On Para-academia: some Metaphilosophical Reflections

•November 16, 2012 • 13 Comments

I’ve been silent for a while, and this post is by no means a rebirth of this blog. I simply feel that I should make public some metaphilosophical considerations regarding some issues that seem to me of extreme importance and that demand that I break my usual silence. As it happens, some of my ideas here go against the apparent consensus among friends and colleagues out there, but I mean what follows in constructive, rather than confrontational spirit.

Some may have noticed that I haven’t participated in the discussions related to ‘para-academic practices’ which took place between my fellow Speculations editors and the editors of continent. (here and at the conference in Basel last September). Why? Whilst some economic considerations made it impossible for me to be present in Basel aside, an honest answer is that I am somewhat sceptical towards the enthusiasm many out there are displaying towards ‘para-academia’.

As an undergraduate, I became enamoured with Pierre Hadot’s reconstruction of the history of ancient philosophy, and enthusiastically agreed with his indictment of late medieval and, mainly, modern ‘academic’ philosophy, The latter was, in his eyes, guilty of taking philosophy off the streets and enclosing it within high University walls, changing its very nature and corrupting its transformative power. So Hadot thought that

from the end of the eighteenth century onward, a new philosophy made its appearance within the University, in the persons of Wolff, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. From now on, with a few rare exceptions like Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, philosophy would be indissolubly linked to the University. We see this in the case of Bergson, Husserl, and Heidegger. This fact is not without importance. Philosophy – reduced, as we have seen, to philosophical discourse develops from this point on in a different atmo­sphere and environment from that of ancient philosophy. In modern University philosophy, philosophy is obviously no longer a way of life or form of life – unless it be the form of life of a professor of philosophy. Nowadays, philosophy’s element and vital milieu is the state educational institution; this has always been, and may still be, a danger for its independence.

(Philosophy as a Way of Life: 271).

So much did I embrace Hadot’s vision, that I decided to leave academic philosophy altogether, tired with the self-referential and pretentious debates I heard around me. That didn’t work out very well after all. Still, even today, I retain some of my undergraduate fervour for ‘philosophy for something’ (which does not mean to subordinate philosophy to anything, just to envision it as producing intellectual progress that eventually feeds back into culture as a whole).

It is undeniable that nowadays a lot of professional philosophy is self-referential to an angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin debate level. Last year Philip Kitcher published a provoking paper (paywalled, email me for the pdf) comparing the current institutional practice of (analytic) philosophy to that of music as practised inside peculiarly uncreative kind of conservatories. It’s easier to quote here the opening paragraph rather than summarize the protracted metaphor:

Once upon a time, in a country not too far away, the most prominent musicians decided to become serious about their profession. They encouraged their promising students to devote hours to special exercises designed to strengthen fingers, shape lips, and extend breath control. Within a few years, conservatories began to hold exciting competitions, at which the most rigorous etudes would be performed in public. For a while, these contests went on side by side with concerts devoted to the traditional repertoire. Gradually, however, interest in the compositions of the past—and virtually all those of the present—began to wane. Serious pianists found the studies composed by Chopin, Liszt, Debussy, and Ligeti insufficiently taxing, and they dismissed the suites, concertos, and sonatas of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and Prokofiev as worthy of performance only by second-raters. Popular interest in the festivals organized by the major conservatories quickly declined, although the contests continued to be attended by a tiny group of self-described cognoscenti. A few maverick musicians, including some who had once been counted among the serious professionals, offered performances of works their elite ex-colleagues despised. When reports of the broad enthusiastic response to a recital centered on the late Beethoven sonatas came to the ears of the professionals, the glowing reviews produced only a smile and a sniff. For serious pianists, the fact that one of their former fellows had now decided to slum it was no cause for serious concern. Compared to the recent competition in which one pianist had delivered Multi-Scale 937 in under 70100” and another had ornamented Quadruple Tremolo 41 with an extra trill, an applauded performance of the Hammerklavier was truly small potatoes. As time went on, the outside audience for ‘‘serious performance’’ dwindled to nothing, and the public applause for the ‘‘second-raters’’ who offered Bach, Chopin, and Prokofiev became more intense. The smiles of the cognoscenti became a little more strained, and the sniffs were ever more disdainful.

(Philosophy Inside Out: 248-249)

The allegory here is built to match the analytic camp, but with some modifications (indulgence in overtly-experimental, avant-garde arrangements rather than hyper-technical etudes) it could as well be applied to the more continental/theory kind of academic work (what’s continental philosophy’s music? Jazz?). (Summarizing his argument to the bone and glossing over its Deweyian slant) Kitcher’s moral is that

In setting high standards for precision and clarity, the Anglophone philosophy of the past half century can be valuable…—just as finger-tangling etudes can be excellent preparation for aspiring pianists. Yet unless one can show that the more abstract questions do contribute to the solution of problems of more general concern, that they are not simply exercises in virtuosity, they should be seen as preludes to philosophy rather than the substance of it.

(259)

But is this a fair assessment? Unlike Kitcher, James Ladyman defended specialization and technical proficiency in professional philosophy claiming that given the sheer breadth of human knowledge it is simply impossible to produce philosophical progress, today, without specialists concentrating their efforts on specific, and sometimes technical, problems. This is the hackneyed analytic vs. synoptic opposition: in my view, both are equally necessary. So Ladyman is correct when he writes that

It is…unwise to expect the average academic philosopher to do justice to the subject as a whole. Rather, it is important that some people become specialised in understanding exactly why we do not know the answers to specific questions many of which make sense only to experts. This may not amount to advancing our understanding of the meaning of life, but it is in keeping with Socrates’ conception of the philosopher as gadfly, asking awkward questions and exposing epistemic hubris.

And yet Kitcher’s parody doesn’t lose its bite when we consider that sometimes it is easy, within an overgrown specialized field, for certain degenerate research programs to get mixed up with those others which are worth pursuing (and indeed, remember Ladyman’s scathing assessment of contemporary metaphysics in chapter one of Every Thing Must Go). Moreover, Christopher Norris indirectly replied to Ladyman’s defense of specialization when he very cogently noted (in the last piece of metaphilosophical reflection I’m going to refer to) that

the philosopher-specialists are apt to finally disqualify themselves, as did the logical positivists before them, by imitating science but inevitably lagging behind it by any measure of substantive contributions to knowledge….Hence the unfortunate impression often given by, say, philosophers of mind or philosophers of perception, that they’re somehow hoping to bootstrap their way by sheer analytical acuity to discoveries of the sort more typically and aptly claimed by disciplines such as neurophysiology.

…

Where analytic philosophers tend to go wrong is not in striving for the conceptual precision or explanatory power that typifies good physical science, nor in taking scientific methods and procedures as an object of study. Rather it is in academic philosophy’s wholesale adoption of a notionally science-led research culture, where piecemeal problem-solving is the order of the day, and there is little or no room for the kind of nonconformist speculative thought that has been a regular hallmark of major advances in philosophy, as well as in the sciences. By surrendering that crucial margin of autonomy – the space for independent critical reflection on whatever engages one’s interest – philosophy aligns itself not so much with science itself, but with a markedly paradigm-conserving, conformist type of scientific activity. In so doing, it fails to make contact with the physical sciences or other regions of enquiry in a way that might yield the highest rate of mutual benefit.

I agree with Ladyman that philosophical problems shouldn’t be pursued with the explicit (and intellectually constraining) aim of delivering ready-made results to the general public (to this extent philosophy indeed is ‘not for the masses’ as per the title of his essay), and therefore that we shouldn’t aim at playing yet another Beethoven concerto just to make people happy – to stick with Kitcher’s metaphor. But I also think, with Norris, that even the most technical issues should always be capable of be seen (perhaps through a long chain of more or less direct conceptual relations) as part of an overarching project of human progress of clearly distinguishable and explainable value and oriented towards conceptual innovation (and I guess that this is where the Sellarsians will get excited, and start claiming that good old Wilfrid was precisely capable of doing both at the same time). But, importantly, here’s where the musical metaphor breaks, and this is a crucial point: call me old-fashioned, but I believe in a handful of classic Enlightenment values, among which is the progress-producing power of knowledge. I don’t believe that music, nor any other artistic pursuit, can so easily accommodate progress talk – if at all (more on this later).

What I want to highlight is that the problem, as I see it, should go under the name of self-referentiality. By this I mean both the lack of contact with the wider society and the internal loss of discrimination between progress-bound research avenues on the one hand and projects as self-flattering as fruitless on the other. Self-referentiality kills (good) philosophy because the wider public is interested in receiving and participating in philosophical education whenever given the chance (there are countless examples to bring to corroborate this claim, from small scale philosophy nights at local pubs to city-wide philosophical festivals over entire days), and ivory-tower enclosure keeps what should be an integral part of society’s intellectual life criminally inaccessible for most people.

But — and here I start treading on contentious ground — self-referentiality of the second kind (internal miopia to the effective value of one’s own philosophical scene) can easily survive, and thrive, even where philosophy has been helped to evade the Tower. Sometimes the freedom from stifling (or perceived as such) academic norms or standards is hard to manage, and often the result of such release from academic shackles is work of dubious worth because, well, it is self-referential (keep in mind that I am mainly referring to philosophy here: I don’t have the credentials to comment on any other discipline). To focus on ‘speculative’ circles, it seems evident to me that (mutatis mutandis: replace focus on texts, signs and signifiers with that on stars, monsters and cosmic darkness) many are repeating exactly the same kind of conceptual excesses and indulging in the Byzantine, affected and jargon-heavy prose we accuse minor deconstructionists of engaging in with abandon in the 1980s and the 1990s. Too much self-referentiality, and too little of that necessary ingredient of any responsible philosophy: self-criticism.

That was me being diplomatic and polite. Let me reformulate the thought in a more direct way. Some of the stuff out there, to say it with Wolfgang Pauli, is not even wrong. Too often I see para-academic work boiling down to philosophically uninteresting and sterile lucubrations on the author’s favourite topic, book or musical genre. And sometimes it is really just worthless bullshit. I know that nowadays the hip thing to think is that academic, University-based philosophy is necessarily musty, boring and inconsequential but (even if true) this doesn’t mean that we should give up on the institution of the University. Yes, often academic philosophical work is worthless bullshit too. But to think that the solution to all philosophical (internal) ills is to re-cast it all into a para-academic shape is mistaken. There is only good philosophy and bad philosophy and our main (if not unique) interest and intellectual responsibility should be discriminating between the two, whatever their provenance. So, I want to claim that

1)      If we want to reform academic philosophy we cannot just abandon ship. The institution of the University, in its ideal form (more on this later) is a damn fine ship. It’s one of the most important institutions humans have created, and if today it is in a late-capitalist shambles we should feel the moral obligation to re-found  it according to our best ideals (as radical an overhaul as necessary) rather than simply sneer at it as doomed to unredeemable complicity with the economic machine.

2)      Even more contentiously, I believe that some form of institutional regulation, mostly in the form of training requisites, is necessary for good philosophy to be possible.

In the context of the debate between my Speculations friends and the continent. editors a lot of emphasis has been put on the Academia / University distinction (put forward by Michael), privileging the first as an ideal space of knowledge communication while denouncing the latter as an overly-bureaucratized, profit-seeking institution. I want to endorse this distinction, if with a few caveats. It is not enough to call Academia a space for knowledge exchange. I think that it is important to distinguish between the communication of knowledge and the creation of knowledge. When the other editors discuss the value of open access publications and of the myriad of ways in which everyone can today virtually attend classes delivered by the best teachers in their field I could not agree more with their emphasis on the necessity of promoting these forms of dissemination of knowledge as widely and as radically as possible. I’ve always been a committed supporter of open access publications, and I believe that the days of paywalled academic journals and of expensive academic books are numbered (or should be forcefully made so by us). Both Springer and Elsevier have recently introduced an ‘open access option’ for contributors to their journals: they just ask the author for 2000 Euros/Dollars upfront to have his or her article go open access. What is this if not the shameful, shamelessly exploitative, foolish grasping at straws of corporations terrified by the sudden realization that their source of profit is doomed to disappear? Both the dissemination of new knowledge and University education should be free (i.e., fully subsidised by tax-payers’ money). Fullstop.

But so far we’ve only touched the issue of the communication/exchange/dissemination of knowledge, not that of its creation. If no good philosophy is created, it doesn’t really matter how widely it gets circulated or how freely one can access to it (in fact, when bad philosophy goes viral it’s only for the worst). There sometimes seems to be the tacit assumption that a greater circulation of ideas will necessarily produce more quality. Perhaps this is my very own temperamental attitude speaking, but I’m someone who, against this assumption, fully subscribes to Deleuze’s famous considerations on philosophical conversations:

philosophy [doesn’t] find any final refuge in communication, which only works under the sway of opinions in order to create “consensus” and not concepts. The idea of a Western democratic conversation between friends has never produced a single concept.

…

Every philosopher runs away when he or she hears someone say, “Let’s discuss this.” Discussions are fine for roundtable talks, but philosophy throws its numbered dice on another table. The best one can say about discussions is that they take things no farther, since the participants never talk about the same thing. Of what concern is it to philosophy that someone has such a view, and thinks this or that, if the problems at stake are not stated? And when they are stated, it is no longer a matter of discussing but rather one of creating concepts for the undiscussible problem posed. Communication always comes too early or too late, and when it comes to creating, conversation is always superfluous.

(What is Philosophy?: 6, 28)

I’m no Deleuzian, but Deleuze is actually an excellent example to introduce my general point: someone who has undoubtedly been one of the most original, daring, creative and speculative philosophers of the XXth century, and someone who can hardly be accused of academic conservativism. But his most speculative moments were always supported by his frighteningly deep knowledge of the history of philosophy (and history of science), the product of the most classical French University training married to an exceptional mind (and the same, of course, goes for all of his great French contemporaries). To think that we should simply remove all academic constraints and gatekeeping to sit back and witness a thousand speculative flowers bloom in occasional workshops or collectives (or the blogosphere) is to be (at least) dangerously optimistic.

I’ve read somewhere an argument to the effect that the lack of academic patronage in people like Leibniz, Hume, Diderot and other philosophical protagonists of the pre-Kantian philosophical scene somehow proves that, even today, we don’t need academic affiliation to create original thought. This argument, I’m afraid, is at best historically naïve. Sure, these philosophers were not ‘professors’. But they were, pretty much invariably, rich, white males living in a pre-capitalist society and with enough personal wealth to allow them to securely entertain the leisurely activity of philosophizing. When’s the last time you’ve seen a rich, well-educated diplomat writing metaphysical treatises while on business trips? Times have changed, and to look back at the good ol’ times when the ‘everyman’ was a philosopher will not help. Academia, in its idealized (but not utopic) institutional form (that is, organized in Universities) I’m referring to here, should precisely be an environment protected from economic, sexual and racial inequalities and accessible only on the base of intellectual merit. Once again, we cannot give up on this ideal just because its current shape is tragically less than ideal. We need Universities, and that fact that nowadays philosophy is bound to decadently bureaucratized institutional conditions should only encourage us to renew it, and create better Universities (a task which is arguably inextricably bound with a larger-scale renewal of our society and its economic organization). To corroborate this point, look at the phenomenon of ‘philosophical counselling’ which, often explicitly endorsing an Hadottian call to bring philosophy out of the University and back to bear directly on people’s lives, really boils down to a commodification of ‘philosophical’ self-help paid by the hour.

I endorse all of my friends’ reflections on the necessity of ‘opening the gates’ of academia when it comes to democratizing its output of knowledge, but I think that some gatekeeping is necessary when the goal is to maximise the quality of production of new knowledge. Paul Boshears recently wrote that ‘when it is impossible for any one person to distinguish signal from noise, reliable signal markers are necessary. This promise is implicit in the vetting process that underwrites accreditation’. Indeed. And my point is: if nowadays the accreditation process has been reduced to more of a monetary exchange between ‘prestigious’ institutions and debt-ridden students (converting monetary capital into symbolic capital, as Bordieu would have it) than to a question of objective merit, it doesn’t follow that we should throw the baby of the vetting process out with the bathwater of a corrupt, McDonaldized University system. So here’s my most conservative line: no good philosophy gets created without very good training (methodological and historical), a training that takes time, effort and humility and, crucially, training that needs to be delivered in an appropriate institutional setting. To be completely honest, I’m not even so positive as I used to be towards the internet-based ways through which anyone can now rise to sudden philosophical fame. To re-employ the image used by Paul above, the signal to noise ratio gets so unbearably high that it becomes humanly impossible to tell the wheat from the chaff and, in the worst cases, theorizing of low quality but high intellectual marketability gets more attention than it deserves (a phenomenon someone would call an ‘online orgy of stupidity’). It seems to me too high a price to pay to break out of the—admittedly slow and archaic—academic journal avenue of publication (and these considerations partially explain why I retreated from the blogosphere). In the meantime, open access journals with a quicker turnaround and wider distribution (like Speculations and continent.) are a better compromise between quality control and wide dissemination, but even this is no ideal solution. I think that an interesting route would be open access peer-review: for a period of time a given paper gets posted on an internet platform where a large number of (perhaps anonymous, perhaps not) reviewers (from a pool of selected editors, not just anyone) can comment according to a pre-defined format which emphasises constructive comments strictly relevant to the argument, with the clear aim of delivering, at the end of the review process, a publishable and final piece of writing (I don’t believe in continuously updatable pieces of writing: that’s a late deconstructionist/1990s hypertext-cyberculture ideal which is just impractical and ultimately useless).

So what should we do? I will endorse ‘para-academia’ where that means the effort to create new kinds of Universities, organized according to different and better guidelines but where intellectual freedom doesn’t get confused with a theorizing free-for-all. (I’ve seen several references to the Public School in New York, as an excellent example of a para-academic institution to follow. As interesting as it looks, I don’t know enough about it to pass an informed judgment, but I would like to note that experiments of this sort are nothing too new: in 2013 will recur the 30th year celebrations for the founding, in 1983, of the Collège International de Philosophie, an institution founded in Paris by the likes of Derrida, Lecourt, Faye and Châtelet with the intention of reforming what was perceived to be an inadequate approach to philosophy in the French universities, and organized around the ‘principle of intersection’: of systematically mixing philosophy with the arts, sciences and law). However, I’m concerned when talk of para-academia proudly coats itself with an antagonistic tone which seems to betray more a spirit of teenage rebellion against the Dads of the University than a militant desire to draw a concrete strategy to reform an institution we all should care about. If all of today’s young and promising intellectuals self-exile themselves in short-lived and nebulously structured para-academic outfits, tomorrow’s University will remain unchanged.

Ultimately, I think that a very good case can be made that there is simply too much out there: too many ‘philosophers’, too many publications, too many conferences  Here’s where I would enforce an even stricter gatekeeping: the academic market is oversaturated because, for profit’s sake, Universities have been giving away, for the last several decades, Ph.Ds to people that, frankly, didn’t deserve them (having said this, I of course sympathize with the shameful predicament into which underpaid adjuncts are forced into and with that of many friends I know with fresh Ph.Ds and no University employment – and note that I am not predicating from a safe place: I don’t even have a Ph.D yet, and when I will I’ll be adrift in the academic market like everyone else).

Indeed, given that this is delicate ground, and people’s egos are easily bruised, let me put myself on the line, lest I be accused of thinking too highly of myself. In my ideal academic world very few would be accepted into PhD programs, and only after a thorough admission test – like it exists in some European countries. In my ideal academic world, someone like me should not have been accepted for a PhD in the first place, for much higher standards of acquaintance with the philosophical tradition and of production of original thought should be required. This sort of gatekeeping would not mean deficit of intellectual freedom: those qualified enough to enter academia should be left total freedom to follow their own interest. Much of the dynamics which we are well-accustomed to and we are fond of denouncing — academic factions, fashions, clientelism, narrow-mindedness and conservativism — are fuelled by legions of lesser philosophers needing to buttress their intellectual paucity with alternative ways of self-defense. This pruned academia would feed back knowledge into society exclusively through open-access publishing, free internet-delivered lecture courses, and special programs aimed to inform and engage the public. Is this a Kantian utopia of academic freedom? Perhaps, but nothing we don’t already have the resources, today, to bring into reality. I will repeat this: I take the deliverance of free education to be a core duty of any society, on par with free healthcare. But would you want to be cured by a self-taught doctor?

Let me wrap this up by referring directly to the case of the now-ubiquitous term ‘speculation’ or ‘speculative’, often used in these days to indicate a philosophizing method alternative (or at least parallel) to the University-based one. Make no mistake: I am a proud editor of Speculations and Paul, Michael, Thomas and Rob can (I think) testify to my thorough and earnest commitment to the journal and my positive if not ambitious attitude towards its present and future developments. I am also someone who, everything considered, is happy to save the term ‘speculative realism’ from the dustbin of modish philosophical trademarks: I think it’s a good term that can still be salvaged and re-engineered to index an ambitious and genuinely progressive philosophical realist project (and there’s a forthcoming issue of Speculations that will try to do precisely this). That is to say, speculation/speculative can be excellent words to orient philosophical practice to the extent that they are made to resonate with ‘daring’ and ‘innovative’ (meditations on a given issue). But they can also carry with them the meaning of ‘arbitrary’, ‘pretentious’ and ‘hasty’ (conclusions arrived at without sufficient justification). Speculation, in other words, should always be a means to an end, and it seems to me that all too often the end remains out of view, or insufficiently clarified. Contentiously, again, I think this is the gap which lies between philosophy and so-called ‘theory-fiction’: I have nothing against the latter, but it lacks the goal-oriented nature of philosophical thought. As such, its freedom of expression can surely deliver unexpected insights, can be a sandbox for new conceptual tools, or can attempt to express in artistic language what cannot still be expressed through rational argumentation. But it does not do, by itself, any philosophical work. It might even be a necessary part of philosophical work, indispensable for progressing through conceptual revolutions (I am cautious about this, but I’m open to this possibility), but by itself is not sufficient. Cultivated for its own sake, it is frictionless theorizing in the intellectual void. To coat one’s own personal interests with opaque philosophical jargon in order to propel it to cosmic significance and then call it philosophy is nothing but a travesty.

I take philosophy very seriously. Philosophy is not about what is interesting, nor about what is cool or hip. It’s about having the intellectual responsibility of identifying what is important to make sense of for the sake of the expansion of knowledge. It is about seeking rational explanations of human and non-human phenomena, questioning the obvious character of present presuppositions, learning from and drawing upon our best sources of empirical knowledge and engineering new concepts to help make sense of their deliverances. But conceptual engineering must be constrained by its input (avoiding vague references to some kind of intellectual intuition on the state of things) and by its goal (to feed back into a broader explanatory project). All too often free from such scruples, the recent recovery of talk of objective reality has given free rein to a new wave of speculative theorizing which — allegedly about such a reality – expresses, at every step of the way, little more than the author’s narcissistic pleasure in ranting against human narcissism.

Finally, as self-professed Enlightenment supporter, I’m pretty concerned by the current enthusiastic rehabilitation, in the name of ‘realism’, of tropes (mostly of German romantic descent) that belong squarely to the reactionary counter-Enlightenment movement running from Hamann to postmodern relativism or to mystical-irrationalist subcurrents of thought (rather ironically given the feigned hostility to precisely these stances) – something which can be perhaps be explained by a lack of historical consciousness induced by an excessive, intoxicating exposure to speculative thought. Personally, I unconditionally take a philosophically refined (naturalistically motivated) nihilism to be the only responsible and philosophically fertile intellectual stance to endorse as a background to both our inquiries into ourselves and the universe. However, while nihilistic consequences of the Enlightenment (recall how the term nihilism itself was coined by Jacobi in order to find words to denounce the perilous nature of the Enlightenment project, an attitude that survives today in reactionary thinkers like MacIntyre…or Heidegger) are to be embraced rather than evaded, I am truly baffled by certain forms of ‘militant’, indulgent, and self-congratulatory nihilism out there, engaged in what seems to me to be a particularly amusing variety of performative contradiction.

When lacking something meaningful to say, I’d rather shut up. But as I said in the opening, I decided to break the virtual silence of this blog because I genuinely care about these issues. I might be wrong in some of the opinions I’ve expressed here – these are issues I am still trying to grapple with myself. But I hope that they will be received as bearing a constructive desire to improve forms and methods of our philosophizing (to make it more relevant, more effective, and more progressive). If my tone seemed dismissive, I apologize. However, I take the pursuit of truth as more important than the flattery of people’s feelings or polite silence.

 

P.S. – Self-promotion time. Those looking for more critical discussion of ‘speculative realism’ can (while waiting for Speculations IV) take a look at my review essay here, where I essentially describe what SR should be, emphasising its five core commitments.

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Derrida Quote of the Day

•May 21, 2011 • 2 Comments

Context: this quote comes from the concluding essay in Questioning Derrida (2001) where Derrida replies to a number of authors which wrote the other chapters of the book on various facets of his work. This is (part of) the section where he comments on Chris Norris’ essay titled ‘Deconstruction, Ontology and Philosophy of Science: Derrida on Aristotle’.

I am not shocked, even if it makes me smile, to see myself defined by Norris, in a deliberately provocative and ironic manner, as a “transcendental realist”. Earlier I said why I didn’t believe it was necessary to reject the transcendental motive (motif). As for the deconstruction of logocentrism, of linguisticism, of economism (of the self and of the at-home [chez-soi], oikos, of the same) and so on, as for the affirmation of the impossible, these are always advanced in the name of the real, of the irreducible reality of the real —  not of the real as attribute of the objective, present, perceptible or intelligible thing (res), but of the real as the coming or the event of the other, where it resists all reappropriation, even ana-onto-phenomenological appropriation. The real is this non-negative im-possible, this impossible coming or invention of the event whose thought is not an onto-phenomenology. It is a thought of the event (singularity of the other, in its unanticipable coming, hic et nunc) that resists its own reappropriation by an ontology or a phenomenology of presence as such. I’m attempting to dissociate the concept of event and the value of presence. It’s not easy, but I am trying to demonstrate this necessity, like that of thinking the event without being (it) (sans l’etre). Nothing is more “realist”, in this sense, than deconstruction. It is that (whoever) arrives ([ce] qui arrive). And there is no fatality before the fait accompli: neither empiricism nor relativism. Is it to be empiricist or relativist to take into account that which arrives, and the differences of every order, beginning with the difference of context? (113)

Let me comment on this.

Why do I keep banging on with Derrida? Am I expecting people to believe him to be a ‘realist’ now? To turn into Derrideans? No. But that he wasn’t a realist does not mean that he was an anti-realist, or some sort of perverted linguistic idealist with a fetish for written words, someone that has therefore no value whatsoever for those uninterested in ‘language’ and ‘literature’.

This passage makes very clear (and other passages in this chapter are even more explicit) that his understanding of the ‘unpredictable’, ‘unnamable’, ‘indiscernible’ advent/event of the Real is not far at all for that of Badiou. There are bits in this essay where he talks about his understanding of ‘event’ which are indistinguishable from Badiou’s own rhetoric (to this extent, Badiouians that spit on Derrida’s name should probably read before talking). The real ‘that resists any appropriation’, always eluding phenomenological taming.

Is this not materialist enough for you? Fair enough (even though a number of interpreters –and Derrida himself — have explained rather clearly how the structure of the trace presupposes a pre-conscious, pre-personal, pre-human archi-materiality which is nothing ideal or [vulgarly] ‘linguistic’ – and to this extent Derrida is much more of a ‘materialist’ than Badiou is. Plus, he named one of his cats Lucrèce).

It is also true that, in the last decades of his work, Derrida drifted into a way of philosophizing and towards a spectrum of themes (hospitality, traveling, the gift, justice, the secret, forgiveness, the promise, spectres, his cat…) that is legitimate for ‘realists’ to find less directly pertinent to their philosophical agenda. He indulged in his own personal obsessions. So what? Must a philosopher be there just to fullfill your expectations?

Fine, the constant performative obliquity of his style is often tiresome (even though this quoted passage looks pretty clear to me…), but that doesn’t mean that one can just mock it and carry on.

I don’t want everyone (in fact, anyone) to turn Derridean, that’s just stupid. I despise any form of philosophical personality cult. His work is interesting, but — like everyone else’s — limited. And at points disagreeable. I spend much less time than it might seem reading Derrida. But some forms of ignorance just irritate me beyond measure. I’d just like everyone to get the utterly banal point that ‘principled’ rejections are as idiotic as ‘fashions’ and ‘fads’ are.

Anyway, I now probably should stop with the ‘Derrida Quote of the Day’ series [1, 2, 3]: it’s getting a bit boring.

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That’s Weird

•May 13, 2011 • 6 Comments

Yesterday I’ve listened to the recording of China Miéville‘s talk at Kingston University on ‘The Weird’ in fiction and politics (by the way, I’m not sure who runs the Backdoor Broadcasting Company, but they have my deepest respect for what they do). Given my sceptical stance towards the porting of weird tropes and language from fiction to non-fiction (including politics and philosophy) I was somewhat prejudiced, and was expecting, from Miéville, an all-round defense of all things weird. I was wrong.

Miéville defends his predilection for weird fiction (both in its early twentieth-century peak and in its contemporary resurgence, of which he is of course a central herald) but is very cautious in claiming any straightforward political relevance for ‘the weird’. He similarly expresses scepticism regarding the — now waning — popularity of hauntology both in its metaphysical sense and in its political ‘applications’: Miéville sees hauntology as being concerned with that-which-comes-back-unexpectedly-revealing-itself-as-always-already-there, on a par with the psychoanalytic return of the repressed, and of course the horror/spiritual trope of the revenant, the re-turner. Therefore — I surmise — offering limited resources to the political theorist seeking to formulate the possibility of radical novelty. This is a classic criticism towards ‘deconstructionist politics’, an orientation often indicted of political unassertiveness (or straightforward passivity). On the other hand though, Miéville didn’t explain precisely how ‘the weird’ fails as well to offer a viable theoretical alternative. A discussion regarding the poltical poential (if any) of these two borrowings from fiction would be extremely interesting, but it’s way out of my competence, and it’s not my primary interest here.

[However, let me note that Miéville seems highly sceptical of the sudden widespread interest in Black Metal among leftist intellectuals: Miéville observes that, death of the author notwithstanding, one just simply cannot ignore the intrinsically reactionary, neo-romantic nature of a musical genre whose practitioners are — when not, I would add, just plainly politically ignorant, too busy posing as more-evil-than-thou to care about politics — mostly openly placed on the far right of the political spectrum. In general Miéville doesn’t seem to me to be particularly enthusiastic about the current ‘let’s turn weird all of our intellectual productions’, whilst at the same time staunchly defending the importance of this genre as a literary production. I agree on both counts. And once again, let me clarify that I write this as an avid weird fiction reader, science fiction aficionado (enough to name my red cat ‘Jones’) and as someone that, with a library of about 200 albums accumulated over the last 10 years knows a thing or two about Black Metal].

What is ‘the weird’ anyway? Miéville prunes away misunderstandings: weird fiction is not a genre populated by folklore-inherited monsters (ghosts, vampires, werewolfs), does not employ the trope of the horror unleashed by human hubris and rationality gone wild (Frankenstein, Moreau) and — most importantly I would say — does not employ its unsettling elements (creatures, places…) as allegories. Miéville is particularly fond of cephalopods in general and octopuses in particular (which explains the one tattooed on his arm) precisely for this reason: they are (spectacularly intelligent) creatures which are virtually absent from Western mythology and are either prone to non-codified symbolic appropriations or seem to have no allegorical meaning whatsoever. Allegories, Miéville goes on arguing, are most interesting when they break down, when they stop working, when they mean nothing and acquire a life of their own (even though, to be pedantic, we could argue that such an allegory is no allegory anymore since strictly speaking what makes an allegory not just an over-stretched metaphor is the possibility of its rational, conceptual interpretation).

Miéville cites Lord Tennyson’s poem ‘The Kraken’ as an excellent example (in fact, a metaphor) of how allegories die when overexplained:

Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His antient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumber’d and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

The Kraken dies when exposed to the gaze of humans and the light of day. The allegory is at its most awe-some power when its meaning is either absent or impossible to analytically decode. And of course, who else sleeps on the bottom of the sea (and has cephalopod-ish semblance)? Good Old Cthulhu of course, which is not just any ‘monster’ (Wikipedia, accurate as ever for anything related to geek culture, rightly describes it as ‘a fictional cosmic entity’).

So, crucially, the weird resist allegorical meaning. Miéville exemplifies his point by stating that (Giger’s) Alien is not weird. Why? Well, because of its all too obvious (‘camp’ is a word which Miéville uses often in this context) sexualization, both in shape and in actions (see the famous scene of the Alien’s tail creeping up Lambert’s leg). Conversely, the weird indexes that which is utterly alien, unsettingly resistant to conceptualization, impossible for thought to metabolize. As Miéville notes, however, this concept-proof constructions used as literary devices impose an interesting disjunction (very noticeable in Lovecraft): on the one hand their complete transcendence, while on the other the literary necessity and the human desire to get to describe them. So, we are told how utterly impossible the shapes seen by the terrorized witness were…and yet these latter are still able to go on describing them in all their grotesque details. This tension is even more evident, Miéville observes, when Lovecraftian creatures are ‘tamed’ in order to be located in the economy of spin-offs RPGs: ‘so, how many HPs does a shoggoth have?’. I don’t fully share Miéville’s passion for tentacled creatures (which I still find too easily sexualized) so I think that in this respect Cthulhu is the least successful of Lovecraft’s deities: all too representable (reason for its iconic ‘popularity’: indeed Miéville laments the capitalist mercification of Cthulhu in plush form – shame on me for having bought one!) as compared to other, more thoroughly cosmic, Old Ones. Even in fiction then, abysmal incomprehensibility must give something in to representation. Just as ‘an incredulous [or terrified for that matters] stare is not an argument’, a blank page is not a story.

The weird attempts to describe things so violently in-themselves to shatter any attribution of meaning and scale down human self-perception. In this regard, I was extremely pleased with Miéville’s claim that William Hope Hodgson was perhaps a worse writer but a more interesting one than Lovecraft was since, well, I always thought that to be the case. You want cosmic weirdness and ancestral isolation? The breathtaking second half of The House on the Borderland (a book that is now over a century old) still leaves me speechless at every re-read (if you got a Kindle, you can find a free copy in the Kindle store, do get it).

The weird is not the horror of the unheimlich re-cognition but that of getting a glimpse of the unknown and realizing that it is operating according to meaningless rules, rules which have been in place far before we appeared in the universe and will go on undisturbed after we’ll depart it. I am deeply enamored with Thomas Ligotti’s short ‘story in the story’ The Astronomic Blur (part of Sideshow and other stories, in Teatro Grottesco) a two-pages long tale of a mysterious (yet anonymous, bland) little store with a strange flickering light. It’s hard to convey the mood which Ligotti builds up in just a few paragraphs, but the last, masterfully constructed one is a marvelous example of the getting a-glimpse-on-the-meaningless trope of weird fiction:

Perhaps I had seen too deeply into the nature of the little store, and it was simply warning me to look no further. On the other hand, perhaps I had been an accidental witness to something else altogether, some plan or process whose ultimate stage is impossible to foresee, although there still comes to me, on certain nights, the dream or mental image of a dark sky in which the stars themselves burn low with a dim, flickering light that illuminates an indefinite swirling blur wherein it is not possible to observe any definite shapes or signs.

Leave the unknowable alone or it shall annihilate your ambitions with the hazy banality of its meaninglessness.

Having reached this point, it is all too easy to leap from weird fiction to Meillassouxian ‘realism’ of contingency and related philosophical ideas. For what is hyperchaos if not a name for those strange aeons during which even death may die? This is a most delicate point, since we are starting to walk the thin line between the careful comparison of certain kinds of sensibility — of affine orientations of thought — and the wholesale, meaningless (in the vulgar sense) and often pretentious unregulated exchange of concepts between ‘dark’ literature and philosophy.

When asked about style Miéville concedes some ground to the critics that accuse Lovecraft of over-writing of employing a baroque, faux-18th century, and heavily adjectival style. Yet he defends the necessity of such a ‘convoluted’ style for weird fiction to achieve its affective results. I wasn’t surprised, since Miéville quite obviously adores to use powerful, and often cryptic, words: if you ask me, occasionally indulging in this impressionistic practice too much — see the quantity of things which ‘ooze’ in Perdido Street Station (which, don’t get me wrong, is a staggering novel, in content and in style): winds, aerostats, blood, spit, skin (?), houses (!), rivers, flying creatures… However, in fiction a story has to be told, and I wouldn’t want Miéville to change his trademark style, where the vocabulary is skillfully employed to construct metaphors which buttress the ‘weird’. On the other hand, in philosophy (which is not, pace Rorty just ‘a kind of writing’) and in science, there are good and bad metaphors, i.e. those that facilitate an increase of knowledge and those that remain pure metaphors, resisting any possible conceptual clarification. Philosophy needs the former. Breaking down metaphors, those that die when brought up to the light of day, meaningless metaphors are not the right material for philosophy, even when such a philosophy is trying to track the consequences of the meaninglessness of the universe. As a rule of thumb, over-writing is a mistake in philosophy. I wouldn’t go as far as Williamson in arguing that ‘pedantry is a fault on the right side’, because I believe it is perfectly possible to be good, engaging and yet precise writers. Bachelard writes (about science, but insofar as philosophy and science aim at being modes of rational inquiry, the point stands for both): ‘the danger of immediate metaphors in the formation of the scientific spirit is that they are not always passing images; they push toward and autonomous kind of thought; they tend to completion and fulfillment in the domain of the image’. The Miévillian ‘broken metaphors’, literary powerful, don’t do philosophical work, but remain lost in a fuzzy world of affective ideality.

The central trope which weird fiction and philosophical speculation share, that of the meaninglessness of the in-itself, is expressible without having to recur to wild metaphorizing. Incidentally, it has always been my understanding that what Meillassoux wants to do with mathematics is precisely this. The in-itself is only mathematically expressible, and mathematics is the language of contingency, a formalism of symbols devoid of meaning. Again, an interesting parallel could be drawn here, between ‘Meillassouxian mathematics’ and Lovecraft’s employment of mathematics to convey the utterly alien and the non-linguistically conceptualizable. The fact that both weird fiction writers and speculative realists are interested in the way in which the in-itself is fiercely (human)concept-proof does not imply that philosophers should buy into the affective style which writers employ in order to produce a sense of awe in the reader. ‘The architecture oozes out of its bounds’ is a powerful, highly impressionistic literary metaphor which produces definite effects on the reader, hence with a specific literary value. On the other hand, in a philosophical context a sentence like ‘The noumena ooze back into the phenomenal world’ means nothing, i.e. does no philosophical work – in terms of clarification of concepts – whatsoever.

Having said that, what I find most interesting is a certain cultural resonance between ‘weird fiction’ and ‘new realism’, specifically when it comes to the dialectic between the intelligible and the unknown/unknowable and to the meaninglessness of the natural world. I take it to be a central axiom of any realism that certain things or states of affairs in the universe are unknown and perhaps unknowable. To make such a claim is not to be an anti-realist, but a consistent realist. Stathis Psillos spells this out very clearly when he writes that

Despite their many differences with the early empiricists, modern anti-realists do share with them the view that existential claims should be tied to some possibility or other of verification, a thesis which scientific realists deny.…Since…it is typical of scientific realists to argue that the content of the world can in principle exceed what human beings (even ideal observers) can access epistemically, none of these modern anti-realists is a scientific realist. (Scientific Realism: xx)

And recently Michael Brooks wrote it in a recent featured story on the New Scientist (pdf)

There are some things we can never know for sure because of the fundamental constraints of the physical world. Then there are the problems that we will probably never solve because of the way our brains work.

To accept that in principle parts of the universe can exceed our epistemic and conceptual grasp does not turn one into a vulgar Kantian, for to assert epistemic inaccessibility does not imply lack of reference and ontological antirealism (unless you are Van Fraaseen). It is a realist move to claim ‘there are things we do not know’ (and yet exist) and even ‘there are things/mathematical propositions we cannot know to be true’ (and yet are true).

What I take to be the most important contribution that a certain continental ‘orientation’ can bring to the table of the (scientific) realist is the elaboration of strategies for identifying and transcending the horizon of knowledge (meant as Badiouian technical term). As I see them, an attempt to break the constraints of ‘warranted assertability’ is the minimum common denominator that unites the philosophy of Deleuze, Derrida and Badiou (a trend which in fact goes back to the French tradition of épistémologie of Bachelard and Canguilhem). We must trace the historical evolution of our scientific concepts in order to be committed to an open-ended project of enlargement of knowledge and of creation of new concepts and truths (uphold the virtual possibility of the previously impossible).

It seems to me that a balance must be reached. An excessive emphasis on the weirdness, inaccessibility and incomprehensibility of reality in itself (re)produces a secular form of a vacuous mysticism of darkness (which is more self-congratulatory than philosophically fertile) and undermines naturalism by re-imbuing nature of ‘supernatural’ traits. On the other hand, we should be cautious with hyper-rationalisms, relying on the sheer power of pure thought to comprehend everything, for that is just the flipside of the old theological coin: on the one hand negative theology (which is always about meaninglessness for-us), on the other confidence in the lumen naturalis of reason (which ultimately banishes meaninglessness in-itself). The limits of our epistemic grasp cannot be overcome via either poetic talk nor via a mysteriously efficacious intellectual intuition. They can only be probed and pushed by rational inquiry.

Epistemic optimism is not an ‘all or nothing’ package, since there are clear limits to the knowable imposed upon us by our very best scientific knowledge (the Hubble horizon, the sub-Plank scale…but also the mathematical work of Goedel and Turing). Similarly we need to push thought to its rational limits, circulating — to borrow Graham Priest’s terminology — between transcendence and closure. Even someone like me, with neo-Pythagorean, mathematical-structuralist sympathies must acknowledge that there are limits to our scientific/mathematical knowledge because I believe that (probably due to my other, de-totalizing, post-structuralist sympathie) the uni(multi?)verse itself is not the kind of complete and consistent whole which we would like it to be. It is dappled, chaotic and imperfect – and the rather gifted (yet limited) creatures called humans are the product of this chaotic, purposeless and meaningless universe.

So no, thought is not omnipotent but yes, there is something like objective scientific progress and like the discovery of new truths. No, there’s no need to quiver in awe of ‘fanged noumena’ but yes, there are things ‘out there’ which will always elude any conceptualization (due to the limits of our biological brains) and attribution of ‘meaning’ (due to the intrinsic meaninglessness of reality). I join Meillassoux here, in stressing that the answers to ‘big questions’ don’t have to induce in us any sort of fear and trembling, but can be just be prosaically, rationally given.

Ultimately, I like to be disturbed and unsettled by weird literature and to be stimulated and provoked by ‘speculative’ philosophy – and these are pleasures best enjoyed separately.

Posted in Philosophy, Uncategorized
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Speculations II Finally Out

•May 5, 2011 • 3 Comments

We are pleased to announce that the second volume of Speculations is now available for download on the website.

I am posting this from my phone so I don’t have time to make lengthy comments, but once again, my thanks to my fellow editors, especially Thomas for his usual epic pagination/editing/layout work. Thanks to his work you can download Speculations as a pdf, in iPad format or Kindle format; you can buy a print-on-demand paper copy or you can even print and bind your very own handmade copy (complete instructions will soon appear on the website). And of course you can read it online.
You’ve got pretty much no excuse for not reading it!

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Resurrecting the Corpse of Philosophy

•April 24, 2011 • 3 Comments

Image Credit: Alessandro Bavari

Narratives of philosophical progress crumble when scrutinized by the eye of the blackened theorist. The degradation of ontology must aim towards a chaotic reterritorialization of the concept of Being, its hallucinatory positivity buried deep under an unlimited plateau of immanence, covered with the scattered remains of decaying noumena – a metaphysical Blashyrkh, a desert that no mind can ponder.

Opening windows onto the freezing vista of the cosmic thanatosphere, thought will sharpen its edge — blunted by centuries of human-centered navel-gazing — and cut open the corpse of anthropocentrism. The slime of the absolute will ooze out, coagulating into unforeseeable shapes. A new form of heretical Spinozism will deploy its perverse weaponry against itself in a degenerate form of post-Socratic suicide, revealing to its own blind eyes the organic scree of biological contingency – leaving behind a Corpse Without Organs.

Negatively charged with a filthy desire for death, the subject — coerced to follow the cruel vector of Bataillean materialism — will reach a veritable aphotic zone of thought: delivered from the warming comfort of life the Ego will realize that it is its own pathology, impotent when contemplating the baleful axiomatic of death, speechlessly facing the blade of a Macbethian dagger covered in the black blood of the Earth. Free from the parsimonious administration of rule-bound metaphysical dilemmas, thought will be perpetually inebriated by the fumes rising from a boiling, chaotic sea of virtualities.

Surely enough, the moribund apostles of phenomenology will raise their miserable howls, vouching for the resurrection of consciousness, unable to realize how their hysteric agitation simply plunges them all the more deep into the quicksands of their own pestilential, coprofilic narcissism. The only ‘Yes!’ their ears will hear shall be shouted by a drooling prophet, whose mad logic sadistically splits the affirmative into its constitutive double negation (no plus no). New philosophers will be maggots feeding on the carcass of the Lebenswelt, whose feces will join the deep stream of chthonic powers.

Emerging from the wet abyss of its biological crypt, pure post-human thought will perform a predatory, autophagous Aufhebung over its own material substrate, willfully becoming the slave of its own meaninglessness, gnawing at the Yggdrasil of its foolish sovereignty. Its voided interiority exposed in an act of perverse Lacano-Augustinianism: noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi. in interiore homine habitat nihil. This amputated Reason will mockingly goose-step around burnt gospels of perished theologies.

Nebulously, the subject will re-coalesce around the empty space prised open by the geo-traumatic ex-pulsion of Nature out of its abode, the move of a reinvigorated post-idealism. Having poured black salt into the flesh of theological metaphysics, scarred by the wounds inflicted by universal contingency — and having painfully achieved the anorexia of meaning — thought will finally violate the obvious, orienting its nomadic trail among the tombstones of expired transcendentals in the caliginous light of the black Polaris of nihilism.

Strange aeons will bring about new, occult modes of thought, frantically developing rotten rhizomes and decaying yet again in a farcical cycle, like organic Tinguely-esque machines. Catalyzing apocalyptic prophecies, creating the space for the compossibilization of self-sabotaging theoretical lines of inquiry and shepherding the swarm of thanatocratic practices, philosophy will become the protocol of furious Wiederholung of deranged political sequences.

Exorbitantly rational in its un-reasonable justice, a universal loop-sided apokatastasis will eventually restore the authentic empty form of the Real when the universe will exhaust its reservoir of Cold Dark Matter and stretch itself in a final convulsion of self-annihiliation, zeroing life, matter and time – Which, if not victory, is yet revenge.

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Badiouian Set Theory Workshop

•April 21, 2011 • 1 Comment

After months of hard work to organize the whole thing my good friend Burhanuddin Baki has finally given me the green light to announce a forthcoming workshop on ‘Badiouian’ Set Theory, here in London. Once a week for three weeks, starting the 24th of May, Burhan will  explain basic and advanced topics in Set Theory to an audience of non-mathematically trained Badiouians.

I cannot emphasize enough how much I welcome this initiative. Even though Badiou’s work can surely be understood and appreciated on a ‘qualitative’ level, it is only fair to Badiou himself to make an effort to try and at least achieve some familiarity with the mathematics grounding his system.

After the English publication of Being and Event, everyone became an overnight expert in Set Theory, casually dropping the name of Cantor or Cohen into philosophical conversations as if they were old acquaintances. Perhaps it is so, but I for one am extremely pleased about the opportunity to have a mathematically-trained person explaining some concepts which are objectively hard to master in their proper form (one above all, Cohen’s forcing).

Perhaps it is me being lazy, since Badiou makes it very clear that between Being and Event and Number and Numbers he has explained more than enough and that ‘anyone who still claims not to understand should write to me telling me exactly what it is they don’t understand — otherwise, I fear, we’re simply dealing with excuses for the reader’s laziness’ (TW: 19) [you gotta love this line]. But still, repetita iuvant.

Burhan was probably thinking about this line of Badiou’s when he subtitled the workshop ‘Everything You Needed to Know about Forcing but were Afraid to Ask Alain Badiou’.

I’ll be giving an introductory presentation of B&E as a whole, which –given that I expect most of the people there to be already familiar with it– it’s going be very short and sweet.

Enough from me, the program follows:

A Set Theory Postgraduate Workshop for Readers of Being and Event or: Everything You Needed to Know about Forcing but was Afraid to Ask Alain Badiou

24 May, 31 May and 7 June 2011 in Room G03, 28 Russell Square

As part of its ongoing Seminar Series on Mathematics for the Humanities and Cultural Studies, the London Consortium will hold a series of three postgraduate students workshops that aims to discuss and provide a quick overview of some of the mathematics that needs to be known in order to follow the use of set theory
in Alain Badiou’s Being and Event [L’Être et l’Événement]. The main focus of these ‘bootcamps’ will be on introducing and discussing, in a friendly manner, the technicalities concerning the “mathematical bulwarks” mentioned in Badiou’s philosophical masterpiece:
(1) the Zermelo-Fraenkel Axioms of Set Theory
(2) the Theory of Ordinal and Cardinal Numbers
(3) Kurt Gödel and Paul Cohen’s work on Consistency and Independence.

Particular attention will be paid towards providing a sufficiently detailed, rigorous and clear explication of Paul Cohen’s technique of forcing and generic models, a mathematical result that Peter Hallward has called “the single most important postulate” in the whole of Being and Event. If time permits, we might also be touching on some recent mathematical developments in the field as well as trying to understand how Badiou contributes towards the contemporary re-intervention of mathematical thinking into philosophy.

The workshops will be held in room G03 at 28 Russell Square, Bloomsbury, London. The intended audience are postgraduate students or researchers who are interested in understanding Badiou’s philosophy but who lack the mathematical background. There are no assigned compulsory readings for the bootcamps,
and there are no pre-requisites save for some minimal familiarity with mathematics at the pre-university level. The sessions are free and open to the public but please register by sending your name, email and affiliation to [email protected] so as to give us an idea of the numbers since the classroom size, unfortunately, will be limited.

Workshop Convener: Burhanuddin Baki

Schedule and List of Topics

Session I (Tuesday, 24 May)

2-4pm – Basic Mathematics and Short Introduction to Forcing
Short Introduction to Badiou’s Being and Event; Basic Arithmetic, Abstract Algebra and First-Order Logic;
Idea of Mathematical Proof; Induction; Naïve Set Theory, Cantor’s Theorem and Russell’s Paradox

6-8pm – Zermelo-Fraenkel Set Theory
Zermelo-Fraenkel Axioms plus the Axiom of Choice (ZFC); Peano Axioms of Arithmetic; Gödel’s
Incompleteness Theorems; Being and Event Parts I, II, IV and V; Some Alternative Axiomatizations of
Mathematics and Set Theory

Session II (Tuesday, 31 May)

2-4pm – Cardinal and Ordinal Numbers
Cardinal Numbers; Well-Orderings; Ordinal Numbers; Continuum Hypothesis; Being and Event Part III
and Meditation 26; Introduction to Surreal Numbers

6-8pm – Kurt Gödel and the Constructible Hierarchy
Some Relevant Model Theory; Formal Semantics of Situations; Formal Semantics of Events; Gödel’s
Completeness Theorem; Compactness Theorem; Löwenheim-Skolem Theorem and Paradox; Transfinite
Induction; Cumulative and Constructible Hierarchies; Axiom of Constructibility; Gödel’s Proof of
Consistency; Being and Event Meditation 29; Introduction to Large and Inaccessible Cardinals

Session III (Tuesday, 7 June)

2-4pm – Paul Cohen, Forcing and Generic Models
General Machinery of Forcing; Analogy between Forcing and Field Extensions; Cohen’s Proof of
Independence

6-8pm – Beyond Cohen’s Forcing
Cohen’s Proof of Independence (con’t); Being and Event Meditations 33, 34 & 36; Forcing in terms of
Kripkean Semantics; Forcing in terms of Boolean-valued models; Forcing Axioms and Generic
Absoluteness; Introduction to Categorial Logic and Topos Theory; Forcing in terms of Topos Theory;
Short Introduction to Forcing in Badiou’s The Logics of Worlds

Suggested Introductory Reading List

Avigad, J. (2004). “Forcing in Proof Theory”. http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/avigad/Papers/forcing.pdf.
Badiou, A. (2007). Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum.
Badiou, A. (2007). The Concept of Model. Translated by Zachary Fraser & Tzuchien Tho. Victoria: re:press.
Badiou, A. (2008). Number and Numbers. Translated by Robin Mackay: Cambridge: Polity.
Badiou, A. (2009). The Logics of Worlds. Translated by Alberto Toscano. London: Continuum.
Bowden, S. (2005). “Alain Badiou: From Ontology to Politics and Back”.
http://jffp.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/jffp/article/view/244/238.
Chow, T. (2004). “Forcing for Dummies”. http://math.mit.edu/~tchow/mathstuff/forcingdum.
Chow, T. (2008). “A Beginner’s Guide to Forcing”. http://arxiv.org/abs/0712.1320.
Cohen, P. (2002). “The Discovery of Forcing”.
http://projecteuclid.org/DPubS/Repository/1.0/Disseminate?view=body&id=pdf_1&handle=euclid.rmjm/1181070
010.
Cohen, P. (2008). Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis. New York: Dover.
Crossley, J., et. al. (1991). What is Mathematical Logic?. Mineola: Dover.
Devlin, K. (1991). The Joy of Sets: Fundamentals of Contemporary Set Theory. New York: Springer.
Doxiadis, A., et. al. (2009). Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC.
Easwaran, K. (2007). ” A Cheerful Introduction to Forcing and the Continuum Hypothesis”.
http://arxiv.org/abs/0712.2279.
Fraser, Z. (2006). “The Law of the Subject: Alain Badiou, Luitzen Brouwer and the Kripkean Analyses of
Forcing and the Heyting Calculus”. http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/30.
Goldblatt, R. (2006). Topoi: The Categorial Analysis of Logic. Mineola: Dover.
Hallward, P. (2003). Badiou: A Subject to Truth. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press.
Halmos, P. (1974). Naive Set Theory. New York: Springer.
Jech, T. (2004). Set Theory: The Third Millennium Edition, Revised and Expanded. New York: Springer-Verlag.
Jech, T. (2008). “What is Forcing?”. http://www.ams.org/notices/200806/tx080600692p.pdf.
Kanamori, A. “Cohen and Set Theory”. Bull. Symbolic Logic 13(3) (2008), 351-78.
Kunen, K. (1992). Set Theory: An Introduction to Independence Proofs. New York: North Holland.
Norris, C. (2009). Badiou’s Being and Event. London: Continuum.
Pluth, E. (2010). Badiou: A Philosophy of the New. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Potter, M. (2004). Set Theory and its Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford U. Press.
Smullyan, R. & M. Fitting. (2010). Set Theory and the Continuum Problem. Mineola: Dover.
Tiles, M. (1989). The Philosophy of Set Theory. Mineola: Dover.

The London Consortium is a multi-disciplinary graduate programme in Humanities and Cultural Studies. We are a collaboration between five of London’s most dynamic cultural and educational institutions: the Architectural Association, Birkbeck College (University of London), the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Science Museum, and Tate.

Posted in Mathematics, Philosophy
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Williamson on What Philosophy Ought to Be

•April 12, 2011 • Leave a Comment

As something of a follow-up to the previous post, I just attach some passages from the concluding afterword/sermon (his word) in Timothy Williamson’s The Philosophy of Philosophy (2007), rather unambiguously titled ‘Must Do Better’: something of a manifesto for how/what analytic philosophy ought to be. I have mixed feelings and undeveloped thoughts/concerns about this vision of philosophy but I just don’t have time to comment right now. Still it’s pretty provoking material by itself (and quite nicely written): more than just methodology it’s a matter of philosophical ethics. I only indulged in highlighting some key passages.

Much contemporary analytic philosophy seems to be written in the tacit hope of discursively muddling through, uncontrolled by any clear methodological constraints. That may be enough for easy questions, if there are any in philosophy; it is manifestly inadequate for resolving the hard questions with which most philosophers like to engage. All too often it produces only eddies in academic fashion, without any advance in our understanding of the subject matter. Although we can make progress in philosophy, we cannot expect to do so when we are not working at the highest available level of intellectual discipline. That level is not achieved by effortless superiority. It requires a conscious collective effort. We who classify ourselves as “analytic” philosophers tend to fall into the assumption that our allegiance automatically grants us meth-odological virtue. According to the crude stereotypes, analytic philosophers use arguments while “continental” philosophers do not. But within the analytic tradition many philosophers use arguments only to the extent that most “continental” philosophers do: some kind of inferential movement is observable, but it lacks the clear articulation into premises and conclusion and the explicitness about the form of the inference that much good philosophy achieves. Again according to the stereotypes, analytic philosophers write clearly while “continental” philosophers do not. But much work within the analytic tradition is obscure even when it is written in everyday words, short sentences and a relaxed, open-air spirit, because the structure of its claims is fudged where it really matters. (286)

…

How can we do better? We can make a useful start by getting the simple things right. Much even of analytic philosophy moves too fast in its haste to reach the sexy bits. Details are not given the care they deserve: crucial claims are vaguely stated, signifi  cantly different formulations are treated as though they were equivalent, examples are under-described, arguments are gestured at rather than properly made, their form is left unexplained, and so on. A few resultant errors easily multiply to send inquiry in completely the wrong direction. Shoddy work is sometimes masked by pretentiousness, allusiveness, gnomic concision, or winning informality. But often there is no special disguise: producers and consumers have simply not taken enough trouble to check the details. We need the unglamorous virtue of patience to read and write philosophy that is as perspicuously structured as the diffi culty of the subject requires, and the austerity to be dissatisfi ed with appealing prose that does not meet those stan-dards. The fear of boring oneself or one’s readers is a great enemy of truth. Pedantry is a fault on the right side. (288)

…

Precision is often regarded as a hyper-cautious characteristic. It is importantly the opposite. Vague statements are the hardest to convict of error. Obscurity is the oracle’s self-defense. To be precise is to make it as easy as possible for others to prove one wrong. That is what requires courage. But the community can lower the cost of precision by keeping in mind that precise errors often do more than vague truths for scientifi  c progress. (289)

…

Rigor and depth both matter: but while the continual deliberate pursuit of rigor is a good way of achieving it, the continual deliberate pursuit of depth (as of happiness) is far more likely to be self-defeating. Better to concentrate on trying to say something true and leave depth to look after itself. Nor are rigor and precision enemies of the imagination, any more than they are in mathematics. Rather, they increase the demands on the imagination, not least by forcing one to imagine examples with exactly the right structure to challenge a generalization; cloudiness will not suffice. They make imagination consequential in a way in which it is not in their absence. The most rigorous and precise discussion often involves the most playfulness and laughter: toying with subtly different combinations of ideas yields surprising scenarios. Humorless solemnity masks sloppiness and confusion. (289)

…

When law and order break down, the result is not freedom or anarchy but the capricious tyranny of petty feuding warlords. Similarly, the unclarity of constraints in philosophy leads to authoritarianism. Whether an argument is widely accepted depends not on publicly accessible criteria that we can all apply for ourselves but on the say-so of charismatic authority figures. Pupils cannot become autonomous from their teachers because they cannot securely learn the standards by which their teachers judge. A modicum of willful unpredictability in the application of standards is a good policy for a professor who does not want his students to gain too much independence. (290)

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On Continental Stereotypes

•April 8, 2011 • Leave a Comment

Hans-Johann Glock’s What is Analytic Philosophy? is a thorough, widely researched meta-philosophical survey of the historical origins, ‘doctrinal’ developments, current state and possible future permutations of ‘analytic philosophy’ — a term that Glock uses always with caution arguing that it is ‘neither a geographical nor a linguistic category’ and that ‘analytic philosophy should be explained in terms of family resemblances. What holds analytic philosophers together is not a single set of necessary and sufficient conditions, but a thread of overlapping similarities (doctrinal, methodological and stylistic)’. Careful in not taking for granted any definition, Glock however argues that

The analytic/continental distinction colours philosophical perception even among those who do not regard it as absolute. More generally, there is no gainsaying the fact that the idea of a distinct analytic philosophy continues to shape the institutionalpractice of philosophy, whether it be through distinct journals, societies, job advertisements or institutes.

Indeed, the book is especially good when it comes to give an account of the dynamics of the split between the two traditions from within the German-speaking world, essentially arguing that analytic philosophy is as geographically ‘continental’ as its continental cousin — both in its historical origins and in its present state — and when very clear-headedly criticizing analytic philosophers themselves for failing to recognize the existence of high-profile analytic philosophers working in non-Anglophone countries (being Glock German himself). He writes

On the basis of my reasonably well-developed acquaintance with the various sides of these linguistic and philosophical divides, I entirely acceptthat the analytic emperor does have clothes. And although many of its original sources were Germanophone, the bulk of its contributions to philosophical understanding have come from Anglophones.This is no excuse, however, for the notable failure of many analyticphilosophers to pay due attention to figures and ideas that hail from beyond their philosophical, their linguistic or their national horizons….The exclusionary demeanour of the Anglophone mainstream is indisutably an intellectual disadvantage when the grounds of exclusion arelinguistic or geographic rather than philosophical.

and, stressing the ‘indifference and condescension with which many Anglophones greet non-Anglophone philosophy’ he argues that

This holds not just of those contemporaries who indulge in hackneyed jibes at the ‘continentals’. It also afflicts some (first-time) visitors to the continent who note, with genuine surprise, that some of the natives are neither Hegelians, nor Heideggerians, nor postmodernists, and may even be capable of intelligent questions and objections.

and concludes by noting that

Here is the problem however. Whilst very rightly condemning the limited horizon of Anglophone analytic philosophers the subtext of Glock remark essentially perpetuates the ideal of the very existence of colourful, native continentalists (perhaps wearing a turtleneck sweater, sipping a glass of wine and a brandishing a baguette?). His critique of ‘cultural stereotyping’ tells us: ‘Not all continent-dwellers are continental philosophers!’ but pretty much supports the stereotype ‘…but those that are continental philosophers are hardly capable of deploying an argument’. His snipe to Derrida is one of many in the book (Derrida’s arguments are predictably dismissed as and reduced to linguistic puns and obscure turns of phrases, mistaking as usual an employment of language and logic stretched to the limits of expressibility with ‘French’ nonsensical playfulness – perhaps Glock should read the very clear and concise account of Derrida’s logic by Graham Priest, someone that of logic and argumentative clarity knows a thing or two) and, more generally, the feeling throughout the whole book — whenever he mentions continental philosophy (particularly Heidegger, whose ‘”ontological analysis” or “analytic of Being”…is supposed to reveal the meaning of existence’)– is that of someone trying as hard as possible to keep a straight face and not to burst out laughing.

His patronizing attitude comes out most clearly in the final chapter (dealing with the ‘Present and Future’ of philosophy) where — expressing clear skepticism towards attempts to ‘reconcile’ the two traditions on the grounds of the many notorious past examples of failed dialogue (as a basic list he mentions: Ryle’s review of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit; Carnap’s attack on Heidegger’s ‘The Nothing noths’; the 1958 Royaumont encounter between British and French philosophers; Bar-Hillel’s attack on Habermas’ appropriation of speech act theory; the spat between Searle and Derrida over Austin’s speech act theory and the alleged ubiquity of writing; the protests against Derrida’s honorary degree in Cambridge and the aftermath of the Sokal hoax) — he writes that

This is most unfortunate for an author which — even when openly being a partisan of analytic philosophy — moves some firm and clearly argued critiques to this tradition, in particular on the counts of ‘scholasticism, disengagement from other disciplines and the public, factionalism and the exclusionary demeanour towards non-Anglophone and non-analytic philosophy’. If the passage above is not an example of exclusionary (if not downright patronizing) demeanour I don’t know what it is. Of course, the fame of continental philosophy is not a complete fabrication of arrogant analytics, but has got some very solid grounds. And also, Glock’s is not an out-and-out celebration of his (analytic) tradition either (in the context of his critique of self-referentiality he introduces an amusing footnote noting that in the analytic literature

But the point is that the perpetuation (quite literally, since above he’s reporting Diego Marconi’s opinion) of these sweeping, uninformed (if not downright facile) stereotypes regarding continentals in an ambitious, authoritative and fairly recent (published in 2008) monograph, directed mainly towards an analytic audience is quite lamentable. Glock’s ‘historical’ apparatus is extremely well researched when it comes to analytic philosophy, but this level of scholarship is not matched by an equally informed (at least) outline of what continentalists were actually trying to do some decades ago and of what they are up to today.

Glock concludes arguing that

What the analytic scene needs is not a deliberate switch to continental, traditionalist or pragmatist modes of thought, but analytic philosophy in a different vein: engaging and engaged instead of scholastic and isolationist, collegial, undogmatic and open minded instead of factionalist and exclusionary.

Indeed. And open-mindedness usually involves trying to overcome tradition-inherited stereotypes. In this otherwise excellent book, there is very little ‘open-mindedness’ when it comes to at least suspend one’s judgement regarding the alleged chronic obscurantism which plagues that funny bunch of continental philosophers.

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On Rorty’s abuse of Derrida

•March 5, 2011 • 5 Comments

I’ve recently read Rorty’s notorious paper ‘Philosophy as a Kind of Writing’ (pdf here): this is the first time I read any substantial chunk of Rorty’s work (because frankly I never felt any necessity to do so) but of course I was vaguely familiar with his ‘idiosyncratic’ (at best) appropriation/presentation of Derrida. However, the essay is much worse than I thought, and often downright outrageous.

This essay (and others of this kind) is the reason why the work of Derrida is still today largely shunned as postmodern, rule-free, trendy relativism and Derrida himself dismissed as a pretentious self-indulgent sophist adrift in a sea of signs. Mostly, by people that haven’t spent nearly enough time reading what Derrida actually wrote.

If there is something for which Derrida can definitely be blamed for, it is his failure to distance himself strongly enough from this kind of appropriation of his work (and perhaps also from the Caputo-Vattimo-Kearney theological trend). The criitc will surmise, that the reason is that, after all, he didn’t really disagree with it. A more charitable interpretation is that he tried to avoid open conflict when possible and — unwisely but somewhat consistently with his own commitments —  allowed for his work to be bent in unexpected directions.

Passages like the following, however, are nothing but Rorty ventriloquzing Derrida in order to support his questionable pragmatist ‘it’s-all-just-a-language-game-forget-boring-transcendental-arguments-and-be-merry’ agenda, with an undergraduate-level method of (mis)interpretation. What is most irritating is that pieces like this have influenced people’s understanding (admittedly, especially in the English-speaking world: on the continent people often knew better than to listen to Rorty) of Derrida’s work and method for decades to come. Better to have enemies like Sokal or Searle than ‘friends’ like Rorty.



After having presented Derrida as a pragmatist buddy, all fun, games and mockery and no argumentative rigour, even Rorty has to find a way to account for the fact that Derrida actually does have philosophical, affirmative theses and does build (quasi)transcenental arguments. How? Simple, by claiming that that’s where Derrida went wrong, where he copped out, unable to take the high-pragmatist/ironist road of doing ‘just writing’, dropping good ‘shadowy deconstruction’ to actually put forward bad constructive reasoning:

When reading stuff like this I wonder what kind of academic-philosophical scene would allow Rorty to become a (relatively) major name of American philosophy.

UPDATE

I can put some extra meat on my argument regarding Rorty’s responsibility for the dismissive reception of Derrida in anglophone philosophy with two examples.

I was just listening to Philip Kitcher’s talk from the ‘Future of Philosophy’ workshop which took place here in London in December 2010 (you can find all the talks here). The talk (itself very interesting) is now available as a paper, recently published on Metaphilosophy.

Opening his talk, Kitcher warns his audience that he has been ‘going pragmatist for a while’, and reports a joke from a colleague of his at Columbia, telling him: ‘it’s a good job they didn’t give you the Jacques Derrida chair of Philosophy!’ (laughter from the audience: I guess for analytic philosophers the joke is hilarious).

What? Would any continental philosopher (read: anyone who has read Derrida) define him a pragmatist? Quick answer: no. It is actually ironic, since continental philosophers who don’t like Derrida usually (wrongly, again) accuse him of being an ‘idealist’ of sorts! So what, a pragmatist idealist? Rare breed!

Whose fault is that? Kitcher’s not well-read friend’s? Only partially. The blame goes straightforwardly on Rorty, who basically brainwashed an entire generation of philosophers with his pragmatist-ironist blabber. Want proof of that?

An article got my attention yesterday (was suggested by Pete Wolfendale over on Twitter). It is Jay Rosenberg review essay of a number of books by/on Rorty, titled ‘Raiders of the Lost Distinction: Richard Rorty and the Search for the Last Dichotomy’ (which you can find here). When a paper has a title like that you know you’re up for a good ride. And indeed, Rosenberg’s essay is a ferociously sarcastic (actually turning Rorty’s style against himself) critique of Rorty’s ‘positions’. No point in summarizing it because it’s a constant scornful punchline, you should read it for yourself, I actually laughed out loud in a couple of places. Now, why am I mentioning this? Because of this very telling passage

And I suspect that Rosenberg, together with hundreds of others, never got to read Derrida, precisely thanks to Rorty’s utterly nonsensical presentation of his work. That wouldn’t be too bad (since it’s perfectly fine if you don’t want to read Derrida) but what is quite outrageous is that now Derrida is called ‘a pragmatist’.

So well, if you’ve reached this post by Googling ‘Rorty Derrida’ (I know that’s happening quite a lot), please, do consider the option that Rorty is — to be kind — not a reliable secondary source on his work. Rather, ready anything Chris Norris wrote on Derrida (and indeed on Rorty’s appropriation of Derrida) to have a much more balanced idea on his work (this interview is perhaps a good starting point).

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Nagel Quote of the Day

•March 4, 2011 • 2 Comments

The last paragraph of the introduction of his classic The View from Nowhere.

In days when claims of inventing new, revolutionary solutions to philosophical problems seem to be standard practice, and when self-proclaimed innovators don’t share Nagel’s ‘feeling’ anymore, I find this 25 years old paragraph still refreshingly honest.

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