“For just as the phenomenon of death indexes an anomalous zone in the conceptual fabric of the manifest image – the point at which our everyday concepts and categories begin to break down, which is why it remains a privileged topic for philosophers exploring the outer limits of the manifest image – so, by the same token, the concept of extinction represents an aberration for the phenomenological discourse which sought to transcendentalize the infrastructure of the manifest image precisely in order to safeguard the latter from the incursions of positivism and naturalism. Yet it is precisely insofar as the concept of extinction expresses a dissonance resulting from the interference between the manifest and scientific images that it could not have been generated from within the latter; it is manufactured by deploying the manifest image’s most sophisticated conceptual resources (in conjunction with elements of scientific discourse) against that image’s own phenomenological self-understanding. At this particular historical juncture, philosophy should resist the temptation to install itself within one of the rival images, just as it should refuse the forced choice between the reactionary authoritarianism of manifest normativism, and the metaphysical conservatism of scientific naturalism. Rather, it should exploit the mobility that is one of the rare advantages of abstraction in order to shuttle back and forth between images, establishing conditions of transposition, rather than synthesis, between the speculative anomalies thrown up within the order of phenomenal manifestation, and the metaphysical quandaries generated by the sciences’ challenge to the manifest order. In this regard, the concept of extinction is necessarily equivocal precisely insofar as it crystallizes the interference between the two discourses.” Nihil Unbound p 231 (Emphasis mine)
The red-herrings so haphazardly bandied-about – “neurology death cult”, reductivism, mettrieism – are symptomatic of a lack of philosophical engagement. Brassier’s project couldn’t be clearer: far from championing the reduction of subjectivity, its denunciation as ‘unreal’, and so on, his work is devoted to thinking the trauma that accompanies subjectivity when it has thoroughly demystified itself. The concept of extinction, far from some gothic fetish or fixation, is “necessarily equivocal” in that it forces us to reflect on this trauma without being capable of resorting to some mode of resistance or avoidance. If Brassier was championing an absolute reduction of the manifest to the scientific image, this entire discussion would be absurd, as it explicitly aims to exacerbate and valorize the dissonance between these images. Brassier claims we should maintain the manifest image precisely in order to mobilize it to explore this dissonance, to confront and live with this trauma rather than avoiding it. If he were a reductivist, these claims would be nonsensical.
In a time in which subjectivity really is being reduced, deprived of its special and mysterious status (both by science, and by the evacuation of agency from politics in the form of technocratic administration), Brassier demands that we cease to recoil from reduction even while we refuse to simply submit to it (as if such a submission were possible). Rather, the manifest image will persist, and Brassier’s argument is that it should persist in the mode of resolute confrontation with this trauma. Moreover, this trauma can itself become the libidinal source of a renewed self-relation in which subjects become concerned with exploring the limits of their own subjectivity, experimenting with this unshakable condition rather than taking it for granted.
(This, uncoincidentally, strongly resembles Marx’s definition of communism, which is not another positive order which comes after capitalism, but is simply the process by which capitalism is progressively abolished, dismantled. As Nicole Pepperell has argued, the purpose of Das Kapital is to expose the massive reservoir of practico-conceptual structures that must not only be undone, but which communism will have to at the same time study, as its very being will exist solely in the experimental misuse that suspends their proper functioning. The agent of political change, the proletariat, is precisely the subject that has been totally deprived of agency (having literally sold this capacity), totally ‘reduced’ to its integration in the production process; the crux of Marx’s argument is that this position is not hopeless, and that their is still a subject that remains, witness to its own desubjectivation, and that can then instigate a break precisely by mobilizing this irreducible dissonance. Today, when technocracy has nearly universally deprived us of political subjectivity (of a say in the large-scale projects by which we organize our social existence), instead deferring to the ‘scientific’ necessity of capitalism, we all become capable of joining the proletariat by becoming subject to this very desubjectivation.)
This is precisely what Brassier recommends: not the simply ‘reduction’ of subjectivity, but a mode of subjectivity that valorizes its own naturalization and disenchantment, that refuses to impose itself as metaphysically primary as much as it refuses the same gesture on the part of science, in favor of insisting on the primacy of the dissonance between the two. This dissonance, this process of desubjectivation with which the subject is nonetheless coincident (which Agamben calls the condition of ‘shame’), is the ultimate aim of Brassier’s work, not ‘reduction’ or ‘extinction’, as any moderately careful reading will prove. He even goes so far as to claim science is only possible on the condition of this dissonance, as the norms of truth and rationality are only operative on the basis of the will to know furnished by the manifest image.
If this doesn’t prove the inanity of the aforementioned charges so regularly leveled at Brassier, nothing will. Those charges are based on nothing but reckless and cursory readings, and forgo serious engagement with the content of the text in favor of easy dismissal on the basis of decontextualization. They’re no less absurd than claiming Harman thinks everything is made out of hammers.
Hmmm, I think you’re reading quite a bit into Brassier here that simply isn’t there. Your argument here sounds more like Zizek than Brassier, where there’s an ineliminable remainder that is the subject that resists any reduction (“the spirit is a bone” and all that). The whole point of Brassier’s evocations of trauma, as I understand it, is that there is no subject whatsoever. This point is further confirmed by the manner in which he’s sided with Churchland and the project of eradicating folk psychology. To speak of the subject (and psychoanalysis for that matter) is to fall into a folk-psychological mythology because categories like the subject, thought, unconscious reasons and beliefs, desires, etc., are all folk-psychological categories that have no being at the neurological level. From the OOO standpoint, by contrast, this simply doesn’t hold. Subjects are objects as real as anything else. They can’t exist neurologically, but they are emergent objects that cannot be reduced to the neurological either. Hence, with respect to B, “neurology death cult” or “la mettrieism”.
I think you’re the one reading into Brassier something that isn’t there.
The citation above clearly disproves your comments.
Every time he has addressed Churchland’s work, he has criticized it on precisely this point.
Your comments here fail to address the argument of the post, which is that your reading of Brassier as a reductionist is unfounded, a point explicitly supported by textual evidence – and not some offhanded comment, but the principle conclusion toward which the entire book was building.
Reid,
I don’t see how the passage you cite disproves claims about B’s reductivism at all. If anything B is endorsing that reductivism and using it to show why that manifest image is mistaken. What you’re suggesting here would be like claiming that the atheist who talks about religious beliefs is claiming that we must retain those religious beliefs by talking about them.
No, he’s not. This is wrong, and here is the proof:
“the concept of extinction expresses a dissonance resulting from the interference between the manifest and scientific images that it could not have been generated from within the latter; it is manufactured by deploying the manifest image’s most sophisticated conceptual resources (in conjunction with elements of scientific discourse) against that image’s own phenomenological self-understanding.”
“philosophy should resist the temptation to install itself within one of the rival images, just as it should refuse the forced choice between the reactionary authoritarianism of manifest normativism, and the metaphysical conservatism of scientific naturalism. Rather, it should exploit the mobility that is one of the rare advantages of abstraction in order to shuttle back and forth between images, establishing conditions of transposition, rather than synthesis”
The thesis couldn’t be clearer: Brassier’s arguments cannot be generated within the scientific image, but only from the dissonance between manifest and scientific images. PHILOSOPHY SHOULD NOT REJECT THE MANIFEST IMAGE IN FAVOR OF THE SCIENTIFIC IMAGE. He says this explicitly! Just read it! Moreover, he goes on to claim that science cannot proceed at all without founding itself on the will to know produced by the manifest image! Philosophy should strive to ‘shuttle back and forth’ between the two images, using the resources of science to radicalize and experiment with the manifest image, not abandon it!
This is the central argument of the whole book: a REJECTION OF REDUCTIVISM in favor of recognition that science cannot get off the ground without the manifest image, and the injunction that rather than subordinating one image to the other, we experiment with the necessary dissonance between them.
Honestly, it couldn’t be any clearer. Just read the quotation! Your position on Brassier is unsustainable once the actual content of his position is addressed.
Reid,
My tendency is to believe that texts have multiple levels. There is the self-reflexive level of how texts represent to themselves what they are doing or attempting to do. That is, what they claim to be doing or trying to accomplish. Then there is the level of what texts actually do in their practice or content. The two things can be wildly at odds with one another. Thus for example, an author can say “I will show x” and end up showing exactly the opposite of x. I think something like this takes place in the case of B. The position you describe here would be closer to object-oriented ontology than B’s nihilistic materialism and thanotological ontology of extinction. Also, were your reading here true, I’d have a hard time understanding how a number of enthusiasts of Brassier here in the blogosphere, including, but not limited to yourself, could consistently advance charges of folk-ontology and folk-psychology against other positions as you’ve consistently done. In order for that argument to be advanced you have to hold that the neurological and the quantum are the “really real” over and against everything else, which is thereby treated as a mere epiphenomenon or effect with no proper ontological status of its own. Yet here you’re trying to grant this “manifest image” (note the Freudian terminology used here and reflect on how the manifest is treated in Freud as, e.g., unreal) a genuine ontological status as real. But then you get an entirely different ontology.
Larval: “My tendency is to believe that texts have multiple levels. There is the self-reflexive level of how texts represent to themselves what they are doing or attempting to do. That is, what they claim to be doing or trying to accomplish. Then there is the level of what texts actually do in their practice or content. The two things can be wildly at odds with one another”
Kvond: [translation from the above] “Reid, even though you defend your reading expertly at the level of the text, and show yourself to be more familiar with Brassier than I, through the power of a multiple level reading I will transcend your argument and claim myself victor, and disappear in a magical puff of smoke!” Now the magic words “blogosphere”,”Folk-psychology”, “quantum” “Freudian” Poof.
You are simply avoiding the issue. Brassier explicitly rejects what you impute to him. The words are right there. I don’t really care what you think he is actually doing in spite of himself, because these claims seem transparently incorrect. Brassier’s argument is right there. You can either address it or not, but you can’t make up some secret real argument that you think he is actually making in spite of the letter of the text.
Brassier’s argument, and this goes for Churchland, Dennett, and pretty much every naturalistic philosopher, is not that the manifest image isn’t real, but that it misrepresents itself to itself. Of course there are things called ‘desires’, ‘selves’, etc – they are socio-linguistic conventions. The question is whether these are the best way of explaining the phenomena they refer to, or whether their explanatory power is blunt compared to that of neurology, in this case. Denunciations of folk psychology are aimed precisely at the pretension that these concepts have some metaphysical validity apart from their correspondence with conventional, habitual employment.
Brassier’s argument goes further, however, in claiming that there is a certain constitutive misrecognition that serves as the basis of scientific inquiry (the will to know). In this regard, the manifest image is necessary to the extent that without it, scientific knowledge could never distinguish itself as such. This is why he focuses on the necessary dissonance between the two images.
Moreover, your claim that he requires a physicalist ontology is patently wrong, as is proven by the central ontological claim of the book, that the ‘fundamental’ ontological substratum is ‘being-nothing’ or the zero-degree of existence, and not ‘neurons and quanta’ as you seem to think.
Prior to his infatuation with the Objectological, here is Levi’s acclaim of the non-correlational “promise” (yet confessed incomprehension of) Brassier and Laruelle,
“Laruelle’s critique of philosophy and mode of analysis strikes me as among the most promising for escaping the correlationist circle and for thinking, as Brassier puts it “matter itself” (matter without concept) rather than “matter as such” (matter determined by the correlationist circle). However, I confess that while I understand his claims about the division of the world into a datum and a faktum that is then synthesized according to a transcendental deduction unique to that particular philosophy, I find myself completely lost when I get to Brassier’s discussions of cloning, the given-without-givenness, determination-in-the-last-instance, and real-in-the-last-instance. Any help as to just how this dimension of his argument is to be understood would be greatly appreciated. In the absence of an understanding of this move, it seems to me that Laruelle’s position just degenerates into the worst sort of philosophical relativism”
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/04/14/laruelle-and-the-non-concept-of-matter/
Reid’s right here. Even if you try to argue that Brassier isn’t succeeding at what he’s trying to do, it doesn’t make him a reductivist.
Nihil Unbound was tough going for me, but it is beyond clear what Brassier is rejecting about Churchland’s argument. You haven’t got a leg to stand on.
As to the folk-psychology thing — You can be a non-reductivist and still believe that folk-psychological notions as they exist are totally wrong. I am one such person.
I will say I sympathize with your frustration here, however. It is certainly annoying when someone reduces a very complex philosophical position to a vulgar epithet or charge, like suggesting that there’s no place for humans in a particular ontology or that a particular ontology rejects all normativity and functions as an apologetics for neoliberal capitalism, etc. That’s really not fair to a philosophical position. While I don’t think one can sustain the case that Brassier is not a reductivist and that there is a place for politics, ethics, etc., within his ontology as these are all based on folk-psychological categories, I can see why you would be irritated with a label like “neurology death cult”.
It’s also frustrating when someone says that what is actually argued in the text is not relevant to how we characterize the writer’s position.
Hear hear. I don’t exactly agree with the precise way Ray problematises the relation between the manifest and scientific image, but nonetheless strongly agree with the fact that he problematises it.
There have been some bad misrepresentations of Brassier and anyone else who stands on the roughly materialist/naturalist side of, and the sooner we start debating the relative merits of the actual positions themselves, rather than straw men, the better off we’ll all be.
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Hi Reid,
I’m also very interested in trying to reconstruct a Marxist politics which is able to incorporate the critical standpoint of the speculative realists, and despite the fact that there’s as yet no explicit political program to Brassier’s philosophy, I still find his work encouraging given that he utilises a few Marxist concepts along the way, ‘commodification’, ‘reification’ and ‘species-being’ being the ones that immediately spring to mind. Like many of us, I’m very much looking forward to a systematic presentation of these ideas in the not too distant future.
Yet, to play the village idiot here, I’m not sure how a Marxist politics might be founded on this ontological conception of the ‘shame’ or ‘trauma’ of being alive. Who is it who feels this trauma? And if I’m not feeling particularly traumatised does this mean I have a false consciousness? Presumably the trauma is for those who are aware of the (subjective?) dissonance between scientific objectivity and those subjective myths we live by (i.e. freedom of volition), and from this standpoint we can somehow construct a new mode of ‘knowing’ which shuttles back and forth between the critical perpective of the scientific image and the constructive perspective of the manifest image. And from there we might increase our capacity to act, or fulfil our potential to know: a politics which appears to be basically Aristotelian. Yet even to admit that this manifest image holds some weight (or is equally valuable) is surely to give some ground to the forces of history: the manifest image as I understand it being the way in which humankind has come to ‘conventionally’ understand the world. And this mode of knowing as ‘transposition’, isn’t this ascribing an ideal constructive capacity to the human subject, in just the same way as Brassier transcendentalizes the concept of ‘trauma’?
Obviously this is not an orthodox reading of Marx, although I think it is more faithful than most orthodoxy.
The who in question is the proletariat, as the class whose existence coincides with its own dissolution (the subject that witnesses and survives its own desubjectivation is Agamben’s definition of shame, and also is the sense of trauma undergone by the manifest image in Brassier). Marx says this quite explicitly. The proletariat is not an already constituted class or social group, but a class that must be constituted (Marx thinks that the industrial working class will serve as the initial base, but to identify the two is plainly wrong), and whose constitution as such would coincide with the dissolution of class itself.
Marx moreover says that the proletariat is that form of humanity that survives the ‘complete loss of man’, his total reduction to the commodity form. As the working class is the first social group to become commodified in this way, to experience and survive the loss of its humanity, he naturally thinks they are the first to enter the proletariat.
I think in this regard, its important to distinguish proletarianization, as the process in which people are stripped of their capacity to survive without selling their labor-power, and the proletariat itself. The former always concludes with the people in question re-appropriating means of survival in the form of a wage and consumption, hence thereby covering over the radical de-humanization or de-subjectivation they undergo. The proletariat itself is constituted as soon as such people confront this dimension as a constitutive condition. In this regard, its not a matter of false consciousness: the trauma is not necessarily something that actually happens (although it does actually happen to many people), but is more importantly something already accomplished insofar as you are capable of living, insofar as you are somehow integrated into relations of production, and also something that hangs over your head as a constant threat in the form of unemployment.
So its not necessarily a matter of scientific naturalization rubbing up against human autonomy, although this is an example of the shame structure. It’s more of a directly socio-economic question of the a priori expropriation founding one’s capacity to live.
Its not a matter of bringing one to ‘correct’ consciousness so much as valorizing a subjective position oriented around a certain constitutive impossibility, the sense in which the subject coincides with its own loss, as opposed to a position that represses or disavows this impossibility.
It is also less a question of Aristotelian increasing of potential than one of a certain universality, a universal solidarity on the basis of this constitutive dimension of shame, both on the ‘psychological’ level attested to in the discussion of neurophilosophy, and the economic level attested to in Marx. In capitalism, this dimension is somehow covered up and used to extort people, or is brutally and mercilessly exposed in the form of injury, poverty, expropriation, etc. Its a question of how to found a collective living-together, a collective project that is universally inclusive, how to reconstitute a relation to others and to oneself that does not fall prey to the same problems as capitalism and other social formations.
As for your point about the historicity of the manifest image, I’m not really sure what you mean. The constitutive capacity isn’t ideal, its material-praxical, manifest in practice, including habituation at the level of the brain. For Brassier, this trauma is a necessary and universal condition for knowledge in the scientific sense, but this does not mean that it is somehow also constitutive of the world or the objects of knowledge. That’s the point of the discussion of Laruelle and being-nothing.
I hope this answers some questions, I realize its a bit rambling but I’m in a rush. If it’s not adequate let me know and I’ll try to clarify later.
Reid: “PHILOSOPHY SHOULD NOT REJECT THE MANIFEST IMAGE IN FAVOR OF THE SCIENTIFIC IMAGE. He says this explicitly! Just read it! Moreover, he goes on to claim that science cannot proceed at all without founding itself on the will to know produced by the manifest image! Philosophy should strive to ’shuttle back and forth’ between the two images, using the resources of science to radicalize and experiment with the manifest image, not abandon it!”
Kvond: Hot damn. Thanks for making Brassier more interesting.
This exchange made my day – I’m going to read me some Brassier today!
Reid, thanks for the clarification, I like the direction your work is going in terms of teasing out a politicised reading of Brassier via Marx. I still find it difficult to accept the contention that ‘trauma’ is a ‘universal condition for knowledge’ given that concepts of trauma seem to depend on a quasi-Freudian folk psychology, one which is then inflated and projected onto an ontology of the human. Likewise, I fear that without some kind of conception of history in your account of class struggle you’ll risk ending up with an ahistorical or ‘moral’ proletariat, a proletariat ‘who have nothing to lose but their shame’. If this ‘constitutive capacity’ (which maintains a subjective relation between the scientific and manifest image) ‘isn’t ideal’ but is ‘material-praxical, manifest in practice’ then I assume this practice changes with history, as does the human, along with the world it co-exists with, and its historically contingent manifest images, etc. Ultimately, I’m still not sure what use the terms ‘trauma’ and ‘shame’ might have for Marx-to me, they still seem to be transcendentalized terms for modes of phenomenological experience. Anyway, still have many aspects of your post to digest, so I hope I haven’t misread you too much
I’m still working on all of this, mind you, and I’m in relatively early stages, so I hope you’ll excuse the provisional nature of my reply.
I’m not sure what you mean by “concepts of trauma seem to depend on a quasi-Freudian folk psychology, one which is then inflated and projected onto an ontology of the human.” If by ‘ontology of the human’ you mean an ontology which deals with the being of humanity, then yes, it is that. But it is in no way makes being dependent on humanity. Knowledge is dependent on the sort of intelligence that humanity happens to carry (due, of course, to historically contingent reasons), but this is an epistemological question, not an ontological one. Nonetheless, the concept of trauma certainly owes much to Freud, specifically to a Lacanian Freud, one who has nothing of interest to say about psychology, but rather is concerned with metapsychological structural conditions under which something like thought, a psyche, and inner life, become possible (as fantasmatic, illusory). In this regard, I would place both Freud and Lacan in what Brassier refers to as the tradition probing the extremities of the manifest image.
I do have a concept of history, although its only ever been vaguely hinted at here. I’m working on a paper developing it right now, and I’ll hopefully discuss it as that process goes on. Nonetheless, I fear that your invocations of history here run the opposite risk, of leaning towards historicism. I’d on the other hand endorse an ahistorical (which does not mean atemporal) condition of historicity, which would be precisely the traumatic loss of prehistory. This is conceived along Lacanian lines, in the form of fundamental fantasy, a structurally necessary supposition of a time in which we were conscious before we confronted our own fragility and mortality.
Shame is certainly ‘transcendental’ in this sense, although it is a transcendental with a thoroughly material-pracical genesis (Sohn-Rethel is the model here). I’m not sure what you mean by ‘phenomneological experience’, because the point of the concept is to denote the point at which phenomenological consciousness confronts its own dissolution, ruination, etc. The latter may be a condition for the former in the sense that the former must somehow repress or disavow its necessary confrontation with the latter, but this, again, is far less a matter of installing folk-psychological terms as transcendentally necesssary than it is about mobilizing the capacities of the manifest image against itself, which is precisely Brassier’s project, and moreover, is isomorphic with Marx’s project vis-a-vis capitalism.
Anyway, there should hopefully be a lot more explication of these points up here in the coming months, so hopefully what isn’t clear now will start to come clear there.
Not to be too unkind, but this is the second time I have seen Levi attempt to dispute Brassier et al with Reid, and frankly it is the second time I have seen Reid undress him. It should be recommended to Levi that he avoid disputing with Reid in this area, inparticular with the aire of the-master-of-the-discourse authority he likes to carry with him (along with his remarkable capacity to conduct a mult-level reading). Its much better to remain in the more impromptu Speculative Realm where more or less everything goes.
I appreciate your angle Reid, but I think you’re wrong: you’ve isolated a very small section of Nihil Unbound, one that didn’t immediately evoke memroies for me of having read it, despite having read the book very thoroughly, and then you have read what you want to read into that paragraph, which actually seems to have more to do with Brassier’s take on Levinas, than on Brassier’s actual thought. A few pages later he then overturns Levinas’ thought, taking a more through nihilistic angle (just read from where you quote to the end of that section).
I don’t beleive Brassier intends on bringing in any redemptive factor for the subject. He may give the conditions of possibility for the subject to exist, but that doesn’t change the fact that the subject is ‘dead’for him.
His closing lines are pretty clear on this:
“In becoming equal to it,philosophy achieves a binding of extinction, through which the will to know is finally
rendered commensurate with the in-itself. This binding coincides with the objectification
of thinking understood as the adequation without correspondence between the objective
reality of extinction and the subjective knowledge of the trauma to which it gives rise. It is this adequation that constitutes the truth of extinction. But to acknowledge this truth,
the subject of philosophy must also recognize that he or she is already dead, and that
philosophy is neither a medium of affirmation, nor a source of justification, but rather the
organon of extinction.”
Even here he may seem to be giving the subject a slight reprieve, but then he’s already specified that that same subject is both dead and extinct… if he were wanting to argue for some cute little dialectic interaction between the subject and science (essentally the ‘subject’ and ‘object’), as you argue, he wouldn’t have overturned Adorno so throughly in Ch.2, where Adorno tries to do precisely that, and he could do no better than refraining in keeping referring to the subject as dead… a pretty damning statement that’ll put paid to him ever publishing in Reader’s
Digest!
I appreciate the criticism, but referring to these lines seems only to support my take. I don’t think its right to suggest I pulled something out of context – the lines I cited were from one of the concluding sections, constituting one of the final statements assessing the trajectory of the manifest image throughout the text. I don’t see how the reading of Levinas does anything to undermine this statement; if anything, the first sentence of the next paragraph suggests that this reading is intended to support the cited claims. His criticisms of Levinas are centered on the ethical reinscription of trauma, which is also the sense in which it is subordinate to phenomenological self-understanding of the manifest image. But my point in no way relied on either phenomenological or ethical reinscription.
The point about being already dead is, again, supportive of my reading. The point about anterior posteriority is that the subject in a sense coincides with its own death, it outlives its own death in the mode of not knowing it is yet dead, gradually coming to realize it was always already dead. This strange persistence in death is precisely the mode in which the manifest image remains irreducible.
As for the point about Adorno, the criticism is precisely of the dialectic of subject and science, as you say. Yet Brassier spends quite a lot of time on a non-dialectical negativity precisely for this reason: a way of thinking the strange dissonance between subject and science without one sublating the other.
I’d just like to point out that any death cult coming out of eliminative materialism would be a neuroscientific, not a neurological one.
Multiple levels notwithstanding, I share your bewilderment that anybody could read Nihil Unbound and come away thinking that it advocated straightforward reductivism.
OK but there is no sublation for Adorno either. The latter’s ‘life mimicking death in order to live’ becomes ‘death mimicking death’, with no life, for Brassier. Our forecast extinction points to our current extinction, rather than being a being a distant opporunity for circumvention of that same Universal extinction by whatever species exists at that point (as far fetched as that now seems).
The dialectic interaction you talk of between the Manifest Image and Science is surely a dialectic between subject and object, such, as you correctly say, has been dismissed.
I actually get what you’re saying though, yet if you’re right in saying that Brassier does take the stance outlined by you, and supported by that on quote, then brassier is at fault in giving too much over to the aegis of ‘death’ rather than ‘life’ in the text as a whole. Why is he not proclaiming the resilience of life in the face of death: Life lives even as dead? This is where the ‘death cult’ notion comes from, and if it is a misinterpretation of Brassier’s thought, then Brassier is to blame for it. For he could easily have stated the case that you are attributing as a primary aimng in a book less pervaded by death, nullity and extinction. In fact as a thinker sympathetic to
science the bias in his use of words here, given your anlysis of what he apparently is saying, is most unscientific. One could argue that he used such language to prevent his philosophy from becoming another ‘pathetic sop to the human twinge of sentiment’ but then that would rebound on itself in your analysis as he seems somehow to spirit in a ‘life’ for the ‘subject’ in the final sections of his book. I don’t know that you’re wrong per se in attributing what you have to Brassier, but I think NU does not set out a clear project. That’s fine, not many projects are clear. Take any philosopher and the same could be said on the whole. But for this reason I cannot take what you say as the final and only word! …but it has made me think again… thank you
Adorno may not have recourse to a straightforward Hegelian dialectic, but his non-conceptual difference nonetheless leaves the Hegelian mechanism roughly intact while simply undermining its capacity for completion. Brassier, in contrast, rejects such a difference extrinsic to the concept that serves as an unsurpassable obstacle, in favor of emphasizing the identity in conceptualization by way of which the concept is given, yet which is not reciprocally given by the concept.
This is why Brassier employs a concept of death. Death is typically thought as the return to the inanimate, as distinct from non-life, which is simply the inanimate itself. Hence, to say that life is always already dead is to say it has already returned to the inanimate by which it is given. This is saying something different than that there is no such thing as life. The point is that distinction between life and death is unilaterally determined by the non-life which gives both in their identity and distinction. This is why he says, at the end of the Adorno chapter:
“Yet thanatropic mimicry is the symptom of a non-conceptual negativity which is already at work among objects independently of their relation to subjectivity; a non-dialectical negativity which is not only independent of mind but realizes the indistinction of identity and non-identity outside the concept…In this regard, the thanatosis of enlightenment marks that point at which the transcendental subject of cognition is expropriated and ‘objective knowledge’ switches from expressing the subject’s knowledge of the object to the object’s knowledge of itself and of the subject that thinks it knows it.” [44]
Thus, the subject (and, correlatively, life) is not dispelled, it is retained but in the mode of belonging to the object, rather than to itself. Life as belonging to the non-living is death, in the sense that it has already returned to the inanimate. It would perhaps be more correct to reverse Adorno: Death mimicks life, or more precisely, the non-living mimicks life, which is therefore already dead.
I certainly understand why the heavy use of the concept of death would lead to such name-calling, I don’t really care except that it is used to avoid actually engaging the position with which one disagrees.
I don’t think the aim is that obscure. He begins by discussing the difference between manifest and scientific images, and by rejecting the straightforward reduction of the former to the latter. He then goes through several attempts to bridge the gap, all of which in some manner endorse the opposite reduction, while nonetheless gaining conceptual materials for a non-reductive dualysation. He concludes by sketching this dissonant duality. Moreover, I don’t see why its unscientific. It seems, on the contrary, that he shows how reductivism is unscientific insofar as it compromises the norms that make science possible. Rather, he attempts to reconceive scientific knowledge as a self-knowledge of the object achieved by proxy through human intelligence, which arises due to a ‘glitch’ in the manifest image. So I don’t think its some kind of desperate deus ex machina at the end, it seems a clear and consistent argument.
I do certain appreciate the criticism greatly, as it is far better to engage arguments than name-calling straw-manning.
of course, Ray is attempting to locate the stance of Thought (in Laruellian sense) in its necessarily unilateral correlating with the unattainable Real; Ray is merely talking about the “untold” in Laruelle’s thought that is always already assumed there, or implied – the Lived (again a Laruellian term) of the radical solitude of Thought; lived or “le joui” is a concept coming from non-analysis, the Laruellian reversal of Lacanian psychoanalysis, so it does contain the meaning of trauma
I don’t think Adorno maintains a Hegelian element in that sense. Brassier implies he does, but Adorno clearly states across his ouvre that the subject will always revert into objectivity, not as a gradual upwards move towards sublation, but a a perpetual negative turning. Adorno, for me, says what you are trying to attibute to Brassier – life lives within the aegis of death, because of the later, not inspite of it.
“The object’s knowledge of itself and of the subject thst thinks it….” is not the subject’s being subject in spite of its objectivity, it is the subject’s being the object that is subject, always on the pole of the object, which in fact includes the pole of the subject, a point which becomes clearer in Brassier’s appropriation of Laruelle’s ‘determination-inthe-last-instance’.
“Laruelle’s work challenges this correlationist consensus by proposing a version of transcendental realism wherein the object is no longer conceived of as a substance but rather as a discontinuous cut in the fabric of ontological synthesis. It is no longer thought that determines the object, whether
through representation or intuition, but rather the object that seizes thought and forces it
to think it, or better, according to it. As we have seen, this objective determination takes
the form of a unilateral duality whereby the object thinks through the subject.”
The subject is animated by the lifeless object, so any appearance of life is merely feigned unkowingly, in contrast to the Adornian feigning of life by the subject (that is object).
Although Brassier has approached DofE where this isn’t entirely clear, it’s still evident.
Yes, no worries, I won’t strawman you, or chuck out insults. Curiously though, whilst I have this discussion going here, Levi Bryant is taking to me account on the Larval Subjects blog over my post at Speculative Heresy, on a quite different basis! I suddenly feel ‘wanted’ !
Fair enough, I’m not nearly as well read on Adorno as I would have to be to continue this.
“not the subject’s being subject in spite of its objectivity, it is the subject’s being the object that is subject, always on the pole of the object, which in fact includes the pole of the subject”
I don’t see how these are different. The latter is precisely what I meant with the former. They way you present Adorno looks identical to the way I see Brassier. I guess the critical point would come in what Adorno (at least according to NU) sees as a potential for redemption, escape from instrumental rationality, etc.
Good luck!
well, I think this is prcisely where me’re disagreeing… it is relly because there is a real closeness between what Adorno actually says and what Brassier argues for.
But that does hinge on Adorno’s ‘hope’ which brassier sees in residing in a better future which will reflexively redeem the past, thus redeeming the present. However, I would argue that Adorno’s hope exists in lieu of the object of that same hope ever being realisable, and it is that hope that is ‘life’, as the realisation by the subject of its objectivity, and the possibility of escape from objectivity that that infers, but which will never come about, as objectivity is essential for the subject.
anyhow, that’s what I think.
But yes, it may seem like splitting hairs…
obviously, sorry for the spelling mistakes
=precisely, we’re, disagreeing, etc !
Reid: “Death is typically thought as the return to the inanimate, as distinct from non-life, which is simply the inanimate itself. Hence, to say that life is always already dead is to say it has already returned to the inanimate by which it is given. This is saying something different than that there is no such thing as life. The point is that distinction between life and death is unilaterally determined by the non-life which gives both in their identity and distinction.”
Kvond: Just to give the weekly Spinoza dose, the above is essentially the return of modal subjectivity to Substance (which is “dead” because it has no affects), from which it was never separated.
As alreadly mentioned, in the rhetorical thrust/accusation towards death the “dead” as well must be understood in context with Lacan’s analytic “la mort” and Freud’s “death drive” (the unwege towards the abiotic), in which there is a improper conflation between the unwege [unwinding] and the thought “I want to die”. The “dead” is actually ecstatic.
Thougts on the unwege and the Pleasure Principle: http://kvond.wordpress.com/2009/06/14/the-zuggtmonic-drive-dark-intelligence-without-center/
Damn, I’m lexically and phonetically perverse. Umwege, not Unwege.
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