Larval Subjects .

Steven has posted the first draft of his chapter on Deleuze and Whitehead over at Pinocchio Theory. This article is well worth a look. A good deal of what he’s discussing converges nicely with issues I’ve been trying to develop around individuation, constellations, and populations (events and societies in Whitehead’s language). I’m itching to go back to Whitehead now and take a closer look.

BOOK III, PROP. XXIX. We shall also endeavour to do whatsoever we conceive men to regard with pleasure, and contrariwise we shall shrink from doing that which we conceive men to shrink from.

Note.–This endeavour to do a thing or leave it undone, solely in order to please men, we call ambition, especially when we so eagerly endeavour to please the vulgar, that we do or omit certain things to our own or another’s hurt: in other cases it is generally called kindliness. Furthermore I give the name of praise to the pleasure, with which we conceive the action of another, whereby he has endeavoured to please us; but of blame to the pain wherewith we feel aversion to his action.

It is always a somewhat uncanny experience to be read by others and hear how they situate your own thought. I am pleased to discover that there is a problematic or conceptual arch that inhabits the musings I post here as I experience my own thought as meandering, anarchic, and without coherence. N.Pepperell of Rough Theory has written a nice response to my discussion yesterday on constellations and populations, raising some important and forceful questions. N.Pepperell writes:

Tacitly, this formulation is not completely adequate to the framework Sinthome has outlined, which would require an analysis of the constellations or assemblages that give rise to such abstract thought – and, for that matter, to the alternative form of thought that would be oriented to really existent phenomena. Such analyses, however, are difficult to provide within the confines of a blog post and, in any event, the point of this post was to outline concepts, not to put these concepts into play against any particular concrete example to which they might be applied. My comments here are therefore simply placeholders noting where Sinthome’s concepts would point over time.

What I did want to suggest, though – and I must necessarily be very gestural here – is that it may be worth considering what peculiar characteristics an assemblage might need to possess, for it to generate particular kinds of abstract thought as one aspect of its distinctive forms of self-organisation. This is, as I mentioned in another discussion over at Larval Subjects, what I take Marx to have been attempting in Capital. What is interesting in Marx’s analysis is that he doesn’t interpret the abstract forms of thought he analyses as conceptual – as something that result from generalising or abstracting away from more concrete, really existent, phenomena. Instead, he interprets them as plausible expressions of forms of abstract social practice: Marx’s work, as I understand it, suggests the possibility that abstract forms of thought might express a dimension of social practice that enacts an on-the-ground indifference to the determinate specificity of concrete entities – a dimension of social practice that appears as it is, abstract.

In such a case, perversely, only abstract theoretical categories would be appropriate, as the really existing configuration possesses practically abstract dimensions – it generates what I generally call real abstractions. Of course, in this case, those abstract categories would only themselves be adequately grasped once they were no longer understood – as they tend phenomenologically to present themselves – as conceptual abstractions or generalisations obtained by stripping away the specificities of concrete experience. Instead, certain forms of abstraction would have to be recognised as the historical, material specificity of a particular dimension of concrete practice – a recognition that would entail a form of theoretical work like what Sinthome proposes, which would seek to uncover the way in which a particular form of abstraction was assembled through determinate forms of practice.

I confess that at the moment I do not have a response to this question. The motivation for a discussion of populations and constellations is to avoid the common theoretical move of dismissing certain social movements as not being genuine instances of the kind in question. For instance, one says “x’s are not real Marxists” or “x’s are not real Muslims”, despite the fact that x’s are a really existing group acting in the social world and interacting with others groups. In a certain sense, then, discussion of populations and constellations is a call for “realism” and nominalism where the configuration of the social is concerned. In this regard, phrases of the form “x’s are not y’s” come to be seen not as reports of the true essence of something, but rather as rhetorical strategies surrounding antagonistic relations among groups struggling for hegemony over politically potent signifiers, social networks, and social institutions. As a matter of principle, it follows as a consequence of my materialism that what N.Pepperell says here must be the case. A genuinely consistent materialism cannot maintain a distinction between ideas on the one hand and material reality on the other, treating the latter as real and the former as mental entities, but must instead treat thoughts themselves as material realities. At this point an entire series of difficulties emerge surrounding questions of representation, for the idea– in my previous post the “concept” or “abstraction” –both functions to represent something else but is also something in its own right. As a further difficulty, such a strong distinction between “words and things” implicitly suggests that the theorist is transcendent to what the theorist theorizes, thereby undermining the position of immanence. Would it be going too far to suggest that the abstraction is itself an element of the assemblage it purports to represent? The remainder of the post is well worth the read.

BOOK III, PROP XXVIII: We endeavour to bring about whatsoever we conceive to conduce to pleasure; but we endeavour to remove or destroy whatsoever we conceive to be truly repugnant thereto, or to conduce, to pain.

Lars and company have invited me to speak at Newcastle University in the UK for the 3rd Symposium in the Music, Philosophy and Vernacular series in November. I suppose I’ll finally have to get a passport now and come up with something to say about music from a suitably hip continental perspective. Actually I’ve been wishing to discuss the symptomatic role that music plays in Plato’s Republic and up through the writings of Augustine and Plotinus for some time now, as there music seems to occupy an odd position between the fallen material world and the world of logos or the intellect. Music, in this view, inhabits the edge of materiality or that point of materiality where the material transcends itself and ceases to be material. Not only is music the most mathematical of all the arts, but it is that art that is least attached to the five senses due to the unique temporal structure that renders a musical refrain simultaneously something that unfolds in time while nonetheless being a unity with itself that can only be grasped through operations of thought. As such, the musical requires an operation of the intellect to be grasped or a movement beyond appearances. It will be recalled that Plato, in the Phaedo, will argue that all philosophy is a preparation for death and that the philosopher lives his life as if he were already dead. By this Plato is referring to the necessity of cultivating the soul through a purification of the soul that separates it from the body, where the body refers to anything having to do with the sensations and the passions. This will lead to elaborate discussions of what sort of music and poetry is permissible in the Republic, and a categorical rejection of certain rhythms and the flute due to the manner in which these meters and instruments excite the passions and incite a sort of madness. Augustine will later make similar points about music, discerning the study of certain musical structures and grammatical patterns as a necessary stage in the cultivation of the soul that separates it from the body. You didn’t think Catholic church services were so somber and boring because the early founders of the church lived in boring times, did you? Of course these are only vague thoughts and I’m not sure what the cash value of all this would be. The question would be one of pushing past this dualistic tradition and discerning, in this strange relation to music, a symptom that both belongs to a certain metaphysics and upsets that metaphysics. I’ll have to wait and see what the actual theme of the series will be this year. It appears I need to send Lars, the Newcastle staff, and the students even more love letters than I already do. Perhaps Anthony will stop being angry with me and we can share a pint. I’m both tremendously excited and honored. It’s nice to be appreciated. Especially when it isn’t deserved.

BOOK III, PROP XXVII: By the very fact that we conceive a thing, which is like ourselves, and which we have not regarded with any emotion, to be affected with any emotion, we are ourselves affected with a like emotion (affectus).

Note I.–This imitation of emotions, when it is referred to pain, is called compassion (cf. III. xxii. note); when it is referred to desire, it is called emulation, which is nothing else but the desire of anything, engendered in us by the fact that we conceive that others have the like desire.

Corollary I.–If we conceive that anyone, whom we have hitherto regarded with no emotion, pleasurably affects something similar to ourselves, we shall be affected with love towards him. If, on the other hand, we conceive that he painfully affects the same, we shall be affected with hatred towards him.

Corollary II.–We cannot hate a thing which we pity, because its misery affects us painfully.

Corollary III.–We seek to free from misery, as far as we can, a thing which we pity.

Note II.–This will or appetite for doing good, which arises from pity of the thing whereon we would confer a benefit, is called benevolence, and is nothing else but desire arising from compassion. Concerning love or hate towards him who has done good or harm to something, which we conceive to be like ourselves, see III. xxii. note.

There is an abstract and Platonizing tendency of thought that is difficult to avoid. Whenever faced with a phenomenon we ask the question what is it, and immediately set about trying to find a category, concept, form, or Idea to which the phenomenon belongs. The category or form thus becomes transcendent to the phenomenon in question, such that the category doesn’t function simply as a sortal or descriptor of the phenomenon, but instead becomes a normative measure of the phenomenon, determining the degree to which the phenomenon approaches the Ideal set up by the category.

Read on.
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The new issue of the International Journal of Zizek Studies has been released. You’ll find my article, “Symptomal Knots and Evental Ruptures: Zizek, Badiou, and Discerning the Indiscernible” (warning PDF), in there as well. Be gentle, I wrote the vast majority of it in a 24 hour period.

I’m wondering about the effectiveness of listing Spinoza’s propositions this way. One of the central issues here is the necessity of perpetually relating these propositions back to conatus and the earlier propositions, without which they can’t be understood and seem arbitrary. Each of the propositions follows as a logical implication from the naturalistic thesis that the body endeavors to increase its power and maintain its being or organization. So long as the propositions are read in isolation and not related back to these initial claims this is entirely unclear. Anyway, I forge on:

BOOK III, PROP XXVI: We endeavour to affirm, concerning that which we hate, everything which we conceive to affect it painfully; and, contrariwise, we endeavour to deny, concerning it, everything which we conceive to affect it pleasurably.

Note.–Thus we see that it may readily happen, that a man may easily think too highly of himself, or a loved object, and, contrariwise, too meanly of a hated object. This feeling is called pride, in reference to the man who thinks too highly of himself, and is a species of madness, wherein a man dreams with his eyes open, thinking that he can accomplish all things that fall within the scope of his conception, and thereupon accounting them real, and exulting in them, so long as he is unable to conceive anything which excludes their existence, and determines his own power of action. Pride, therefore, is pleasure springing from a man thinking too highly of himself. Again, the pleasure which arises from a man thinking too highly of another is called over-esteem. Whereas the pleasure which arises from thinking too little of a man is called disdain.

An apropos proposition.

I’m really rather sick of all this fighting with the bloggers of The Weblog and An und Fur Sich. First, let me say that I understand why Adam and Anthony found my comparison to Heidegger and the Nazi affair deeply insulting and inflammatory. It wasn’t my intent to suggest that they were Nazi’s, but I can see how they might have thought this and I truly, deeply, profoundly, wish another example had occurred to me when I was struggling to express my point. I haven’t behaved the best in a lot of these arguments, though I’ve also felt under siege as well. I generally think there are a lot of misunderstanding here. I don’t like polemic and argument generally, though some recent events might indicate otherwise. Generally I think Adam and Anthony are good folk that say a number of interesting things regarding religion, politics, and philosophy. To be clear, I do not feel either of them are fundamentalists or supporters of fundamentalism. I’m really pretty sick of all these debates. I’m also pained by this conflict with two people that I rather like and agree with on a number of other issues. I don’t enjoy wearing the hat of “militant atheist” because I rather detest religious arguments and would prefer instead to talk about concrete philosophical and political issues. I post this because I’m pained by the discussions that have recently occurred.