Boredom and Contingency, Part 1

An axiom: Enjoyment is the primary form of being in the world. It is our currency, our investment in the world. Enjoyment is inescapable; investment is necessary. Let us say that enjoyment is the necessary and inescapable motivation for all human behaviour.  We only do things because we find enjoyment in them.  When we laugh, kill, write, eat, wallow in depression, smoke, exercise, rape, make love, steal, read, starve ourselves, protest, capitulate, worship, hate Republicans or create spreadsheets, we do so because of an unconscious investment of enjoyment in some element of the situation.

This enjoyment is necessary. Yet it is not directly encountered in any given act; what we encounter is the pleasure of reading or the misery of starvation. Enjoyment is always mediated through other affects.

A second axiom: While enjoyment itself is necessary, any given object of enjoyment is absolutely contingent. Because we are invested in some situations and objects and not others, enjoyment requires a correlate: boredom. Boredom is the absence of enjoyment. While enjoyment constitutes our point of view, our focus on an object, boredom constitutes our peripheral vision.

Enjoyment is the unconscious avatar of necessity, because at any given moment it appears impossible to change our investments. Boredom, on the other hand, is the unconscious avatar of contingency because it stands as a constant reminder that our point of view and investments are changeable. Objects of enjoyment are wholly fungible.

Yet, enjoyment and boredom are not absolutely symmetrical. While enjoyment constitutes our point of view and is framed by boredom, they are not simply correlates. Boredom is different from enjoyment in two ways: one quantitative, the other qualitative.

Quantitatively, it is easy to see how we are uninvested in and therefore bored by the greater part of the world. We enjoy elements of a situation, often and sadly enough the minimum number of elements required in order to maintain the situation. The rest sinks beneath our vision. Objects of enjoyment are a drop in the ocean of unnoticed objects.

Qualitatively, if we accept the idea that contingency is the proper name of being, then non-investment is not only the condition of enjoyment, it also completely undermines it. The world does not maintain an a priori ratio between contingency and necessity; contingency must be the a priori truth, while necessity is an a posteriori fiction.

In Part 2, Zizek's essay "Is It Still Possible to be a Hegelian Today?"

Arche-Fossils and Apocalypse, Part 2

The notion of dia-chronic statements is one element of the dispute between Meillassoux and Hagglund. In order to properly frame this encounter, it is necessary to briefly discuss the nature of Radical Atheism. Hagglund portrays his book as a reading of Derrida, but it is also an original work of philosophy; Hagglund is, arguably, ventriloquizing his thoughts through Derrida's words. In light of this, it is acceptable to attribute the ideas and arguments of Radical Atheism to Hagglund himself, rather than constantly invoking the absent Derrida.

Hagglund's arguments rely heavily on his elaboration of temporal succession. The question is: how does one moment pass into the next? Each now cannot be annihilated by a future now, because the previous now would have passed into non-being; the future now cannot have a relation with the present now. Rather than claim that time is non-being in itself, Hagglund argues that each moment must be internally split from the very beginning; every moment is split between the has-been and the not-yet. Any given moment, therefore, cannot subsist as present in-itself.

It is the present's inability to be present-in-itself that forms the core of Hagglund's objection to the principle of non-contradiction, another of his disagreements with Meillassoux - but this issue currently lays outside our remit. Our line of reflection lies on a different path: the trace as synthesis, the infinitely finite time of survival, the impossibility of apocalypse, and finally, the conflict between that impossibility and the possibility of dia-chronic statements.

Given that every manifestation is internally split along temporal lines, the question of synthesis - that is, identity - must be answered anew. If being is not presence, if it does not persist in-itself from moment to moment, how is any given case of identity possible? Hagglund claims the trace is the "agent" of synthesis. In order for any moment to be, it must be inscribed materially - Hagglund calls this the becoming space of time. However, every inscription must be open to the succession of time and, therefore, potential alterations and erasures. This openness to succession is the becoming time of space. The material inscription of the temporal moment is referred to synonymously as the trace, spacing and différance.

The temporal split that necessitates the trace and the inscription's openness to alteration and erasure forms what Hagglund calls the infinitely finite. Temporal succession is always the moment (T) plus one. Time is T + 1, into infinity. Each future negates the past, forming a negative infinity. Hagglund accepts that only a positive infinity is a true infinity, therefore succession is finite - but an infinite finitude, without possible end. (Actually, I'm not sure if that is exactly correct)

Finitude is another mark of that which is not present in itself. All things are finite, all things are open to erasure and or alteration. This is the core of his polemic against the religious, which, in his terms, always holds one term to be above this openness. For religion, there is always one infinite, present in itself being. To be above openness, however, is to be above the very possibility of change. In other words, it be pure presence is to be changeless, motionless, lifeless.

For Kant, immorality was one of his regulative ideas. He considered it to be uncognizable because it necessarily implied atemporality, but it was thinkable as an idea. More than thinkable, it was desirable on an ethical basis. Hagglund argues that immorality is neither thinkable nor desirable, on the basis of the above; to be atemporal, to be outside succession, is to be fully present and therefore outside life. The absolute good of immortality is indistinguishable from the absolute evil of death.

Because of immortality's identity with death - its basic undesirability and subsequent self-refutation - we inevitably must affirm the mortal time of survival. Everything we do presupposes the infinitely finite time of survival, even suicide. The affirmation of mortality is utterly inescapable, and this is not a negative predicament to be mourned. Mortality is the condition of life itself, which is to say, life and death are co-implicated from the very beginnings.

The key issue in relation to Meillassoux is this insistence that the trace is the condition of life, rather than the condition of any existence whatsoever. The inscription that is the becoming space of time is always the inscription of a life. On page 19, Hagglund says the openness applies all the way up and down, "all the way down to the minimal forms of life." It "applies to all the fields of the living." Now, Hagglund does not make any explicit distinction between inanimate matter and biological life. He appears to be describing the trace as the condition of any change whatsoever, but always explicitly indexes the trace to life as such.

Leaving aside the question of Hagglund's relationship to correlationism aside for the moment, it is worth analyzing Hagglund's discussion of apocalypse in light of dia-chronicity. Kant knows that atemporal immorality - as the end of time and succession - is uncognizable, so his solution is to posit the end as an Idea, "which only appears to be the same as annihilation for us as time-bound creatures." (RA, 45 K843) Kant defends this through a reading of apocalyptic writings, noting that the word apocalypse derives from the Greek word for "revelation." It is the end of a world where the timeless truth is revealed and everything temporal is destroyed. This consummation can only be an Idea; if we try to cognize it, we end in contradiction.

Hagglund reads two of Derrida's texts on apocalypse. The first is "On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy." Derrida uses the word Come (Viens) against the idea of the apocalypse. It is the coming of time as the ultra transcendental condition for all events. The second text is "No Apocalypse, Not Now." Written for a conference on nuclear war, it claimed that nuclear war would destroy everything. This is the only way for time to end. Nuclear war would destroy all symbolic capacity, and the movement of survival.

Hagglund argues that the trace undermines the very idea of apocalypse, because apocalypse hinges on the distinction between temporal appearance and the thing in itself. For an apocalypse to be an apocalypse, it would have to destroy everything and reveal an indestructible thing in itself. Given that the trace is the necessary condition of being, the elimination of the trace via the elimination of the archive would be an "absolute destructibility that does not exempt anything." (RA, 46)

Significantly, Hagglund says that absolute destructibility "reinforces the radical finitude that deconstruction articulates as the condition for life in general. As a finite being I am always living in relation to the threat of absolute destruction, since with my death the entire world that opens through me and that lives in me will be extinguished." (RA, 47)

The conflict between absolute destructibility and dia-chronicity should be clear. The trace, as the condition for being in general, is indexed to the existence of the archive's inscriptions. An apocalyptic revelation is therefore impossible; with the absolute destruction of the trace/archive, no thing in itself would stand revealed. After the absolute destruction of the trace and manifestation, only nothingness would remain. In Meillassoux's terms, the nuclear annihilation of one of the terms of the correlation would also result in the annihilation of the relation itself, and therefore being itself would cease (to be is to be a correlate).

However, as we have seen, science is perfectly capable of making statements that subtract one term of the relation in order to exam the other term as it is in itself, that is, mathematically. Science is capable of formulating mathematical statements about the universe as it will be after the annihilation of humans, or even after the universe reaches a state of absolute entropy. In other words, apocalypse - the elimination of the manifestation and revelation of the pure in-itself - is entirely possible, and perhaps inevitable.

What we have here is, in fact, the beginnings of a refutation not only of infinite finitude, but also of Hagglund's conception of change (i.e., potentiality, virtuality and actuality) and even a neutering of Hagglund's critique of non-contradiction.

Badiou & Potted Plants

In the previous post, I discussed Meillassoux's attempt to refute Humean anxiety about causality. The die can produce numbers from 1-6, but it would be a fallacy to say it could become a potted plant because this possibility is not given. Alain Badiou's [i]Logics of Worlds[/i] offers another route.

In Book 2, Section 1, Badiou lays out the transcendental structure of determinate worlds. Worlds are local spaces that form the background of entities, and entities form points within these worlds. He argues that all appearing is governed by a handful of operators such as the envelope and conjunction.

Now, sub-section 5 concerns the ability to think, within a world, that which does not appear within that world. In other words, my ability to think the lack of tarantulas currently appearing in the world of my apartment.

His first argument is fairly straight-forward and continues on the basis of his destruction of the chimerical set-of-all-sets. If it were impossible to think the non-appearance of a being, than every being would have to appear in every world, and suddenly we would have a universe again.

LoW's complicated relationship to phenomenology appears in his second argument. If each being is being-there, than this includes the logical possibility of not-being-there. He will refer to this as a zero-degree of appearing. Again, straight forward.

The third argument is much more technical. Let's examine it in detail, and begin by quoting the function of the transcendental:

"At the core of the transcendental questions lies the evaluation of the degrees of identity or difference between a multiple and itself, or between a being-there and other beings. The transcendental must therefore make possible the 'more' and the 'less.' There must exist values of identity which indicate, for a given world, to what extent a multiple-being is identical to itself or to some other being of the same world." (p. 102-103)

So, the transcendental governs how identical X is, or different from, Y - as well as itself, X. X is more or less identical to X, and more or less different from Y. If X does not appear in a world at all - if tarantulas do not appear in my apartment - than X/hairy spiders must have a zero-level of identity with the beings within the world/my apartment. Thank God.

The third argument relies on this. Any evaluation of identity - saying that X has a strong value of identity to itself or Y - implies that this value could be nil. X could appear quite strongly, or it could appear not at all.

The value of these three arguments is that they do not rely on sense perception or on a calculation of probabilities. Remember Hume's problem: why is the world a consistent place, given that the structure of cause and effect is not empirical? Sense perception only tells us that every time we have seen the cue ball strike the 8 ball, they have interacted in such an such a manner. We can't ground necessity, and if we lose necessity, we end up with an infinite number of possibilities for the 8 ball - why should it not transform into a potted plant?

Well, we can say that not every possibility can exist in a world, because that would make that world the universe. We can also say that while we can think the sudden appearance of a potted plant in the pool-world, we have the corresponding ability to think of it not being there at all. We also have the ability to think the plant's nil-level of appearance - the possible plant has no conjunction with the pool ball.

This does not make the 8 ball-plant transformation impossible, but it shows that, once we stop thinking in terms of infinite probability, than it is no longer really thinkable.

Meillassoux on Hume

The splash that Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude has made seems to be going through stages. Initially, at least in the blogosphere, the concern was largely with Meillassoux's idea of the arche fossil. Recently, I've started to see some engagement with his absolute contingency and divinology - Martin Hägglund's comments actually made Derrida sound attractive to me.

Still, I haven't come across commentary on my favorite section of the book, the take down of Hume. It seems to me that this chapter is the lynchpin - this is the chapter that secures what I see as a genuine realism - for my own reasons, reasons I will get to another time, I would also say this chapter secures a solid empiricism.

As far as I know, most strategies for dealing with Hume's problem of causal necessity involve dissolving it (ie, ignoring it) or shifting the terms of the problem without actually solving it. Hence, Hume's own skeptical tactic of changing the question to the origins of the belief in causal necessity, or Kant's transcendental move of claiming that, given the consistency of representation, causation could not be otherwise. Phenomenologists throw their hat into the ring by radicalizing Kant via the hermenutics of finitude.

As Meillassoux points out, all of these strategies still presuppose the necessity of causal necessity. Each of these strategies sidesteps the question of why causation itself is not simply random - if there is no necessity, then there is also no reason why wine should not spontaneously become water, or why the moon should not suddenly fly away from the Earth, etc. His goal is to evacuate existence of all necessity, while maintaining a place for the world's manifest stability.

So what is the fourth option? Meillassoux calls it the speculative option. Instead of showing the necessity of laws or God, "we must ask how we are to explain the manifest stability of physical laws given that we take them to be contingent." (p.91,92)

Why assume the necessity of the laws of nature? The standard argument goes that if the laws could change, (say, if light could change its speed) they would do so, with whatever degree of frequency you wish to claim. It is this "frequentalist implication" (FI) that must go.

Let's expand on the FI. If I were playing a game of dice, and the six side came up a thousand times in a row, I'd begin to suspect the die was loaded. If you're smarter than me, you'd begin to assume that much earlier. What about a more extreme possibility? Why doesn't the die transform into a potted plant? Why doesn't the die negate gravity and float into the air? There is no way to eliminate these possibilities, based entirely on experience. Just because X follows from Y today, does not mean it will follow tomorrow. Hence the belief in causal necessity - sooner or later, you have to assume enemy action.

This is a version of apriori reason - we know there is no aposteriori reason why the 6 six shouldn't come up a thousand times in a row - that'd be the gambler's fallacy. And we know there is no apriori reason why your die should not become a potted plant. Here is the flaw: what the FI does is conflate the possible and the whole - as Meillassoux says of the FI, "what is apriori possible [is] thinkable in terms of a numerical totality." When we say the propability of your die becoming a plant is 1:X, that X is a number in a calculable totality, known apriori, however infinite in a cardinal sense.

So the FI is an element of apriori reason. What we have to show is that apriori reasoning is illegitimate here - in fact, that the FI is a fallacy. What is the condition of refuting the FI, and therefore securing the manifest stability of nature while at the same time claiming absolute ontological contingency? We eliminate that X by showing that the absolute contingency of the world is inaccessible to probabalistic reasoning.

They key is refuting this equating of the thinkable with the possible. We can think, without contradiction, an infinite number of outcomes when we roll the die. The result could be a one, or a six, or a magically appearing seven, or a miniature unicorn. Meillassoux borrows from Alain Badiou's reading of set theory, and the upshot here is the detotalization of number. The universe, or being as such, is not totalized by an apriori thinkable set of infinite cardinals.

What in set theory is capable of doing is showing is that this numerical whole is a chimera? This is where Alain Badiou's just-translated book comes in. The argument isn't all that difficult, and is a spiritual descendant of Russell's Barber paradox. The short version - being as such is turtles all the way up, down and around. Take a set - (A, B, C). Set theory says that A, B and C are all themselves sets - A is made up of (X, Y, Z), and Z is made up of its own sets. The question that concerns us here, is there a set that encompasses all other sets? In other words, the numerical totality that would supply the X of 1:X?

The answer is no. There are two kinds of sets - reflexive and non-reflexive. Reflexive sets include themselves as an element in their set - for example, reflexive set A includes A in itself - (A, X, Y). A is an element there. Non-reflexive sets do no include themselves - take B, whose elements are (C, D). B is not an element of itself.

If there is a set of the whole, it obviously must include itself. If A includes all sets, it must include itself.

However, if we divide all sets into reflexive and non-reflexive, a problem emerges. If the set of the whole, A, includes all non-reflexive sets, B, then there must be a complete subset of non-reflexive sets. Let's call this set of all non-reflexive sets the Chimera. To quote two paragraphs from page 110 of Logics of Worlds:

"Is the Chimera reflexive or non-reflexive?. . . . Now, if the Chimera is reflexive, this means that it presents itself. It is within its own multiple-composition. But what is the Chimera? The multiple of all non-reflexive multiples. if the Chimera is among these multiples, it is because it is not-reflexive. But we have just supposed that it is. Inconsistency.

"Therefore, the Chimera is not reflexive. However, it is by definition the multiple of all non-reflexive multiples. If it is not reflexive, it is in this 'all', this whole, and therefore presents itself. It is reflexive. Inconsistency, once again."

So the Chimera can neither be reflexive or non-reflexive, and if all sets must be one or the other, then the Chimera simply is not.

What this means for our argument is that there is no numerical totality of possibilities. The FI completely depends on such a totality, and this totality does not exist. In other words, probabilistic reasoning - either apriori or aposteriori - is incapable of supplying the X that 1:X requires. There is no grand set of possibilities to choose from. The only possiblities are those that are given - the one, the two, the three, etc. The miniature unicorn and the potted plant are not given possibilies.

The admittedly strange upshot: we know that absolutely everything is absolutely contingent, but we have no valid reasons to believe that everyday relations (pool games, combustion engines, scientific experiments) will be thrown into chaos.

Ok, so why did I say at the beginning that this is the real condition for a realism? Leaving aside my allusion to empiricism, what this does is continue the Enlightenment project of demystifying the world. In other words, I think any realism must be a continuous project of seeing the world as an ever more prosaic place.

It may appear that Meillassoux's absolute contingency is anything but prosaic, as I think it is easy to latch onto it in a heroic way, such as "anything is possible," or "where there is a will, there is a way." Meillassoux himself nods in this direction when he claims that contingency is the basis of all critique of ideology. However, I think what his project does is really to throw us back onto the given world as a banal place where there are no gods to save us. These gods take many forms, especially in theory - the openness of the future, the inbreaking of an Event, or anarchic sensible becoming. I think Meillassoux shows us why we can and must dismiss these gods as attempts not to go beyond the given, but as attempts to deny or escape it. This post already seems long enough, so I'll leave it there now.

Poles Within Philosophy - A Manifesto of Sorts

I have an irresistible need to justify this addition of a new blog to the already vast collection of philosophy blogs. If I name the anxiety, does that mean I get a pass on the rather personal nature of what I'm about to write? Probably not, but the anxiety is bound up with the reasons for the creation of the blog, so it might as well be reflected on. Hopefully I will be able to demonstrate that there is a certain joy traveling hand-in-hand with said anxiety.

There are four poles that I find myself torn between. The tradition grinds against the creation of novel concepts, and personal ethics seem to conflict with the impersonal nature of coherent, productive concepts.

The first pairing is attached to one of the great conflicts in academia. The western philosophical tradition is massive, and carries extraordinary authority for good reason. If one is to engage with philosophy, there is no doubt one must carry with them a keen knowledge of the tradition. Exactly how does one go about producing the new without any knowledge of the old? One at least requires knowledge of what the problems are and how others have worked on them. Without this knowledge, one risks solipsism, a complete inability to engage others in dialogue. The other risk is banal repetition, a simple recreation of the wheel. What the tradition finally stands for is established excellence. Brilliant minds have produced brilliant works, and we must never cease measuring ourselves against them.

What must be resisted here is tradition-as-police. Sooner or later, one must speak in their own name - one cannot simply genuflect before greatness and consider this philosophy. What this finally means is that one must be willing to risk mediocrity - what else could it mean? We have to risk the (however justified or unjustified) disapproving stare of the patricians. This disapproving stare can take many forms: "You have misread X," "You haven't even read X," "Your concept has been done before, and done better." Surely these are far more withering criticisms than "you have contradicted yourself." Contradictions are bugs that can be stamped out; the risk that one is mediocre and perhaps displays a complete lack of talent are greater anxieties, at least for myself. But if philosophy is finally a praxis of creating concepts, I can't just linger around admiring the tradition.

As for the second pair, it is entirely native to philosophy. The title of this blog's shout-out to Spinoza is an attempt to capture it. Philosophy has long had a twin vocation - learning to die and/or live, and the establishment of intellectual norms (if not the actual production of knowledge). I think there is a tension here because I have the suspicion that Nietzsche is correct when he says every philosophy springs from a moral seed. It seems like there are two questions to be asked of any philosophy - one, what desire inhabits it? And two, is it true? The disappearance of the question of truth is an endlessly complex one, but we cannot forget that it is fairly new so far as the tradition is concerned.

When one creates a concept, it is entirely an ethical matter, ie an expression of human or inhuman desire? Or can we actually claim that philosophical concepts have an ability to hit upon the real? Here, I consider Spinoza's work to be exemplary - it is both an ethics and an ontology (marked by the coldly calculative nature of geometry). This is the sort of tradition I would like to find myself in.

So, these are the four coordinates I find myself thinking in. The will to risk mediocrity while measuring myself against greatness, and the attempt to create coldly impersonal concepts fused with ethical concerns. In practice, this will shake out into roughly four kinds of posts. Some posts will be a sort of apprenticeship - my attempts to figure out what the hell people like Badiou are saying. In other words, plain old commentary. Others will be explorations of concepts I personally favor. Ethology posts will be attempts to explore the desire inhabiting concepts, and finally, ethics posts will be where the rubber hits the road - the yolk of the egg.