The danger to which the proletariat has been exposed since its appearance on the historical stage was that it might remain imprisoned in its immediacy together with the bourgeoisie. With the growth of social democracy this threat acquired a real political organization which artificially cancels out the mediations so laboriously won and forces the proletariat back into its immediate existence where it is merely a component of capitalist society and not at the same time the motor tat drives it to its own doom and destruction. Thus the proletariat submits to the ‘laws’ of bourgeois society either in a spirit of supine fatalism (e.g. towards the natural laws of production) or else in a spirit of ‘moral’ affirmation (the state as an ideal, cultural positive).…

On this territory, social democracy must inevitably remain in the weaker position. This is not just because it renounces of its own free will the historical mission of the proletariat to point the way out of the problems of capitalism that the bourgeoisie cannot solve, nor is it because it looks on fatalistically as the ‘laws’ of capitalism drift towards the abyss. But social democracy must concede defeat on every particular issue also. For when confronted by the overwhelming resources of knowledge, culture and routine which the bourgeoisie undoubtedly possesses and will continue to possess as long as it remains the ruling class, the only effective superiority of the proletariat, its only decisive weapon is its ability to see social totality as a concrete historical totality; to see the reified forms as processes between men… With the ideology of social democracy the proletariat falls victim to all the antinomies of reification that we have hitherto analyzed in such detail.

And here’s a little tidbit from a recent story in Bloomberg:

President Barack Obama said he doesn’t “begrudge” the $17 million bonus awarded to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon or the $9 million issued to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO Lloyd Blankfein, noting that some athletes take home more pay.

The president, speaking in an interview, said in response to a question that while $17 million is “an extraordinary amount of money” for Main Street, “there are some baseball players who are making more than that and don’t get to the World Series either, so I’m shocked by that as well.”

“I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen,” Obama said in the interview yesterday in the Oval Office with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free- market system.”

I think that I would be departing from the truth if I were to attempt to iron out the glaring contradictions of that period by artificially constructing an organic development and fitting into the correct pigeon-hole in the ‘history of ideas’. If Faust could have two souls within his breast, why should not a normal person unite conflicting intellectual trends within himself when he finds himself changing from one class to another in the middle of a world crisis?

1. Democrats will outline a “strong” version of the financial reform bill, though it will still basically be objectively watered down in comparison to the hopes raised by liberal progressive bloggers following the many rumors of Volcker’s return to power in the administration.

2. This “strong” bill, however, will face staunch resistance by bankers (though many bankers and financiers—especially the smarter ones—will also have decided to simply double-down and go along with the administration, probably as a PR move), as well as nihilistic rage by Republicans, who will be able to launch a massive campaign of deception and further rile up populist ire against the Obama administration.

3. In an effort to please the Republicans, as well as the holdouts in the banking industry, Obama will launch a series of “backdoor” meetings, through which the bill becomes further watered down. Also, no Republican will support it—and Democrats will not call them out on it in public.

4. Republicans will launch a massive advertising campaign demonstrating how the Obama administration has “colluded” with the financial sector, and that the Democrats are in the pockets of lobbyists and billionaires. Misguided populist rage ensues.

5. Years later, creepy, plastic-haired Republican is elected president and—thanks to instantaneous Democratic capitulation and a debilitating case of political Stockholm Syndrome—their proposed financial reform bill passes, without requiring any visible negotiations with banks. Bill is even more favorable towards banks, and a massive step backwards from what had even existed before the crisis. Oh, and no one notices except maybe Glenn Greenwald in a blog post too long to sustain attention.

And there you have it!

So now I just want to selectively quote Brad Johnson’s brief post over at An und für sich regarding the recent narrative taken up by certain liberal progressives about how this sort of disenchantment was predictable from the beginning given Obama’s lofty rhetoric and promise of hope and change, and that people who took Obama seriously should become more pragmatic, more “realist.” Here’s what Brad writes:

As I reflect on the latest setback to the Democratic party’s legislative agenda in tonight’s election in Massachusetts, I’m reminded of the increasingly prominent narrative making the rounds amongst the A-list liberal bloggers. Basically, so we’re told, we should’ve known better than to expect anything more than what we’ve gotten so far out of an Obama presidency. Sure, he used flashy, inspirational rhetoric to secure an unprecedented coalition of support, but if you really believed the rhetoric, you weren’t actually listening to the message. In effect, those who feel either betrayed or let down are really just feeling the bitter sting that comes on the backside of naivety. Politics is hard; compromise is necessary; Obama has been very up-front about his feeling son Afghanistan, health care, etc. etc etc.

I’m not going to disagree with the practical relevance of this line of thinking. Nor do I underestimate its power as a kind of pragmatic consolation. I am also amongst the first to be annoyed by the residual Obama demagoguery amongst the limousine liberals here in the Bay Area. What I resist, however, is the conclusion drawn: i.e., that those who believed then should either “grow up” or “shut up” now.

…In short, then, it is not the responsibility of the disappointed merely to grow up. More precisely, I should think it is a matter of what they are growing into. If growing up means merely reasoned political pragmatism, then I fear for what the future brings. If it means, however, the disenfranchised become capable of making their demands and expectations effective — that is, of being able to discern the various shades and scales of a leadership’s failure, and responding in such a way that is neither wholly complicitous with its failure or at odds with its professed aspirations — then by all means, let’s grow up, but never shut up.

This all strikes me as exactly right. Furthermore, I think the most problematic part about this whole “realist” attitude about “growing up” is that it’s fundamentally idealistic, in the sense that it relies on the belief that piece-meal progress is the only desirable and possible outcome of the political process. But I think what the past year (and past several years) has shown is that such reform is impossible, that the deck is rigged, yet we continue to play as if it’s a fair game. In that sense, “realism” (and its cynical variants) is at its core an idealism of the present, the most intense form of ideological belief there is: the belief that the system will last forever.

In other words, the “realm of the possible” is at once the realm of the purely ideal, the impossible, because the system in place is designed such that it can’t ever really happen, the “possible” can never actualize itself. From this perspective, I would argue, only the impossible is what is possible, because it means changing the system itself, fundamentally altering the coordinates to change how we organize possibility and impossibility. But you can only do that if you, first, accept the fact that the system is plagued by an irreducible antagonism that can’t be contained within it: this is why, although they’re obviously racist, reactionary, astro-turf stupidity (without granting the liberal class bias in this judgment), the Tea Parties contain a utopian element. Although they clearly misdiagnose the antagonism as one between the People and some abstract notion of the all-pervasive “government,” they are at the very least willing to acknowledge the primacy of social antagonism, which is precisely what is lacking in the Obama administration, its fundamental unwillingness to name the antagonism. This is demonstrated by their not exactly shocking decision to not take a hard-line against bankers and big business, which have ruined so many people’s lives in the recent economic crisis.

If each failure made by the exponents of reform, then, makes me feel that I should be even more cynical, even more jaded, and even more pessimistic, it’s important to keep in mind and never forgot that this is only because the possible is impossible if we accept liberal capitalism as the horizon of our eternal present without a future, that the system is here to stay. What pessimism really means is fighting for the impossible, because the impossible is the only real possible alternative to our present sociopolitical nihilism.

Whenever we are dealing with an “official” progressive succession of philosophers, the truly interesting thing is to consider how a philosopher who was, according to this “official line,” “overcome” or “completed” by his successor(s), reacts to his successor(s)…

What is the philosophical status of these “retroactive” rejoinders? … They do not so much undermine the underlying line of succession … as, rather, bring forth its most interesting and lively moment, the moment when, as it were, a thought rebels against its reduction to a term in the chain of “development” and asserts its absolute right or claim… That is to say, when the Old is attacked by the New, this first appearance of the New is as a rule flat and naïve—the true dimension of the New arises only when the Old reacts to the (first appearance of) the New. Pascal reacted from a Christian standpoint to scientific secular modernity, and his “reaction” … tells us much more about modernity than its direct partisans. The true “progress” emerges from the reaction of the Old to the progress. True revolutionaries are always reflected conservatives.

— Slavoj Zizek, “Fichte’s Laughter,” in Mythology, Madness, and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism, pp. 122-123.

Communists, Marx and Engels averred in their original conception laid out in The Communist Manifesto, have no political party. They simply constitute themselves at all times and in all places as those who understand the limits, failings, and destructive tendencies of the capitalist order as well as the innumerable ideological masks and false legitimations that capitalists and their apologists (particularly in the media) produce in order to perpetuate their singular class power. Communists are all those who work incessantly to produce a different future to that which capitalism portends.

Via Socialism and/or Barbarism.

I’m not sure I really got the point of Val Kilmer’s “Stevie” character. The guy was just kind of an asshole.

Update: Oh, and in other Herzog news, it looks as though the entirety of Mein liebster Feind is now available on YouTube (h/t Perverse Egalitarianism).

This has the effect of making one feel as though they belong to a collective project, united in a common utopian bond for a better world and new possibilities beyond capitalism, even if they disagree with Jameson at times. In that sense, the use of plural pronouns simulates or performatively enacts the very goal of bringing about such a collective project or, one might say, a collective subjectivity, en concreto (without, obviously, being a substitute for real concrete action). Furthermore, it seems opposed, in my mind, to our contemporary ideological situation in which the fragmentation and dispersal of a unified subject under postmodernism has led to new, hyper-mediated and reified forms of “selfhood” engendered vis-a-vis contemporary “communicative capitalism.”¹

Perhaps what we need instead, and which certain modes of communication or ontologies fail to provide, is an authentic sense of collectivity, a “wishful participation that borders on enthusiasm” (as Kant said of the French Revolution) for a new form of collective praxis, in which possibilities of rupture and change suddenly erupt out of our flat, gray, atonal, and thoroughly globalized network of late capitalism. Such a project, of course, would be something like a new way of thinking the unity of theory and praxis for our ideological present.

1. To some degree, one might further identify the recent trends of “home-brewed” ontologies in our corner of the blogosphere in just this light: the fragmentation of a unified subject finds its full realization in the self-construction of entire universes, without any of these Weltanschauungen necessarily coming into direct contact or out-and-out contradiction with one another. Instead, they are referred to as “my” ontology, “my” toys, “my” ideas, and “my” project. Although they intend to describe being qua being, they are meant to be understood more in terms of individuation, drawing on highly localized networks, while even the loosely collective monikers themselves are of a dubious status, “under erasure.”

In many courts of law, both opponents must obey a common rule that technically allows the prosecutor and the defense attorney to exchange roles at any time. Those who do not acknowledge and adhere to the legal language game are either ordered out of court or ruled incompetent by the court. In this sort of game, no matter how forcefully or enthusiastically they might oppose one another, neither opponent occupies the position of “the other.” As Rescher notes, this dialogue always has the potential to become a monologue. Indeed, in the works of Aristotle and Hegel, dialectics did become a monologue. And though Plato’s dialogues were written in the form of conversation, finally they, too, must be considered dramatic monologues—as Bahktin pointed out in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Western philosophy thus began as an introspective—that is, monologic—dialogue, or, alternatively, dialogic monologue.

Karatani then goes on to assert that mathematics is privileged because its knowledge goes beyond that of the subjective I of dialogic monologue, a characteristic that finds its expression Plato’s and Euclid’s notion that “only that which survives the process of legal argumentation can be deemed mathematics.”

In this manner, mathematical proof is presumed to be produced by intersubjectivity, that is, by that which lies beyond individual cognition. The true Socratic/Platonic invention is not the idea that reason inheres in the world or the self, as is often claimed, but rather that only that which goes through the dialogic process is rational. Those who refuse dialogue, no matter how deep the truth they may grasp, are irrational. Whether or not the world or the self contains reason in and of itself ultimately counts for nothing; only those who are subjected to dialogue are rational.

This leads Karatani to defend Kant’s use of mathematics in the Critique of Pure Reason against the logical positivist critiques, arguing that Kant’s position radicalizes the notion of mathematics as rational, intersubjective dialogue by inscribing deep within mathematics the problem of alterity in communication. Kant achieves this, according to Karatani, through an introduction of what Karatani calls the “transcendental other,” a secular other who is “everywhere and everytime in front of us,” or in other words, the thing-in-itself.

All of this is very interesting, to my mind, but I think Karatani’s identification of Hegel as a practitioner of “dialogue as monologue” proceeds a bit too smoothly. A particularly revealing quote on this matter comes at the end of Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes, in the section on “Kraft und Verstand, Erscheinung und übersinnliche Welt,” in which he writes:

In dem Erklären ist eben darum so viele Selbstbefriedigung, weil das Bewußtsein dabei, um es so auszudrücken, in unmittelbarem Selbstgespräche mit sich, nur sich selbst genießt, dabei zwar etwas anderes zu treiben scheint, aber in der Tat sich nur mit sich selbst herumtreibt.

In the above passage, Hegel identifies the problem of communication as a reliance on positing a false alterity vis-a-vis the process of dialogue as monologue. In other words, although consciousness appears to be in “communication” (or, alternatively, “pedagogy,” if we are to translate things back into the terminology of Platonic dialogues) with some Other outside of consciousness, consciousness is in actuality communicating only with itself, and it is interesting to note that Hegel uses the language of enjoyment (“Selbstbefriedigung,” which can be rendered more formally as “self-enjoyment,” or more crudely as masturbation, as well as the verb “geniessen,” to enjoy) to describe this activity, as well as that of busyness and the drive, both of which I think ought to be seen in light of Freud.

This, I think, opens up a new set of questions regarding both the particular status of the transcendental other, of mathematics and language as systems of mediation and/or alterity, as well as the more Hegelian trope of the necessity of error in the dialectic. Moreover, we might ask ourselves, when we engage in communication with “the other,” to what extent this other is in fact a genuine marker or placeholder of alterity, or instead only the mere appearance of alterity as posited by a certain “drive” towards dialogue as monologue, in order to realize the subject’s jouissance through this very self-activity.

The cynical narrativization of the crisis by the banks and their helpers in government speaks to a larger issue—the issue of the native temporality, or temporalities, of capitalism. While capitalism advertises itself as affiliated sudden change, unexpected novelty, and revolutionary change, in actual fact it works always and everywhere to flatten whatever forms of time that it can. It attempts, at every turn, to transform qualititative change into quantitative accumuation, differential turbulence into a concretized status-quo. In fact, recent economic developments point toward the secret trajectory (and capitalist use-value) of neo-liberalism. While for many years it was possible to think of the emergence of the liberal center-left as a hybirdization of social democratic politics in service of a cynical (and cynically capitalized) power grab against the strong right of the Thatcher and Reagan era, the last year or so has shown what the relatively strong state of the the third way was actually for – collusion with and the buttressing of corporations, the nullifcation of risk. Along with risk, of course, disappears the temporality of risk – that is to say time itself, in any form more open than inevitable progression of the same. Catastrophe itself is ransomed off by state funds.

Click the link above to read the entire post, it’s certainly worth it.

…Those who manage to convince themselves that the order of the Other is here to stay, that the statist power of the present is firmly grounded and basically secure, are the ones clinging to a shaky arrangement with quiet desperation. Those who roll the dice betting on act/event-level transformations are, contrary to senseless common sense and vulgar popular opinion, sober realists; today’s self-declared “realists” (i.e., those banking on the indefinitely enduring continuity of current circumstances) are the ideologically intoxicated utopian idealists enthralled by dreams of a nonexistent, unattainable stability.

—Adrian Johnston, Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations, p. 54.

If we may be monks, the conditions that allow our speculation are brought along with it, and if we really are pursuing, not just speculation for its pleasures of freedom and imagination, not just some kind of run-around of Institutional restraint, searching for cheaper prestige, but true ideas and ideas that inherently should matter to the world, the consequence of our ideas (politically, ethically, socially) must be embraced. In this way there is an epistemological mandate for our ontological speculation which immediately connects ethics to metaphysics.

I second the need to conect ethics to metaphysics, although I imagine that we would part ways considerably over precisely how to forge such a connection. I also like that Kvond’s remarks on scholasticism tangentially connect up to the Kojin Karatani excerpts a few posts earlier, where he makes a brief critical remark on the philosophia scholastica.

In Logiques des mondes, further evidence surfaces of Badiou tending (at least temporally) to prioritize names over affects in the process of forcing [forçage]. Therein, he characterizes courage as a capacity to face “points.” One of the conceptual coordinates added to Badiouian philosophy by this sequel to Being and Event is this concept of the point. In several contexts, Badiou, avowedly influenced in his youth by both Sartre (proponent of a philosophy of freedom celebrating the powers of subjectivity as an autonomous negativity) and Althusser (advocate of a structuralist Marxism denigrating Sartrean-style subjectivity as an ideological illusion secreted by trans-individual sociohistorical mechanisms), confesses that one of his deepest-seated philosophical ambitions has always been and continues to be to succeed at combining these two seemingly antithetical influences as indispensable parts of a single philosophical orientation.¹

Although not entirely related, I believe that the polyvalence of subject here (between “subject” as radical Sartrean-style “autonomous negativity” and “subject” as Althusserian-style “structural subjection”) figures directly into a critique of certain flat or object-oriented ontologies. Quoting Johnston:

According to Logiques des mondes, some worlds (although not all worlds), as onto-logical situations…contain within themselves points qua nodes which, when confronted, force an either/or choice between mutually exclusive alternatives (some other worlds, designated as “atonal,” lack points; these flat, grey reality-systems are devoid of immanently embedded internal catalysts for choices not already covered by these same systems). The concept of the point is one example of Badiou’s efforts to think both senses of the term subject.²

What I take Johnston to be saying here is that, by omitting the subject (again, in both senses of the term), “flat,” “atonal” “reality-systems” lack the proper quilting points which “force” the subject to choose (the condensing and splitting of pure multiplicities into the “either/or” of the Two, a logic which I believe derives from Lacan’s alienation-separation axis). Hence, any ontology or system which supposedly provides an account of being qua being that is flat or atonal can only function as a description of a world or situation in which there exists no subject and no possible appearance of a Truth Event that could radically alter the conditions of that world. This, I think, is a serious error, but now I want to move to Karatani:

I now take up the three main currents of thinking in postwar France: existentialism, structuralism, and poststructuralism. The existentialist, Jean-Paul Sartre, stressed freedom, while admitting the structural determinedness of humans. His vantage point might be defined as practical. On the other hand, when the structuralists questioned the concept of subject as a substance and saw it merely as an effect of structure, they took a theoretical stance. In this context it is quite understandable that they returned to Spinoza. As I mentioned earlier, the thesis of Kant’s third antinomy results in Spinoza’s position—that everything is determined by causes, but people think they act freely because the causes are so complex.

…It is meaningless to oppose subject against the structuralist stance, or to seek the subject therein. Because, from the beginning, it is only by bracketing the subject that structural determinism is attained. Conversely, only when structural determination is bracketed can the dimension of subject and responsibility return. Later, when poststructuralism sought to reintroduce morality—it was simply as a matter of course.³

In other words, for Karatani Sartre’s emphasis on “autonomous negativity,” to use Johnston’s phrase (a phrase that, in fact, draws an interesting and perhaps overlooked parallel between Sartre and Žižek) ought to be read above all as a practical standpoint, whereas Althusser’s structural determinism qua “structural causality” and “overdetermination” ought to be read as a theoretical standpoint. Thus, although they appear to be antithetical, they are in fact perfectly reconcilable once we conceive of structure and subject as the unity of theory and practice. This allows Karatani to re-read Kant’s third antinomy as essentially affirming and negating both existentialism and structuralism.

Additionally, Karatani goes one step further by arguing that, outside of the subject-as-freedom and structure-as-determinism antinomy, one already finds an implicit kind of subjectivity lurking behind this opposition. According to Karatani, this is the (Cartesian) subject as void, the subject that carries out the process of bracketing:

In the Saussurean system, and its legacy, a word is the “synthesis” of the signifiant (the sensible) and the signifié (the suprasensible). But the crucial point here is that such a synthesis is established only ex post facto—that it makes sense to me. In the end, when Saussure suggested that form (le signifiant) constitutes a differential, relation system, the architectonic of the system tacitly took as a premise what had already called “transcendental apperception.”⁴

Further along, Karatani writes:

…Cartesian doubt begins from his realization that the truths people believe in are simply determined by the “example and custom” of the community to which they belong, namely, by shared rules and paradigms. That is to say that Descartes had already been observing the world in the manner of a cultural anthropologist. As I pointed out earlier, many postlinguistic-turn philosophers reject methods such as his, motivated as they appear to be in introspection. But the reason Descartes himself tended toward introspection in the first place was because his predecessors of the philosophia scholastica—whether nominalist or realist—had all thought within the frame of the “grammar” of the Indo-European language group. In this respect, the Cartesian cogito is nothing if not the awareness that our thought is always already bound by language. In Kant’s terminology, this is the “transcendental” standpoint toward language. The transcendental position is equivalent to bracketing the imagined self-evidence of the empirical consciousness in order to reveal the (unconscious) conditions that constitute it. What is crucial here is that the transcendental standpoint inexorably accompanies a certain kind of subjectivity.⁵

In my opinion, the strength of Karatani’s position derives from the fact that he is able to reconcile subjectivity and structure by reinterpreting Descartes and Kant as radical thinkers of the unity of theory and practice, which avoids the Scylla and Charybdis of volunteerism and determinism. Yet where Karatani fails, his inability to provide an adequate theory of how to radically reveal and overthrow the “examples and customs” that communities mistake as truths, is precisely where Badiou succeeds: although Badiou’s subject seems to tilt more towards volunteerism in that the subject is forced to choose between a Groundless either/or, which retroactively confers the status upon of subject upon the subject (this leads Badiou toward the problem of “affect” and “will,” as Johnston notes), he nonetheless provides the proper theoretical contours for how to think of change as “transcendence in immanence” (the Event as neither wholly determined by its worldly preconditions, nor as a quas-religious transcendent Beyond lacking any and all preconditions).

Badiou’s theory of the Event, I think, is not only a major improvement over Karatani’s anarchist-communist synthesis, but also entirely compatible with his defense of the Cartesian cogito. I think Žižek’s work is useful here because he provides a kind of metaphorical bridge between Karatani’s Kantianiasm and Badiou’s Platonism. But I want to first let some of this digest and then I’ll try and move on to that topic a bit later.

1. Adrian Johnston, Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009), pp. 62-63.
2. Ibid., p. 63
3. Kojin Karatani, Transcritique: On Kant and Marx (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005), pp. 120-21.
4. Ibid., p. 77.
5. Ibid., p. 82.

Contingency is as it were the inner blind spot of bourgeois consciousness, or of the existential experience of capitalism. In the twin forms of chance and of “crisis” or “catastrophe,” it marks the moment at which events that are meaningful socially or historically turn incomprehensible, absurd, or meaningless faces to individuals, who can henceforth only ratify their bewilderment with the name of “accident” or of well-nigh “natural” convulsion and upheaval. That in bourgeois science these “irrationals” or unthinkables become themselves the object of new forms of scientific inquiry and specialization—in probability theory and statistics, for example, or in crisis theory or catastrophe theory—is perhaps a rather different development from the second feature of Lukács’s analysis, which designates the blind spot of the system itself, and the incapacity to grasp totality as a meaningful whole.

Well, now I’m tempted to read Studies in European Realism (lest we remind our readers, not of the object-oriented variety).

To begin, I find Levi’s argument interesting, as opposed to his earlier attempts to somewhat naïvely convert Marx’s entire body of works into ontological objectology in one fell swoop, but in my opinion I don’t find it entirely convincing, for basically one simple reason.

The beginning of his post does a decent job of outlining the difference between epistemology and ontology. Levi talks about how epistemology is premised on “bracketing” entities as they are in themselves and privileging the sensible realm of how we perceive things: accordingly, epistemology is, obviously, a philosophy of access. No one was claiming otherwise. On the other hand, ontology, etc., etc.

What I don’t understand is this: Levi goes from talking about the difference between epistemology and ontology (let’s call this “axis 1”), and then, after quoting very large excerpt from Roy Bhaskar, he switches to talking about the difference between anti-realism and realism (let’s call this “axis 2”). In other words, it seems to me that Levi’s argument makes sense only if we agree with this clever rhetorical substitution (I’m tempted to use the word “trick,” but I’ll give Levi the benefit of the doubt) of “axis 2” for “axis 1.” Note that the first reference to the word “realism” (occurring as “anti-realism” in Levi’s post) doesn’t appear until immediately after he cites Bhaskar, rather than being part of a larger argumentative syllogism.

Maybe I’m stupid or missing something, but how can one so quickly make this jump from axis 1 (epistemology—ontology) to axis 2 (anti-realism—realism), without providing any argument for why we should believe that these two axes of terms are interchangeable? I’ll grant Levi the fact that his reference to Hume sort of implies that he’s talking about a specifically anti-realist form of empiricist epistemology (as opposed to naïve epistemological realism, which he’s gone into quite some depth about in his past posts), but that doesn’t solve the problem of conflating the latter of the two terms (ontology and realism) in his set of binary oppositions, which seems a bit deceptive in my opinion.

Now, obviously, Levi has certain partisan commitments to ontological realism, commitments which predate this post, but unless he’s truly convinced himself so thoroughly of just how correct he is that he doesn’t need to provide any argument for why ontology and realism are interchangeable terms, one would at least expect some mention of why he’s substituting these terms for one another. I mean, it seems pretty clear to me that there are a lot of different forms of ontology that aren’t realist, as I’m sure Levi’s well aware of.

Ordinarily, such a substitution might not be entirely problematic: if the argument just ended there, we could just presuppose that Levi was extending an argument from one of his previous posts about how ontological realism offers a more powerful and coherent philosophical argument than does epistemological anti-realism, but that isn’t the point of this post. The point of this post seems to be that psychoanalysis presupposes a realist ontology, which is another thing entirely:

Wouldn’t it be delicious, I thought, if it could be shown that Lacanian psychoanalytic practice could be shown to presuppose a realist ontology?

Of course, this isn’t exactly what the title of his post suggests (“A Psychoanalytic Defense of Realism” is different than “A Realist Interpretation of Psychoanalysis”), but I’ll put that aside for now. The problem seems to be that Levi’s extending his conflation of axis 1 and axis 2 towards a second, far more complex argument about psychoanalysis presupposing a realist ontology, as he writes. But, while he’s provided a convincing argument for why psychoanalysis is premised on certain fundamental ontological conditions, this is hardly tantamount to proving that it implies a commitment to ontological realism. And while his last paragraph purports to answer the question of where the “realism” is in all of this, it seems that he’s only restated what is ontological about the argument, not what is realist.

So, we might ask, where is the ontological realism in all of this? Why, we might ask, is this practice only intelligible on the grounds of an ontological realism? If, as my good friend suggested, we only went on perception, the practice of analysis would be completely incoherent? Why? Because the practice of drawing the differend between the Other and the Other is dependent the premise of something that we do not have access to through perception.

That psychoanalysis is not premised on epistemology or perception or “access,” etc., is not tantamount to psychoanalysis being ontologically realist. One can’t simply jump from axis 1 to axis 2 like Levi’s done. Now, Levi is obviously well-versed in Lacanian theory, so maybe I’m just missing the crucial lynch-pin in his post, or perhaps like Harman’s theory of vicarious causation, it is an incomplete argument to be followed up with something more thorough, but I’m kind of at a loss.

As a final remark, I want to note that Levi’s defense of the self-reflexive nature of psychoanalytic theory in this Ktismatics thread belies his argument in favor of ontological realism, at least of the object-oriented variety:

It is, of course, true that every practice has a theory of what it is doing behind it. The shaman has a theory of his interventions, the CBT a theory of his engagement, and so on. This isn’t really the point. What distinguishes psychoanalytic theories of practice from a number of other theories of practice is that it is a self-reflexive theory. Other therapeutic orientations tend to think of the therapist as something separate from the patient. They think of the problem as in the patient and their role in the treatment as separate from that problem. This is basically the medical model of psychological disorders. When a doctor treats someone for the flu, the flu is strictly inside the patient and the doctor is independent of that disorder. Psychoanalysis, by contrast, takes into account the transferential relationship between the patient and analyst and how transference structures the dynamic of treatment.

(Although it isn’t entirely relevant to my argument, I also think it’s worth pointing out that in this same thread, Levi additionally foregrounds the epistemological dimension of psychoanalysis, rather than the ontological—gasp!):

The point was that if a therapist does not know how to properly listen they end up making the patient’s symptom worse. When analysts attempt to mold their patient’s in the image of what they believe is good for the patient they further alienate the patient’s symptoms or desire, intensifying the lethal nature of the symptom.

While I vigorously agree with Levi’s argument regarding the issue of reflexivity, as I think it offers a powerful answer to the skeptical charges against psychoanalytic diagnostics of symptoms—and indeed, the entire notion of “symptoms” as such—I fail to see how this argument, which relies on a category of subjectivity that necessarily carries out the reflexive operation (otherwise, how can the theory itself be operatively reflexive? Does it make any sense for objects themselves to be reflexive?), chimes with object-oriented ontology, for which the subject is just another object. Here Levi’s arguments appear totally anathema to those of Graham’s, or even his own. I mean, quite simply, how could such reflexivity possibly function in a flat and realist ontology like Levi’s? In fact, Levi even says it can’t (!) in one of his posts titled “Self-Reflexivity and the Hegemonic Fallacy”:

What self-reflexive approaches cannot abide is an ontology where the agency of difference cannot be localized in any one or predominant agency. In other words, self-reflexive analysis cannot abide multiplicities where the final phenomena is the result of a complex interaction of differences without one presiding over the putting-into-form, and where the actors in these multiplicities are heterogeneous, consisting of a variety of different objects ranging from the human to signs to technology to physical objects to animals and so on. Unfortunately, for self-reflexive thought, the world consists of these sorts of multiplicities.

In my opinion, this amounts to a major contradiction.

Over in the comments section of Kvond’s recent post on Harman, commenter Eli has written a lengthy and formidable remark that sums up and extends the critiques that have thus far been made, revealing the absent center, the constitutive lack, which appears to structure object-oriented philosophy as both a movement and a theory. While the comment itself surely deserves the status of its own complete post, for the time being a few excerpts will have to suffice in order to simply draw attention to his response:

Harman’s attitude toward just about everything is an “aesthetic” one, and he even says that we should regard aesthetics as “first philosophy”. But note that he means nothing remotely sophisticated by “aesthetics” here. Philosophy for him is about liking and disliking things – quite literally – and he views it as a purely aesthetic pursuit – not because he has some theory about how aesthetics judgement supplants all others or what have you; there’s no judgment, no cognitive dimension whatsoever involved: it’s literally as primitive as “x feels good”, “I like x”: hence his love of travelogue, catalogues, lists, photographs with pretty colours: the world is a vast aesthetic sensorium featuring the pleasing and the displeasing and philosophy is the catalogue and guide.

…What puzzles me most when he gives papers saying how philosophy should forget about epistemology and should instead concern itself directly with fire and cotton, monkeys, tornadoes and quarks, is why no-one just asks him straight out: “Could you give me an example of what a philosopher might have to say about monkeys or comets or neutrinos that’s not covered by the sciences?” What would he have to say? “Errm, well … when a monkey eats a banana, there is actually no interaction between the monkey and the banana, because monkeys and bananas are vacuum-sealed objects which forever infinitely withdraw from one another. No-one has ever seen a monkey or a banana in the purity of their individual essences, and they can only interact on the inside of an intention, and all objects relate to each other by means of intentions”. Why don’t people just start howling with laughter and derision when he says such things?

I strongly urge our readers to read Eli’s damning commentary in its entirety, and hopefully within a few days I’ll be able to muster up the time to sketch out some further thoughts of my own (namely, where I agree with what has thus far been said, and also where I disagree).

The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington said Wednesday that it will be unable to continue the social service programs it runs for the District if the city doesn’t change a proposed same-sex marriage law, a threat that could affect tens of thousands of people the church helps with adoption, homelessness and health care.

Always good to bring an older classic thinker into the mix. My choice in this case is Giordano Bruno, who has so much in common with Grant. A critical analysis of Bruno’s Cause, Principle, and Unity would work perfectly here. Put it on the smaller bookshelf where I keep books currently in use for projects, where I will see it each day as a reminder to reread it when I have the time.

Instead of going off on my own commentary, I want to just quote Kvond’s comment on this, since anything I have to say in response would be largely derivative of what he has said:

The blog is now deleted…but at least this past discussion over at Dead Voles points us in the direction of much of Harman’s “allure” thinking about what makes good philosophy. In this his theory of causation and his methodology coincide. Personally I find this production-line thinking combined with Harman’s “shock value” and “great idea” esteem to be antithetical to what philosophy should be about, and carries with it some substantive comparisons to Capitalist Speculative Bubble debt deferral. As such it draws our attention to the problems with the underlying theory itself, and the values that underwrite or inspire it. This is only to say that both his thinking and his methods should be shown in a more socially critical light, a light that ultimately goes to the question of cause and to the purpose of philosophy itself. Is philosophy ever anything more than “black box” making as Harman claims?