Recently I had the privilege of reviewing a brilliant article on Deleuze and Lucretius that, I believe, pretty much nailed it regarding certain issues pertaining to the whole, the one, and totality. Among other things, the article challenges the tendency throughout the philosophical tradition to equate the whole and the one, or to treat the whole as a totalization. The standard and ancient philosophical thesis is that the whole forms a one that is also a totality. We see this in Plato, we see it in Parmenides, and also see it in Hegel, for example. Lucretius’s argument is very simple. When we claim that a whole is a totality, we’re saying that nothing escapes the whole. We’re saying, as Hegel tried to argue, that everything is actual. This is the meaning of totality. Lucretius, by contrast, argues that while being is always a whole, it is never a totality or one. Why? Because while there are a finite number of types of atoms, there are an infinite number of atoms that can be composed in an infinite number of ways. As a consequence, any whole of atoms that happens to form will never form a totality because atoms in this whole will never exhaust all possible combinations. As Lucretius is careful to note, it is difference that is primary, not identity defined by forms, essences, or concepts. No two entities are ever exactly alike and no thing ever exactly repeats by virtue of the infinity of atoms. For this reason, no whole forms a totality because every whole is only a local arrangement of atoms that actualizes some possible combinations and not others. As a result, every whole is an open and creative whole. There is no combination that could totalize the combinatorial possibilities.
What holds for Lucretius’s thought holds even moreso for OOO and MOO (machine-oriented ontology). (M)OOO rejects the thesis that some fundamental being like atoms is somehow more real than all other types of beings, such that larger scale entities like atoms (as conceived in contemporary physics), molecules, animals, trees, rocks, institutions, galaxies, etc. are mere epiphenomena. As a consequence, there are combinatorial logics at all levels of scale and these combinatorial logics never manage to form a totality. Like Lucretius, (M)OOO argues that no combination never manages to form a totality and argues that new combinations form new entities irreducible to lower-level scales. Being is creative. Combinatorial logics might manage to form a whole– though I don’t think so for reasons of the rate at which information can travel –but they never manage to form a totality.
Here it is worth noting that it has traditionally been theology and idealisms that have defended the identity of the one, whole, and totality, not naturalism. There are notable exceptions here as in the case of the theology of Derrida, if he has one (I tend to side with Hagglund on these issues), but a drive towards totality and the one has been the rule of theological orientations, not the exception. By contrast, naturalism, whether in its physicalist variants (evolutionary theory, cosmology) or its mathematical variants (Badiou’s deployment of set theory) has defended the open-endedness of nature and its inability to reach closure. Thus, on the theological side we have thinkers like Hegel, Leibniz, and Thomas that defend the idea that everything in being has a reason and is divinely ordered in such a way as to form a necessary totality– even if only eschatologically –while on the naturalist side with thinkers such as Lucretius, Galileo (yes, I know he was a priest but he exploded all constraints of his theology), Darwin, Freud, Cantor, etc., in the thesis that nature is profoundly open-ended and never manages to totalize itself. This is not simply a thesis about biological evolution. In cosmology, for example, we learn that natural laws themselves were formed in the initial, infinitesimal seconds of the big bang, that various elements are formed in stars and depend on the size stars can achieve (what would be achieved at larger sizes?), and that there are good reasons to suppose that there are universes with very different physical laws. We encounter something similar in the mathematics of the 20th century. What we’ve discovered is that being is far closer to cultural, historical, and poetic creativeness than the rigid laws of a godlike sovereign designing and structuring being (Spinoza’s God excepted here).
It is naturalism not theology and “transcendence” that allows us to think the ungroundedness of being and its infinite fecundity. Theology and discourses premised on purpose, meaning, design, and transcendence have always striven to tame this infinite fecundity and its power to generate new local “laws” and forms of being. It has perpetually striven to transform contingency– read “creativity” –into plan and necessity. Theological orientations perpetually strive to transform logoi (contingent and open pluralism) into logos (theological necessitarianism). If Melancholia was such a profound film, then this was because it recognized that there’s no necessary reason for us to exist and that there’s no destiny of being that necessarily involves us.
October 28, 2012 at 4:16 am
It’s unique that your irreducitonal theory is attacking the whole tradition of mechanisitic, reductionist, and positivistic ideology that for the most part still rules the scientific community; yet, there seems to be many in favor of this materialist vision. I think of Richard Lewontin and Levins in their The Dialectical Biologist, or John Bellamy Foster in his Critique of Intelligent Design.
I kept thinking back to Lewontin’s and Levins use of Marxian dialectical materialism in their own scientific view which support two basic principles: first, that a whole is a relation to heterogeneous parts that have no prior independent existence as parts; and, second, which flows from the first, is that, in general, the properties of parts have no prior alienated existence but are aquired by being parts of a particualr whole; and, third, that the interpenetration of parts and wholes is a consequence of the interchangeability of subject and object, cause and effect. (273)
The first consequence for them that all objects are internally hterogeneous is that there is no ground (in their terms, ‘basement’); and, second, that change comes about by opposing processes united within the object itself. As they tell it parts or processes confront each other in opposition, conditional on the whole of which they are parts.
As they say in their conclusion: “As against the reductionist view, which sees wholes as reducible to collections of fundamental parts, we see the various levels of organization as partly autonomous and reciprocally interacting. Much like Harman and yourself they see both vertical and lateral relations among the levels of objects, as operating in a conjuncture of directions.
What’s interesting to me is how your aligning object-oriented philosophy with the whole gamut of non-reductionist materialism that as you show starts with Epicurus and Lucretious against both atomism and substantial formalism in Plato and holism in Aristotle. A lot of it still comes down to efficient causation as an explanatory principle: how to support radical contingency instead of natural law as a principle. I think, as you, that a Lucretian turn is in order, as compared to the mathematical turn of Badiou and Meillasoux, not that theirs is a welcome addition, just that they have reduced things to math, and for me this is still a reductionist ploy.
Anyway have fun on you busy days and weeks coming up…
October 28, 2012 at 4:31 am
Noir,
Those are huge inspirations for me! Thanks for the connections. I’m always hesitant to use the term “dialectical” but I’m a tremendous fan of Lewontin. Nice to meet others thinking in this vein!
October 28, 2012 at 4:44 am
Yea, I understand, I am closer to Althusser’s aleatory materialism of the later writings, as well as his critique of Marxist theory and its use of evolutionary theory and Feurbach, which was a return to Idealism… Althusser was slowly overcoming many things and can still teach us a great deal about our own roots in materialism. But I know that you already are well versed in this whole tradition, including Althusser… just good to see you touching base with it and going against many of the so called naturalists qua Idealists like McDowell, Brandom, Sprigge, Leslie, and Rescher and others… Even your early love Deleuze has a few Idealisms that need to be overcome… but, you’ve spoken of this before too…
More and more I see what your actually intending with what you’ve termed ‘immaterial’ objects; yet, for me they are just the aleatory that does not fit into our current theories of materialism, rather than actual immaterial objects in themselves. It’s our materialism that needs readjusting, or maybe just a return to our roots in Epicurus/Lucretious/Philodemos, etc… that is needed. More and more this kind of thinking may slowly bring me round to some form of object based approach… It’s just the basic principles that still need working out… haa, ha… isn’t that true for us all…
October 28, 2012 at 5:01 am
You give me more credit than I deserve (thank you, that’s kind)! I just stumble through these things best I can and *try* to be honest based on what I think I think and what I’ve read that I find persuasive. I then try to telegraph or report it to others because I’m intellectually lonely. I need to spend more time with the later Althusser. I have reservations about what I’ve read but also find the aleatory materialism deeply appealing.
October 29, 2012 at 5:27 pm
If Melancholia was such a profound film, then this was because it recognized that there’s no necessary reason for us to exist and that there’s no destiny of being that necessarily involves us.
That is only partially true and you know it. Melancholia is remarkable because despite all the hopelessness there is a tremendous sense of release, solace and a religious presence in the absence. If it were just another Lovecraftian nihilism trip, it would not be remarkable at all.
October 29, 2012 at 6:20 pm
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