Braver responds

This all seems reasonable:

“Let me try one more time to clarify what I had said about my status. The book is a defense of anti-realism, and I do consider myself an anti-realist. What I wanted to say was that I’m not a partisan anti-realist, and the book isn’t an anti-realist polemic. My goal was to show that anti-realism is reasonable, pace analytic dismissals, but it would be against neither the letter nor spirit of the book to take it as a summary of a movement that’s exhausted itself and needs to be put out of its misery. My adherence to anti-realism was, at the time of writing, largely default; I hadn’t seriously considered alternatives because any possible realism seemed to have to ignore Kant’s advances (this was why I couldn’t really get your book at the time). The first part of Meillasoux’s book has already shaken this automatic fidelity. While I am not yet on board with SR, I’m very open to being convinced and, were this to happen, I don’t think there would be much to revoke in my book.

Harman: ‘This becomes very clear by the end of Braver’s book, where Derrida is shown to undertake such a thorough subversion of realism that it’s hard to see what the next “radical” step in that direction could possibly be.’

Yes, this is what I meant to say about my chapter on Derrida, not that I was suspicious of him but that I couldn’t see how to carry on afterwards (tho non-geniuses rarely do).

Sorry to keep beating a dead horse, but I don’t think I’ve done a good job clarifying my position.”

excellent Cogburn post

Don’t miss COGBURN’S LATEST. And his “inside analytic baseball” point about who uses “realism” as opposed to who uses “naturalism” is well-taken.

One of my reasons for moving away from “realism” as a term is that lately I’ve been looking at how objects can either be undermined (by saying that they emerge from some pre-objective, primal, churning depth) or “overmined” (by saying that objects are a useless fiction posited as a substratum lying beneath relations, accessibility to the mind, or bundles of qualities). Materialism, in view, is the one theory that manages to crash into both Scylla and Charybdis– it undermines objects by saying “these are just mid-sized things of everyday experience; smaller particles explain them perfectly well” and simultaneously overmines objects by saying “there is nothing more to the ultimate constituents of reality than the properties that can be said to belong to them”.

That gives four options:

1. object-oriented philosophy (in the broad sense of any philosophy in which autonomous individual entities are central, including Aristotle’s)

2. undermining objects through a more primordial dimension (monism, the pre-individual, the virtual, primordial flux or becoming)

3. overmining objects by saying that they are nothing more than their qualities, effects, or relations (empiricism, idealism, correlationism, relationism)

4. undermining and overmining objects simultaneously (materialism)

The problem with “realism” as a term is that there are realists in all four groups! (Given that the most basic sense of realism is “belief in a reality independent of the mind.”)

Notice also a major problem with Heidegger’s critique of ontotheology (adopted by Derrida). It only deals with the “overmining” problem, not the others. Heidegger tells us “nothing can be reduced to its overtly accessible traits; the being of beings withdraws from all access”. But this dumps overmining at the price of undermining– being is deeper than beings, and Heidegger often has a tendency to turn being itself into a colossal lump, as followed in the Levinasian concept of the shapelessil y a (“there is”) revealed in insomnia.

As stated earlier today, I think realism was the right song to awaken continental philosophy from its tacit anti-realist slumber. But now the stakes are shifting, and will soon lie elsewhere.

more from the writing advice bag

OK, I just finished up through page 25 of the Croatia paper. That’s about sixteen hours behind schedule, but it’s not rare to be sixteen hours behind schedule, and that’s why it’s good not to write anything at the very last minute. (Sometimes you’ll get away with it, but sometimes you’ll find yourself making excuses and downplaying expectations upon arrival– which is not a good position to be in, and above all not fair to those who invested scarce resources in bringing you.)

There is still a concluding section, and these sections are vitally important as a way of tying together all the various motifs found in any lecture, as well as establishing a final, powerful “take-home lesson” for the audience.

This particular concluding section needs to be around 7-10 pages. I read fairly fast, but don’t want to have to read as fast as I did in Bristol. (I think that paper was 45 pages– almost too long.) This one should be around 32-35 pages total.

So what do I do now? Do a quick rough draft of the concluding section?

NO. This is the one place where I make an exception to that usual rough-drafting method. In a concluding section, clarity and rhetorical focus are vital. And in my opinion, this comes only when you’re a great believer in what has come before. And you can’t be a great believer in what has come before if it is stylistically garbage.

So, I will follow my different strategy, used when writing conclusions… I’ll give myself the rest of tonight off, in order to refresh my eyes and my memory banks.

Then, I will spend 1-2 days polishing and polishing the already extant 25 pages. Once those are sufficiently polished, I will outline the concluding section, and then I will write it.

But notice what has already happened… I’m completely out of any possible panic zone. Today is June 12. My flight to Croatia is early on the 19th. I have 6 empty work days ahead of me in which to finish this.

Now, let’s imagine that I get sick this week. Or let’s imagine some incredibly fun social things come up, and I uncharacteristically turn my back on all work for 4 or 5 days. It won’t matter anymore, because the paper is basically finished, as long as I clean up the style a bit.

So, let’s say I become sick or lazy this week. What’s the worst case scenario?

*I could easily write a 7-page conclusion on the flights between Cairo and Zagreb.

*I could easily write a 7-page conclusion on the 19th in Zagreb, since I don’t speak until the 20th

*in a pinch, I could ad lib a conclusion (heck, you can ad lib a whole talk; the only reason I’m not doing so this time is because a formal paper was recommended this time)

But I’m not going to do any of those things. That’s what the 25-year-old version of me would have done, and I wasn’t very happy in those days, and those sorts of last-minute operations were a large part of the reason for the unhappiness. Thus, I fully intend to finish the whole thing a couple of days from now, well in advance of the trip.

I want to have a relaxing week. I want to enjoy Commencement on Thursday night before getting on the plane a few hours later. And most of all, I want to enjoy my long layover in magnificent Istanbul on Friday morning. None of that would be possible if I’m still struggling with the conclusion.

But there’s a tradeoff…

By finishing the lecture early, I eliminate anxiety. And while anxiety is certainly an uncomfortable experience, it often serves as an effective screen for depression. In other words, if you’re extremely anxious about completing a given piece of writing, as horrible as the anxiety is, it works as a sort of drug that makes you focus on nothing but sheer survival.

If the anxiety is absent, and the lecture is completed in final form 4 or 5 days ahead of schedule, this means that there are no alibis. I can’t tell myself that it wasn’t my best work, I was under the pressure of time, etc. No, this will be the best work I am currently capable of on the topic in question (materialism). This means not only that the judgment of others cannot be deflected by alibis. It also means that my own critical self-judgments cannot be thus deflected. I’ll have 3 or 4 days to reflect in solitude on whether my thoughts on materialism are really adequate or even interesting.

When you first find yourself in such a position, it’s extremely unpleasant. It can be a slow process across the years to build up sufficient confidence in your own work that you no longer need anxiety-inducing procrastination as a painkiller for the possible pain of confronting your possible own inadequacies.

And in fact, there are always inadequacies in any piece of work, and we need to confront those in order to develop. Anxiety tends to deaden the subtle skills that enable us to walk the narrow path between self-critique and self-dismissal.

Cogburn on the advice posts

JON COGBURN weighs in on my recent advice posts.

While he agrees with most of what I say, he finds himself unable to share my recent positive attitude toward “bureaucratic writing.” The reasons he gives are compelling… Many of these tasks are sheer makework providing cover for bad things that administrators have already decided to do anyway. Most of the economic things happening to American universities these days amount to horrific belt-tightening, and so forth.

Part of my sunny attitude may admittedly have to do with our currently better predicament at A. U. C. We lost a huge chunk of endowment on the stock market like everyone else, and things are being delayed or killed here too. Just not as much. We have a sparkling new campus, a highly ambitious and capable new Provost, and in general have plenty of running room ahead to be much better than we’ve been. (In terms of our niche and solid brand name in the Middle East.) So, things are pretty sunny here, and I know my administrative reports will not be ignored, so it will be nothing but a pleasure to prepare next year’s thorough report on research at A. U. C. [ADDENDUM: We’re also not dependent on impoverished state governments to help us, and better yet, our students don’t wrestle with the “student loan debt” issue, and I think it’s only a matter of time before that point deals a crippling blow to American academia as we know it.]

But I have to agree with Jon about a lot of these documents. One thing that usually makes me hate a writing task is when I have to co-author it. Nine times out of ten, writing by committee means bland, lowest-common-denominator word and style choice. That undercuts the whole fun of writing for me, which is the chance to clarify some subject matter by thinking about it carefully and trying to find the surprises that are latent in any subject matter if you look hard enough. Indeed, my definition of writing would be: “the search for surprises in a given topic.” Interesting people are the ones who surprise us, who have a core of individuality that breaks through any of the stock character types that laziness always seduces us to become.

Just thinking on the fly, the bureaucratic writing I always avoid is the collectively authored stuff, yes. That’s when it becomes a bureaucratic burden.

But when you have the chance to, say, write a reference letter, you have the chance to reflect on what makes a particular student unique compared with all other students you’ve had. And if you think hard enough, there’s always something. (The only reference letters that annoy me are the ones where I had somebody as an Intro student 5 years ago, haven’t seen them since, and barely remember them except that my computer shows that they got an A in the class. Because then all I can do is report the A and make a few bland remarks about how only a certain percentage of students were able to attain an A in that class. It’s far more interesting if I’ve interacted with them a bit, had them in a few classes, seen how they deal with other students under pressure, and so forth. Then it becomes almost like developing a character in a novel to write a letter about them.)

In short, I would agree with Cogburn that a certain species of administrative writing is, in fact, a headache and a time-wasting burden. No argument there.

has the term “realism” outlived its usefulness?

Yes, I’m a realist. But yes, I also am beginning to believe the the term “realism” may not be useful for very much longer, at least not in the circles in which I and most of my readers travel. This really became clear to me while writing the Bristol lecture, and is becoming even clearer while preparing the Zagreb piece. Let’s see if I can sketch quickly the reasons for saying so, since the rest of the lecture still beckons.

The most general meaning of realism would be something like “belief in a reality outside the human mind.” But all kinds of different philosophies could proclaim such a belief, while having disturbingly little else in common. That wouldn’t be such a problem, if not that the further disagreements may be a lot more important than the shared belief in an external reality.

Speaking tactically, realism was the right chord to play in continental philosophy during the decade now ending. You can see this not only in speculative realism, but also in DeLanda, who has a great rhetorical force precisely because he comes straight out and says “I’m a realist.”

In analytic philosophy, this would be just another day at the ballpark, since realism has always had a respectable niche there. In continental philosophy it’s always been otherwise. Was there anyone in the continental tradition, pre-2002, who just came out and said “I’m a realist”? I say 2002, because that’s when DeLanda’s Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy was published, as well as my own Tool-Being, both of which state, bluntly and in the opening pages, that the time for realism has come.

The typical continental gesture prior to that, inherited from both Husserl and Heidegger, was the “we’re already beyond that problem” gesture, even though no one was really beyond it. Continental philosophy was, quite simply, an anti-realist project through and through. Hence the great merit of Lee Braver’s A Thing of This World, whose subtitle has a certain justified audacity: A History of Continental Anti-Realism. Braver was really the first to come out and say, “yes, it’s been an anti-realist project all along.” He now says that I was too quick to attribute anti-realist positions to himself, but be that as it may, Braver is certainly not a rabid realist like the speculative realists. And this meant that it wasn’t an attack from the outside, as all of ours might appear to be.

In my estimation, realism must still be championed against all the continental anti-realisms– which still hold the institutional upper hand, though no longer the momentum. The momentum is on our side, and it seems to me that all the anti-realist permutations are so exhausted that it will be hard for continental anti-realism to last for much longer. This becomes very clear by the end of Braver’s book, where Derrida is shown to undertake such a thorough subversion of realism that it’s hard to see what the next “radical” step in that direction could possibly be. In fact, even if it remains controversial to call Deleuze a “realist,” I am quite sure that it was vaguely realist instincts that turned Deleuze in about the mid-1990’s from just another cool French thinker at the fringes into the European avant-garde referent. Suddenly we were free of signs and traces and texts, and in contact with something that felt fleshy and real. (I remember the status of Deleuze in about 1990, and it was nothing at all like it is today. He was about a half-step above Baudrillard on the prestige scale. In fact, Lingis taught a Deleuze/Baudrillard course at Penn State my first semester there. Nothing against Baudrillard, whom I rather enjoy. But no one has ever claimed that Baudrillard was the central pillar of all French philosophy, and in those days no one was saying it about Deleuze either, other than a couple of ahead-of-their-time visionaries like Dan Smith. Now, plenty of people say it about Deleuze. Some people call Deleuze “the 20th century Kant,” and so forth. Almost no one was saying it then.)

But back to the point…

Perhaps I’m just getting tired of people saying that philosophers are “realists” just because they might concede some rumbling unified lump of indeterminate reality beyond human access. I’ve tried to say, again and again, that this is not enough to establish a realist standpoint. But now I’m wondering why I’m trying so hard to save a word. The meaning of words is a matter of consensus, and given that the consensus seems to be that “any residue of reality outside human access means realism,” then perhaps it’s time to drop the word. Heck, Kant would be a realist by this definition!

Here are some of the realisms that I want nothing to do with…

*the aforementioned “any inarticulate residue outside the human mind is enough to constitute realism”

*scientific realism, which thinks that we merely need to get rid of “the manifest image”, and that the sciences can give us access to the true properties of things (I oppose this because I don’t see that things are assembled out of properties; that’s just Humean empiricism transposed into the pre-sensory realm, and shows scoffing disregard for the achievements of Husserl in discrediting “bundle of qualities” empiricism), and…

*which wants to eliminate intentional objects such as Popeye and battles of centaurs, merely because they “only exist in the mind,” as opposed to some extra-mental physical realm; if the previous point ignores Husserl, this point ignores Latour– who decided that the physical world does all the reality and the mental world does all the distortion? Read Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern for a nice demolition of this dichotomy.

I’m starting to wish there were a shorter phrase available than “object-oriented philosophy” (OOP is a bit too flip, and the quasi-acronym “Orpheus” applies only to my own variant of OOP, as opposed to Levi’s and Latour’s). But if what you’re concerned with is the status of individual entities, as I am, then “realism” no longer does the trick. Yes, I’m a realist, but 80% of realists (estimated) are dedicated to annihilating individual entities in favor of either a rumbling monistic plasma or bundles of scientifically discernible qualities. Neither of those suffices for me. (And I’m glad to welcome Levi to the Zubiri party, because once you’re at the party, the reality of individual things seems so much more strange than classical realism ever seems to indicate.)

These thoughts are still in development. But it’s possible that Zagreb will be the last time I ever use “realism” in the title of a paper. We have our realist foothold in continental philosophy now; it wasn’t there before, and it needed to be established. But it seems to me that that’s no longer the central point of dispute.

the savage side of Constantine

Gibbon:

“After a signal victory over the Franks and Alemanni, several of their princes were exposed by his order to the wild beasts in the amphitheatre of Treves, and the people seem to have enjoyed the spectacle, without discovering, in such a treatment of royal captives, anything that was repugnant to the laws of nations or of humanity.”

a Levi/Reid conversation

Larval Subjects addresses Planomenology, and has an interesting conversation afterward.

The one thing that still puzzles me is when Reid says: “I still don’t see why you think Badiou’s appearance requires a human observer any more than Graham’s intentional relations between objects do. My point is that if Badiou is susceptible here, Graham should be too.”

And on that point, Levi answers effectively on my behalf:

“I confess that I’m constantly surprised that enthusiasts of Badiou do not see the issue that I’m getting at with respect to his anti-realism, so I don’t know what more to say. If a thinker asserts the identity of being and thought it strikes me as obvious that they’ve sutured being to the human in some way. More fundamentally, the fact that Badiou consistently refers to cultural and human examples in the development of his theory of objects strikes me as proof positive that at the level of his theory of worlds or situations he remains in the orbit of Althusser and Foucault (remarks he himself has explicitly made). Finally, the fact that in Being and Event he explicitly ties the structuring function of situations (what he now calls worlds) to the Encyclopedia and calls, elsewhere, Foucault the thinker of the Encyclopedia shows that fundamentally his theory of worlds remains of the orbit of the human and cultural. Perhaps a radicalization of Badiou’s position is possible that would be explicitly realist in flavor, but I don’t think one can compellingly argue that Badiou himself has developed this account. Do not forget that when Badiou develops his own version of “anti-humanism” he’s not doing so in a realist vein, but in the vein of Althusser’s anti-humanism which treats economic and cultural processes as more fundamental than human individuals. In other words, it’s an entirely different anti-humanism than the sort being discussed by the SRs.”