autonomy and sincerity

Instead of looking for artificially skillful starting points for any piece of work, it’s best simply to begin with whatever is truly most on your mind at the time of writing. This is the same basic principle as my idea (expressed several times on the old blog) that a good outline is the key to a good style. Style comes not from crafty choice of adjectives, but from articulating a problem or situation in the way that seems simplest and most reasonable to us, since no one else will choose the same manner of articulation as being the simplest and most reasonable. Despite the idea that logic is universal, we are never more idiosyncratic than when we think logically.

What is most on my own mind these days is that every new philosophy that gets introduced is in some way a slap in the face of the autonomy of objects. Many new philosophies appear, but all agree in “radicalizing” objects by trying to derive them from some primary radix from which they are derivable. I’ve dealt with this theme on the former incarnation of the blog, a bit more in the final chapter of Prince of Networks, and will do it again in Bristol a month from now. (And by the way, I’m pretty sure Toscano will be standing in for Meillassoux, a worthy replacement.)

For various reasons I also need to write a whole new book this summer as well, and I’ll probably start that book with the same phenomenon… Everyone gets the adrenaline rush of conquest whenever they can start a new philosophy by slapping around autonomous individual objects from page 1. The earlier blog already listed some of these ways…

*”objects are nothing but their relations and effects on other things”

*”objects are nothing but how they appear to us; we don’t need to believe naively in things-in-themselves anymore”

*”objects are nothing but bundles of qualities”

*”objects are just crystallizations of a deeper, pre-object realm”

*”objects are derivative of a primal flux”

*”the world is actually one; objects exist only as surface-configurations of this deeper unity”

*”objects are always reducible to more fundamental, tinier objects”

*”objects are reducible to a process of historical sedimentation that must be unearthed by genealogy”

There are others, but this is a good opening sample. Objects are always called upon to be the reactionary straight man for whatever new radical philosophy is hot at the moment. Objects are reminiscent of Aristotelian substances, and everyone knows what an arid, reactionary model that is.

Except– it’s neither arid nor reactionary. There is nothing more weird than an object with is both autonomous in its own reality, and (insofar as it does interact with other things) non-autonomous.

A certain form of this paradox can already be found in Plato’s Meno, I have mentioned, when Socrates says that we have to know what virtue is before we can know what qualities it has. The “radical” approach to philosophy would call it “meaningless” to say that we can know a thing before knowing its qualities. I disagree with that complaint, and agree with Socrates. A thing is different from its qualities, as well as from its relations, accidents, moments, history, and pieces. The maximum allowable autonomy must be granted to objects, for a variety of reasons that this summer’s book will develop.

To grant autonomy to the things means to adopt an attitude of sincerity rather than one of aloof critique and smirking transgression. Our goal is no longer to say “the object is nothing more than X, Y, or Z”, thereby disintegrating it. Our new goal is to articulate the fault-lines in any given object. The sneer must be banished from the register of recognized intellectual gestures.