sense of the”imaginary’ fit here… which … well.. .while much of it comes from Blake and his ‘senses’… but hardly phenomenological… I think of the imaginary as the explosive, the revolutionary disruption of all things received, dislocation, bricolage… the power to take apart and re-arrange in what in the constraints of the old order, seemed, but was not… unimaginable. What William Carlos Williams–in his timeless quintessentially modernist “Spring & All” meant by ‘imagination’… Yeah… I know Lacan has this term locked in… but banging at the door are these other ways of using the word…and not just the word. It’s what made Blake! It’s what WCW lived for.. and it’s everything I do that matters. How does this fit in? What is it?
February 26, 2013 at 8:04 pm
Where does practice go?
February 26, 2013 at 8:31 pm
Josh,
When I say we’re alone in this world, I mean that there are no divinities looking after us. Of course we’re social beings. I wasn’t suggesting we’re individualist solipsists. Where do these values you’re talking about come from? If you reject the thesis that there are Platonic forms or that there are divinities, then the only remaining option is that value arises from the living and is not a property of the things themselves. What my cats value (apparently dead birds and mice) and what we value are quite different. I don’t see why the idea that values arise from collectives has to be a will to power thesis. It can just as easily be what is most conducive to our collective flourishing.
February 26, 2013 at 8:32 pm
Depends on the practice. Farming is a practice that involves the symbolic and real. A courtroom trial seems to unfold in the imaginary and symbolic.
February 26, 2013 at 9:11 pm
Um, we’re sort of in the wrong thread with comment 5, delete this and that and post there?
February 27, 2013 at 11:25 pm
Note that Quentin Meillassoux banishes Diderot from being a materialist, because Diderot is a quasi-panpsychist: he claims that all materiality is sensitive, or “vibrant” (as Jane Bennett would say). It seems to me that the real division is between materialists a la Meillassoux, who insist that matter is inert, and “vibrant” materialists like Diderot and Bennett (and perhaps also Nietzsche & Deleuze).
February 28, 2013 at 1:09 am
Steve,
I leave open what matter might be, though I personally am suspicious of pan-psychism and see no good reasons to adopt it. I have a hard time seeing Meillassoux’s position as materialist as he seems to assimilate matter to mathematics, confusing measure and description with what is measured.
February 28, 2013 at 3:05 am
Levi, I don’t follow Meillassoux either. But I think he clarifies what is at stake, and not just in terms of mathematics:
“I call ‘materialism’ …every thought acceding to an absolute that is at once external to thought and in itself devoid of all subjectivity. For example, Epicureanism is a materialism, in so far as it claims to accede to the absolute reality of atoms and void, where the latter have no subjective-psychological, egoic, sensible or vital traits whatsoever.”
He goes on from this to reject “Diderot’s hylozoism” as well as “Nietzsche’s will to power” and “Deleuze’s ‘larval selves’. “
February 28, 2013 at 4:09 am
Steve,
Don’t get me wrong. I’m open to arguments for pan-psychism (I even argue that machines are intentionalistic in some places), I just feel like I need better arguments. In Difference and Givenness I defended a version of pan-psychism, and in Scotland Beth Lord asked why I wasn’t a pan-psychist/vitalist given my theory of machines. There’s a reason I’m so attracted to vitalist thinkers and that they’re my constant interlocutors. Perhaps I’m just in denial. I still can’t help but feel that sentience and cognition is something that only arises under certain conditions.
February 28, 2013 at 3:58 pm
About the origin of values, I think of it in the same way I do beauty; we can learn loyalty from dogs, respectability from cats (the attitude of cats round here to observation and the way they present competence to strangers are hilarious) and various other positive qualities from objects that model them for us. Although the human expression of a value may be a human idea, there is something of that value in the thing that inspires it, such that the value springs to being in our mind.
Of course, dogs might be learning that which appears as profound loyalty from the way we feed them without asking for anything in return, or from other things about how we treat them or appear to them, but such a circle of value creation is more interesting to me than the idea that we simply construct the value arbitrarily out of ourselves, with it’s inspirations in the world acting as missattributions of internal causes.
Now it might be that this is basically the same as your position, and the idea that humanity is the source of values is just a trivial linguistic difference between us, but to me the idea the patterns of human meaning can be inspired and developed by inhuman structures, seems to me to be a big part of the motivation of looking into the non-human, because however moral and high minded looking beyond the conventional mental space of humanity is, it is also often deeply rewarding in terms of what you see.
March 1, 2013 at 4:14 am
Levi, I am not really trying to argue you into panpsychism. But I think that Meillassoux points to an ambiguity in what claims of materialism entail. — and that is what my comments above were trying to get at.