a bit of philosophy amidst the kitten posts

What I’ve been working on whenever Tamanya sits on my shoulder (like a parrot) and purrs (unlike a parrot) is Badiou’s Theory of the Subject. But what I’m thinking of at the moment is something Tim Morton said on his blog:

“The image is also a good example of what Meillassoux calls ‘the rich elsewhere’—his description for Graham Harman’s initial statement about objects.”

Tim’s probably right that Meillassoux was referring to me there, but the person he actually mentions is Latour. Meillassoux’s complaint is that the correlational circle is a very powerful argument, but that people like Latour (and me, by implication) simply respond by saying: “Yes, but the correlationist is so boring. There is a rich and diverse world, and I have no interest in wasting my time on this boring correlational argument.” He calls this a “secession” rather than an argument. Meillassoux’s claim, at the Speculative Realism Workshop at Goldsmiths, is essentially that no philosophy can be a rationalism unless it passes through correlationism all the way to the end and realizes that correlationism is (initially) a powerful argument that naive realism cannot withstand.

In my book on Meillassoux, forthcoming in July, one of my claims is that the correlational circle cannot get him where he’s trying to go. We can give the following stripped-down spectrum of possible views on the real world, insofar as this is relevant to Meillassoux’s argument:

1. naive/dogmatic realism. (“there is a real world, and we can know it”)
2. weak correlationism; Kant. (“there is a real world, but we can only think it, not know it”)
3. strong correlationism. (“the thought of a world outside thought is a contradiction in terms, but that world might exist anyway”)
4. idealism (“there is nothing outside thought”)

It is by exploring the tension between 3 and 4 that Meillassoux attempts to generate his own, novel position: speculative materialism.

One of my claims in the book is that position 3 is impossible, and thus the ensuing deductions about contingency do not work since they follow from an impossible premise. To take the correlational circle as Meillassoux recommends seriously entails that one become an idealist.

I’ve said this here before, but it’s been a few months.

Another puzzle in Meillassoux, that has not often been noted: despite his concept of hyperchaos, he thinks that laws of nature do exist. These laws can change at any moment for no reason whatsoever, but they are laws nonetheless. Local actions are governed by natural laws. Hence the distinction in his philosophy between virtuality and potentiality: the latter can indeed by measured according to statistical law, whereas the former cannot because there is no sum total of possible cases, not even an infinite number. This puzzled me for a long time, but then I noticed that it’s rather reminiscent of Badiou’s own distinction between the event and the state of the situation.

Finally, I’m more sympathetic to Meillassoux’s “virtual God” argument than many have been. Not because I find that particular notion compelling, but because it’s hard not to enjoy his shift from mapping the world in terms of its most likely possible future to its most significant possible future. You can do that if you’ve eliminated probability from the future of the world, after all. To be more specific, he says roughly: “Yes, there could also be a unicorn-to-come or spaghetti-monster-to-come, but who cares about these monsters? They would change nothing.” The only futures that matter are great possible leaps, and there’s only one remaining possibility, he says. But that’s the part I find contestable.