Infrastructure

Tonight I will speak about infrastructure, since that is what interests these architects in their current project: a Mediterranean rail network.

In our recent correspondence, Meillassoux insisted that truth must be interesting; this is the reason, he said, that he reworks his writings so carefully before publication. He wants to make sure that each step of his argument is interesting no less than true.

I have a similar conception. It seems to me that avoidance of error is less important than avoidance of banality. Avoidance of error seems to me to based on the notion that truth means accurate propositional-discursive content, and error is the inaccurate version of the same.

But if you hold as I do that propositional content is always a translation and hence always inaccurate in the strict sense, then a new approach is needed. Contact with the real is not made through accurate propositions, but through some other means, and for me that is surprise. We make contact with the real precisely when we encounter surprises. Aristotle was already onto this when he defined substance as that which can have opposite qualities in opposite respects. You know you are dealing with something real when you are dealing with something that is precisely not a bundle of properties that can be assembled in discursive propositions, but something that undercuts such efforts in turbulent fashion.

Plato was onto this too, in fact, in the repeated claims of Socrates that we must know what something is before we know its qualities. The fact that he never attains such definitions does not mean that his dialectic is merely anoretic, so that the true Platonic doctrine would be an esoteric content sneakily eithheld from the dialogues. Instead, it means that the real is something that withdraws from all dialectic, and all propositional content. Truth is approached obliquely, and it is a failure of imagination to think this causes truth to degenerate into arbitrary poetic utterance. There is a difference, after all, between effective and ineffective poetry, just as there is a difference between scientific revolutions and the painstaking assembly of scientific facts. The latter is useful and needs its place in nany theory of truth, but it is neither the exhaustive nor even the exemplary case of truth.

The problem with systems of philosophy is that, in their demand that we include in them everything that exists in the world, they condemn us to offering much filler, much banality. No one has good ideas about everything, after all, nor does any philosophy ever destroy all possible ibjections to it.

Just as a rail infrastructure links pre-existent population centers rather than laying an exhaustive geometrical grid over the world, a philosophical infrastructure should link whatever surprises and paradoxes an individual thinker may have uncovered. Over time, the infrastructure can spread, bringing new topics into itself. But some topics may never be reached, and if we should seek to reach them, the effort should never be forced.

On slightly different topic, in my Latour book I said that his philosophy contains the four key concepts of actors, irreductions, translation, and alliance. All are crucial, but in a sense OOO departs from Latour on all four, at least in my version of OOO. Namely,

Actors are not all equal. There is a difference between real and sensual objects, and it is absolute, they are radically different in kind.

Latour holds that nothing is either reducible nor irreducible to anything else. My position, contrary to false assertions that I think spaghetti monsters are as real as atoms, is that real objects are never reducible and sensual objectsalways are. There is, however, some difficulty in nknowing which objects are real. We can never be sure of tis, in fact. No intellectual intuition allows us to make this determination; the belief in a given real object is always falsifiable.

As for translation, Latour holds that all relations are mediated. I counter that this leads to a Zeno-like paradox, and that there is in fact a kind of direct contact: a real-sensual link is always direct, whereas real-real is always linked by the sensual and sensual- sensual is always linked by real.

As for alliances, whereas for Latour a thing is determined by it’s aliens, i hold that it is determined only in isolation from its alliances.

I hope this is helpful, and i apologize in advance for any weird iPad spelling corrections that may have inserted some comical unintended vocabulary into the foregoing paragraphs. It will be some hours before I can edit this post on the slightly more reliable laptop.