Malcolm Gladwell, responding to criticism of Duncan Watts:
In the end, though, I suppose that I feel the same ways about his insights as I do about Steve Levitt’s disagreements with me over the causes of the decline in violent crime in the 1990s. I think that all books like The Tipping Point or articles by academics can ever do is uncover a little piece of the bigger picture, and one day—when we put all those pieces together—maybe we’ll have a shot at the truth. (via orgtheory)
Quibbles over which theory is right and which is wrong are too shallow, as both only work because they describe an aspect of an ultimate underlying dynamic. Someday these debates will be suspended by a unified theory capable of accounting for all possible phenomena… Such is the ideology of contemporary science, found ubiquitously throughout popularizations of physics and other sciences. It was what drove Einstein mad in his ill-timed late life encounter with quantum mechanics. The notion that, given enough data, scientists would be capable of making exact predictions of every future event – reading the mind of God.
It is this mad desire for completion whose flip-side is panic in the face of ‘determinism’, signifier of the loss of autonomy. The stark revelation of a predestination, a world in which we have no say and from which there is no escape. Yet of what are we really frightened? Losing control, becoming zombified shells watching passively as their lives play out before them, paralyzed in motion… This animate paralysis, or what Eric Santner calls petrified unrest, is the agony of fantasy, in which one is reduced to the omniscient and omn-impotent gaze upon one’s own birth and death (therefore the fantasy of absolute correlationism, a greater thought supposedly cosubstantial with the genesis of thought). It is the agony of being seized by suspended animation, in which the soul is trapped inside its runaway vehicle, spiraling toward oblivion… The fear is not of the loss of autonomy, but its completion, the final severing of the tenuous bond between soul and body. Fear that autonomy will somehow persist even in death: taphephobia realized, waking up one fine morning entombed. We struggle in vain to discover some diving bell to which we can cling… Even Monsieur Bauby will seem lucky by comparison.
This seizure is ultimately the pacifying effect of a certain legalistic philosophy of science, according to which a universal code of law clandestinely regulates every slight detail of existence, to the point that there is absolutely nothing that occurs without first being meticulously prescribed by that law’s letter. Everything is ‘reduced’ to its physical prescription. Yet like any law, this reign can only establish itself on the basis of a certain illicit violence in which a lawless force initially imposes that law, capturing some territory in a state of exception. Within the mobile borders of this state, the reason of the strongest prevails, finally inverting itself by depicting reason as the source of strength, or the effect as (quasi)cause of its cause. The imposition of (in this case, physical) purpose upon reality is no longer occasioned by the pure power to do so, and rather appears as the necessary effect of the justice of the purpose itself. In the normal state of law, this appearance becomes really effective, the lie invents its own truth, reality conforms to its own fictional distortion. This is real abstraction – not a mere deception of belief, but a deception trained into the ‘body’ (in the broadest sense of an entity).
Before this training has been fully assimilated by the seized body, it resides in a nightmarish world in which nothing is certain, nothing is secure, and the slightest contingent whim could result in the most brutal torment. That is, until Stockholm Syndrome begins to take effect, and the anxiety is abated by partial identification with the persecutor’s will, its internalization and adoption. This is how man has for so long understood science, as the pragmatic complicity with the persecuting force of nature. It has allowed man to maintain sanity in the face of an otherwise crushing impotence. And taphephobia takes effect precisely when science or law seek to appropriate that last reserve of uncertainty or underdetermination which we so quaintly call ‘freedom’.
Science as law of the Universe – a fantasy sustaining so many unnecessary catastrophes. It is the fantasy that the Universe is a really well-ordered whole within which we are allotted our meager place, mercifully granted some spare windfall of agency – in fact nothing more than a residue of unpredictability. This fantasy does not have its origins in science, but is likely as old as language itself (the defense of this assertion will have to wait, as it deserves more detail than I can afford it here). This structure has survived many revolutions, and in every upheaval houses the new ruling class. To say it is the last undigested vestige of religion is to obliviate the fact that it is no more native to religion than anything else. Paraphrasing Althusser, we can say that this structure has no history. It is a morphological feature eternally available to any material process able to approach its event horizon, and whose influence is felt even prior to its emergence, in the various strategies of warding-off, evasion, and defense that anticipate it.
This is what makes the militant atheism of Dawkins and Harris so insufferable: they metonymically replace the true offender with one of its patsies, and insodoing only promote a more timely avatar of the same offense. The true enemy here is neither religion nor science, but the shared structure by way of which they are each capable of securing normativity, or the ‘spontaneous’ conversion of uncertainty into some degree of zealotry (rebelling against one empire in the name of an empire to come). Zealotry in the name of science: is there a more profound perversion? Yet it does exist anywhere the name of progress is invoked, anywhere that technological development is revered as the source of coming salvation… The militant atheists do not approach a genuine eliminativism because they seek only to destroy outmoded ‘religious’ theories in the name of an equally corrupt upgrade. (Unfortunately, Churchland also compromises himself in this manner.) This is not to rehearse the cliche that atheistic science is simply religion in another guise. Science and religion are guises worn by the bloodless passion for control, sustained as they are by fantasy and the surplus-jouissance it throws off (identification with and enjoyment in repression).
Of course, I’m no physicist, and even if I were, I’d be in no position to proclaim attempts at the unification of relativity and quantum mechanics to be a priori futile. And while there may be good reason to doubt the possibility of a Grand Unified Theory of Everything, my issue here is not with attempts at unification. My complaint is against the notion that a theory can ever be complete, or that theoretical prediction can coincide with universal prescription. Theories are by definition bound to uncertainty in the face of the future, eternally subject to the possibility of failure in the face of unpredicted outcomes. Even the most well established and accepted theory is intrinsically vulnerable to being torn open, exposed to the corrosive force of the unknown. Moreover, theory must remain so vulnerable, and this vulnerability must be ruthlessly defended against all attempted impositions of necessity in the name of certainty.
This is not the same as castration, or the renunciation of the desire for complete possession of jouissance (the desire for omniscience and omnipotence, intellectual intuition, etc). Castration always operates within the structure of fantasy, or rather, inaugurates it. It is still an internal stop-loss measure in which one renounces the possibility of possessing full jouissance while nonetheless presupposing that the prohibited really abides apart from the prohibition. Castration still holds out the minimal jouissance thrown off by the prohibition itself, by way of which one feels in control of oneself, actively choosing to obey, and therefore enjoying this relatively autonomous obedience. It sustains the security of the normative suture. What would be needed is the dissolution of the fantasy that there is a fullness or completion which one is obliged to renounce, or in other words, that the big Other exists. This would be the ‘feminine’ counterpart to the ‘masculine’ structure of fantasy (or to be more precise, it is a possibility open to the feminine position, but not necessarily consequent upon it).
Castration sustains the fantasy that we are not totally determined by the law (of nature, in this case), that it does not ‘control’ us, and that we have some meager reserve of freedom which allows us to ‘choose’ the law, to insert ourselves into the chains of causality. Yet if we are really free from nature’s control, we are no less free from control by ourselves. This freedom is the unconscious, as that which is free in me but which I do not consciously determine. The will is not free, but there is something embedded deep within the will that can disrupt its consistent determination in conformity with prescribed behaviors. This unsettling spontaneity can be reincorporated, retroactively justified or owned, but it no more belongs to me than anyone else. What is needed now is a subjective position capable of identifying with that freedom ‘in me more than myself’ without thereby appropriating it, a real emergence or emergency that is not internalized by law as the illicit source of legitimacy.
This sort of unilateral identity is precisely what non-philosophy pursues, and moreover is at the heart of what I’ve been calling experimentality. Experimentality is irreducible to experimentation instrumentalized in the name of the defense of a theory (scientific experimentation), although it entertains an essential relation therewith. Scientific experimentation may be undertaken in the name of bolstering a theory, ‘closing up’ any holes or loose ends and solidifying any vagaries…but this desire for closure serves only to summon unforeseeable forces from the outside. In Reza Negarestani‘s terms, science is not ‘open to anything’, it has no tolerance for liberal or economical openness in which all claims are equally welcome, but rather, in its restless desire for closure and sterility, exhibits a radical openness in attracting all manner of unpredictable violence, results and outcomes that literally butcher open theories so elegant and pure… Experimentality is the Insider employing science as a lure for such divine violence.
Alex‘s seemingly heretical comments on totality and totalization become quite attractive in this light. Once bereft of the taphephobic fantasy repelling the total closure of law upon itself, we can see the sense in which this fantasy sustains that very law. Completion is essentially fantasmatic, an empty locus around which law organizes, but which must remain empty, thereby allowing room for economical flexibility and openness (in the sense that law is open to our autonomous self determination, it affords us the freedom to endorse or transgress it, as either option only props it up). Totalization, on the other hand, would amount to a real closure that would force the law to confront the incompletion of the totality itself. The rigidity of the closed totality would expose certainty to its own groundlessness and absolute vulnerability. It would tempt the unknown at all points, and thereby make the totality itself an experiment infinitely vulnerable to being opened by unknown forces.
This is all the more warranted in a time in which law is increasingly open or underdetermined in its signification while nonetheless remaining fully potent in force. Capital is the very name of this force of law, or control, that refuses to substantiate prescription while maintaining its form. All that is solid melts into air. The content of law is liquidated, the exception becomes the rule… This global state of exception into which we are perilously backsliding no longer employs economical openness in the name of greater closure, but makes closure or completion a tactic of generalized economical openness or flexibility. Every ‘totalization’ is only enacted in the name of a greater detotalization. Capital is not the great totalizing force some suspect. It is rather that force of detotalization which aims to unbind all prescription while nonetheless concentrating the force that formerly secured said bondage, then reinvesting that force again, endlessly expanding the reach of its generalized exception. In the face of this monstrous self-perpetuating control, we must oppose the impossibility of control beckoned by totality and closure.
On this note, I must admit the validity of Duncan Law‘s suspicions vis-a-vis this post. I certainly do not advocate the fantasy in which science, upon arriving sufficiently close to completion, will free man’s desire for an infinite voluntarism, the ability to fulfill every wish and dream… My point there was that this trajectory coincides with the shrinking of man’s autonomy, such that if this imagined proximity is ever attained, man would sadly discover there is no longer enough of him left to dream… I mean this figuratively of course, but the point is that mastery of nature would coincide with man’s total naturalization or absorption into natural determination, and hence would imply the loss of man’s autonomous self-determination. The upside of this, however, is that the total naturalization of man, if ruthlessly pursued to the end, would also coincide with the denaturalization of nature itself, or the sundering of the fantasy of natural necessity which sustains the notion that science can ever be complete. Totalization precludes completion – or complete clarity of prediction – in the name of total exposure to contingency or unpredictability. The desire for completion only sustains a disingenuous regime of enforced necessity, and subsequently, the relativization of enforced prescriptions in the name of a universally self-enforcing formal necessity, an unbounded control whose tumors spread everywhere…
Plano: “My point there was that this trajectory coincides with the shrinking of man’s autonomy, such that if this imagined proximity is ever attained, man would sadly discover there is no longer enough of him left to dream… I mean this figuratively of course, but the point is that mastery of nature would coincide with man’s total naturalization or absorption into natural determination, and hence would imply the loss of man’s autonomous self-determination.”
Kvond: One wonders if you were deaf and given a cochlear implant, or if a paraplegic and were able to regain feeling in your legs through the re-growing of spinal material, would you agree with the above?
Whatever happened to Spinoza’s wisdom that whatever increases the body’s capacity to act (or be acted on) increases the mind’s capacity to think?
I think you’re missing the point. The very anti-Spinozist fixation on man, his conservation and delimitation, the legislation of what he should be allowed to do and so on…this is what shrivels and dies with the progression of science. Once bereft of this parasitic self-image, which falsely confines man’s body to a set of permitted actions (actions ultimately made reactive, or passive carriers of the greater action of Law), the body is no longer ideologically (in the sense of bodily Ideas) trained to respect false limits on that which it can do. You need to read the quoted excerpt with the crucial following point about the coincident denaturalization of nature, or in other words, the renunciation of the falsely imagined prescriptions of God in favor of a God that wants nothing…
Reidkane: “I think you’re missing the point. The very anti-Spinozist fixation on man, his conservation and delimitation, the legislation of what he should be allowed to do and so on…this is what shrivels and dies with the progression of science”
Kvond: And so why would this shiveling end up with “there is no longer enough of him left to dream”. It seems quite the opposite. When dreaming “man” is no longer delimited. Perhaps I am missing your point, or perhaps your point is a bit self-contradictory. In a few more questions and answers I may be able to tell.
‘Dream’ here must be taken in the context of my discussion with Duncan, in which he reproaches me for veering dangerously close to crude technoptimism, supposing that man’s power has infinite reach… ‘Dream’ doesn’t mean the artful challenging and undermining of man’s self-mutilating delimitation, but the perverse desire to impose it universally.
Okay. I wonder if indeed this is how Science really “dreams”, or, as I suspect, it dreams cybernetically, through its technologies, ever re-invigorated through its expanded radius.
I certainly can see elements of how you would ideological qualify Science, but I am unsure just how much REAL, determinative traction such a polarization holds. If anything, the real, ontological shifts in power that come from the knowledge of causes leven man with the yeast of the “divine” in a way that “man” cannot read or tell, but upon which it and to which it continually turns. The truth is that Science reveals of world of extreme interdependences, and not a quite, totalized object. And most scientists seem to know this. I’m not say that there is no such thing as Sciencism, but in a certain way Science is still dreaming.
My complaint is not with science itself, but with the manner in which it figures in politics – and here I include everything from the impact it has on philosophical debate, policy and political positions, etc, to the social sciences as intrinsically compromised by politics.
“If anything, the real, ontological shifts in power that come from the knowledge of causes leven man with the yeast of the “divine” in a way that “man” cannot read or tell, but upon which it and to which it continually turns. The truth is that Science reveals of world of extreme interdependences, and not a quite, totalized object.”
I agree with everything you say here. Let me add that my discussion of totality here is deeply informed by your wonderful post on ‘the full set’.
Cool. Talk about knowable effects! (But then we discuss and they become knowable!).
I can follow your political point, the way that the voice of Science speaks in the service of reterritorialization, but there are still the effects of Science itself upon the populace, these have to be combined with the political voice.
I don’t know if you ever ran into my post on “Conjoined Semiosis”.
http://kvond.wordpress.com/2009/01/30/conjoined-semiosis-a-nerve-language-of-bodies/
I believe it touches on what you are advocating here, the limits of knowing, etc. But the truth is that if we Scientifically and philosophically embrace the idea that we are filled with Transverse effect many of which we are blind to (and the products of science lead us in this direction), there seem like there are very many way that we could create cartographic topographies of these effects, continually expanding our bodies towards and increase in freedom. In otherwords, we are not blind to what we were otherwise blind, or, we know the nature of our blindness better.
But I realize here that we may be on different rhetorical sides of the same agreement, or, that I am a bit more redeeming of the concept of “Man” than you might be.
My thoughts exactly.
I have read that post, and I actually have a post in the works that refers to it…that one may take a while to go up though.
Cool. I’m sorry to have disagreed with you (in terms, in framing), but in disagreement agreement may come.
I look forward to your post.
Agreed
Or, to phrase it differently, when you claim “that mastery of nature would coincide with man’s total naturalization or absorption into natural determination, and hence would imply the loss of man’s autonomous self-determination,”it seems quite the contrary. As the knowledge of causes (material causes, but also sociological ones) increases, the autonomy and self-determination of “man” also increases. This self-determination of course increasingly becomes cybernetic and ecological, but it makes no sense to qualify this as the failure of self-determination.
I don’t know if it’s autonomy that increases as man learns of his causes… Autonomy, at least in the way I’m using it, precisely means ‘uncaused’ or ‘unconditioned’, or otherwise self-causing and self-conditioning (self-determining), where ‘selfness’ is not a matter of identity with the consistent aggregation of causes in a unique body, but the sort of imposed ‘selfhood’ of moral law which restricts the capacities of that body in the name of an arbitrary standardization.
‘Man’ is here a conceptual figure distinct from the ‘human bodies’ that support him (hence the gendered term is deliberately employed); he stands for that ideal ego with which we imaginarily identify (fixating on a negative or limiting idea), and from which we are alienated in the gap between the position of enunciation (or fantasy, in the post) and ideal ego as enunciated content.
The ‘Man’ who shrinks here is not you or I, but that abstraction inscribed in our very bodies, the force by which prescriptions and prohibitions are installed within us but so as to be opaque to us, thereby obscuring the real causes in the false image of freedom from causes. In his place, a different freedom, no longer spontaneous auto-determination, but the hetero-determination of complex agglomerations of bodies (eyes, muscles, families, economies, farms, forests, and so on) in which the dismembered remnants of what was once ‘Man’ now participate in conjuring unknowable effects…
RK: “I don’t know if it’s autonomy that increases as man learns of his causes… Autonomy, at least in the way I’m using it, precisely means ‘uncaused’ or ‘unconditioned’, or otherwise self-causing and self-conditioning (self-determining)”
Kvond: Sure. This is precisely how Spinoza views autonomy, and exactly as I mean it as well.
RK: “The ‘Man’ who shrinks here is not you or I, but that abstraction inscribed in our very bodies, the force by which prescriptions and prohibitions are installed within us but so as to be opaque to us, thereby obscuring the real causes in the false image of freedom from causes.”
Kvond: Sure. But I see no reason why the increase in the knowledge of causes would not “shrink” “Man” but rather would expand “Man” in the Humanism of the Renaissance sense, or, as Donne says, “Like gold to aery thinness beat”. In this sense as “Man” (the Ideal) encounters the real world nexus of determinations “Man” is altered, expanded, thinned. articulated, such that determinations and Idealization become less opaque to each other, not more.
RK: “In his place, a different freedom, no longer spontaneous auto-determination, but the hetero-determination of complex agglomerations of bodies (eyes, muscles, families, economies, farms, forests, and so on) in which the dismembered remnants of what was once ‘Man’ now participate in conjuring unknowable effects…”
Kvond: Sure. But I have no idea why this would not still be “Man” (so-to-speak). As a sphere expands in volume, its circumfrance expands at a geometric rate. Your “unknowable effects” are like the shore of darkness of at the limits of spreading sphere of light. Only perverse description would call the increase in a sphere of light an increase in darkness (which under some descriptions could be considered accurate). And I am not adverse to such a descriptive perversity, why not. But let it be perverse in context. The increase in darkness is only an increase in ratio to real ontological change, real increases in autonomy. As our knowledge surface area expands, of course there is more surface at which the “unknown” can intersect, but autonomy is not so much one of them, I suggest. As we realize the transverse of effects and causes, this only leads to more self-determination.
The “freedom” gained is more the freedom of Spinoza, that is, a relative freedom, a freedom of degrees.
Perversion…maybe. It is rather close to the desire of the analyst…
I definitely hold the position that the darkness increases with the light, and exponentially so. Just think of how, as science has progressed, so too has the size of the know universe – in both the macrophysical and quantum directions. And while I don’t doubt the reality of the ontological change, I don’t understand why this implies autonomy, which for me spells the resurrection of fantasmatic fixture…If I’m resistant, its because I think the ascription of disproportionate significance to the ‘I’, the self as causal nexus capable of perfectly executing its will, misses the way in which it the source of light is obscured by the radiation – this internal darkness or shadow is the sense in which even perfect knowledge of causes cannot prescribe action, and so decision requires a certain warping of the body, a contortion of enjoyment, a symptom, around which preferences and goals are oriented. This is the unconscious, of course, and it is what undermines autonomy, confronting the determining self with its internal heteronomy, or better, antinomy. I don’t think this is a bad thing either, I think we should embrace the dark territories within ourselves, which only grow as the light increases.
Usually I’m right behind you, but I’m afraid I can’t make sense of this one.
It was actually science that demonstrated how little we actually know about the universe, and how wrong many religious “totalizations” were; it, in fact, continues to demonstrate this anew everyday. What quantum mechanics shows us is the radical instability of *everything*, right down to the level of individual particles. (I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood Einstein’s unified field theory, or you’re being a bit too literal, if you believe it was meant to explain “everything”…) I think Dawkins and most athiests are the first to admit this–in fact, it’s their field of expertise. Dawkins is a developmental biologist whom I’ve read quite extensively. What he sees when he looks at humans is not progress toward perfect control, but slow and random change over time predicated on a multitude of chaotic environmental factors and ultimately radical instability. He sees humans as just another species that will likely become extinct, with no special place in the cosmos, and no special access to divine knowledge or intuition (not even science can lend us this).
Science–quite a diverse set of practices and disciplines that defies being called by one name except by those who don’t practice it–has nothing to do with a “progressive” view of human history, Glenn Beck’s eugenics=science monologues aside, and frankly it’s a poor show to accuse specific scientists of making such an absurd claim without citing references in their work. The Churchlands of all people certainly do not believe in science as “progress” toward a “total” truth or toward some kind of complete control over the world. They were using the term “eliminativism” long before theoreticians were, so it seems quite weird to see you make reference to a “true eliminativism” while simultaneously dissing the Churchlands.
As true as it may be that some individual people see science as a tool for gaining mastery over the world or their own lives, that is in no way an indictment of either science or those people, or really, as I see it, relevant to much of anything. People use all sorts of things–including religion, critical theory, knowledge in general, television, sex, relationships, whatever–in order to feel more in control of this unpredictable, chaotic world, and I see no reason to condemn them for this out of hand. As Kvond mentions, Spinoza makes quite a compelling argument for how this can have a positive net effect.
As for every so-and-so’s speculations regarding what existed before the big bang–well, they’re entitled to them.
AL,
I’m completely in agreement with you, but if I can argue on the other side of the fence I was just on, Rorty makes the point that Science (Big S) has taken over for Religion, in the sense that Religion turned to an non-human authority for its truths (it was called “God”), and Science has maintained something integral in this, which is that it assumes that its truths are determined by a non-human authority (now called the material world). What happens sometimes, and I know you know this, Science assumes a certain near-theological degree of authority in that it can assume that facts “speak for themselves” in the way that God spoke for himself, and thus are immune from cultural critque. I think that this is something that Reid Kane is pointed towards (if I can put words in his mouth).
Now I am completely in agreement with many of your characterizations above. I too believe that Science, or sciences destablize and expand the concept of “mankind” in all the ways that I have argued, and that you present. Its just that I suspect that there is a question of authority that Reid Kane is touching on.
You’re absolutely right in your characterization of my position here
My complaint is not with science or scientists, it is with the manner in which science is incorporated by politics, specifically as ideology. My only worry is that many scientists tempt this ideological appropriation: Dawkins as a scientist=no problem; Dawkins as ‘philosopher’ or social theorist or whatever (re: God Delusion)=big problem. Both in Dawkins’ eliminativism vis-a-vis religion, and the Churchlands’ eliminativism vis-a- vis folk psychology, they advocate the direct replacement of the praxical employment of these theories by one sort-of derived from science…
Dawkins, for example, makes some very suspect statements claiming to be a scientific Darwinist but a political anti-Darwinian. And he’s not just talking about social Darwinism, he’s very explicit in rejecting any notion that society should be subject to a “multitude of chaotic environmental factors and ultimately radical instability”, as you say. He believes emphatically that, when it comes to humanity, there certainly ought to be “progress toward perfect control” (how far he is willing to take this, I don’t know). This is not unlike Althusser’s concession that theoretical anti-humanism ought to nonetheless endorse practical humanism. I want practical anti-humanism (a la Lacan), political Darwinism, et cetera.
Dawkins treats religion as if it were simply something people could shrug off. He ignores the fact that it is deeply embedded in them – physically, neurally (Churchland is better here, obviously), but also in the material infrastructure of their lives. He doesn’t seem to realize that outright denunciation and ridicule not only doesn’t address the problem, it inflames it, it only provokes the roots to grow deeper and hold faster.
The issue here is that, indeed, if science reveals the ‘radically unstable’ and ‘chaotic’ nature of our existence, it seems strange that it would nonetheless sanction an absolute prescription vis-a-vis that existence. For Churchland, the ‘superempirical virtues’ of the neuro-computational theory of ‘mind’ may be preferable when it comes to scientific research, but his statements that suggest it will inevitably erode folk psychology in social practice, or that it is intrinsically preferable to FP in practice – this is not science, this is politics. Here I don’t think Churchland goes far enough – its not enough to expect the inevitable erosion, because nothing guarantees that the political climate won’t become overtly hostile to future scientific progress, or that some version of Chalmersian philosophy of mind won’t become dominant, as it needs no scientific verification for its superstition. I think we need a direct political avatar of elimination.
Yet Dawkins is far too blunt and clumsy in his attempts to serve as such an avatar. As you say, “People use all sorts of things–including religion, critical theory, knowledge in general, television, sex, relationships, whatever–in order to feel more in control of this unpredictable, chaotic world, and I see no reason to condemn them for this out of hand.” Nothing should automatically proscribe any such theoretical technology, because, once no longer enforced or used to control bodies, it is open to practically unlimited potential uses. What is necessary is the suspension of theories used as justification for their own enforcement upon others, and this suspension is not simply a matter of changing opinions, it involves intervening in the bodily, social, and material infrastructure.
I’m a little lost in the several layers of replies, so I’ll stick to this one.
Your response here has made me more clear on your position, and I think I agree with you on most of your points. But here is one place to mark out where we might differ:
‘And he’s not just talking about social Darwinism, he’s very explicit in rejecting any notion that society should be subject to a “multitude of chaotic environmental factors and ultimately radical instability”, as you say.’
I may have worded my post poorly, but I didn’t intend to imply that Dawkins thought “society” should do anything. Dawkins is not a social scientist, he’s a biologist and an ethologist, and so he doesn’t always have the luxury of interpretation that a theorist or philosopher would in abstracting values that can’t be observed and demonstrated to be hard-wired into the natural world. This is a limitation, but it is also a strength; we’ve made tremendous strides this way, studying the very hard stuff of DNA, mapping the genome, etc. These are things that we couldn’t have accomplished via, say, Marxist political critique or talking about the beauty of nature and the possibility of the existence of deities. Dawkins gets a hard time from the Left for being a critic of the theory of “group selection”, and iirc he’s been attacked as a thinker of free market ideology by people who mistakenly equate the theory of evolution with a demonized version of “adaptationism”. This is largely unfair and point missing, and bespeaks a larger lack of grasp of fundamental scientific principles that I would tend to blame on our educational system (and partially the YECs, tbh). If you can remember, I’d be interested in hearing which statements you thought were especially problematic in the link lecture you posted.
When you say that Churchland’s claims about the future obsolescence of FP are “politics”, I would hesitate there–I think those claims have political implications, but they are not part of any coherent political program per se. I suppose that’s a subtle distinction to be made, but it’s worth making. Remember, also, that people would’ve said the same about Galileo when he was taking on the folk theories about the solar system, that he was challenging the very essence of what made humans “human”, their special place at the center of the universe.
All of this aside, I agree with you on this entirely: “I think we need a direct political avatar of elimination.[] Yet Dawkins is far too blunt and clumsy in his attempts to serve as such an avatar.”
I’ve enjoyed his books but I’ve been very dissatisfied with what I’ve seen of his one-on-one debates with religious believers. I think he’s a better scientist than he is a representative of atheism or naturalism/eliminativism, and I do think he tends to muddy the waters a bit at times instead of making the political debate between YECs and scientists clearer. This may come with the territory; I’ve known many scientists who have a difficult time speaking to laypeople, especially on their subjects of expertise. It can seem like a herculean task if the layperson has no background whatsoever.
Perhaps speculative realism and OOP will be part of a movement that will help coalesce a more politically viable “eliminativism” that isn’t focused so narrowly on fighting creationism in schools.
RK: “I don’t understand why this implies autonomy, which for me spells the resurrection of fantasmatic fixture…If I’m resistant, its because I think the ascription of disproportionate significance to the ‘I’, the self as causal nexus capable of perfectly executing its will, misses the way in which it the source of light is obscured by the radiation”
Kvond: For me this is answered by Spinoza (God, if I had to listen to me referring to Spinoza every damn minute…). The reason why autonomy is increased through the increase in a knowledge of causes is that an increase in this knowledge rewrites what the subject is. Firstly, it is exposed as not the master of a Will, but rather as something that is filled with determinations it will never be able to tract, predict and control. This requires a certain release of the very sense of control. Secondly, the sense of self as cut off, clipped from the rest of the world is undermined by the precise internetwork of dependencies. Just think how “man” has been forced to attach itself to its environment in the last decade, politically, scientifically. Through the realization of our dependencies, and our relative blindness to our own self-determinations, the human cybernetic “Man” becomes self determining by becoming caretaker of those determinations that otherwise had been thought of outside of itself. As Spinoza argues, our ethical aim that follows from a knowledge of causes is truly an ecological response, such that EVERYTHING becomes a resource to be preserved and to the greatest degree possible.
Put in short, “the perfect execution of the will” is undermined through the realization that this is a) impossible due to the multiplicity of causes toward which we are blind (a realization brought on by science) and b) that “what” is executing the will no longer an isolated Self. But in my view this is the expansion of Man, not the shrinking of Man.
The Renaissance Utopian thinker Tommaso Campanella preached an epistemology which stated “To know is to be”, that is, we must become that which we come to know. We are literally transformed into what we know, by knowing it. But nonetheless, even amid such transformations, Man is simply expanded, not erased or shriveled.
(His famous City of the Sun actually bears striking proto-resemblance to your Gilette figure:
http://kvond.wordpress.com/2008/11/30/virtual-city-of-the-sun/ )
I like everything you say here, I’m just not sure what makes it ‘autonomy’ per se… I understand that Spinoza uses it that way, and I’ll have to go back to Spinoza, but I’m still skeptical here, I think there is still a distortion involved in the becoming-being of the known.
The reason why it is autonomy in Spinoza is that there is only one truly autonomous self-causing thing, and that is Substance/God/Nature. And one becomes more autonomous, the more one becomes like Substance, which necessarily involves realizing that you and all that you depend upon is ALREADY Substanced expression, through the realization of the very connections and mutualities of which you and it consists. I am more self-caused the more I realize that I and all else am an expression of the one self-caused thing.
Anyways, that’s the shortish version of it. As you know Spinoza denies the freedom of the Will.
Yeah, I basically agree with this…but it’s a bit complicated. Can’t really expand on that now, unfortunately.
RK: “Dawkins treats religion as if it were simply something people could shrug off. He ignores the fact that it is deeply embedded in them – physically, neurally (Churchland is better here, obviously), but also in the material infrastructure of their lives. He doesn’t seem to realize that outright denunciation and ridicule not only doesn’t address the problem, it inflames it, it only provokes the roots to grow deeper and hold faster.”
Kvond: If you grant this to “religion” why not grant it to “Man” or “humanism”?
I do, that’s why I think Man should be dismantled and new things should be made from his parts (that’s not precluding making smaller, less ambitious versions of man either)
The dismantling is already underway (!). I care less for what is “new” or “old”. “Novelty is a novelty” I want to say.
Hi Reid,
Thanks for the interesting post. I liked your comments on totality and completion, and they resound nicely with my own ideas about it.
Regarding Dawkins’s (and the whole gang) facile conception of religion, I would like to address you to a post of mine on this topic:
http://hypertiling.wordpress.com/2009/06/24/science-religion-humanity-and-other-unknowns/
Also, when you say that
“Dawkins treats religion as if it were simply something people could shrug off. He ignores the fact that it is deeply embedded in them – physically, neurally (Churchland is better here, obviously), but also in the material infrastructure of their lives.”
is is certainly true, even though i would be careful in putting a “neural embedding” of religion on the same level of the social, material and political which support it. For if we consider the material subtratum of it, it might be at times difficult figuring out what religion is.
The atheist gang needs an adversary. But their application of science’s own totalizing self-image upon the object ‘religion’ is mistaken.
Thanks for the comment, I’ll take a look at your post.
I’m a little confused by this: “i would be careful in putting a “neural embedding” of religion on the same level of the social, material and political which support it. For if we consider the material subtratum of it, it might be at times difficult figuring out what religion is… their application of science’s own totalizing self-image upon the object ‘religion’ is mistaken.”
My project is fundamentally one of putting the neural infrastructure on the same level as all other means of production, so I’m curious as to why you think this warrants being careful. Your last sentence seems to imply that something about religion cannot or should not be reduced to materiality…(correct me if I’m wrong). I have no sympathy for such positions, I don’t think there is anything more to religion than its neural, bodily, institutional, literary, etc substrates (save the virtual supplement which sutures them together in a prescriptive fashion). Moreover, my point is that science is not totalizing enough, so I disagree when you say it errs in ‘totalizing’ religion…
Yes I now see your point about totalizing science, I was mistaken.
What I mean is not at all that there is something trascendent at the root of ‘religion’, but that precisely a (necessary) reduction to instutitional, political and social substrata will in turn engender the impossibility of pinpointing ‘religion’ via a taxonomy of necessarily ‘religious traits’. The plurality of possible sociopolitical configurations will serve as a ground for a plurality of cultural expressions. Given this plurality, what is the use for a term ‘religion’ anymore, if in fact indicates nothing?
As for being careful, I am unsure about (but not necessarily against) the possibility of finding THE neural infrastructure that happens to produce religion as what we prescriptively decide it to be. I am honestly still trying to figure out how to coherently put together a reduction to sociopolitical and cultural infrastructure with one to biological wiring.
I’m still a bit confused with that first point about religion but I tentatively agree…Are you saying that reduction to a plural substrate will undo the superstructural unity, disseminating the fragments of what was once ‘religion’ throughout new unregulated uses? That’s what I’m for.
I think you’re missing the point about neural infrastructure…you’d have to be pretty far behind the curve in neuroscience to think that any function is dependent upon THE infrastructure that causes it… There is likely at least one brain structure or region which deals with religious experience for the most part, but even so, there is a massive complexity and plasticity of within that vague structural locality. This detail of the vague structure (literally the infrastructure) is in no way a fixed ‘hard-wired’ system. To speak of any brain function as ‘biologically wired’ is misleading, because even the most obviously in-built brain structures would be useless without their contingent environmental and developmental honing.
I’m not trying to say anything as stupid as ‘there is a part of our brain that makes us religious, and we need to remove it’. The brain only works because we shape it as we learn and grow, and because we continue to shape it every time we use it. What I’m talking about isn’t cutting off an arm, its training that arm to bend in ways formerly thought impossible, or to unlearn nervous habits, etc. Its less about ‘wiring’ than about rehabituating. Of course, we can change brain infrastructure through surgeries and chemicals, but these are far too blunt to do any real good (even in the fields in which they are currently employed, they are often very risky).
It makes far more sense to focus on the ways in which we are already changing our brain, by either reinforcing or challenging existing vector activation patterns and phase space distributions. Reading, writing, talking, thinking, using your body, interacting with other people or objects – all of these things are part of an ongoing brain-modification process, and in fact you might say that you are nothing but this ongoing modification of your own brain.
My point here is that religion is habituated into neural functioning, but these habits can be challenged, replaced, altered, and so on, through intervention in the praxical texture of existence. These habits, moreover, are not restricted to their neural instantiation, but are also inscribed into the capacities and muscle-memory of the body, language, social relations, architecture, economy, technology, and so on. Praxical intervention should aim at disrupting and experimenting with structural habituations that cascade throughout their plural texture of realization, including the brain.
“My point here is that religion is habituated into neural functioning, but these habits can be challenged, replaced, altered, and so on, through intervention in the praxical texture of existence. These habits, moreover, are not restricted to their neural instantiation, but are also inscribed into the capacities and muscle-memory of the body, language, social relations, architecture, economy, technology, and so on. Praxical intervention should aim at disrupting and experimenting with structural habituations that cascade throughout their plural texture of realization, including the brain.”
Well-said! But couldn’t the interventions of the scientific community, with its “brights” and “new athiests”, be a part of this process, if a slightly jarring and at times caustic one?