I’ve expressed this thought elsewhere and before, but what we need more than ever right now is a skepticism of skepticism, a cynicism towards cynicism. It’s not that we should become wide-eyed naifs, believing all that we encounter. No, it’s that critique and cynicism, as Sloterdijk noted, have become both the reigning form of ideology and dominant mode of cultural production within the academic humanities. Today what we get is critique upon critique and critiques of critiques, where yet another critique arises to critique these critiques as I’m doing now. Indeed, with Laruelle we get the most radical mode of critique yet, a critique that shows that all thought is ultimately based on a circularity and unfounded decision, that ultimately leads us to a “real-in-the-last-instance” of which we can never speak because to do so would be to introduce yet another circular determination based on an ungrounded decision. We get a real of which we’re permitted to say nothing. In all instances we win, showing always how each statement, each claim, each thought, is pervaded by an illegitimate decision, yet we are permitted to say nothing beyond pointing this out. A true Pyrric victory.
We’re drunk with critique, cynicism, and skepticism. And in this way, all critique has come to be neutralized. We now know, a priori, that everything we speak of– including our own critiques! –will contain illegitimate assumptions, illicit interests on behalf of the powerful and dominant classes, and unfounded decisions. It is all neutralized in advance. In the culture industry of the academy– and, in particular, the academy that calls itself radical –we will always be able to show that some scandalous desire, ideology, or interest is at work. As a consequence, we become paralyzed. We can say well enough what is wrong with any positive knowledge claim and how any ethical or political proposal conceals hidden interests and despicable forms of oppression and inequality, we can show, like the theologians, how everything is stained by sin, yet we can make no positive proposals. Our sole and single ethical prescription becomes “make no claim, make no proposal, judge no thing.” Our business– and it is a business, a tenure business –comes to consist in showing that everything is stained and dirty.
In a strange way, we thus become the mirror image of the theologians, yet with the caveat that where they can commit by virtue of their belief in a transcendent term– a horrific God that would condemn trillions to eternal suffering –we can say nothing. Like the theologians we find sin in everything, seeing all as fallen. Like the theologians or the fundamentalist freaks of today, we discard all science as really being masked strategems of power, of interest, that are ultimately constructed and without any truth. We thus strangely find ourselves in the same camp as the climate change denialists, the creationists who use their skepticism as a tool to dismiss evolutionary theory, and those that would treat economic theories as mere theories in the pejorative sense and continue to hold to their neoliberal economics despite the existence of any evidence supporting its claims. We critique everything and yet leave everything intact.
The point is not to abandon the project of critique. We’ve all heard the critiques of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, of the gender theorists, of the post-colonial theorists, of Bourdieu and his critique of the scholastic disposition (academia and academics), of the Derrideans, the semioticians, and a host of others. These critiques, at this point, are complete. They no longer shock. As Lacan observed in “Position of the Unconscious” in Ecrits, the formations of the unconscious shift and respond to our interpretations of the unconscious. The point is that today we need to find the will to believe a little, to affirm a little, and to commit a little. Marx called for “the ruthless critique of all existing things”, yet that stance has today become the most reactionary and ineffectual position at all. In the absence of daring to affirm certain things as real and true, we leave all intact as it is. Only where we abandon our foundationalist, obsessional assumptions, our desire to have the truth before we pursue the truth, our intoxication with epistemology, will we be able to move beyond this paralysis.
Larval Subjects . 
December 20, 2012 at 2:08 am
I’m sure you’re familiar with Žižek’s work THE SUBLIME OBJECT OF IDEOLOGY (1989). What do you think of his discussion of cynicism as a form of ideology, and his distinction, with Sloterdijk, of kynicism and cynicism — the former a critique of “official culture” and the latter a critique-of-the-critique?
Excerpt:
“Kynicism represents the popular, plebeian rejection of the official culture by means of irony and sarcasm: the classical kynical procedure is to confront the pathetic phrases of the ruling official ideology — its solemn, grave tonality — with everyday banality and to hold them up to ridicule, thus exposing behind the sublime noblesse of the ideological phrases the egotistical interests, the violence, the brutal claims to power. This procedure, then, is more pragmatic than argumentative: it subverts the official proposition by confronting it with the situation of its enunciation; it proceeds ad hominem (for example when a politician preaches the duty of patriotic sacrifice, kynicism exposes the personal gain he is making from the sacrifice of others).
“Cynicism is the answer of the ruling culture to this kynical subversion: it recognizes, it takes into account, the particular interest behind the ideological universality, the distance between the ideological mask and the reality, but it still finds reasons to retain the mask. ”
Source: http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/cynicism-as-a-form-of-ideology/
Taking the skepticism-of-skepticism in another direction, Richard Tarnas says that the postmodern mind is skeptical to the point of being chaste, and that it must eventually give itself to something or other, or else it remains chaste for no reason. It’s like that “stand for something or you will fall for anything” idea, which is usually attacked as a rationale for supporting ideology, but in this case is an admonishment against those who remain so cynical, skeptical, critical that they would never “dare to be naïve” — those who are so disenchanted that they have lost all capacity for wonder, agape, comprehension of miracle and mystery.
December 20, 2012 at 3:50 am
I liked and felt fellow feeling with many of the sentiments expressed in this post, but do want to express a couple of small worries. The first worry concerns the fact that I always thought of you as the OOOer who most tended to strike a middle ground between asserting the need to preserve many of the insights and lessons of critique (at the level of gender, race, capitalism, class, etc.) while also asserting the need for more affirmative and constructive projects that depart from strictly critical approaches (to all of the latter). This post struck me as taking more of a straight-up critical stance towards critique, and though I think it’s more a function of tone than of any kind of seismic shift in your predilections, I just wanted to state my preference for the middle ground. (In fact, I think that you’ve made an important contribution to the range of political and intellectual options available beneath the overall OOO umbrella by defending aspects of critique on occasion.)
Far as my second worry goes, I will confess to a certain trepidation about the wisdom of expressing it now rather than waiting for the dust to settle on a few online kerkuffles that may be factoring into the situation to which it pertains. But I’ll throw caution to the wind go for it anyway. My quibble concerns the fact that Laruelle’s project is not entirely critical in nature, but also possesses affirmative and constructive elements. These include an orientation towards lived experience, thinking-according-to-the-victim, the formulation of new utopian orientations for the species (as discussed in Future Christ), and the practice of a non-critical form of heresy-production. In short: I see a lot more going on in that project than the mere assertion of an unknowable absolute, and think there are ways in which it can be put into a productive dialogue with a lot of the things going on in OOO. And having engaged seriously with the texts of OOOers, Laruelle, and the Laruellians, I don’t find them to be as ontologically incompatible as many people seem to think.
No huge deal on either front though–just some thoughts for future conversations.
December 20, 2012 at 9:08 am
[…] of skepticism’ nor a ‘cynicism towards cynicism’ ―as Levy Bryant suggests in his last post [here]―. Against this scholastic view, Bourdieu says that the most effective reflection is the one that […]
December 20, 2012 at 8:13 pm
amen
December 21, 2012 at 11:06 am
I agree with Aaron here. If the goal of the new critique is to dispense with the critical framework of what has been considered critical works so far, then Laruelle is the nearest model we can utilize perhaps to inaugurate a new critical activity, a critique-without-criticism. This is of course dependent on where we are taking Laruelle’s own critical interventions. There is a danger in Laruelle to ignore historical alternatives to, say, capitalism, which have been greatly responsible for the very materialities of philosophical hallucination that he condemns. And yet Laruelle comes at a precise time when these hallucinations are no longer concealed within the discipline of philosophy but have been in effect saturating the culture industry. This makes him a powerful critic of capitalism at the same time of the very poverty of philosophy that flourishes on a concealment of Being (if Being is the right term for the over-all hallucinatory form of materiality that reflects the circular decisional structure of its speculation). The question of how it compares with OOO alternative, vis-a-vis the undeniable hold of Capital on humanity, I think boils down to the argument whether Laruelle also views Capital as a hallucinatory material rather than a real force of history. This is crucial.To view capital and its historical consequences as neutral objectified materials (because they are hallucinatory to which all forms of visioning/critiquing History are condemned, much like all forms of representing the Real are) is already to deem it impossible for the humanity-in-the-last-instance to even view itself as humanity, that is, in the last instance with a task to solve. I take it that this ‘Laruellean last-instance’ cant take any other form except as a historical challenge.
December 21, 2012 at 4:35 pm
Aaron, Virgilio,
I don’t advocate abandoning critique. As I wrote in the post:
Moreover, the onto-cartography I’m developing is, among other things, a form of critique in that it partially investigates how corporeal and incorporeal entities structure social relations. I do think, however, we need a critique of critique. First, Bourdieu has gone a long way in showing what is problematic in many forms of critique through his analysis of the academic critic and how their social position systematically distorts the issues in texts like Pascalian Meditations. Here I think Laruelle is among the worst offenders and is a dead end. I’m willing to be persuaded otherwise, but no one so far has taken the time to do this. Second, I think we need to acknowledge the limits of critique and turn more attention to the activity of building or constructing alternatives in the world. As a political strategy, what does critique presuppose? How does it see itself changing things? Are these tenable assumptions and is this a tenable theory of change? Those are the sorts of questions we need to ask. Third, what sort of will/desire inhabits critical consciousness and is this will ultimately in line with the aims of genuinely emancipatory– read egalitarian –just politics? If we find that the critical temperament presupposes a will to mastery and is premised on avant-gardism, shouldn’t this fall before critique as being contrary to emancipatory politics? What would be an alternative model?
December 21, 2012 at 5:15 pm
What, incidentally, does it mean to say that capitalism is “hallucinated”?
December 21, 2012 at 5:23 pm
Hi Levi. I take my view on Capital as a hallucinatory material from my extrapolation of Laruelle’s view on how all forms of objectification of the Real is hallucinatory in nature. So if Capital is an instance of this objectification, are we willing to pursue the nonphilosophical (without the hyphen) view to its radical length such that Capital itself is deemed to be just a hallucinatory material? My view is that Capital is a real force of history, not hallucinatory, that we need to challenge.
December 21, 2012 at 5:44 pm
I share your opinion that Laruelle is somehow a dead end. But just the same it does not prohibit us from mining potential views out of his rather thorny texts. If Laruelle needs to be interrogated, now is the time before his directions get even more vulnerable to appropriations that relegate his texts to just another theology in the making. I emphasized the nonphilosophical (without the hyphen) for to my mind that is the point in his philosophical undertaking where I believe we can still save the appearance of a strong Laruellean critique.
As Aaron would also emphasize “no huge deal” here. I’m looking for a fruitful conversation.
December 21, 2012 at 8:28 pm
It strikes me as rather intellectualist to suggest that capitalism is a hallucination. It would be nice to be able to wave our hands and say it’s all just a dream, but materially it’s all too real. Critique such is this is why I think Bourdieu’s analysis of the scholastic fallacy is so important.
December 21, 2012 at 10:09 pm
I haven’t read Laruelle’s stuff on non-Marxism yet, so I’m not sure if he argues that capitalism is hallucinated. In my own appropriation of his work, I actually intend to move away from the characterization of philosophical decision as a narcissistic hallucination and towards what I’m calling a “nontological” (rather than strictly “non-philosophical”) position–i.e. a position in which one can make a (conditional) philosophical decision and issue positive ontological assertions about the contours of being, while preserving many of Laruelle’s axioms regarding the One, the vision-in-One, and thinking-according-to-the-victim. I think that a lot of people who are interested in both Lareulle and ontology will find that move useful.
Thank you for pointing out the sentence in which you reaffirm positive sentiments re: critique. Like I said, I didn’t find the piece indicative of some seismic shift in your orientation on the matter, just a bit harsher than usual in its overall tone.
December 21, 2012 at 11:04 pm
P.S. I will be unpacking these ideas at a much greater level of detail in the third chapter of my dissertation, which will involve a specific focus on Laruelle, Harman, and Whitehead/Shaviro, including a syncretic technical discussion concerning the ways which all of the latter can be applied to the study of media. Right now I’m still on chapter one, but when I get to that point maybe I’ll send you some ideas if you’re up for it and don’t have too much going on at the time.
December 22, 2012 at 8:05 pm
http://parodycentrum.blogspot.nl/2012/12/status-of-parody-in-world.html