Yesterday a friend of mine related a criticism of posthumanism often heard from colleagues: “What is the point of posthumanism if the analysis is still conducted by humans?” I think this is a good question. The term postmodernism is itself a highly contested term, meaning a variety of different things, so the question is difficult to answer in a way that will satisfy everyone. For example, there are the posthumanisms of the transhumanists that imagine fundamentally transforming the human through technological prostheses and genetics. More recently, David Roden has imagined a “pre-critical posthumanism” that entertains the possibility of the emergence of a new type of intelligent species altogether that would arise from humans, but would no longer be human. Such a posthumanism would be genuinely posthuman.
While I am intrigued by both of these conceptions of posthumanism, this is not the way in which I intend the term. As I understand it, a position is posthumanist when it no longer privileges human ways of encountering and evaluating the world, instead attempting to explore how other entities encounter the world. Thus, the first point to note is that posthumanism is not the rejection or eradication of human perspectives on the world, but is a pluralization of perspectives. While posthumanism does not get rid of the human as one way of encountering the world, it does, following a great deal of research in post-colonial theory, feminist thought, race theory, gender theory, disability studies, and embodied cognition theory, complicate our ability to speak univocally and universally about something called the human. It recognizes, in other words, that there are a variety of different phenomenologies of human experience, depending on the embodied experience of sexed beings, our disabilities, our cultural experiences, the technologies to which our bodies are coupled, class, etc. This point is familiar from the humanist cultural and critical theory of the last few decades. Posthumanism goes one step further in arguing that animals, microorganisms, institutions, corporations, rocks, stars, computer programs, cameras, etc., also have their phenomenologies or ways of apprehending the world.
I think this is a point that is often missed about OOO. OOO is as much a theory of perspectives, a radicalization of phenomenology, as it is a theory of entities. While the various strains of OOO differ amongst themselves, they all share this thesis in common. There is a phenomenology for, not of, every type of entity that exists. One of Graham Harman’s central claims is that the difference between a Kantian subject and any other object is a difference in degree, not a difference in kind. When Harman claims this, his point is that just as Kantian subjects structure the world in a particular way such that they never encounter things-as-they-are-in-themselves, the same is true for all other entities as they relate to the world. Atoms structure the world in a particular way, just as red pandas structure the world in a particular way. No entity directly encounters the other entities of the world as they are. In The Democracy of Objects I argue that every object is an observer or particular point of view on the world, and propose, following Niklas Luhmann, that we need to engage in “second-order observation” or the observation of how other observers observe or encounter the world about them. In Alien Phenomenology, Ian Bogost proposes a new type of phenomenology, not unlike Jakob von Uexkull’s animal ethology, that investigates how nonhuman entities such as cameras and computer programs encounter the world. In The Ecological Thought, Timothy Morton formulates a similar idea with his account of strange strangers.
This is one of the things that makes the realism of OOO “weird”. Far from defending one true perspective on the world, OOO instead pluralizes perspectives infinitely, arguing that each entity has its own way of encounter the world about it. It is a radicalization of perspectivism. It is an ontology that is fascinated by how bats, cats, shark, tanuki, NASA, quarks, computer games, and black holes “experience” or encounter the world around them. The realism of OOO is thus not a realism that says “this is the one true way of encountering things”, but rather is a realism that refuses to reduce any entity to what it is for another entity. The tanuki or Japanese raccoon dog (right) can’t be reduced to how we encounter it. It is an irreducible and autonomous entity in its own right that also encounters the world about it in a particular way.
Hence the all important distinction between “phenomenology-of” and “phenomenology-for“. A phenomenology-of investigates how we, us humans, encounter other entities. It investigates what entities are for-us, from our human perspective. It is humanist in the sense that it restricts itself to our perspective on the beings of the world. Though phenomenology has made significant strides in overcoming these problems, it is nonetheless problematic in that it assumes a universality to human experience. For example, this phenomenology tends to gloss over the worlds of autistics like Temple Grandin, blind people, gendered bodies and how the world is experienced differently by different sexed bodies, people from different cultures, etc. Even though it talks endlessly about perspectives (horizons), it nonetheless tends to universalize the perspective of its own lived experience. Luhmann explains well just why this is so, insofar as all observation is based on a prior distinction that contains a blind spot that is unable to mark what it excludes.
By contrast, phenomenology-for is a phenomenological practice that attempts to observe the manner in which another entity experiences the world. Where phenomenology-of adopts the first person perspective of how I experience the world, where phenomenology-of begins from the unity of that first person perspective on the world and what things are in the world for me, phenomenology-for begins from the disunity of a world fractured into a plurality of perspectives and attempts to enter into the perspectives of these other entities. In Luhmannian terms, it attempts to “observe the other observer” or “observe how another observer observes the world”. It begins not from the standpoint of the sameness of experience, but from the standpoint of the difference of experience.
The plate to the left drawn from Jakob von Uexkull’s Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans gives a sense of this alien phenomenology. The top picture depicts how humans experience a field of flowers, while the bottom picture depicts how bees experience a field of flowers. Von Uexkull doesn’t ask “what are bees like or for us?”, but instead asks the question “what is the world like for bees?” In other words, von Uexkull adopts the perspective of the bee and attempts to infer how bees experience the world. He is able to learn something of the experience of bees through a knowledge of their physiology and optics that allows him to infer what their vision is like, through observation of their behavior, through observation of their responsiveness in situations where we can discern no stimuli that they would be responding to (thereby allowing him to infer that they’re open to stimuli that we can’t sense), etc. Alien phenomenology thus practices a different “transcendental epoche“. Rather than bracketing belief in the natural world to attend to the givens of our intentional experience alone, he instead brackets our intentionality, so as to investigate the experience of other entities. This is a practice that can be done with armies, stock markets, computer programs, rocks, etc.
It is natural, of course, to ask how this is even possible. Aren’t we still the ones examining the experience of other beings and thus aren’t we ultimately talking about the experience of ourselves and not the experience of other beings? To be sure, we are always limited by our own experience and, as Thomas Nagel pointed out, we can’t know what it is like to be a bat. However, all this entails is that we can’t have the experience of a bat, not that we can’t understand a great deal about bat experience, what they’re open to, what they’re not open to, and why they behave as they do.
The problem is not markedly different from that of understanding the experience of another person. Take the example of a wealthy person who denounces poor people as being lazy moochers who simply haven’t tried to improve their condition. Such a person is practicing “phenomenology-of”, evaluating the poor person from the standpoint of their own experience and trying to explain the behavior of the poor person based on the sorts of things that would motivate them. They reflect little understanding of poverty. They are blissfully unaware of the opportunities that they had because of where they are in the social field, of the infrastructure they enjoy that gives them opportunity, the education they were fortunate enough to receive, etc., etc., etc. All of this is invisible to them because, as Heidegger taught us, it is so close it is not seen at all. As a consequence, the wealthy person assumes that the poor person has all these things. However, we can imagine the wealthy person practicing something like alien phenomenology or second-order observation, thereby developing an appreciation of how the world of poverty inhibits opportunity. Prior to developing this understanding, the wealthy person behaves like the person with vision who berates a blind person for not seeing a sign.
Clearly there is a difference between the person who is completely blind to the experience of others, assuming their experience is identical, and the person who has some understanding of others. Take the example of the man who screams at his infant child for crying and beats her. If we look at this person with disgust and contempt, then it is not simply because this person beats the infant, but also because his abuse is premised on the idea that infants can understand screaming and yelling and modify their action accordingly. This person is unable to adopt the perspective of the infant and is unaware of how infants experience the world. As a result, he relates to the infant in brutal and cruel ways.
Just as we readily recognize that there’s a difference between the person who assumes the experience of all other humans is like their own and the person who develops an awareness of how other people experience the world differently, there is a difference between a person who relates to an animal as a mere object to be used as he sees fit, and the person that recognizes that animals have a perspective or way of encountering the world. Through ethology, second-order observation, or alien phenomenology, we can begin to learn something of what the world of the animal is like as Temple Grandin did in the case of cows. While I will never myself have the experience of being a cow, I can develop some understanding of what it is like to be a cow and this understanding will lead me to relate to cows differently.
Returning to the question with which I began this post, what’s the point? Why bother? I think there are a number of answers to this question. Recently, on NPR, I heard an English professor discussing the importance of the novel Black Beauty (sadly I didn’t catch her name). She remarked that Black Beauty contributed to better treatment of horses because it depicted, among other things, to the perspective of the horse. As she put it, “to recognize that other beings have a point of view, is already to grant them some ethical status or deserving of ethical regard.” We see this point in the case of civil rights struggles. A big part of these struggles consisted in the recognition of the point of view of minorities and women. In recognizing that these people also have perspectives, that they aren’t simply “objects” in the pejorative sense, we also recognize that they deserve to be treated with dignity. The same is true with animals. To recognize that animals have points of view, that they have perspectives, is to recognize that they deserve to be treated with dignity. Our attitude towards them changes when we adopt their perspective. Similarly in the case of the disabled and those suffering from mental illness. When we adopt their perspective we’re less likely to treat them in brutal and horrific ways as is so often the case in many homes.
From an ecological perspective, alien phenomenology is crucial to understanding of the dynamics and impact of climate change and properly responding to it. When bees began disappearing a couple years ago, we had to know something about how bees encounter the world to respond to this crisis. It wasn’t enough to just approach bees in terms of what they are for us– pollinators of plants –we had to understand something about what it’s like to be a bee, how bees are related to their world, to respond to this crisis. Alien phenomenology is a vital component to responding to the extinction of species upon which we depend.
In our political struggles, we need something like alien phenomenology to strategically respond to the entities against which we struggle. If it is true that institutions like governments, corporations, militaries, etc., are intelligent actors in their own right, over and above the humans that serve as their neurons, then it is necessary to figure out how these entities encounter the world about them, to properly combat them. We need to learn “what it is like to be a corporation?” to find ways to fight the exploitation of corporations. If we assume that they experience the world in the same way as humans, chances are we won’t be able to respond in the appropriate ways at all. There are all sorts of reasons for adopting a posthuman perspective at the ethical, political, and ecological level. There aren’t many good reasons for not adopting such a perspective.
Larval Subjects . 
November 10, 2012 at 8:02 pm
It was Jane Smiley who was speaking about Black Beauty on NPR. You can hear the full interview here:
http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=163971063&m=164207512
November 10, 2012 at 8:31 pm
Love the distinction between difference-in-degree and difference-in-kind. Deleuze’s BERGSONISM (1966) does a great job going into detail about this, which is really the radical difference in kind between quality-quantity, or between continuous-discrete, analog-digital etc. When we think of such things as opposed, we are viewing them from “one side of the split” so to speak, from the side of quantity (for opposition is a quantitative metaphor). Same goes for intensity, extension, space — ultimately the ability to observe differences in kind relies on what Deleuze calls “thinking in duration.” The empirco-scientific-quantitative perspective can tell you the amount of atoms in a sugar cube and the configuration of those atoms, but the philosopher can tell you that sugar cube’s way of being in the world. So this really opens up the whole can of worms, time versus space.
Kerslake’s DELEUZE AND THE UNCONSCIOUS (2009) has a beautiful description of how humans are able to perceive time in a seemingly unique way: “For Bergson and Janet, the human being is an organism that happens to have become complex enough to open up a ‘zone of indetermination’ (Bergson, 1896) in its brain, which permits the suspension of habitual reaction and the appeal to past experience. This cerebral zone of indetermination becomes the ‘gap’ or ‘interval’ through which duration enters, proceeding to take charge of the organism, turning it inside out. Time surges into the brain, changing everything, so that now it is the brain which becomes shaped around an ever-accumulating ontological memory, rather than vice versa. Wherever interiorized duration arises, time pushes through and inverts the fabric of the universe, so that matter must now be taken as the envelope of temporal becoming, rather than time being dependent on matter. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze makes the Kantian point that ‘a succession of instants does not constitute time any more than it causes it to disappear; it indicates only its constantly aborted moment of birth. Time is constituted only in the originary synthesis which operates on the repetition of instants.’ At the moment that the material universe inverts itself and interiorizes itself virtually, it (starting with the brain) becomes shaped around time, rather than vice versa. There is an ascent, through the involution of virtuality, to an entirely new order of validity, beyond the order of actual fact. The emergence of memory through the zone of indetermination opens up a process of interiorized differentiation which proceeds to evolve in tension with the more generalizing tendencies of intelligence.”
Also enjoyed the reference to Luhmann as to why every philosophy necessarily has presuppositions, every line of reasoning makes assumptions about which it can say nothing — I might even go so far as to say every rational claim is based on irrationality, or everything which is meaningful relies on our ability to think a meaningless sign (Meillassoux). I am a huge fan of Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form, and the work Luhmann has done with it, so any time I see a shout out there it makes me happy. Have you heard of Boundary Logic? It is kind of a cross between Laws of Form and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Some nice terms from B.L. like ‘fictim’ (think Tim Morton’s Beautiful Soul Syndrome).
Now, as a sometime Jungian, I do want to propose something, which might sound strange, but it’s the idea that a lot of what we consider to be distinctly human traits are actually shared with other creatures: that every unique creature is cut from some archetypal cloth, so to speak, so that we can’t claim that, e.g. love is a uniquely human experience. (Other animals experience love). Or, as RAW puts it, dogs taught humans devotion and honor, while humans taught dogs guilt and shame. My point here is just that we shouldn’t think of something like “honor” as distinctly human, else we accuse others of anthropocentrism or humanism when they see honor in the animal kingdom (or even plant or mineral?). There is so much accusation of “projecting human emotions” or projecting human values onto things, but what I’m saying is that these emotions/values aren’t human to begin with.
I’d like to mention here Paul Auster’s idea of the language of inanimate objects, that objects themselves tell a story, so to speak, or engage in the world in their own way. Auster came up with this idea vis-a-vis film, that cinema is the language of inanimate objects, but it applies here too. The question is, which is new, the projection of an emotion onto the object, or the object? This gets to Deleuze’s point in BERGSONISM that when we hear a piece of beautiful music for the first time and think that we are experiencing a new emotion, we should properly reverse this “common sense”: the truth of the matter is that we are a new human, being felt by something which came before us. It is only hubris that makes us think we came before. We always feel a priori, even if we know very well that we didn’t exist forever, because we humans _did exist for as long as we’ve been alive_, so when I hear a song for the first time, I automatically think, “Well I’ve been around for as long as I can remember, and this song is new” — no! The song, or more precisely the feeling evoked by the song, is old. I am a new human being felt by a much older feeling. I won’t say that feeling is ahistorical, surely it developed within the framework of history, but there is something sum-historical about it which borders on descriptions of ahistoricity, something universal about feelings like love and so on.
I watched a great DeLanda talk on Deleuze and Aristotle where DeLanda explains why there are no universal ahistorical “essences” of various species. Aristotle would have assumed that there was a “Zebraness” to zebra, for instance, but we have since revealed this to be untrue. If zebras went extinct, then even if something else came along which looked identical to the zebra, it wouldn’t be the zebra. (Like Zizek’s point in SUBLIME OBJECT OF IDEOLOGY about how even if a real horse with a horn were found, it wouldn’t be the unicorn, it would just be something _like_ a unicorn). So, DeLanda goes on to say how extinction is permanent, how species are historically developed etc … and I thought, this must be the same for feelings! In the past, I had always assumed that if everyone who loved were to vanish, somehow love would persist — something new could come along millions of years in the future and still experience love. But now I’m not so sure. It really raises the stakes when you have the idea of planet earth being “the last bastion of love and hope in the universe” or something along those lines! But isn’t this the hubris we wish to avoid? In other words, doesn’t it dethrone humanity’s privileged position to think, all of our so-called human emotions are actually just the archetypal cloth we are cut from, along with everything else, each actualizing from the same virtual?
I’m still undecided on this point. Part of me agrees with Meillassoux that nothing which exists is necessary for the conditions of existence to persist. So if we consider feelings to be essential to the structure (rather than the content), then there is something like a universal ahistorical status for certain constructs.
November 11, 2012 at 4:26 am
Really great stuff. I’d really like to hear you expand more on the last point — in regards to using alien phenomenology as a tool in political evaluation and struggle. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how to use OOO as grounds for a new way of thinking about technology. And I keep running into questions around the edges of what you’re talking about here — specifically in the New Aesthetic discourse, which, for my part at least attempts to understand technology in OOO terms, where we constantly get attacked for being uncritically pro-technology.
First, as you articulate in the Black Beauty example, doing phenomenology-for has a powerful empathetic effect. Working to see the world from the point of view of a particular object necessarily changes our attitudes about that object. Further, it seems this approach would necessarily draw us closer to these objects, possibly even requiring us to become ethical advocates for them (as many (including Harman) feel and articulate in the case of animals).
Will this mean we inevitably become ethically entangled with the objects we choose to make the subjects of our attention? Does the decision to struggle-against necessarily have to come before the phase of doing phenomenology-for? You give the example of doing phenomenology-for corporations, an object against which you think struggle is necessary. Can you truly approach the question of what it’s like to be a corporation if you’ve already condemned it at the start? Also, does this mean that ethical/political judgement (i.e. the choice of against which things to struggle) must proceed this process of doing phenomenology-for so as to correctly frame it?
I think there’s potentially a lot of power in this. It would seem to imply that OOO acts as a moderating force — a way of thinking that prevents the full “othering” of even those objects we seek to critique and resist, as the obligation of doing phenomenology-for, even (especially) in the course of struggle would do. I know that would contradict much orthodoxy requiring constant critique to count as political engagement. However, I find something truly beautiful in a way of thinking that requires an empathetic process as pre-requisite to such critique.
November 11, 2012 at 12:52 pm
Thanks for this very clear and useful position statement, Levi. I’ve argued for a rapprochement between the speculative posthumanism (which is, as you say, about literal post-humans) and its various forms such as posthumanism alien phenomenology. The bottom line is that that epistemological humanism constrains “posthuman possibility space”. As we relax a priori constraints on possible experience or thought, etc. we widen the scope for phenomenological and cognitive variation among nonhumans – post-humans included.
So I see a lot of common ground between our approaches.
That said, I find Harman’s claim regarding entity-access implausible and extravagant. We can question whether human modes of access to the world are privileged without generalizing attributing access or phenomenology. Galen Strawson and David Chalmers have argued that even electrons may have protophenomenal properties of some kind. Maybe they are right, but there is no theory that explains how micro-level protophenomenology coagulates into phenomenology. Until we have that, there seems to be nothing gained metaphysically from either panpsychism or protopansychism.
Phenomenologies seem to be the preserve of the tiny elite of entities that need online access to the content off distributed representational activity. This is, admittedly, a generalization from the human case. But it is not unmotivated. Most of our phenomenology seems to have representational content and seems to involve graduated scale of access to that content for various agencies in the mind.
So bats, autistic people, or posthumans with multi-threaded time consciousness seem prima facie plausible candidates. But why suppose that there is something it is like to be “rocks, stars, computer programs, cameras”?
November 11, 2012 at 1:40 pm
Hi David,
To be clear, I’m not a panpsychist. I don’t think rocks or neutrinos have experience. Rather, I think that they are only selectively open to causal perturbations, eg, neutrinos are unable to interact with most matter we’re familiar with because of their neutral electric charge. Here an alien phenomenology is an investigation of the causal influences to which a type of entity is open.
November 11, 2012 at 3:02 pm
That’s a very helpful clarification! But I wonder if dropping the term “phenomenology” might preempt some avoidable misunderstandings.
November 11, 2012 at 9:25 pm
Might the Deleuzian notion of “affects” be relevant here? I have a capacity to be affected by certain things, and the neutrino has a capacity to be affected by different things. Neutrinos are unable to interact with most matter we’re familiar with because they have no capacity to be affected by those things.
DeLanda explains this line of thought quite well in this lecture: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZjMKGTYfK4
The capacity to be affected by things seems relevant here. If I lose the capacity to be affected by witnessing injustice, for instance, or if I no longer have the capacity to feel agape, wonder, mystery, then I have lost something, even if what I have lost is only a potential.
November 11, 2012 at 9:46 pm
Jung is also relevant here, by way of his influence on Deleuze. (See Kerslake’s 2007 book DELEUZE AND THE UNCONSCIOUS for the Jung-Deleuze connection).
Jung says “psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another [ — and it’s probable that] psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing.”
While this may be panpsychism, or neutral monism, I think further reading of Jung leaves it somewhat undecided.
I also think Hillman is relevant here, insofar as Hillman sought to excise Jungian thought of all of its conceptual, abstract, theoretical underpinnings. Hillman felt that the image came first, and any explanation of the image fails to grasp its haeccity. (In Lacanian terms, I suppose Hillman’s “imaginal” is Lacan’s topology, and Hillman’s “explanation” is Lacan’s “Imaginary (mis)recognition”).
From this perspective, the image is precise, particular, historical — and any such description, theory, concept, abstraction is merely a general, imprecise attempt at universality, ahistoricity. In a way, Hillman leaves room for mystery in his worldview. Any attempt to eliminate history is just being what Chesterton called a “morbid logician,” who seeks to explain away everything but instead casts everything into shadow, unlike the mystic who leaves one mystery unsolved and illuminates all. Perhaps this is why Jung was so fascinated with mystics. (Side note: there is some interesting work being done by Ian Almond on Derrida and Sufism which has a lot to do with the mystery, secret, paradox, aporia etc). Deleuze also curiously ends BERGOSNISM (1966) with an appeal to the mystic.
This leads me to my claim that we need an account of acausal orderedness, synchronicity, meaningful coincidence — the ability for contingency or randomness to still be significant. Such an account would no longer rely on scientific metaphors of quantity, nor on naturalist causality, randomness, chaos etc, but would acknowledge the a priori necessity of order, and the actual particular (as opposed to the general which is only imagined to have come first). To clarify: Deleuze says that we are mistaken if we think order appeared ex nihilo from chaos. On the contrary, order was always-already around, just like “something” was always-already around before we could imagine “nothing.” We are mistaken if we think something came from nothing, or that order developed out of chaos — or even that meaning developed out of meaninglessness. Indeed, from the moment we can even comprehend meaninglessness, we have always-already comprehended meaning.
Here’s a short story offered by David Foster Wallace which gets at what is at stake between the argument for acausal orderedness, or the idea that the only order is causation (which I disagree with! — indeed, I think that causation is chaotic, arbitrary, and that order is necessarily acausal).
‘There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out ‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.'” And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. “Well then you must believe now,” he says, “After all, here you are, alive.” The atheist just rolls his eyes. “No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.”
‘It’s easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people’s two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy’s interpretation is true and the other guy’s is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person’s most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there’s the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They’re probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists’ problem is exactly the same as the story’s unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.’
The point I get from David Foster Wallace is that we can certainly say, scientifically speaking, God doesn’t exist — but this is just affirming what the mystics know anyway, which is that God doesn’t have to exist to function, i.e. that causality is not necessary for order, and that the appearance of the absolute is different from the absolute itself. (Incidentally, Zizek says in 2011’s LESS THAN NOTHING that the history of religion is one long history of mistaking the appearance of the absolute for the absolute itself). In other words, if we take the story of the eskimo above, science can always write it off as meaningless coincidence, but that is an opinion — it could also be meaningful coincidence! I am certainly not espousing fatalism, predeterminism etc — I am merely offering an account for how something which is totally random, by chance, can still be meaningful. Indeed, I would claim that all meaning is predicated on our ability to think a meaningless sign (following Meillassoux) — all rationality is predicated on irrationality. Even 2 + 2 = 4 is irrational because there is no reason for 2 + 2 to equal 4 instead of 3 or 5. It is completely arbitrary. Nevertheless, rather than this foundation of irrationality being a shortcoming of rational thought, this limitation (i.e. the inability to say anything at all about the ineffable, that which cannot be spoken about) is the strong suit: since we can’t talk about what can’t be spoken about, that means we _can_ talk about what can be spoken about. If this seems like simple tautology, if you respond “duh!” then I’m sorry, because this seems rather profound to me: our ability to speak about things implies the obverse, an inability to speak about nothing. Or, put in the language of Hillman, our ability to speak about concepts implies our inability to speak about images — when we start talking about images, we conceptualize them, and are no longer talking about the image but only our general abstraction of it. Thinking precisely means staying with the image, sitting with the paradox, accepting tension/frustration/confusion rather than trying to evacuate it. And this is what mysticism is all about: sitting with the paradox.
November 11, 2012 at 9:50 pm
I accidentally wrote “any attempt to eliminate history” but what I meant to write is “mystery” not “history.” Although I suppose, in a strange way, when we eliminate all mystery it is for the telos of achieving some sort of imagined universality or ahistoricity. So maybe my slip was a moment of serendipity.
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