Ellen Joy: A Speculative Realist Criticism

"We choose to seek, then, a non-projective, non-hermeneutic criticism that would multiply and thicken a text’s sentient, bottomless reality. This criticism would be better described as a commentary that seeks to open and not close a text’s possible “signatures.” Aesthetics may constitute a domain of illusions, but these illusions posses their own material reality and are co-sentient with us"  Ellen Joy: Notes Toward a Speculative Realist Criticism

Levi Bryant responds on Larval Subjects [...]
Books do not mean something, they do something.

Here then we get the first sense of what it might mean to say that criticism comes after the text. This thesis is not the bland truism that the text must first exist for us to “criticize” it, but rather is the thesis that criticism is a production based on the affectivity of the text. In other words, the question is no longer the question of what the text means with the aim of closing the text, but rather is the question of what the text builds. Criticism here would be aimed at what texts build and allow to be built. And since the building power of any entity is infinite, texts would be radically open."

Philosophy & Revolution

I left this comment to a thread on Larval Subjects.

This thread began with an image from the Occupy Wall Street Protests… yet, curiously, not one of the other comments so far have made reference to this… like the “Main Stream Media”… as though it didn’t exist… was not worth notice or comment.

Yet here is an action in progress, itself an emerging ‘assemblage” on the edge of our massive, massively repressive self-referential system—alive with individuals in process of defining their goals, defining what they are collectively—so far, mostly outside the mad scientist’s dissected frog’s eye—trying to SEE what they are—which makes them all the MORE interesting, especially given the example of the Wisconsin protests… which BEG for study and analysis on the power of media feedback to define and limit the goals of nascent revolutionary movements.

What can philosophical thought contribute to present, immediate-right-now events? I’m sure I could add—as an unapologetic non-philosopher—plenty of reservations to Zizek, but gods bless him, he risks projecting his thought into the chaos of our shared historical reality… no less aware than anyone else of the cautionary tale offered by Heidegger.

There are things happening here that deserve attention and thought—how when the cops confiscated sound amplification, they devised a method, on the spot—of shout and response, where one person shouted a phrase, the near crowd would repeat it, broadcasting the words to the more distant crowd. This kind of creative response … I can’t put into words how important I think this is.. and why I think the relative confusion of this prolonged form of demonstration matters so much… that in ACTION, people on the ground, not from directives above, find ways to solve problems—and in process, REdifine the goals and the very idea of WHAT is possible.

I’d like to turn this to a question of how—if there is no way to change a closed system from the outside—how ELSE such a system CAN be changed? But to confront that system from the outside in such a way that it is forced to respond—and seek within itself a means of responding that was perhaps only latent before?

"Local Knowledge," Where Poetry & Philosophy Meet

As I read Levi's post on the coming of age of a philosopher of "local knowledge," I thought the work of poets I know and have heard and read: Jenn Osman's The Network, her intimate outsiders-intersection with science; the locality of place itself in the poems of Ryan Eckes, of the experience of place in Frank Sherlock; of CA Conrad's intense polyamorous embrace of everything local and real, out of an experience of equally intense alienation-as-object-in-the-eyes-of-others growing up poor and queer in small town America.


... to engage with and understand and leave our fingerprints on... not the world, but a world--the one where we find ourselves in place & time

Levi Bryant on Larval Subjects: Of Disciplines and Practices

Corporeal Poetry: Toward a Poetics of DOING IN THE BODY!

"Deleuze and Guattari argue that the function of language is not to represent or refer, but to performatively enact what they call “incorporeal transformations [...] They are not interested in how language represents, but in what language does. This performative approach to the world is sorely lacking in theory, though it is gaining more and more of a voice.”.

Two Types of Assemblages on Larval Subjects

Next, to move past the incorporeal.  Here's to CORPOREAL POETRY!

Three Part Review of The Speculative Turn

The essays in Speculative Turn offer an antidote to the subversion of serious discourse on the major issues of our time, making a bold case for the relevance of critical philosophy for politics, class, the media, science. Joshua Mostofa's three part review from the magazine, Overland, is itself an important contribution, highlighting major features of what is becoming a new, and newly invigorated branch of philosophy. Read the review, then download the PDF of Speculative Turn--it's free! 

Return of the Real, part One: Enlightened False Consciousness"

Part Two: Keeping em Honest

Part Three: The Speculative Turn

Spinning out into the night from our ever tilting planet...

On Larval Subjects

Graham’s universe is a universe in which entities defy any neat categorization into the domains of “the subject” and “the object”. Rather, we get an entirely different understanding of objects, where objects can no longer be neatly reduced to physical things (where’s the solid clod that is a “celebration”) and where objects can no longer be treated as what is opposed to or stands opposite to a subject. Indeed, we’re no longer quite sure what constitutes a subject. Where before we thought we knew quite clearly what a subject is, now we find that we’re a bit puzzled. And if we are puzzled, then this is because relations are generative of a new, higher level, object.

If this is the case, then we are forced to substantially rethink, for starters, our ethical and political concepts. Hitherto, in the domain of ethics, we thought we knew what we were talking about when we talked about the good life, praise and blame, and ethical principles. We we thought we knew that we were talking about the actions of an individual person. Yet if Graham’s thesis is right, if it is true that relations are generative of higher level objects, we can no longer be quite sure. This entity composed of Levi+Computer is one entity. Levi apart from the computer is another entity. Levi with a gun or a knife is yet another entity. A couple is yet another entity. A girl and her dog or hawk is yet another entity.

A wheel of brightness raised against the night for all to see....

Confluence of Idea & Object

I was walking to the Wine & Spirit store to reward myself for a day well spent, when there on the sidewalk outside 16 Below at the corner of Passyunk and Tasker were some strange and wonderful objects. Still only partially assembled, even incomplete they asserted themselves as beautifully crafted works of art--constructed from black iron and galvanized pipes, nipples & elbows & joints, from auto wheel disks polished and gleaming, decorative glass, record turn tables... all Found Things! The artist, Steven Evans, was unloading sections from a truck and fitting them together as lamps and lighting fixtures.

I love Found Things--freed from the tyranny of fixed contextual identity--or as Levi Bryant would say, from their former regimes of attraction, they call out with potential hidden powers irresistible for anyone with a creative mind and unbiased eye... art lying in wait for the artist, and in Steven Evans these objects have found someone with the skills and vision to bring them together as something new in the world.

Evans doesn't yet have a web page (he says they're working on it), so I can't link images, but they will be displayed in the Tasker window of 16 Below tonight, be on the sidewalk for the funky historic and custom car show on Passyunk tomorrow (Sunday, August 7).

If you can get to South Philly, come see these wonderful pieces. Every work of art is a spark of hope--and when emerging from Found Things--a powerful reminder of what it means to "make new" the objects of our received world.

Mastering the Free Floating Signifiars... Obama's surprising failure

Surprising, given his rhetorical skills.

From Larval Subjects

Discontent with Obama’s handling of the oil spill revolves not so much with how he’s dealing with the spill itself– though there’s plenty to be discontent with there as well –but with his failure to seize this opportunity...
The BP oil disaster is not simply an ecological and economic catastrophe, but is a symptom or a symbol of all the failures of neoliberal ideology. And this is precisely what has been largely missing in Obama’s handling of the issue. What we need right now is not someone who seeks bipartisan legislation, nor someone who works quietly and competently behind the scenes. No, what we need right now is a Lacanian master.

Perhaps the best way to understand Lacan’s discourse of the master is in terms of the moment of kairos in rhetoric. In Greek, kairos means the “right or opportune moment.” The rhetor is the person who is adept at taking advantage of the opportune moment to generate action that leads in the right direction. ...

It is precisely something like this that is the case with the BP oil catastrophe. The oil catastrophe echoes and resonates not only with past oil catastrophes, but with the financial collapse, the West Virginia mining disaster, the exploitation of American tax payer dollars by contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, the exploitation of American citizens by insurance companies, and on and on. If there were ever a moment to quilt together our economic woes, the impending environmental apocalypse, and rampant corruption among the corporations and government as a result of neoliberal ideology, this is that moment. Obama needs to step up to the plate and take advantage of this moment, performing a Kennedyesque moment not unlike that of persuading the American people to go to the moon.

The point isn’t that Obama will necessarily be successful in all that he asks for, but that asking for it plays an important function in structuring the dialogue and changing popular consensus as to what the function of government is and whether or not corporations truly are the best at running things. Now is the time to ask for big things...

Read the rest HERe

Art and Philosophy

Following up on my previous post

Levi Briant has generously responded to my comment with a post on On Art and Philosophy.

Exerts from his post, keeping in mind that he is "still working through these issues, so [...] not committed to these positions in a hard and fast fashion. This is amusing... as--being no philosopher, I am never committed to what I write in a 'hard and fast fashion!"

...philosophy and art engage with being, just in different ways. Good art, I believe, operates in the split between qualitative manifestations and withdrawn being. Indeed, good art, I think, suspends or defamiliarizes the domain of the actual or qualitative beings.

...

[comparing 1984 and The Trial] Great art, I believe, instead operates at the split between the actual and the virtual, suspending the reign of the actual and alluding to that which is withdrawn at the level of the virtual. Great art alludes to another world rumbling beneath the familiar actualities and thereby defamiliarizes the domain of the qualitative or of sensuous manifestations. Where Orwell gives us determinate answers as to why the distopia is organized as it is, for Kafka the principle of this organization is always withdrawn and in doubt.

Of particular relevance to the fetish of 'realism' as understood by certain critics (think James Wood)...

This calls for both a new concept of mimesis and realism in the domain of the arts. Mimesis here can no longer mean the representation of the world as it actually appears. Rather, mimesis, if we are to insist that it is imitation, is an imitation of being. Ordinarily we think of the mimetic on the model of the photograph, treating it as a likeness of that which it depicts. Yet true mimesis is not likeness, but is instead an imitation of withdrawal. It is precisely that artistic practice that produces effects of withdrawal in the work, thereby enacting the split between real objects and their qualitative manifestations. Such is the difference between art and kitsch. Kitsch is pornographic. It wants to deploy everything before the gaze, restricting beings to the level of qualitative actuality, eradicating any dimension of excess or withdrawal in being. [...] for nowhere have they adequately addressed the status of objects as split between the sensuous and the real, but rather they perpetually treat objects as bundles of fixed and static sensuous qualities.
...
Likewise, realism here has to be understood in entirely different terms. Just as mimesis is not likeness, realism is not representation or adequation between a sensuous qualitative state-of-affairs out there in the world and a representation. Realism is not mirroring. In this respect

Read all of Bryant's post on LARVAL SUBJECTS

Poetry, Myth, Philosophy: The Haunted House of Our Childhood

Levi Bryant on Larval Subjects takes up narrative and narrativity: in the de-privileging of narrative characteristic of the disjunctive strategies that run through the best and most interesting contemporary poetry and fiction, another intersection of Object Oriented Ontology and literature, . (For posts touching on this, see HERE and HERE. Even a work like CA Conrad’s Book of Frank, which uses or suggests a conventional biographical framework (if only as parody), goes well beyond attacking one suffocating (straight/male/family) narrative, only to replacing it with another (equally restrictive) Queer narrative. This is the “Book,”not the “Life” of Frank—the text is no transparent window to a ‘content’ somehow untouched by the mediation of language. This foregrounding of language in the poems, with its many disjunctive strategies, leaving no possibility for the exclusive (and excluding) force of narrative closure--doesn’t eliminate narrative so much as radically equalizes it. In the language of the post linked here: refuses to reduce the ontological significance to a single element (the narrative as God, in which all else derives its Being), the difference alone which makes a difference.

All narratives, including the meta-narratives of philosophy: and narrative itself, has its genesis in myth, with its totalizing cosmic/human maps, locating the human in shifting intersections of nature and culture, implicitly and explicitly privileging the human, if not denying ontological status to the non-human, declaring it unknowable, or reducing it to a construct of mind.

We cannot free ourselves from the gods without leaving the house we have built for them. May philosophy and poetry lead us, hand in hand, out of the haunted house of our childhood to take our place beside, not above, the things of the universe.

Net Resources: Politics and Philosophy

Mike Champion, list of links to audiovideo lectures and audio books on politics and philosophy (Kant, Zizek, Linges, Gilgen, Nietzsche and more), posted on Avoiding the Void

Creative Misreading: Philosophy as Critical Poetics

I am irresistably drawn to writing, of which the powers of suggestion seem to overflow the bondries of their defined fields. That is to say, work which invites creative misreading, writing which is in-formed by an implied aesthetic structure that opens it to multiple re-formations, multiple interpretations.
In philosophy: Plato (over Aristotle), Vico, Wittgenstein, Spinoza, Kierkegaard.  What is it about Freud that lends himself to endless reinvention and revision, if not this?
I return to Paul Levi Bryant's Larval Subjects  because, again and again, he touches on something that makes my brain fizz!--on multiple  levels. His thinking within the confines of his own field is always challenging and inovative, worth reading in itself, but more important for me, because again and again, he formulates his idea in such a way that I find myself reading them as though their subject were something entirely different than that intended. Even when, as in the following, it's through texts he's choosen to quote for comment and analysis.
Read these quotes from Deleuze, and tell me you can't follow them simultaneously for what they are meant to be, and as part of a critial exposition on the aesthectics of assembledge in painting and poetry.
(Please do listen again to MC Hyland and her collage poems, assembled from lines taken from The New Yorker.)
This is from a post on Larval Subjects HERE

In preparing my talk on Deleuze’s overturning of Platonism and his theory of simulacra for the RMMLA on Friday, I came across the following terrific interview with Deleuze on A Thousand Plateaus and assemblages:

If there is no single field to act as a foundation, what is the unity of A Thousand Plateaus?

I think it is the idea of an assemblage (which replaces the idea of desiring machines). There are various kinds of assemblages, and various component parts. On the one hand, we are trying to substitute the idea of assemblage for the idea of behavior: whence the importance of ethology, and the analysis of animal assemblages, e.g., territorial assemblages. The chapter on the Ritornello, for example, simultaneously examines animal assemblages and more properly musical assemblages: this is what we call a “plateau,” establishing a continuity between the ritornellos of birds and Schumann’s ritornellos. On the other hand, the analysis of assemblages, broken down into their component parts, opens up the way to a general logic: Guattari and I have only begun, and completing this logic will undoubtedly occupy us in the future. Guattari calls it “diagrammatism.” In assemblages you you find states of things, bodies, various combinations of bodies, hodgepodges; but you also find utterances, modes of expression, and whole regimes of signs. The relations between the two are pretty complex. For example, a society is defined not by productive forces and ideology, but by “hodgepodges” and “verdicts.” Hodgepodges are combinations of interpenetrating bodies. These combinations are well-known and accepted (incest, for example, is a forbidden combination). Verdicts are collective utterances, that is, instantaneous and incorporeal transformations which have currency in a society (for example, “from now on you are no longer a child”…).

These assemblages which you are describing, seems to me to have value judgments attached to them. Is this correct? Does A Thousand Plateaus have an ethical dimension?

Assemblages exist, but they indeed have component parts that serve as criteria and allow the various assemblages to be qualified. Just as in painting, assemblages are a bunch of lines. But there are all kinds of lines. Some lines are segments, or segmented; some lines get caught in a rut, or disappear into “black holes”; some are destructive, sketching death; and some lines are vital and creative. These creative and vital lines open up an assemblage, rather than close it down. The idea of an “abstract” line is particularly complex. A line may very well represent nothing at all, be purely geometrical, but it is not yet abstract as long as it traces an outline. An abstract line is a line with no outlines, a line that passes between things, a line in mutation. Pollock’s line has been called abstract. In this sense, an abstract line is not a geometrical line. It is very much alive, living and creative. Real abstraction is non-organic life. This idea of nonorganic life is everywhere in A Thousand Plateaus and this is precisely the life of the concept. An assemblage is carried along by its abstract lines, when it is able to have or trace abstract lines. You know, it’s curious, today we are witnessing the revenge of silicon. Biologists have often asked themselves why life was “channeled” through carbon rather than silicon. But the life of modern machines, a genuine non-organic life, totally distinct from the organic life of carbon, is channeled through silicon. This is the sense in which we speak of a silicon-assemblage. In the most diverse fields, one has to consider the component parts of assemblages, the nature of the lines, the mode of life, the mode of utterance…

In reading your work, one gets the feeling that those distinctions which are traditionally most important have disappeared: for instance, the distinction between nature and culture; or what about epistemological distinctions?

There are two ways to supress or attenuate the distinction between nature and culture. The first is to liken animal behavior to human behavior (Lorenz tried it, with disquieting political implications). But what we are saying is that the idea of assemblages can replace the idea of behavior, and thus with respect to the idea of assemblage, the nature-culture distinction no longer matters. In a certain way, behavior is still a countour. But an assemblage is first and foremost what keeps very heterogeneous elements together: e.g. a sound, a gesture, a position, etc., both natural and artificial elements. The problem is one of “consistency” or “coherence,” and it prior to the problem of behavior. How do things take on consistency? How do they cohere? Even among very different things, an intensive continuity can be found. We have borrowed the word “plateau” from Bateson precisely to designate these zones of intensive continuity. (Two Regimes of Madness, pgs. 176 – 179)

Aesthetics as First Philosophy

This discussion has grown tentacles embracing multiple comments and several blogs. The following is a comment by Graham Harman of Object-Oriented Philosophy

Levi with ANOTHER GOOD PIECE, (from Larval Subjects) this one on the relation between aesthetics and ontology.

Aesthetics has long been treated as a fringe discipline of philosophy, a moderately respectable diversion for the aesthetes in our midst. But I like Santayana’s point that considerations of beauty play an overwhelming role in our day-to-day lives, despite being only a minor part of philosophy.

My own sense is that aesthetics perhaps deserves to be the central philosophical discipline. (Perhaps Levi didn’t mean to go quite that far, but I am happy to go that far.) I’ve already claimed in print that aesthetic phenomena and physical causation are first cousins, even though they lie on two opposite sides of the great divide created by modern philosophy (”subject” and “world”). I’ll continue to push this idea further in writings to come.

I've long felt that the central aesthetic problem for any artist, as opposed to the concerns of the critic, is the question of Being; why my emphasis on the Aesthectis of Process.

I think of the women... and I do think of them as women, deep in those caves of Spain and Southern France while the men were out hunting--drawing those extradordinary images of bison, elk, bears and mammoths (while having a bit of fun doing cartoon stick figures of their men (with erections, no less, as they did their manly business!)--what else were they doing, if not bodying forth the question of Being?

Why I find nothing could be more natural than Bryant's images from art and science to illustrate
his thinking. Reading Difference and Givenness, I wished he could have formated it more like Larval Subjects. Why can't a book of philosophy have illustrations... even CD's! "Here, when you have read this chapter... listen to Glen Gould playing the Goldberg Variations! And after this one--get in your car, open the windows, and put on Bob Marley!

I bet Nietzsche would have gone for it!

Literature and Philosophy: Realism and its Representations

Intersecting gallaxies.
Levi Bryant has written a post on Larval Subjects touching on questions of reality and its representations as they might relate to philosophy and literature. Realism and Speculative Realism .   Aesthetics is lost without ontology. Lost, or subsumed to a subcategory of distraction... something to follow the weather on Fox News--or thrown into the Wood to be chewed on by a celebrity critic in The New Yorker.

Don't miss the discussion in the comments! Here's one from Bryant:

...It seems to me that what has been most fruitful in literary studies– and its best chance for relevance beyond the monadic cells of literary studies folks –are not those moments where it “respects the literary object qua literary object” (though we hear a lot of this rhetoric) but precisely when the literary object is assembled with something else: linguistics, marxist social theory (Jameson), phenomenology, philosophy, systems and complexity theory, ethnography, information theory and cybernetics, etc. In other words, literary studies does not articulate what is “in” the text, but rather provokes texts to speak by assembling them with something other than the text.

From quantum physics to neurobiology, science teaches us how limited the 'reality' of the world as perceived and processed by sense and brain, and yet we tell stories as though  none of this mattered, as though this were a kind 'knowledge' kept safely sealed away in the labratories of science, referred to in footnotes, as it were... like dangerous microbes, lest they infect us and translate us into some new form of Being. But the seals are porous, the jars of knowledge are broken; we are not what we were, and never have been... not since we began flaking the first pieces of obsidian, kindling flames for ourselves without the aid of nature's accidents.


Taking up the idea that there is no difference that does not make a difference, there can be no knowledge, no generatively fecund thought or creative act, that does not make a difference to every other field of thought and knowledge.
Here is an exert from Bryant's post:

If we are looking for literary equivalents of Object-Oriented Ontology or Onticology, we would do better to look at the realisms of Italo Calvino in Cosmicomics and T Zero, or, better yet, the strange world depicted Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String. In The Age of Wire and String Ben Marcus depicts a fantastic reality that is paradoxically more real than any sort of realism we might find in Mark Twain. Here we have a world of imbricated relations between human and nonhuman actors where we can no longer claim that humans are at the center of things, or even where the human begins and ends. In short, what we get is a network of heterogeneous actors forming a collectivity. In the opening “story”– is it a story? is it an entry in a technical manual? is it a definition or a “how-to” guide? –of The Age of Wire and String, we are told about “intercourse with a resuscitated wife”:

Intercourse with a resuscitated wife for particular number of days, superstitious act designed to insure safe operation of household machinery. Electricity mourns the absence of the energy form (wife) within the household’s walls by stalling its flow to the outlets. As such, an impoverished friction needs to take the place of electricity, to goad the natural currents back to their proper levels. This is achieved with the dead wife. She must be found, revived, and then penetrated until heat fills the room, until the toaster is shooting bread onto the floor, until she is smiling beneath you with black teeth and grabbing your bottom. Then the vacuum rides by and no one is pushing it, it is on full steam. Days flip past in chunks of fake light, and the intercourse is placed in the back of the mind. But it is always there, that moving into static-ridden corpse that once spoke familiar messages in the morning when the sun was new. (7)

Upon reading this bit of extraordinary poetry our first reaction might be to chuck with a bit of shame and conclude that this is a very sexist double entendre that basically says the housework won’t get done unless you fuck your wife. And indeed, there is a bit of this here. Yet there is much more going on throughout Marcus’ strange book besides. What we find in this short passage is a “flickering”, to put it in Graham Harman’s terms, between the present-at-hand and the ready-to-hand, where the latter is brought forward into the light much to our discomfort. Among Harman’s key claims is that all objects withdraw and disappear from one another in interacting with one another.

When I use the hammer, the hammer itself withdraws into the depths, becoming invisible, reduced to its execution in fastening boards. For Graham this is true of all objects and not unique to the Dasein-object relation. In interacting with one another the other object is always veiled by the first. While I do not share Harman’s way of thematizing these relations, his portrayal of exo-relations among objects nonetheless helps to capture the strange world of Ben Marcus. What Marcus reveals in these passages– whether he knows it or not –is a strange world of assemblages or inter-ontic relations among actors, where no actor holds sway over the others. In this world composed of wire and string– network relations –all sorts of actors are mobilized in relations of veiling and unveiling, withdrawing and appearing, as they flicker in relation to one another.

Politics and Metaphysics?

Not metaphysics exactly... but thought that penetrates the obvious, that calls to account the easy... and the difficult... reductions, that translate irreducible reality to manageable abstractions.

Right up there with my favorite "reality checking" blogs: Cosmic Variance and Real Climate... Levi Briant's Larval Subjects

Let me quote at length here... only in the hope that you will take in the whole of this post, and circle back and take in the general conversation on Larval Subjects. Bryant is concerned with "reality" in a way that no one hoping to understand politics... or the role of imaginative literature in addressing that reality,can afford to ignore.

The "Becket" refereed to here is not Samuel, but a blog pseudonym...

Apparently if one finds fault with Badiou or Zizek’s accounts of the political, they immediately fall into the category of “neoliberalism”. It seems to me that the motivation of such critiques, however, is instead something quite different. On the one hand– and independent of questions of politics –there are genuine reasons for finding fault with the metaphysical and ontological claims of Badiou and Zizek. Both, in my view, fall into the anti-realist camp. It seems to me that there is a strong tendency within French inflected Continental philosophy to subordinate all questions of philosophy to political imperatives. As a result, one is supposed to choose their ontology, metaphysics, or epistemology on political grounds rather than grounds that directly pertain to these questions. I suspect that this suturing of the philosophical to the political has more to do with academic insecurities pertaining to the place of philosophy and cultural studies in the contemporary world (having lost a lot of ground in the last three centuries) than anything to do with these questions themselves.

On the other hand, within the domain of politics, I find it difficult not to wrinkle my nose in amusement at Beckett’s charge of an unwillingness to confront ideology. Beckett seems to be of the view that politics unfolds through critiquing ideology. However, having witnessed twenty years of critiques of ideology I’m led to wonder what critiques of ideology have ever done to really change anything. The conception of politics as ideology critique seems to largely result among bookish academics that believe it is books and discourses are the primary real and who are therefore persuaded that change takes place through books and discourses. Like the obsessional– who might this obsessional be? –who talks endlessly precisely to avoid saying what really should be said, this conception of the political endlessly dissects various narratives and cultural formations to create the illusion of acting without ever hitting the real. Indeed, there’s a very real sense in which those literary studies types so delighted by Zizek seem to be more motivated to find a justification for writing about their favorite movies and television shows rather than changing social organization in any significant way.

The critique of Badiou and Zizek on political grounds has little to do with the attempt to defend neo-liberalism, and everything to do, I think, with the manner in which both exclude the domain of political economy from the field of the political. In the case of Zizek we get the assertion of a parallax between economy and politics without ever getting any substantial analysis of economic issues. In other words, one half of the parallax always gets short shrift. In the case of Badiou we are directly told that the domain of economy falls entirely outside of politics. In both cases we get the comfortable analysis of signifying formations, meaning, etc., but never much in the way of concrete engagement with the world. In my view, time would be better spend reading Harvey but that requires paying attention to drearily boring things like actual numbers, trends, economic phenomena, etc., and lacks the narcissistic self-gratification of thinking oneself as a subject of truth procedures or engaging in a “radical act”. What we thus get is a profound contradiction between the form and content of these discourses, the subject of enunciation and the subject of the statement. At the level of content and statement there is the declaration of a certain radicality that purports to be seeking to undermine “capitalism” (whatever that might mean… as if capitalism were an “entity”). Yet at the level of form and enunciation, we instead get a form of theorization and a mode of comportment towards the social world that functions to insure that everything remains in place just as it was before. Was it a critique of ideology that led to certain recent changes in American politics? Weren’t these critiques all over the place for the last eight years? Why did things begin to give in 2006? Better to understand the workings of an assemblage or a network to target the key points or nodes in that network than to tarry with the foam that floats up from those networks at the level of discourses.

Like all forms of obsessional thought, these sorts of political theory believe in the omnipotence of thought, ignoring the manner in which forms of social organization require their telephone wires, highways, electricity, sites of exchange, etc. As a result, they perpetual miss the real infrastructures that organize bodies and render social relations impossible, instead believing that the important things are the electrical pulses that travel along those telephone lines, i.e., the messages. It is remarkable to observe, however, how quickly the content of those messages change when, for example, a shift in these infrastructural phenomena takes place, e.g., the collapse of the economy. Perhaps there is a confusion of causes and effects here.

What a Difference a Difference Makes...

"Everything that makes a difference is."

I'm not going to expand on this here, but read this post and the comments that follow.. what an extraordinary idea if applied to literary theory and criticism.

Why I am happy that Larval Subjects is posting again:

The Ontic Principle: The Fundamental Principle of Any Future Object Oriented Philosophy

What Do Scientists Want (from art)?

From my favorite science blog, Sean Carroll on Hidden Structures. Almost touchingly naive... but gets to the heart of how we talk about judgement in art and literature, what it's possible to say, and what it's not--is there hope of finding a common language?

When it comes to art (considered broadly, so as to include literature and various kinds of performance, not to mention a good bottle of wine) I am a radical subjectivist. If you like it, great; if you don’t, that’s your prerogative. There is no such thing as being “right” or “wrong” in one’s opinion about a work of art; what’s important is the relationship between the work and the person experiencing it.

Nevertheless, there’s no question that one’s attitude toward a work of art can be radically changed by outside information or experiences. You might come to understand it better, or conversely you might be overexposed to it and just get bored.

Scientists, in particular, love it when they discover that some boring old art thing that they had previously perceived as undifferentiated and uninteresting actually possesses some hidden structure. If you were ever caught in the unfortunate situation of teaching an art- or film-appreciation class to scientists, the right strategy would be to reveal, insofar as possible, the underlying theories by which the work in question is constructed. And if you think there are no such theories, you’re just not looking hard enough.

Read the rest
HERE

Real Work Is Play... the rest is labor...

From The Psychoanalytic Field. This is part of a series on work and play--a post too good not to quote in full. I take this as another opportunity to call for a new reading of Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition.

The method of free association was Freud’s response to one of the most challenging tasks with which psychoanalysis has had to grapple over its history: the elaboration of a system of contact, traversal, and translation between the primary and secondary processes as two ways of thinking, and hence as two ways of being, that are radically alien to one another.
In their elaborations of the unconscious, Lacanism and Ego Psychology seem to stand on the opposite ends of a conceptual scale that pits the ineluctable foreignness of the symbolic against the domesticity of development. One recognizes the effects of such theorizing in the tone of the texts as well: from the turgidly undecipherable to the rigidly banal. What a shame it is to have reduced the workings of the unconscious to the structures of language or the chronologies of development, and to have colonized the former with the disciplines and strategies of either of the latter.
While relying heavily on Klein’s notion of unconscious “phantasy,” Winnicott articulates the fact of an in-between that facilitates and organizes the passages between subjective and objective, self and other. Neither a hallucination nor a concretization, the “transitional” object is the site of infantile illusion and, by extension, adult creativity. It is neither simply given nor autocratically created; it is a found object in the sense that, while belonging to an external reality, it is invested with the qualities that suit the momentary psychodynamic purposes of the individual that “finds” it. It becomes “transitional” at the very moment of its finding.
Of all the principal figures in the psychoanalytic pantheon, and in spite of the ideological restrictions of his parental metaphors, Winnicott is perhaps one of the most faithful of Freudians. Rather than upon the uncovering of history, the enunciation of truth, the resolution of conflict, or the mastery over anxiety, it is upon the capacity to “find” and re-deploy creatively one’s own objects, in other words to play, that Winnicott bases his principal mark of health. Instead of merely a tool for analytic inquiry, the capacity to associate freely has now been clearly identified as the goal of that inquiry and, ultimately, as a necessary strategy for “healthy” living. (I think there is a bridge here between Winnicottian play and Deleuzo-Guattarian bricolage.)
This makes a lot of sense to me. And yet, rare indeed are those that undertake an analysis because they want to “play.”

My year or so in therapy was brought on by a crisis, and though I wouldn't have stated it that way, there was never any question but that what marked the end of my need, was a restoration of my capacity for play... something my therapist fully recognized.

A New Read on Antigone

From The Psychoanalytic Field , a preview of a review of Jampert on Deleuze and Guattairi.

Here are some exerts.

In his most recent book, Jay Lampert leads us back to one of Deleuze and Guattari’s most complex philosophical expositions of time and repetition without fuss or fanfare. He weaves for us an account of history that is both rich and concise. In a wonderfully honest and generous paragraph near the end of the penultimate chapter of Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History, Lampert asks: “How is someone trained in philosophy supposed to know how to name even one genuine event of ‘today,’ let alone analyse one convincingly as part of his book?

Lampert unpacks a most subtle and challenging set of questions that have preoccupied, if not defined, the long tradition of western philosophy. From Plato to Hegel, the rehabilitation of multiplicity, of difference, and indeed of chaos under the rubric of the One has had to confront the question of repetition and time, time after time, only to relegate it quite often to the status of a seduction. Contra those who have understood repetition as the reproduction in time of an origin or a preceding state of affairs, Deleuze elaborates a repetition “for its own sake” (« une répétition pour elle-même »), a repetition that accounts for that which does not return, for that which is a becoming without origin or destiny. This is a repetition that does not operate in time; it produces time. This is the repetition Lampert deploys to elucidate not one grand “Philosophy of History” but—count them—nine forms of past, of present, and of future, nine forms of succession and simultaneity, and, finally, nine “movements of the name of history.” Lampert braids his concepts, crosses them, stacks them, aligns them, serially, co-extensively, but always deftly and rigorously, in order to argue that “the succession of befores and afters is a triple by-product of there being three simultaneous simultaneities. What takes the place of the classical concept of history is nothing other than these multiple forms of co-existence with their multiple subordinate forms of serial distribution. Once it is proved that an event’s present status and its past status are independent yet simultaneous, it will follow that the succession-effects of the names of history run simultaneously, and that the past is a real place on the body” (9)

Here, the typical questions of a philosophy of history, of a universal history, (“How come?” “Why now? “What next?”) are all questions of contingency. I believe that these questions very quickly extend into the broader concerns around memory, desire, and life. Indeed, repetition does not belong exclusively on the stage of world historical events with their progressions, interruptions, and recapitulations; repetition also pertains to the passage from one affect to the next, from one performance to the next, and from one observation to the next. A philosophy of history that takes the syntheses of time for a point of departure, a philosophy of history as thought by Deleuze and Guattari and subsequently pursued and elaborated by Lampert is hence a philosophy of psychology, of art, and of science as well..

For the rest go HERE

Walter Benjamin's Dialectic: Holding the tension

From Mike, on Joyful Knowing

Exert from Benjamin, German Idealism and Dialectic

Dialectic is an amazing force precisely because it holds things in indeterminate contradiction through its effort to determine them. This holding together, this arresting and immobilizing that takes place through the negative work of dialectic (the work of the dialectic to not arrest, to mobilize, or to bring forth total-mobilization) is the most forceful element of dialectic. Why? It does not lend itself to the objectification of capitalism, fascism, any of the organizing political-economic structures that reduce the world to what Heidegger rightly calls (also against Jünger) a "world picture:" a world of images fully determined by technology.

Read the rest HERE

"...precisely because it holds things in indeterminate contradiction"

Why I cannot identify Tata's Formalist/Realist problem in either convention, and even less, expect to find release from arrested ideological representations of the Real by rejecting one set of conventions in favor of others.

This has been the running thread through ten of my last dozen posts.

The best critic knows how to hold the tension. To be precise, but neither this nor that.