Dark Chemistry on Brassier

This is actually pretty old now, from Brassier’s 2009 interview at the hands of Bram Ieven. But it seems basically correct:

“I think it safe to say that neither Grant, nor Harman, nor Meillassoux shares my commitment to epistemological naturalism, or my sympathy for ‘reductionist’ accounts of subjective experience. I think they would view it as a mistake to begin philosophizing from the contrast between the ‘manifest’ and ‘scientific’ images of reality as I do, and as result their realism tends to be more catholic and ecumenical than mine, especially where subjective experience is concerned.”

Right. The problem for me with the distinction between ‘manifest’ and ‘scientific’ images is that the two really aren’t different enough from each other to begin with. Namely, they are both images.

If one starts from this point, one is devoted to the project of merely distinguishing between “good” and “bad” images, and one merely flatters the natural sciences for their production of so many good images.

In the meantime, insufficient justice is done to both phenomenology and (God knows) to Latour, because the realm of “manifest images” is treated as a philosophical wasteland that exists only to be debunked. But in fact, there’s a lot going on in the intentional world of Husserl and the relational world of Latour that philosophy needs to account for.

My basic position: philosophy is not the handmaid of the natural sciences of 2010 A.D. any more than it is the handmaid of the theology of 1200 A.D.

[ADDENDUM: One other point… Although Brassier distinguishes himself from the other three original Speculative Realists here, in some ways he and Meillassoux are very similar on this point. For Meillassoux too there are “good images,” though they come from mathematization rather than from the natural sciences as for Brassier. My main critique of the “things in themselves” that Meillassoux tries to proves it that they aren’t really things in themselves at all. They exist after we die, sure, but whether we are dead or alive they do not differ in kind from the mathematical images we have of them. In other words, it’s far less of an “in itself” than we find in Kant.

It should be immediately evident that Grant and I are more similar on this point. For Grant, knowledge is never direct access to a good image as opposed to bad images. Instead, knowledge for him is a “phenomenal product” (Scheinprodukt, Schelling) already different from that which it knows. There’s a sort of translational model for Grant, in other words.]