The words ‘down’ and ‘up’, according to Fuller, are awkward in that they refer to a planar concept of direction inconsistent with human experience. The words ‘in’ and ‘out’ should be used instead, he argued, because they better describe an object’s relation to a gravitational center, the Earth. “I suggest to audiences that they say, “I’m going ‘outstairs’ and ‘instairs.’” At first that sounds strange to them; They all laugh about it. But if they try saying in and out for a few days in fun, they find themselves beginning to realize that they are indeed going inward and outward in respect to the center of Earth, which is our Spaceship Earth. And for the first time they begin to feel real ‘reality.’”
‘World-around’ is a term coined by Fuller to replace ‘worldwide’. The general belief in a flat Earth died out in Classical antiquity, so using ‘wide’ is an anachronism when referring to the surface of the Earth — a spheroidal surface has area and encloses a volume, but has no width. Fuller held that unthinking use of obsolete scientific ideas detracts from and misleads intuition. Other neologisms collectively invented by the Fuller family, according to Allegra Fuller Snyder, are the terms sunsight and sunclipse, replacing sunrise and sunset to overturn the geocentric bias of most pre-Copernican celestial mechanics. (via Wikipedia)
Before Paul Churchland began calling for the obsoletion of folk psychological concepts like ‘mind’ and ‘belief’, Fuller was engaged in a campaign to rid the world of the dead ideas that so dominated the common conceptual repertoire. Science had long practiced the elimination of obsolete theories, but public use of such theories often carried on for decades, even centuries afterward. Sometimes, the public circulation of newly minted metaphors backed by scientific theories would only begin after that theory was dead to scientific consideration, as when a star’s light reaches the earth millenia after it has gone dark.
Popular consciousness is so littered with dead concepts that it is practically made of them alone. This has far from negligible effects, as is sufficiently demonstrated by the remarkable poverty of understanding on both sides of the political debates surrounding topics like evolutionary theory, climate change, abortion, and so on. The use of scientific concepts in popular discourse has definite and undeniable political and economic consequences.
Churchland believes that it suffices to eliminate dead ideas from scientific discourse, and that their public obsolescence will inevitably follow. Unfortunately, even a cursory survey of the evidence reveals that this is dramatically incorrect. Fuller admirably campaigned for significant renovations to even the most basic, unreflected metaphors structuring not only our langauge, but our very perception of the world and ourselves.
Yet a politicized eliminativism cannot simply seek to replace dead ideas with their contemporary stand-ins. It must cut to the heart of popular discourse itself, which is centered around the desire to know ‘once and for all’ how things are. This is the most fundamental attitude to be eliminated, the most malignant unscientific parasite we host. Science cannot proceed without leaving every last idea totally vulnerable, exposed to the possibility of obsolescence in the face of new evidence. A politics based around this sort of ideational fragility is what is most desperately needed today.
Maybe we should leave these “old” ideas in place because we really haven’t figured out “once and for all how things are”. They may come in handy latter.
I agree of course, but my point is that once you traverse the fantasy of ‘knowing once and for all’, the dead ideas gain new usability, no longer restricted by preconceptions of proper use or meaning.
I meant to post a comment to this a while ago and forgot to. Better late than never.
I’m very sympathetic to the idea discourse is bogged down with a bunch of conceptual dead weight. I like to think of it in terms of clogging up the mechanisms of collective rationality, producing noise that distorts real debate about essential issues. The best way for us to deal with this is to come up with a robust conception of collective rationality (in its distinctive differences from individual rationality), and its unique pathologies. This is something I’ve been interested in for a while.
However, there is a danger in your rejection of the desire to ‘know once and for all how things are’. The difficulty is to accept that inquiry is never ending and yet still acknowledge that there is some (perhaps very minimal and non-ontologically inflected) sense in which there is a way that things are. We should strive to make as much as possible susceptible to objective assessment, such that we could all be wrong about any given thing, but we must not in doing so abandon the notion of objectivity itself.
I realize I’m treading a fine line here, and I do appreciate the concern. These posts are obviously, for the most part, preliminary remarks and sketches of larger research projects, so any loose-wording here shouldn’t necessarily be taken as indicative of my ‘final’ positions.
I want to emphasize that, despite the apparent implications of that statement, it is not made in defense of any sort of anti-realist position. If I could parse my own words a bit, I’d like to draw a distinction between ‘the things that are’, or the Real itself, and ‘how things are’ or ‘the way things are’, or in other words, the way it is given. And not just given for-us, but given for-others in general (inclusive of objects, in Harman’s sense), or given in some determinate way, in some mode of ‘givenness’.
My sort of realism is close to Laruelle’s non-philosophy, which (I’m not sure if you’re familiar) only describes the Real as without-givenness. So any particular way in which we understand, experience, describe (etc) the Real already gives the Real in some determinate mode or other. My (and Laruelle’s) point is that the Real determines all of these modes of givenness, but is irreducible to any of them. In this sense, it doesn’t make sense to know ‘once and for all how things are’ or ‘how/what the real is’, because the Real gives itself in many ways without ever being exhausted in them.
This position does not abandon the ‘notion of objectivity itself’, or what I’m calling ‘the Real’, but it makes of its concept nothing but an empty symbol standing in for the incompleteness of every mode of givenness, including epistemic modes.
Levi summarizes this position nicely in an older post: “Just as Spinoza famously declares that “we do not yet know what a body can do!” (and probably, we can add, we never will as bodies can enter into infinite relations generating new affects or capacities to act and be acted upon), the materialist realist is committed to the thesis that “we do not yet know what matter is!””
That may or may not satiate your concerns, but I hope it at least shows that I’m sensitive to them.
I appreciate your position. I’m not as familiar with non-philosophy as I would wish to be, but I have my concerns with it. Personally, I endorse a position very similar to you, namely that the Real (which I would characterise as ‘what is objectively the case’, or the totality of objective truth) is somehow in excess of not just us, but indeed of all beings.
However, I have a certain problem with assuming this excess as a methodological posit (which it seems as if non-philosophy does). It seems as if this excess is an ontological fact, perhaps even _the_ crucial ontological fact, and thus we need some rigorous way of establishing it. I have a little argument in my pocket for doing so (although it is somewhat convoluted), but I’m interested to hear if there is a proper defense of the thesis from a non-philosophical point of view.
My worry is that non-philosophy can’t do this without deploying a bunch of notions that are already ontologically inflected, such as causation (and especially in-the-last-instance), giveness, and positing (or however it is that thought is to be thought).
Non-philosophy does restrict itself to the methodological side of things, and isn’t really interested in make ontological claims per se. That’s one of its limitations. Whether we can make that into an ontological fact…I’d love to hear your argument when its ready. Ray Brassier also presented the beginning of such a project with his Nihil Unbound.
For non-phi itself, though, I don’t really think the distinction between methodological posit and ontological fact is very steady… If we include ourselves, including our thoughts, theories, methods, and concepts, equivocally within the Real and as determined by the Real, then a methodology that inscribes this total inclusion within itself should be more than creatively ‘positing’ some idea – it should be thinking according to the Real itself. I guess in this sense, non-philosophy is less interested in trying to develop the correct ontological theory than in attuning theorization in general to its ontological identity…does that make sense? I’m not really sure where I fall here yet, I’m still working on it.
I don’t think that, from a non-philosophical perspective, there is reason to worry about ontological discursive infection, because the whole point of non-phi is to appropriate ontological discourses, strip them of their pretension toward the Real (namely, that they can give the Real itself, absolutely), and then use their categories and concepts once suspended to construct non-pretensive ‘clones’ now transcendentally remarking their non-reciprocal determination by the Real, and thereby theories that are given by the Real without pretending to give the Real itself. As long as this cloning operation is performed, I think non-phi is immune to such contamination…of course you’d probably have to approach these things on a case by case basis, but I’d be interested to hear if you are skeptical vis-a-vis the efficacy of this operation in general.
I would add that I do not necessarily buy the idea of materialism without a concept of matter. It seems to me that if the excess of the Real over beings requires properly ontological conceptualisation, then there is no reason to demand that a materialistic interpretation of this excess (from the side of beings, rather than the Real) cannot conceptualise it in a properly ontological fashion.
In essence, I don’t understand why we can’t advocate a rigorous concept of matter as excessive. I think that such a concept can be mined out of Deleuze, and hopefully I’ll get to write something about it soon.
If you’re referring to Brassier, his idea is for a concept of matter without materialism, not a materialism without a concept of matter (and he steals this from Laruelle). Brassier indeed tries to deliver such a rigorous concept of matter, and does so while showing great appreciation, as well as skepticism, toward Deleuze’s own version of the concept. Of course, his point is not to reject Deleuze, but to appropriate his work while dissolving the pretension which limits it. In that sense, I think he’d agree with you that such a concept can be ‘mined out’, although you may have different ideas of what that mining entails. I am close to Brassier here as well, although I probably have more affection for Deleuze than he does. In any case, I’m very interested to read whatever your thoughts are, when they’re ready.