Levi on virtualism

LEVI WITH ANOTHER GREAT POST, this time on Deleuze and DeLanda’s fondness for the virtual. If anything, I’m even more bothered than Levi is by this maneuver, and for much the same reason that Levi outlines.

Interestingly, if you ask DeLanda what his objections are to Bhaskar (he greatly admires him) his main objection is that Bhaskar still believes in essence, which DeLanda wants to replace with a thing’s entire generative history (a Bergsonian move, probably picked up via Deleuze: nothing is lost, all is remembered).

Speaking of DeLanda, the past two months have been so ridiculously busy that I haven’t had time yet to finish the very nice-looking manuscript of his new book, which is sitting on my desktop. Perhaps he won’t mind if I offer a few “teasers” in December, though I won’t feel comfortable quoting much from an unpublished book.

As stated in a lecture in Norway last November (which will appear as a chapter in Towards Speculative Realism shortly) my sense from A New Philosophy of Society is that DeLanda was drifting from Deleuze more toward Bhaskar. We’ll have to see if that trend continues. Among other things, DeLanda’s 2006 book was less “Bergsonian” than his better-known Deleuze book of 2002… The talk of every atom retaining the entire history of its genesis was fading in 2006, in favor of a theory of “redundant causation” in which many different histories might lead to the same thing. This will be his first new book since then, and we’ll have to see which direction he’s moving. I didn’t get far enough into the ms. yet to make a judgment on that point.

more Gesamtausgabe

It looks like another Heidegger Gesamtausgabe volume came down the pipe while I wasn’t looking. It’s called Das Ereignis, and sounds Beiträge-esque. You all know the 1930’s is just about my least favorite period of Heidegger (and not just for “Triple Sieg Heil to the Führer!” reasons), but I’ll dutifully read this one like all the others. It’s a kind of lifetime commitment once you’ve put this much energy into it.

I’ve said before that these new volumes are mostly a bore: there is generally a reason why they were left for last. It gets tiresome to read Greek words splattered across a page by the hand of Heidegger, along with hyphenated throwaway terms like An-klang and Er-eignung. However, once in awhile there are brilliant passages, and occasionally even an entire brilliant volume.

The collections of letters are almost always fascinating, so I will continue to cheer the appearance of more of those.

And here’s something else I will consider doing, before long…

Stephen Houlgate was teaching at DePaul before he left for Warwick, as many of you know. He ran a very generous Friday night German reading group at his home in Evanston in those days. And on one of those nights (this would have been 1991 or 1992) he said he had originally planned to reread all of the works of Kant and the German Idealists on the anniversary of their appearance. So in other words, he would have reread the Critique of Pure Reason in 1981, and so forth– just to get some personal sense of what the time span felt like. And then for some reason he got distracted and wasn’t able to carry out that project.

I thought of doing something similar with Heidegger… rereading his lecture courses beginning in 2019, Being and Time in 2027, etc.

The main problem with the project, however, is obvious… I’m a ’68 baby whereas Heidegger is an ’89 baby. So, I’m effectively 21 years “older” than Heidegger for the purposes of this exercise. I would be 81 years old by the time I got to the 1949 Bremen lectures, and even if I live that long may well not live long enough to get to all the language essays of the 1950’s. And why start a project that you might realistically not live long enough to complete, unless others are going to complete it for you? (And it would be pointless in this case.)

So maybe I’ll only think of doing it for the 1920’s. Yes, that’s a nice idea– I’ll consider spending the 2020’s doing a reread of Heidegger’s 1920’s stuff. It’s his best decade anyway.

metaphors I’ve never much liked

1. “The Great Conversation” as a nickname for the great books of the Western Canon. It’s not really a conversation; that’s a bit too pious and also too lighthearted, both at the same time (“Oh, we may disagree, but we will have such a great conversation!”). I think of the Canon instead as “The Great Inventors’ Lab.” They’re doing it and showing us how it’s done, not just conversing about it.

I’m with Deleuze on this one– discussion is important, but in a subordinate sense: as a manner of clarification and communication, not as a primary medium of thought. Good new ideas will always be tougher to defend and develop in conversation than mediocre, polished, currently dominant ones.

2. “Reading between the lines.” This isn’t a very potent metaphor for what is meant, and I would assume that other languages have far more vivid metaphors for this phenomenon. You’re not so much reading “between the lines” as “into the background.” When we speak of reading between the lines, we are speaking of listening to the tone and noticing what is omitted, rather than allowing ourselves to be hypnotized by the surface content of a statement.

There’s a third one that I strongly dislike, but it’s slipping my mind at the moment.

the Maastricht announcement

Here is Tzuchien’s announcement of my talk in Maastricht.

http://versuslaboratory.janvaneyck.nl/seminars/view/20

(Sorry, it still says XXIth instead of XXIst. Typos happen for all sorts of reasons. We’ll fix it.)

Euros, Euros

I’ve just finished my usual pre-Europe tour of Cairo currency exchanges, assembling enough Euros to make this trip work. And I want to say that I’m grateful for how much easier this has become. The main remaining problem is that these places don’t always have huge stocks of the currencies you need… You’re often completely dependent on the question of “did some European people happen to stop in during the last 4 hours?”

During my first semester here, Fall 2000, Egypt devalued the Pound. Supposedly this was in order to let the exchange rate float and reach its true value, and in theory this ought to mean that there is no problem getting whatever currencies you want. But in practice, it seemed to be the case that someone in the government or elsewhere was hoarding hard currencies and not letting them onto the market (the Dollar was popular first, and later the Euro more so; the British Pound is a bit less in abundance, but still commands much respect among Egyptian currency traders).

What that meant is that you would have to start preparing for trips far ahead of time, gathering Dollars or Euros well in advance. Sometimes it was impossible to do so. There was one trip in particular, to Ireland in 2002, where I had no choice but to take a grab bag of Japanese Yen, Saudi Riyals, and UAE Dirhams, just because they’re all usually more exchangeable than Egyptian Pounds.

Luckily, something changed within the past couple of years. I’m not sure what. But it is much easier, if still not easy, to get the currencies you need for travelling.

amusing Tweet of the morning

nervemeter. “Carl Marx created capitalism.” This job has its moments of futility.

The one that has stuck with me over the years was a Plato essay I received claiming that Socrates was charged with “introducing new goods and corrupting the youth for reference.” Maybe my accent was too thick on the latter point.

another Levi blog mini-treatise

He’s really made a genre out of this– the 1,800-word blog treatise.

In any case, HERE IS LEVI’S LATEST POST, which touches on enough interesting ontology to occupy the rest of your day if you’re in the mood for it. Figures covered include Latour, Hjelmslev, and Aristotle, plus more peripheral references to others.

And this is right:

“In Harman’s language, content can be understood as the ‘withdrawn’ being of an actant, while expression could be understood as the ‘sensuous vicar’ by which this withdrawn being is expressed for another being. Why, then, the additional dimension of matter for each of these actants? Because in addition to the internal composition of each actant or its content (what I call the endo-consistency of a being which is roughly analogous to Suarez’s ‘substantial forms’), the being of any actant is infinitely decomposable into other actants or entities.”

My only hesitation is when he goes on to call it a kind of “hyper-chaos,” since for Meillassoux this refers to the total disconnection of all things from each other, given that the principle of sufficient reason disappears and everything loses its reason for existing– loses all connection with other entities. (Hence, my early review of After Finitude in Philosophy Today called Meillassoux a hyper-occasionalist.)

I never thought of enlisting Hjelmslev as an ally, but now I’m interested in doing so after Levi’s presentation.

But here’s what I really like about Levi’s post (and he made a similar point recently in his “history of S.R.” post)… For Aristotle, substance is that which is capable of having different qualities at different times: Socrates can laugh or cry while remaining Socrates, whereas crying cannot be laughing and still remain crying. For Husserl, an intentional object is that which remains identical for our intentions despite wildly shifting adumbrations: a tree can be viewed from many different angles and distances, in different lighting conditions and different moods, while still remaining the same tree for us.

By analogy, any person, thing, city, or philosophical movement is more real the more it is capable of having different features at different times or in different respects. S.R. was like this, and as the variants of Bogost, Bryant, and my own prove, OOO is like this too.

And this is why I detest all dogmatism in philosophy. Just as Hume reduces an apple to a bundle of qualities, so does dogmatism reduce philosophy to a bundle of opinions. The dogmatic, opinionated person is one who insists on surface agreement with explicit propositional claims, not realizing that the soul of the thing needs a bit more finesse than any list of accurate claims can ever approach.

Another bad side effect of this attitude is that the dogmatist tends to overestimate those who agree with him (the dogmatist is usually male, hence the deliberate lack of gender-neutral language here), no matter how flimsy the reasons for agreement. And he tends to wildly underestimate those who happen to disagree with him.

Here’s a good litmus test for deciding whether you are too dogmatic or not… How many people do you admire despite disagreeing with them completely? A good, healthy mind will have a long list of such figures. A narrow, cramped, crabbed, dogmatic mind will tend to admire only those who it deems to be right. But in the end, none of us can hope to be right for very long. There is a reality, but our formulations of it are always going to be somewhat tentative and inadequate. Hence it is foolish to attach oneself too closely to “bundles of opinions,” and to call this philosophy.

In fact, this might even be a good initial definition of politics as opposed to philosophy: politics is the realm of content. In the political sphere, you make coalitions with people based on bundles of overlapping opinions. Here, what matters is whether people agree with you or not. A certain degree of dogmatism must always be found in politics, but it’s poison for philosophy.

taking it easy

A bit of a cold coming on, which is never a good thing when facing a long flight to cold and rainy lands. So I’ll take it easy for the night.

Light blogging from the Low Countries, since it’s a busy trip coming up.

The Onion does England

With some of this I’m incapable of telling the difference between real and simulated British idiom, but I still thought the story at the bottom of this post was funny.

How many centuries would it take for the various versions of English to become mutually unintelligible? It’s still not an everyday occurrence in England that I’m lost by what someone is saying, though it does happen. And there are the famous really confusing things like “tabling” a proposal having opposite meanings in the UK and USA. I also didn’t know what “banknotes” were the first time an English person asked me for some. (That’s “money,” in America.)

The newspapers in India sometimes already lose me: there are sometimes stories there in English that I don’t quite understand, for language reasons rather than knowledge reasons. They also display the phenomenon of language that is completely intelligible and correct, but rather archaic by the standards of American English, such as the great story I read in Chennai last year about the Tamil Nadu state crackdown on “rowdies, goons, and dreaded gangsters.” I also still don’t understand words like “crore” and “lakh” in India, which you find attached to monetary amounts in news stories. I’ve looked them up before, but always forget how much they are.

BBC Upgrades Flap To Row

LONDON—The nightly Ten O’Clock News program on Great Britain’s BBC One channel upgraded a minor flap in Parliament’s House of Lords to an all-out row Tuesday after Conservative Party leader Thomas Galbraith, 2nd Baron Strathclyde, told the Lord Speaker to sod off. “The fortnight-old handbags suddenly exploded into a proper barney when Lord Strathclyde had an eppy and called Baroness Hayman a ‘dozy slag’ and then buggered off for a Jack Dash in the bog,” BBC political correspondent Basil Islington said. “Needless to say, the other geezers went chicken oriental.” The BBC said if the tossers don’t jam their tarts by late afto, they will be forced to classify the bull and cow as a paddy, though they haven’t ruled out the possibility of a total fucking pagger.

down to 50 soldiers

We’re making progress at last… Not only are there only 50 soldiers remaining on Brazil Street, but for the first time since Thursday evening it is possible for pedestrians to walk freely up and down the street. That is a major breakthrough for those of us who live here.

A barrier remains, but it is small enough to let normal car and motorcycle traffic through, and they do so with no questions asked. They are equipped to block anything of larger size, and also just to keep an eye on things.