Engineering the World, Crafting the
Mind | NERO Editions
1.
Before and After Cyclonopedia
Fabio Gironi: As far as I can tell, the elusiveness of Reza Negarestani in the years
2003 to 2012 was due to a combination of your dislike for public exposure and
bureaucratic issues with your travel visas. Spotlight-shy and Iranian: not the best
combination to be a jet-setting celebrity philosopher. Now that you are, more or less,
out in the open, I would like to ask you to do something you probably would rather not
do: give us, finally, a brief biographical sketch of the person behind the name. What
was it like to grow up, as a man and as an intellectual, in Iran? How and why did you
develop a taste for philosophy?
Reza Negarestani: Yes, I am afraid that behind the mystique lies a mundane reality,
which is at times weirder than fiction and at times uneventfully ordinary. On the
mundane side, I should say that a mixture of draconian travel restrictions imposed on
the Middle Easterners, as well as the justified paranoia of being watched at home,
significantly contributed to what you call my “fictional status.” When you are deprived
of both an outside and an inside, you have no choice other than being an arcane
fiction, something that can only be whispered about. The latter is an opportunity to
entirely renegotiate the very reality of who you take yourself to be. That is when
reality can potentially exceed in its strangeness and weirdness what we call an
ordinary fiction. And I did indeed exploit this opportunity to break away from the
world in which unfettered thinking was a crime.
I grew up in Shiraz, a city which is considered as one of the most liberal places in Iran,
famous for its long tradition of poetry and, of course, wine—of which today you can
only get the former. A good portion of my childhood and teenage years coincided with
post-Revolutionary changes and the Iran-Iraq war. Only retrospectively I can now say
that I have been thoroughly shaped by this landscape where people didn’t have the
luxury to think about the future, change, or higher ideals. All that mattered was how to
survive from one day to another while standing in long queues to get the coupon for
your meal—which could be very well your last. Given the financial constraints in this
period, my sister and I had a weekly allowance which was not sufficient to buy toys or
go to a theatre. It was only enough to buy books. That was the beginning of my slow
entry to the realm of philosophy.
During the frequent air raids and blackouts, my sister used to read me French fairly
tales like the Countess of Segur, Persian folklore, Russian science-fiction, or cloak and
dagger stories by the likes of Zevaco and Dumas. This sustained indoctrination
brought me to the conclusion, at an early age, that all I wanted was to be a writer. My
first encounter with philosophy was the Milesian school of the pre-Socratic
philosophy. I was fascinated by their cosmological philosophy, but for me philosophy
was still something of a mystery. In my high school years, I was enamoured with
experimental avant-garde literature and poetry, and could only see philosophy as an
auxiliary field. Around the early 1990s, I came across an English collection of
Deleuze, Bataille, Barthes, and Foucault, and that’s when I thought: if this is
philosophy then I want to be a philosopher. If you know the middle-eastern social
climate, you know that there are only two respectable paths forward, either become a
doctor or an engineer. I was expected to become a doctor after passing the entrance
exam. I didn’t perform well because during the last two years of my high school, I
pretended to be assiduously studying the required materials while hiding philosophy
books between my science books, reading them in the class and at home. And so I
ended up in a system engineering course, because to me it looked closer to philosophy.
I took Heidegger’s identification of cybernetics as the metaphysics of the atomic age
not as an insult, but an idea worth exploring, both technically and philosophically.
Since I seriously started engaging with philosophy, I have never looked back or
dreamed of doing anything else.
The post-war intellectual scene was quite inhomogeneous. Academia was
monomaniacally focused around Islamic theology rather than philosophy, so the true
intellectual scenes were disconnected clusters of few committed people who were
translating foreign works and disseminating them among trusted circles of friends.
Contemporary works of philosophy were scarce, and hard to find. Every time that we
had the opportunity of coming across a new work, we were treating it as if we have
discovered a treasure trove. It is only with the rise of the Internet in Iran at the end of
1990s that some of us finally stumbled on these new online scenes which were
somehow similar to what we were trying to do with philosophy and experimental
fiction in our own isolated world. That’s why I disagree with those friends who think
the Internet, blogs and social media are rife for intellectual inanity. We didn’t take
anything as given, and that includes the Internet. For us, it was more like a generation
spaceship that could finally bring us into contact with an exciting new world, where
we naively thought every westerner is a philosopher and western civilization is
brimming with intellectual excitements.
Fabio Gironi: As much as the memorable phrase “online orgy of stupidity” (referred
to the philosophical blogosphere) still makes me chuckle, I agree with your opinion. I
too, mutatis mutandis, had a similar experience: there was something pretty exciting
about the online philosophical environment in the mid-2000s, and it is undeniable that
this virtual undergrowth allowed people from “intellectual peripheries” (mostly from
non-Anglophone countries) to join a fertile conversation.
Reza Negarestani: When stupidity and the apologetics of ignorance are treated as
expressions of intellectual egalitarianism or freedom, then their valorisation as
universal virtues is inevitable. The so-called orgy of stupidity becomes a planetary
phenomenon that spans across the para-academic sphere, Internet and academia are no
exception. However, we should also take into account the fact that the majority of
people who were or are engaging with philosophy online are young people. Privileging
intellectual excitement over cognitive rigor is an essential trait of the youth. It is a
positive trait if it is transformed into a gateway to the strange domains of systematic
thinking where philosophy is truly the voice of no one. But such a transition can only
happen with the support and sympathy of older generations. A generation that ridicules
the youth, how they do things or how they think and does not counsel them or give
them a hand of support does not deserve to be commemorated. It should rather sink
into oblivion.
Fabio Gironi: I suspect that, had been written without this virtual
window, Cyclonopedia would have been a very different book, as it is shot through
with elements of latter-day cyberculture of clear post-CCRU pedigree. But it is more
than that: your biographical sketch gives some support to my feeling—gotten when rereading parts of it recently—that Cyclonopedia is something of a messy, explosive
release of the richness of your intellectual life, imprinting on the pages some of its
most significant formative influences: from the use of post-Deleuzian jargon to the
references to Zoroastrian and Islamic theology, from F.M. Cornford to mathematical
formalism, from Middle-Eastern geopolitics to Lovecraftian horror. These complex
influences are made explicit by its form as they are from its content: it is consistently
hard to tell where the “weird fiction” novel begins (if ever) and where the
philosophical “monograph” ends. How was Cyclonopedia gestated? What made you
write it?
Reza Negarestani: Yes, the Internet experience or what I used to call the virtual
encounter of the third kind was immensely significant mainly for two reasons. As you
say, I stumbled upon a whole new continent of connections. It was absolutely
impossible for me to not be influenced by these new scenes. The second reason is
because I realized that the Internet is itself fertile for experimentation or to use the
CCRU jargon, a crypt full of demons, avatars, spatio-temporal warps, puppets, etc. It
was almost like a videogame editor software through which you could manipulate the
very fabric of the game-reality.
The initial idea of Cyclonopedia was already there before discovering these new
connections: a mixture of twisted Persian fairy tales, socio-politically charged folklore,
and persistent geopolitical unrest. My aim was to not approach these ideas as a writer
who excessively cares about the refinement of the literary craft or the values of
literature but rather as an engineer. So that’s when I put my formal education in
system engineering in the service of writing a book. From the start I treated it not
exactly as a novel or a work of philosophy, but as system endowed with abstract
tendencies, trajectories which evolve over time, unpredictable behaviours, multiple
scales of information content, etc. As a writer, all I did was to trigger—to a use a
system engineer’s expressions—the initial state of the system and let it to have a life of
its own. The messiness you are rightly referring to is the result of two different issues.
My under-performance as a writer at the level of execution, and my intention as
someone who tries to emulate as best as possible the climate of the Middle East, which
was my immediate zone of experience. I wrote Cyclonopedia with only one priority,
constructing a sense of syncretism and paranoia: both characteristics of the
contemporary Middle East. Good fiction can simulate these features, but to emulate
and re-enact them one requires to find and invent similar mechanisms that can
generate the kind of paranoia, chronic horror, and fertile syncretism which are peculiar
to the Middle Mast, rather than describing or reiterate them via the literary medium.
To achieve this goal, the first step was to build on the idea of the unreliable narrator
and take it to a different level, using the Internet as an ideal environment that should
be taken as seriously as real life. The main experience I wanted to achieve was the
branching paranoia of the reader as an initiation to the horrors yet to come: who is this
person? Is this some hoax gone bad? Or is it something more sinister? Some clues lead
nowhere, some are just plainly ridiculous and some do in fact lead to more intriguing
clues which might be very well false. I was less interested in turning reality into
fictional quantiles than taking apart reality including my own, dimension by
dimension, so as to reinvent it on the level of an unrecognizable fiction. To that end, of
course, I had to start with my own avatar as the author. All I can say is that it takes at
least three years to refabricate yourself—the author of your text—into the puppet of
your fiction.
2.
Cognitive Subversion
Fabio Gironi: How do you look back to it now (the question every writer loathes)?
Even accounting for the difference in genres, it seems fair to say that your style has
changed rather dramatically in the last decade or so: there is little left of the influences
of poetry and of the peculiar kind of post-post-structuralist avantgarde wordplay and
terminology that characterizes many writers influenced by Nick Land. I think you still
have a very recognizable style, but your philosophical writing now has a deliberate
and incisive quality that wasn’t there even in your early theoretical pieces.
Reza Negarestani: Yes, predictably I do detest to talk about that book, not only
because in hindsight I think it fails to perform and reach the level of its ambitions, but
also, because I started writing it sometime around 2002. It took almost three years to
finish it. By the time it was finally published I had moved on to different territories.
Now, it feels as if Cyclonopedia has been written by a different person—not to
resurrect the usual myths—or by me but in a different lifetime. However, I think this
question is quite important for any aspiring philosopher or theorist who wants to travel
across different areas of expression and inquiry. I have produced quite a few short
pieces of fiction and experimental writing since Cyclonopedia. It’s not that I have
given up on this extreme form of experimentalism, it’s just that I have realized the
rigorous psychosis of experimental writing needs to be implemented within specific
parameters and contexts. I imagined Cyclonopedia more as a fiction even though I did
not follow the norm of literature. So, it was necessary for Cyclonopedia to have a
distinct style. But I agree with you that my style has changed over years. This is
because I have come to the realization, after learning the hard lesson, that not
everything needs to be stylized or aesthetized.
Style is something that is intrinsic to how one cognizes and re-cognizes the world. It is
not, however, a way of peddling ideas or look cutting-edge or scholarly. Philosophy
demands as its first priority semantic transparency and a theoretically uncompromising
attitude: you should go wherever the impersonal concept takes you, in spite of your
psychological convictions. Semantic constraints don’t eliminate the style, rather they
positively constrain it so that there is no longer a way to mask the conservatism of
content behind syntactic gimmicks, stylistic contrivances, and a libidinal prose. It is in
the latter sense that style should be seen as a spurious elitism in opposition to
egalitarian semantic transparency, and as such it should be handled with utmost
suspicion. When approached systematically and as an unwavering task, thinking is a
subversive activity in the broadest possible sense, not only against socio-cultural
conventions but also against the most cherished dogmas of the human species. To
become the vehicle of this cognitive subversion, one should, at least in the domain of
theory, commit to semantic resoluteness or perspicuity in favour of syntactic or
stylistic revolutions. This is because the latter, as I implied, is susceptible to safeguard
the most conservative, conformist forms of thought in the name of radicality,
polysemy, creative ambivalence and the so-called righteous fight against the tyranny
of meaning and collective norms of thinking.
Fabio Gironi: It seems to me that you speak having some precise examples in mind
here…
Reza Negarestani: Well, take for instance François Laruelle and Nick Land,
fundamentally different thinkers and writers. Without questioning or doubting the
merits of Laruelle’s work, I think there is a cognitive lesson to be learned here. Once
you almost flatten the distinction between content and form, once you unwittingly
develop an increasingly esoteric style, then you inevitably open yourself to
reappropriation by the most dubious sects. Save for some glaring exceptions,
Laruelle’s thought has been hijacked by new age mysticism, politically-motivated
negative theology, and colonial pessimism masqueraded as the voice of decolonial
emancipation. Land on the other hand is a self-conscious stylist. His industriously
crafted libidinal prose is less a product of a harbinger of semantic apocalypse who
wages an all-out war against meaning (or inadvertent stylistic overexcitement) than it
is a mundane yet effective mobilization of style to recruit the impressionable and those
who are tired, rightly so, by stale and intellectually frustrating philosophy. But beneath
the facade of this titillating, libidinally charged, and insinuating prose lies a
philosophically and politically conservative writer, whose ideas of cybernetics and
complexity hasn’t advanced since the 1970s, whose brand of social Darwinism as
cosmological laws can be effectively debunked by an undergraduate in physics, and
whose idea of the will-to-think is no more than mere a lacquer over petty
psychological fixations.
In a nutshell, Land is one of the greatest English-language writers alive, but being a
great writer is not, by itself, a register of insight or profundity. It can very well be the
symptom of someone who wants to think but is plagued with incessant poetic tics
which are purely automatic and non-cognitive. In contrast to these examples, let’s
mention Carnap (the writer of the Logical Syntax of Language), Wilfrid Sellars and—a
more recent example—Lorenz Puntel, author of Structure and Being. These authors
might strike the reader as boring, or even intolerably pedantic. But once you suspend
your learned biases, you can see that they are much more exciting, subversive and
rebellious than those who boast philosophical egalitarianism and the great outdoors of
thought all the while under the shroud of fighting orthodoxy, indulging in conformism,
conservatism and intellectual idleness.
Fabio Gironi: This reminds me one of those aphorisms Ray (Brassier) is so good at
formulating: “in the conceptual element proper to theory, experiment at the level of
form can mask conservativism at the level of content (…) while conservativism at the
level of form may harbour extraordinary radicality at the level of content.”
Reza Negarestani: Of course, unsystematic or merely psychologically and libidinally
fuelled form, no matter how radical it might be, is by definition a whitewash over
prejudices and rooted dogmas. This does not mean that any adventurist who
experiments with form tries to intentionally hide the superficiality of the content but
rather that, as long as the stylistic form is overpriviledged against the content, we can
never be sure what kinds of conservative and myopic ideas lie beneath, our intellectual
vigilance notwithstanding. This is not to say that we should exactly imitate Carnap’s
semantic acuity and syntactic stringency. The very fact that someone like Land
manages to convert young people at a relatively large scale should not only be
alarming but also objectively understood. Philosophy should strive for semantic
transparency—no matter what the consequences. However, it does not mean we
should forgo with libidinal and emotional implications of thinking. If there is an idea
of the left that we ought to preserve and promote—in either the philosophical or the
political register—it should be simultaneously systematic, semantically open and
libidinally conscious. Ideas take time to develop. To disseminate them, however, one
has to not only go through the toil of back-and-forth critiques but also commit to the
interpersonal emotional labour.
Fabio Gironi: I thoroughly agree, but let me challenge you on this, also in order to
introduce another topic I want to touch. In the most general terms, mainstream
academic philosophy today fails to have a significant or even quantifiable grip on
society at large because of both stylistic and content-related gates (and indeed a
context-specific form of this phenomenon is what drove you away from academic
philosophy and towards engineering in your youth). As a reaction to this—and to the
dismal state of the academic job market—in the last decade or so we have been
witnessing the growth of so-called “para-academic philosophy.” This is composed by
a loose assemblage of individuals with no or marginal connections with traditional
academic institutions, often having heterogeneous backgrounds (from the arts to
mathematics), who come together in virtual—and occasionally real—spaces to do the
kind of speculative, synoptic, or “avantgarde” thinking that would be frowned upon
within philosophy departments.
But avantgardes always act like double-edged swords. On the one hand, they can
function as spaces to forge genuinely new and necessary conceptual connections, and
to respond to the most pressing but unexplored intellectual necessities of the present.
On the other, the very process of “creating novelty” can exercise a grip on
impressionable intellects in a way that almost completely bypasses understanding and
goes straight for the libidinal dimension of thought—even where the content is
genuinely progressive. To put it bluntly then: how do you—Reza Negarestani one of
the, like it or not, “hottest” philosophers in this particular microcosm of para-academic
philosophy that flourished after the dissipation of the “speculative realist” scene—
avoid the production of unreflective followers jotting down on paper “Negarestanian”
word salads? Doesn’t the para-academic environment, with its drive to flatten
traditional pedigrees and gateways, inevitably invite a headlong repurposing of
complex, not fully-digested ideas that can, in the worst-case scenario, merely amount
to a new terminological orthodoxy, a self-congratulatory rebellious attitude, and
ultimately just a new kind of tribalism? Don’t get me wrong: I don’t want to reestablish myopic vetting procedures, and I am also convinced that you cannot do good
philosophy without being excited (both a cognitive and a practical excitement) by a
problem or a thinker. But I am wary of having this affect be the drive of philosophical
production, no matter how well-intended the individual, how straight the moral
compass, or how progressive the conceptual delivery.
Reza Negarestani: Ironically enough, I wanted to say earlier that I’m more concerned
with the lack of constraints in para-academia than the abundance of constraints in
academia, some of which are fundamentally necessary—while some unfortunately
myopic. Let me start by saying this: even in the presence of non-myopic and required
vetting procedures, there is still a good chance that unintelligible or vastly
intellectually sub-standard works creep through the great filters of academia. As an
example, when Harvard University Press publishes a book on computation and culture
that is riddled with patently false claims about concepts developed in computer
science, filled with bizarre overextended analogies, fallacies of reasoning which would
be covered in a Philosophy 101 course, and questionable references—the sort of book
that might be derided as an exercise in para-academic vacuity—then we should realize
that such constraints are merely necessary. They are not by any means sufficient to
guarantee rigorous and consequential works. There are of course differences among
academic publishers as well, some are more vigilant about the content. But a good
portion of them publish works as long as they conform to the convention of academic
writing and format. This is not all, in the current form of academia, tutors are forced to
make many compromises out of diplomacy or bureaucracy. But one can only make so
many practical compromises before compromising the theoretical core of its
convictions.
Sellars has this wonderful essay on Plato where he talks about the difference between
conventions (for example, the building code instituted by the builder’s guild) and
objective principles (practices absolutely necessary to make a house that can withstand
the passage of time and serve a purpose, namely, sheltering people). The kind of
constrains we should strive for and uphold are of the latter kind. Academic
conventions can be useful for streamlining the practice of doing philosophy, but as
conventions they can also be corruptible just like the codes of a builder’s guild that by
virtue of having monopoly over some material ingredients dictates that all houses must
be built using this or that material only.
I admit that in the past I have been facile. I used to see all sorts of academic constraints
as essentially restricting. It is only when you see the flaws and harsh realities of both
para-academia and academia that you grow out of your intellectual slumber. You no
longer take pride in having as many followers as possible. You in fact become
suspicious of such a phenomenon. There are many friends and readers who now feel
betrayed by my more recent work. But a philosopher is a traitor par excellence. A
philosopher should not swear allegiance to this or that thinker, this or that trend: the
only alliance is with thinking, and thought always betrays the established order of
things. To resolutely answer your question: I think if we take the idea of paraacademia seriously as a true alternative, an oasis for uncompromising thought rather
than a safe haven for anti-academic hubris and individualistic amusements, then we
need to have a much lengthier conversation about the adoption of objective
constraints, addressing the issues of financial infrastructure, organization, and the
ethics of auto-didacticism.
Auto-didacticism is a drudgery, it’s like fighting on multiple fronts while
the supply line has been cut off. Nevertheless, in the end—provided you
have survived—it can prove more useful in the study of philosophy than
academic training.
The latter is particularly important, how to train ourselves, how to turn our lives into
an open-ended philosophical life while at the same time grapple with social and
economic limitations and survive, how to build a platform for self-discipline that can
psychologically and materially sustain us, and so on and so forth. Auto-didacticism in
philosophy is not just about the gradual implementation of intellectual self-discipline
but also about logistics, of how to stay alive, to live a satisfying life, to financially
survive. Without sounding as if I’m romanticising auto-didacticism, I would say that
an autodidact has a better chance of identifying and being consciousness of both
negative and positive constraints in philosophy or theory than an academic. Autodidacticism is a drudgery, it’s like fighting on multiple fronts while the supply line has
been cut off. Nevertheless, in the end—provided you have survived—it can prove
more useful in the study of philosophy than academic training insofar as it makes you
desensitized against the ephemeral trends. Over time, your philosophy becomes your
life, and vice versa. One becomes intellectually insecure, an insecurity that fuels more
learning, more work. It is celebrated rather than repulsed. Having dispensed with the
cosy academic position, you never settle for anything, whether it is a research
trajectory, your position in the landscape of theory or your conception of yourself as a
person.
Coming back to your question about affect: if by “philosophical production” we mean
the developmental phase then yes, to prioritize affect over systematic thinking will
only result in re-entrenching egocentric views and the liberal soap opera of opinions.
However, if we by production we mean the dissemination phase, then I disagree.
Shrugging off affect and emotional labour at the level of dissemination of ideas is a
sure recipe for what is already the status quo, an incestuous circle of like-minded
people talking to each other and a mainstream population frustrated by the arcane
discourse of intellectuals. One might object that it is not the job of theorists and
philosophers to make their idea vulgar in the original sense “of the people.” I would
say that it absolutely is. Hoping for some trickle-down division of cognitive labour in
which someone at some point will make these ideas accessible and popular is but a
wishful thinking. Every philosopher or theorist should be both an impersonal vector of
cognitive hardship and affective labour, without confounding the nature and context of
the two.
Fabio Gironi: I don’t want to seem prejudiced against the idea of para-academia:
academia is a sick institution and often certain ideas and concepts of questionable
utility, whose vagueness is carefully weaponized in order to strike a balance between
accessibility and alleged profundity, manage to capture the attention of undiscerning
readers also because of the institutional imprimatur granted by “proper” academic
publishers, as you noted above. Indeed, your defence of autodidacticism and
celebration of intellectual insecurity as a virtue strikes me as necessary, and very
timely. But it is also somewhat old-fashioned—I should say ancient. It is no
coincidence that your work channels elements from both ancient Greek philosophy
and Confucian and post-Confucian Chinese thought in order to defend and celebrate a
certain ideal of education, far removed from how this is today understood in the neoliberal University. Education means more than factual learning: it is rather a concept
that refers to a comprehensive intellectual, ethical, and social building and realization
of the individual’s potentials—paideia, as the Greeks would put it.
If I’m not mistaken, in the general economy of your thought this has important
ramifications that go beyond the inter-generational development of philosophical
thought, or even individual self-cultivation (important as they are) and that directly
pertain to a progressive and emancipatory political project. As you say, philosophers
today tend to have a thinly-veiled disdain for the idea of education, as if their
abstractions would be deflated or defiled when interpreted as somehow instrumental
for individual character-building—a quintessential academic malaise, betraying the
classical ideal of philosophy (as someone like Pierre Hadot has forcefully argued). So,
is education—and a philosophy of education—a concept that should be reintroduced,
or at the very least updated, in the vocabulary of contemporary philosophy, but also
reclaimed as a central topic of political discussion?
Reza Negarestani: Precisely, I would trace such ideas of auto-didacticism back to
ancient philosophy, and also works of Islamic philosophers such as Ibn alNafis and Ibn Tufail. For them auto-didacticism did not solely mean being self-taught.
It was something much more, almost a cosmological conviction about what thinking is
and what it can do, and of course what the philosophical individual Will can achieve
or contribute in this cosmological scenario of thinking without established arbitrary
limitations. The central theme is, as you mentioned, education. Comprehensively
understood, education is an extension of philosophy of mind and autonomy. This
definition, however, requires a far more expansive formulation of the concept of mind
than how it is addressed today.
Without going into much details, this is mind as a recognitive-cognitive space, that is
to say, mind both as a social dimension and mind as the “dimension of structure”
to use Puntel’s term, or with some caveats, intelligibility (if one looks for a more
familiar term). Take intelligibility out and the talk of intelligence in any sense
becomes absurd if not impossible. The necessary correlation between the intelligible
and intelligence constitutes the core of philosophy of mind and by extension
education. But when it comes to the intelligible we should, following Plato and
Confucius, speak of different kinds of intelligibilities, in order to avoid narrowing
down the idea of the intelligible to theoretical intelligibilities—rather, we should to
distinguish and identify theoretical, practical and axiological intelligibilities.
Education, in this sense, is concerned with the expansion of intelligibilities which are
no longer merely theoretical. And it is in conjunction with the expansion of
intelligibilities, in the broadest sense, that we can talk about the cultivation of
intelligence or mind as a collective project. This cultivation which is captured in the
concept of education is properly speaking the cultivation of autonomy not intended as
the end of education but as its very premise. Hegel would have called this concept of
autonomy that is entangled with education—or what he calls the quaking of the Will—
the concrete self-consciousness which is a matter of practical achievement, a selfconsciousness that conceives and transforms itself by seeking its intelligibility in not
only the satisfaction and the intelligibility of another self-consciousness but also
objective reality. Plato would have called this conception of education—the necessary
reinforcing link between the expansion of intelligibilities and the cultivation of
intelligence—the craftsmanship of the soul, what likens the human mind to the Good
itself, the form of forms. Chinese philosophy characterizes it as the cosmological Dao
in the sense of both travelling down a path and the path of way-making. Sellars in his
essay The Soul as Craftman, following Plato, calls it cosmological politics.
Now, being a reaction to global market and economic demands, the idea of education
today is hopelessly bipolar. It is either on the side of pure theoretical intelligibility, as
instantiated by the empirical sciences, or on the side of pure social intersubjectivity,
practices and values, disconnected from modern science. Intersubjectivity without
objective reality is a formula for a kitsch culture of virtue-mongering where values
increasingly elude the purview of facts, and fear of objective thinking becomes a
social convention. On the other hand, science and theoretical focus on objective reality
without intersubjectivity leads to something akin to today’s neoliberal science which
in having dispensed with criteria of normativity, values and ethics in general ironically
traffics the most dogmatic form of politics and human conservatism in the name of
scientific or naturalistic disenchantment. These pathologies of education are prevalent
as much on the left and as on the right. However, I think intersubjectivity without
criteria of objective reality is becoming increasingly the cognitive curse of the left
while science without fact-value distinction or the metalogical standards of
normativity and ethics is turning into a guard-dog for the most dogmatic strains of
philosophy and right-wing politics: techno-traditionalism, social Darwinism, and even
feudalism and monarchy.
What is the solution to the current pathologies of mind as manifested in our systems of
education? I think the first step to address the problem coherently, even before
attempting to resolve it, should be that of a coordinated movement across the sociopolitical spectrum. The aim of this movement should be to update our existing
educational system, both methodologically and theoretically in the sense of alterative
theories of education which are as much informed by developmental psychology as
they are refined by neuroscience and computation, while at the same time developing a
much more expansive concept of education, where the latter would be construed as a
goal rather than a premise for autonomy and collective self-determination. The task
then would be to coordinate our existing systems with the all-encompassing radical
concept of education, whose concrete realization is our long-term goal. But to take any
of these steps we need to first concretely acknowledge that it is politics that should
treat education as an unconditional factor, not the other way around.
As long as, we are not willing to recognize education in the aforementioned sense as
the scaffolding upon which any political movement should be built we are doomed to
live in the status quo. Short of an unconditional prioritization of education, all we ever
can hope for are quick fixes accompanied with phases of socio-political
overexcitement which soon fizzle out, leading us to a position which was worse than
before. Politics without education as its premise can never maintain its long-term
traction. It effectively exempts itself from the concerns of the next generations. But
what is a politics without the potential concerns for next generations—whoever or
whatever they might be—if not an extension of our egotism and selfishness here and
now? While I consider myself a leftist, I nevertheless think that my frustration with the
left is precisely the issue of education. Look at something like left accelerationism:
where is the acknowledgment of education or developmental psychology i.e. nurturing
as the unconditional factor? Where is your logistical-financial and organizational plan
for education? If you lack these then no matter how much you insist on egalitarian
ends, you are not going to attain them. However, being the hopeless leftist that I am, I
believe that left, has “in principle” more chance to concretely address the issue of
education than the right.
I believe in something like a universalist paradigm of education or equality of minds.
Here, the appellation universal does not mean a pre-conceived global paradigm that
can be indiscriminately imposed upon everyone. Education is all about context
sensitivity, fulfilling local exigencies. But at the same time, I think there are deep
cognitive frameworks which are common to us all and can be augmented under a
universal or global framework. I think Kant was onto something important. His
hierarchies of faculties as elaborated under the rubric of transcendental psychology—
i.e. the necessary conditions for the possibility for having a mind—are not merely a
trivial or arbitrary list of faculties. They were as much a necessary list of abilities as
they were an example of an epistemological inquiry into the specific modes of
cognition required for critical and objective thinking. For example, what he calls
sensibility, reproductive and productive imagination, understanding and reason are
actually necessary “classes” or “types” for being a minded subject. If we believe in the
equality of all minds then we ought to also believe in complex recipes that can
universally augment such necessary classes, regardless of whether we belong to
different geographic locations, ethnicities, or even species.
3.
Rational Pessimism
Fabio Gironi: The delicate question of universalism was indeed my next target. Those
who grew up intellectually in the leftist academic environment of the late twentieth
century were taught, more or less explicitly, that “universalism” is something of a
taboo term. Indeed, you just mentioned the left’s penchant for intersubjectivity without
objectivity—that is to say for a celebration of irreducible particularities, local
practices, identities and so on—which renounces global and universalist ambitions.
Now, I think that this anti-totalizing intellectual season (a former teacher of mine once
told me how, sometime in the mid-80s, he witnessed a heckler shout “you totalizing
bastard!” during a public talk by Fredric Jameson—this peculiar “insult” always
makes me chuckle) was a necessary step, contextually justified by a certain postWorld War II socio-political environment. However, it has now become
unreflective doxa, leading to a counterproductive knee-jerk reaction against a whole
constellation of ideas and concepts—many of which you are explicitly committed to.
Universalism is one of those and (neo)rationalism is another, and the two are
obviously related.
This stance of yours has occasionally led you to a collision course with, let’s say, more
“orthodox” leftists, since all too often universalism is equated with authoritarianism,
while neo-rationalism is confused with dogmatism and blinkered logicism (just like
any talk of “norms” is taken to be an implicit call for normalization—may Foucault
save us all!). As if “rationalism” in general was always necessarily guided by an
ambition of comprehensive and total control: a reactionary intellectual orientation for
the preservation of good societal order, the adversary of the philosophical and political
projects prioritizing the bottom-up affective development of vectors of individual
freedom. What are the methods and goals of the universalist rationalism?
Reza Negarestani: Calling yourself a rationalist universalist is even worse, it is
doubly taboo. It is akin to identifying yourself as an agent of some totalitarian
nightmare straight out a postmodern parody where you actually take pride in having a
poor sense of humour, being cretinous and shamelessly insensitive. The corresponding
image would be not O’Brien from 1984 but a villain from a Donald Barthelme’s story
who just wants to liquidate people using absurdist methods for the sheer experimental
joy of it. So, the question, as you brought it up, is: how did we come to have such a
cultural perception about reason or universalism? Can we ever step outside of this
culture? If the answer is positive, what can we accomplish by doing so? And
correspondingly, if we continue to remain in this culture what do we lose or risk? The
answer to these questions is obviously not straightforward. It requires not just a
historical analysis of economic and social conditions using adequately objective
diagnostic tools, but also a system of thought for imagining and concretely building an
alternative world, one that does not begin with the year zero but is built in continuity
with the existing one which we currently inhabit. Both, of course, require the adoption,
refinement and development of our concepts of reason and universality as the first
step.
As you mentioned, given the historical contamination of these concepts, there is an
immense work to be done not just to gain the trust of people but also to repair or
discard their negative aspects in theory and practice. Let me begin with universalism. I
see universalism as a necessary, concrete and global labour of collectivization. It is
very much in tandem with the idea of concrete self-consciousness or collective selfdetermination as a matter of practical achievement built simultaneously on intersubjectivity and objectivity, particularities and universalities which are a priori. Even
in our particularities and differences, we always begin with abstract or formal
universalities, things like being concept-users, private thoughts which are modelled on
a public language, deep cognitive faculties and categories which even in their
specificity have universal logical structures. So, in a sense, we already live in a
universalist state, albeit an abstract one. We are experiencing, thinking and acting
individuals to the extent that we are socially constituted through and through. Kant and
Hegel—despite their shortcomings in appreciating the true consequences of the
sociality of mind—make this point quite clear: we could not have experience—
through which it is possible to develop a conception of ourselves in the world—in the
first place, if we did not have some shared repertoire of universal and necessary
conditions. Speaking of experience as something originally particular or individual is
hardly anything more than a symptom of a purely solipsistically perspectival view that
is irreconcilable with the reality represented by cognitive science, logic, computation,
mathematics, and even evolutionary biology.
However, there is nothing in this abstract universality that safeguards it from
pathologies of individuation and particularism precisely because the real social
conditions in which it is embedded can in fact be pathological as it is the case. So,
universalism in its genuine form is the concrete and critical expression of
universalities at the level of real social conditions. And its aim is the maximization of
the capacities to think and act, to entertain and actualize possibilities beyond the
confines of the existing world in which we live—a world that purports to be a
completed totality. To achieve this aim, to build a new world in which the possibility
of disenthralled thinking and action coincides with possibilities of a world in which the
individual and social problems and pathologies are resolved, however, is impossible
without first responding systematically and rationally to the constrains of the world in
which we already live. In this sense, I would say universalism is at its core concerned
with world-building or more precisely world-engineering to the extent that our
premise, resource and space of labour is always this world and not some imaginary
world or an afterlife heaven. The possible world cannot be one that is sealed off from
this world, a universe or a commune that exists parallel to our world. The former is
merely a fantasy, the latter is not only phantasmic but also parasitic upon the
pathologies the real world without even realizing it.
To sum up, the path to concrete universalism always begins from particularities of our
experience of the world which are constituted by abstract universalities. So, in a sense,
the trajectory of universalism should always begin from local conditions of thinking
and action, rather than a purported universal condition under which we can all be
integrated and unified. But this trajectory does not end with the local, it must pass
through stages and encompass the global conditions of thinking and action. Remaining
in the ambit the local is actually what suffers from a delusive idealism, not
universalism. Why? Because this localism abides by the myth of a closed system in
which jobs can get done effectively and perfectly. But a closed system is simply an
idealized state, to mistake an idealized model with the messy reality is a hallmark of
credulity. Not to mention, the microlocalist setup is destined to be afflicted with what I
call theoretical-practical Habsburg syndrome, i.e., you end up breeding thoughts and
actions which are increasingly less optimal to address your initial ambitions and
problems. In other words, the logarithmic curve of thinking and acting which were
supposed to optimally solve your local problems suddenly drops after a sufficient time,
precisely because you run out of computational or cognitive resources, the majority of
them you have chosen to call enemies. Without interaction with the environment, your
system becomes ever more fragile and soon a premature death knocks at your door.
Fabio Gironi: So what are the main obstacles and resistances posed to universalism
by its detractors, and how can they be countered?
Reza Negarestani: With regard to the demand to resurrect rationalist universalism—
or more broadly the rationalist reconstruction of the world to appropriate the Vienna
Circle as opposed to the Frankfurt School—there are at least three major objections:
(1) Universalism will flatten differences and is ultimately, another form of imposed
global order whose parameters are set in advance. In response to this objection, I
would say that yes this was the case with old traditions of universalism coming from
European thinkers such as Kant. But concrete universalism cannot be imagined
without the non-trivial or synthetic integration of local conditions. A paradigm of
universalism that does not respond to local exigencies in their own context is only a
disguised imperialism.
(2) The second objection might come from a communitarian perspective: surely we
can build a world sealed off from the pathological systems that plague this planet. I
counter this claim by saying that this supposed world is built on two presuppositions:
(a) You are implicitly endorsing a metaphysical totality in which everything that is
going on in this world of ours has been assimilated by a pathological system (e.g.,
Capitalism) but this totality is only an illusion which you have chosen to take for
reality; (b) your commune in fact parasitizes on the affordances provided by our
world. The alleged purity of your thoughts and actions is actually made possible by the
pathologies from which you think you have diverged. Your commune is not a solution
but only another anonymous contribution to the status quo.
(3) The third objection comes from the neoreactionary doctrine: the whole pursuit of
universalism is misguided, for we are particular individuals so entrenched in the
particularities of our experiences and ideologies that any recipe for universalism is
nothing more than a fable for naive ideologues. My retort to this third objection is: ok,
let us believe that universalism, hegemony-construction and consensus-building are
just the logics of illusion. But surely your neoreactionary island requires a certain
labor to integrate the like-minded individuals. In this process, you have assumed that
doctrinal preferences trump over individual preferences, but you are sadly mistaken.
For even in your neoreactionary island, you should deal with the problems of
hegemony and consensus, albeit in a restricted scope. It is not that your idea of
universalism is naïve—even though it really is but rather that you cannot even fathom
the scope of particularities. Even in the case of people subscribing to the same agenda,
we are always the creatures of our own particular experiences.
There is no such a thing as a zero-claim doctrine. If we look at the early
doctrine of fascism—particularly its Italian offshoot—we realize that
this is precisely how fascism took root. It began with the claim that we
indeed have no claim, no recipe because all recipes are oppressive.
Now, an advocate of neoreaction might object that the institution of such islands does
not require any form of unified ideology or consensus-building. Biorealism, or
cybernetic circuitry of capitalism and untethered economic competition, can
effectively consolidate those who have enlisted for neoractionary experimentations.
But again, what is missing in such scenarios is a deeper understanding of the scope of
human experiential particularities as dynamic perturbations of the system. Over time,
even minor disturbances will have cumulative effects which, if not attended to in a
context-sensitive manner, are guaranteed to throw the entire system into disarray. As
for biorealist schemas, even if they were more than unscientific and dogmatic fantasies
about nature—which they aren’t—that could consolidate and orient populations at an
accelerated rate in the fashion depicted by Theodore Sturgeon in his
story Microcosmic God: they will be still impinged upon by norms and personal
desires of individuals. Not to mention, that the apt metaphor for natural selection is
nature as a slow tinkerer rather than a great accelerator. What I would say to my
neoreactionary friends is that to the extent that they do not take seriously the depths of
incommensurable experiences, their island will eventually sink. For they think that in
the Hobbesian game-theoretic jungle, all you need to do is to ward off enemies and
make islands for those who believe in the same social experimentations. But as time
passes, the Hobbes Inferno will exact its revenge upon you. Without an adequate
understanding of particularities even when a common ideology or a so-called universal
method of pruning is at stake, you will end up not just devouring your enemies but
also eating your kin alive.
(4) The final objection comes from various fatalist doctrines, particularly, the doctrine
of anti-praxis with its slogan “let it go.” First of all, I think anti-praxis attempts to
present itself as a zero-claim ideology, one that has no claim, no practical norm, and
no recipe for collective political action. In this sense, one can get the impression that
perhaps anti-praxis is more genuine than the other tenets I listed above, in so far as it
does not deceive you with lofty promises of salvation, emancipation or the great
outdoors. It is what it is and stands in sharp contrast to the illusions of collective
political action. However, such an impression is fundamentally credulous. There is no
such a thing as a zero-claim doctrine. If we look at the early doctrine of fascism—
particularly its Italian offshoot—we realize that this is precisely how fascism took
root. It began with the claim that we indeed have no claim, no recipe because all
recipes are oppressive.
This is not to equate anti-praxis with fascism but to simply point out that a zero-claim
doctrine—one that sees all practical norms as oppressive—is rife for fascist
appropriation. When the proponents of anti-praxis tell us that they have no political
norm or recipe, we should look at them with utter suspicion. They are either trying in
the worst case to dissimulate their ulterior motives under the rubric of ideological
innocence or, in the best case, they are not conscious of their own implicit practical
norms because they have already dispensed with the responsibility, authority,
presuppositions, and implications involved in consuming and producing norms. Saying
that we must abandon all practical norms is already a normative recipe to the extent
that is predicated on the impermissibility—i.e. what we ought not do—of practical
norms. In this sense, anti-praxis is just a false consciousness of its so-called lack of
normativity or purported innocence.
Therefore, either anti-praxis is an implicit normative recipe or it is not. If it is, then it
is not really anti-praxis, and it means that it is unaware of its own normative and/or
practical assumptions. If it is not normatively practical, then it must be a theoretical
position and as such it is predicated upon theoretical norms such as the knowledge of
the current state of affairs, and thus beholden to epistemological norms of attaining the
knowledge of the current situation. In other words, how do we know that the current
state of affairs is thus-and-so? Either we have a procedure of determination that is in
accordance with the public norms of doing theory, epistemology, etc, or it is the case
that anti-praxis assumes we do not follow norms of theory (which are fundamentally
entangled with norms of practical reasoning). In the latter case, anti-praxis is just
another variation of the myth of the given and/or private access to reality. Or, maybe it
is the case that anti-praxis is not even a theoretical position. In that case, it should be
an aesthetic position. But if that is the case, it then has no purchase on the knowledge
of the state of affairs on which it is built, nor does it have any saying as what ought to
be done and what ought not, even doing nothing. We should realize that doing nothing
is itself a practical norm to the extent that we can only say “do nothing” insofar as we
assume we ought not do such and such things. I would say anti-praxis is more like a
new age monotheistic religion that prohibitively feeds off of practical norms of other
religions, all to present itself as the last religion you should embrace.
So, in a nutshell, the first concrete recipe of universalism is the realization of our
world: the real world is not a division between us and them, but a trap or enigma in
which we are all ensnared. Aiming towards the construction a better world, entails
seeking more computational resources. To see an enemy as an enemy is the first
unwise strategy. The enemy is he or she who gives us a perspective otherwise
unavailable to our intuitive or so-called immediate experience of the world. The
abolishment of our pathological particular traits can only start when we diagnose what
these particularities are and strive to change them by global or universal conditions.
Fabio Gironi: Let us move deeper into a more explicit political register. Some of your
comments above regarding universalism and its detractors remind me of the “first law”
of what the late Mark Fisher infamously called the “Vampire Castle,” i.e. the priestly,
resentment-ridden left-wing intelligentsia. As he put it: “the first law of the Vampires’
Castle is: individualise and privatise everything. While in theory it claims to be in
favour of structural critique, in practice it never focuses on anything except individual
behaviour”. Similarly, your polemic against communitarianism and particularism, and
against an understanding of the “local” as terminal horizon rather than as synthetic
step for the piecemeal construction of a global framework seems in broad agreement
with those political-economic stances that in recent years have been assimilated under
the banner of accelerationism (as most concretely expounded in Srnicek’s and
Williams’ Inventing the Future). I know that you were a friend of Fisher, and that you
know Srnicek and Williams well, but can you offer me a clear description of your
political stance, in relation to this broad orthodoxy-breaking and future-oriented trend
in leftist thinking? Do you have any prescriptive stance regarding political action?
Reza Negarestani: I’m afraid that my political stance—or rather my philosophical
view concerning what ought to be done in the arena of politics—oscillates between
deep pessimism regarding our methods and optimism about future possibilities. Yet,
insofar as any possibility can only be actualized by adequate and malleable methods
and tools, and to the extent that our methods, ways of systematization, intervention
with socio-economic reality and so on are either quite rudimentary or disoriented with
regard to the realization of consequential political changes, I think I am more
comfortable to identify myself as a rational pessimist. I reject passive pessimism in the
sense that as long as possibilities can be imagined, we have to actively gamble and
push beyond any vestige of resignation. Without imagining possibilities and piecewise
attempts at actualizing them, there is in fact no good justification for surviving as a
species. As Seneca has pointed out, in complete absence of such a struggle, we must
perhaps devise the most cunning and artful contrivance for bringing our death about.
In that case, even the slogan “let it go,” once inflated, is nothing but a disingenuous
pessimism that attempts to fabricate a semblance of profundity. In reality, it is the very
exemplification of human conservatism and an adolescent disgruntlement which
secretly hopes for a miraculous change even when it tries to seem detached from such
concerns. After all, romantic fatalism is the shallowest form passive optimism, rather
than genuine pessimism.
Other than the question of methods and tools, another reason for my doubt is what I
mentioned in my answer to your previous question and which you brought up through
Mark. It is the enigma of the particular. It is enigmatic precisely because the particular
as a real condition can shapeshift and come in different guises, play different even
contradictory roles in the domains of both the individual and the collective, the local
and the universal piecewise integration and mobilization of localities. Mark was one of
the best critics of the Hobbesian myth of the state as that which guards the human
from their complete transformation into wolves, as that without which humanity is
inconceivable. In a sense, Mark was far more radical than Hobbes in that he fathomed
the depth of the enigma of the particular. The particular can be pernicious or even
illusory through and through. The absolutization of the particular, the individuals—
whether in the name of the victim, the sufferer or in the name of individual choices
and preferences—completely misses the fact that the conditions of individuation can
themselves be pathological. The overemphasis on the particular or the local,
accordingly, can very well the blind perpetuation of the conditions of exploitation and
misery. But particulars can also be positively non-trivial and implicitly collective
perspectives: by making these perspectives explicit, we can shed light onto the
problems of the individual and the collective. However, one thing is certain—as Mark
would have agreed—the depth of particularities is inexhaustible. So much that, as I
argued earlier, even those who dismiss the universalist labour have to deal with its
drastic implication within their neo-reactionary floating islands. Absent a diagnosis of
different kind of particularities, and short of analysing them with regard to the
mechanisms responsible for generating and distinguishing such causal factors or
mechanisms at different levels of socio-economic reality, we are all—and I
mean everyone—on the same Hobbesian Raft of the Medusa. We will eventually
betray ourselves and eat one another, irrespective of whether we think we should strive
for a future universalist collective project, we should denounce such endeavours, or we
should do nothing and just let it go.
For me the task of politics in conjunction with the support of philosophy
and technoscience is to not only show—in theory and in collective
imagination—that the reality of our world is neither inevitable nor a
completed totality, but also manages to concretely build a new world
from whose perspective our reality will be exposed as the illusion of the
inexorable and finality.
Given the endless series of particularities, of individuals, and of localities, as well as
their protean nature, I think that—given our current tools, modes of thinking and
action, methods, etc.—we have at this point a very slim, if any at all, chance to do
anything that leads us beyond the nightmare of this auto-cannibalistic raft. While I
wholeheartedly support the paradigms raised by people like Patricia Reed, Nick
Srnicek and Alex Williams which are focused on consensus-building, hegemonyconstruction and the critical integration of particularities of the human condition, I
think as a philosopher I should take side with the Socratic method of the courage of
truth with regard to the political action. And as such, I believe the prospects are now
very dim, shockingly so. This claim should not incite the cheer of the right-inclined,
resignatory, neo-reactionary, and conservative thinkers. If anything, it should lead
them to confront the prospects of their own reality as well in terms of a pure terror,
insofar as this dim prospect is not exclusive to the emancipatory politics to which we
have subscribed but also includes their recipes or the lack thereof.
This brings me to the main question you raised regarding my political stance. I think
this question is predicated on the assumption that we can define our political position
by rummaging through and resorting to the concretely instantiated political paradigms
which have already been realized and then choose one that fits our methodological and
ideal ambitions. I really fail to see such an exemplification that I can hold to or define
as my political position. One should engage a great feat of self-deception to see
contemporary political paradigms as adequate to respond the existing tribulations and
problems. Sure, I am a leftist who believes in the reality of the class struggle, but this
is not really a political position, only a consciousness of the socio-economic reality. I
take seriously Marx and Engels’s thesis that communism “is not a state of affairs
which is to be established, an ideal to which reality (will) have to adjust itself.
Communism is the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The
conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.” This is what I
would call—again following Mark—the possibility of actualizing that which is
possible but from our perspective, here and now, seem impossible. For me the task of
politics in conjunction with the support of philosophy and technoscience is to not only
show—in theory and in collective imagination—that the reality of our world is neither
inevitable nor a completed totality, but also manages to concretely build a new world
from whose perspective our reality will be exposed as the illusion of the inexorable
and finality. But then again, even this, is not a clear-cut political position. It is merely
a philosophical thesis on the possibility of a different world and the range of political
actions that can fully actualize it.
4.
Philosophy and Engineering
Fabio Gironi: You merge this rational pessimism with the “engineering approach”
for the construction of a better world, as you explained before. To some, this paradigm
of political action will sound like you are vouching for a dispassionate and formalist
approach to politics, and a government of experts—a “technocracy,” something that in
recent times has become anathema in most public discussion (but that, the critic might
enjoy pointing out, has been proven to be a failure at least since Plato’s political
misadventure in Syracuse)—or even for a nefarious kind of “social engineering.” I
suspect that in large part this depends precisely on am equivocation about the very
concept of “engineering.” In our folk understanding “engineers,” broadly conceived,
are often considered too naive to deal with the intricacies of politics, a domain fraught
with normative considerations.
But if I am not mistaken, your expert engineer is as much a technically-minded
problem-solver as it is a creative conceptual builder: a figure that applies his or her
intelligence to the resolution of problems by means of more than the unilateral
application of simple formulas or pre-packaged precepts. Indeed, it seems to me that
this is where many contemporary ideas converge. Srnicek’s and Willams’ proposal to
“move beyond folk politics and create a new hegemony” and their insistence on the
practical/political concept of “repurposing.” Ben Singleton’s reflection on cunning
reason (metis) as employed for the strategic and piecemeal construction of freedom
from constraints. And of course, your own “speculative inquiry into the future of
intelligence,” or functional reconceptualization of intelligence as an emancipatory tool
of self- and collective improvement—as well as for practical action upon the world—
where conception and transformationare two sides of the same coin. Is it then correct
to say the concept of “engineering” (rather different from its “folk” equivalent) is at
the core of both your philosophical and political thinking?
Reza Negarestani: Among computer scientists, there is this joke: when computer
scientists go into a room full of political theorists, philosophers, cultural critics and
linguists, they say to each other, “get rid of all of them and replace them with
engineers.” Well, perhaps this joke is a bit too much but it has a grain of truth. Neither
philosophers nor political theorists are able to design proper methods adequate to
actualize possibilities, imagined or not. We need politically and philosophically
informed engineers and designers. Engineers are indeed not mindless technicians, they
are people who have one foot in the domain of thinking and one in the realm of an
external reality or worldly affairs. They do not see action as a form of hubristic
mastery to the extent that they know whatever we do at any level of reality—be it
natural, social or cultural—will meet the resistance of that reality. To use a Sellarsian
metaphor, reality in the broadest possible sense is not a block of wax ready to be
imprinted. Engineers truly know that. They also never see reality in any sense as a flat
universe, they see it as vast and deeply multi-scaled structure. In order to concretely
intervene at any level of reality we must not only have a multi-level view of the reality
but also know which methods, models or tools should be implemented, and at which
level. To cut at the joints without splintering the bones is a description of what
engineers—as Plato’s good butchers—do.
There are at least two other important tasks which are deeply entangled with the
discipline and philosophy of engineering. One is the labour of modelling and the other,
the design of approximation techniques. Michael Weisberg has recently written a
wonderful book on models and modelling, a topic which in the past was not being
taken seriously but was central to engineering. Weisberg elaborates why all our
encounters with reality involve one or another kind of model, for example, descriptive,
explanatory and predictive models. Even what we call empirical data are not readymade, they are products of model projection, which means data can be distorted or
even false data may be derived if the model is inadequate, too small or too big,
misapplied to a target system or applied to a wrong sector of reality. The thing about
models is that they are packed with all sorts of implicit and explicit theoretical,
mathematical, logical and computational assumptions. Such assumptions encompass
not just the model’s description but also the core of the model i.e. the structure and its
interpretive factors or construals which include information about the scope,
assignment, and fidelity criteria of the model itself. The latter criteria pertain to the
exact information which specify the model’s representational, dynamic and resolution
constraints for a given level or scale. Without proper attention to such details and the
assumptions underlying them, all data and facts can be fundamentally distorted or
erroneous. The whole myth of raw or pure data is perpetuated by people who have no
clue about how data is mined—irrespective of what kind of data we are talking about.
The other task, the design of approximation techniques, is even trickier. Mark Wilson
sums up the nature of the approximation techniques in his new book, Physics
Avoidance. Engineers—like Ben Singleton’s designers as embodiments of metis or
cunning intelligence—are adept at trickery, hacking the system and reality. They know
that it is not the best solution to modify a given target system by intervening with
lower levels or fine-grained scales (like for example, the atomic scale-length of a
metal beam). Intervention at such bottom levels is rife for what Wilson calls
computational hazards, due to extreme fine-grained details of lower levels, any attempt
at modification and intervention will either fail or become sub-optimal. Not to mention
that we often lack any solid grasp of lower level mechanisms, sometimes we don’t
even have any indication as what these fine-grained scales are, we can only postulate
them. So what engineers do is first they model scales or levels pertaining to the
structure of the target system or the phenomenon in question. Such modelling always
involves a controlled amount of simplification and/or idealization which can at a later
time be revised or equipped with more details. Then, they think of how to carefully
bridge lower levels to upper levels where the structure is less fine-grained and more
accessible and more hospitable to intervention and modification. These bridges—
which are essentially mixed-level in that they contain information regarding middle
scales between the bottom and the top—are called approximation techniques. These
are procedures by which engineers circumvent the messy problems of physics without
forgetting about them. Such techniques allow engineers to modify a given system
optimally without always the need to deal with all sorts of details which make
intervention fundamentally impractical from an applied perspective, from the
computational cost standpoint, etc.
Here, however, a problem arises that André Carus, in his critique of Wilson’s work,
has elaborated with the utmost lucidity. What is this problem? It is the idea that
engineering conceived this way would be anti-Enlightenment in the sense that all we
can ever do is to reform our local concepts and descriptive pragmatic resources in a
piecemeal manner, without hoping to achieve unification. We can no longer have
ambitious concepts that can be applied across the board—those global concepts
treasured by philosophers such as the Copernican imperative, reason, freedom, etc.
Our situation is similar to that of a child who plays in the tub and is in command of a
rubber duck. But, of course, the picture of reality is more like that a river where
torrential flows, undertows, and chaotic behaviours take hold of the rubber duck. In
order to make sure this rubber duck sails in the river, we can no longer adopt a global
concept of sail or navigation. We should have atlases of local theory façades which are
responsive to such turbulent quandaries. And of course, to conform to such a picture of
reality, we can only develop local concepts and heuristic norms which are
informational packages that reflect varying and non-unifiable perspectives such as the
concept of hardness—as for example applied to a metal beam—which fundamentally
varies across different scale-lengths of the metal structure.
While I have a sympathy for such view, I believe Carus is right. Our encounters with
reality are not merely such heuristic or pragmatic devices. Engineers always have a
main solution—a global concept—in mind. Then they try to bring various real-time
scenarios under it such that neither the global concept nor local pragmatic concepts are
mutually exclusive but are rather mutually positively constraining and self-reinforcing.
Engineering, in this sense, is about the commensuration of the local and the global, the
ideal and the messy, the strategic and the tactical. Engineering, therefore, incorporates
two senses of the Enlightenment’s rational reconstruction of the world or—to use
Carnap’s later term—explication. One in the sense of realism and one in the sense of
idealism, naturalism and constructivism. To reengineer and recognize reality, one can
neither adopt a universal concept or paradigm nor just local and perspectival concepts.
Both the overarching paradigm and local malleable solution are needed.
Now, as you asked, how do we adapt this engineering paradigm to politics? My friend
Ray (Brassier) cautioned me regarding this unconditional espousal of engineering as a
political method. I fully agree with him. Politics fundamentally differs from
engineering from the perspective of norms of political action. The philosophically and
politically informed engineering as a political method is predicated on the hard labour
of politics which, to a great degree, consists of diagnosing our current situation and
then deciding how should we move forward, the work necessary for arriving the global
concept. However, I do disagree with the idea that unlike the realm of politics where
“what ought to be done” is a matter of antagonism and consensus-building,
engineering is centred on a pre-established conventional norm (i.e., this is what the
system should do, or this is the agreed upon norm by which the system should
behave). Even in engineering, we know that the system can have multiple diverging
trajectories of evolution. There is no pre-established norm or consensus as what the
system is and how it should behave. For engineers, there is no pre-established function
of a given system since such functions do change over time and in accordance with
local contexts. Modelling a system is as daunting a task for engineers as it is for
political theorists and activists to diagnose pathologies of society, and to find a way to
eliminate them. Reality is not a given totality: sometimes you should approach it as a
black box that can only be unveiled by systematically playing or intervening with it.
Other times, you should do the hard work of modelling under epistemological
constraints. All in all, the task is to integrate global concepts with contrasting local
concepts.
So yes, in response to your question I take the paradigm of engineering as a
profoundly composite—epistemological and practical—way of thinking about the
world. And this also leads me to finally answer the question you posed earlier
regarding what can be the concrete way of getting political ambitions done. Our first
step in a concrete political project should be focused on diagnosing the precise causal
mechanism responsible for the pathologies of individuation, to detect the levels at
which such mechanism are entrenched, and then proceed to develop tools to intervene
at those exact levels—like an engineer. If you don’t have the adequate tools to
intervene at that level, then devise approximation techniques, resolve the problem at a
different level. And, again like an engineer, attempt to lay out the logic(s) of existing
worlds at different scales. Make new tools to construct new worlds from the detritus of
the old one. The new different world is not a miracle or a religious afterlife, it is a
world engineered from what is available to us. To recapitulate, we need to first
understand the plural logics of this world almost like the multi-level ontologies of
information science to even think what ought to be done and decide exactly what
methods or tools at what level should be exercised.
5.
Intelligence and Spirit
Fabio Gironi: Speaking of new tools, your Intelligence and Spirit is about to be
published. It is a very ambitious and hefty volume: both a philosophy book (explicitly
ignoring traditional intra-philosophical distinctions between different styles of
philosophy) and a book about philosophy itself. In the latter register, you are more
interested to ask “what can philosophy allow us to accomplish?” rather than
demarcating what is properly philosophical. What can—or should—philosophy do?
Reza Negarestani: Since the beginning of our conversation, I have more or less
presented the vision of philosophy to which I am committed as bereft of all spurious
philosophical divisions. It is not that I think there are no entrenched distinctions, it is
rather the case that such distinctions in methods, styles and ambitions should be finally
overcome and abolished because they pigeonhole the very idea of philosophy.
Philosophy is the organon of intelligence, the medium by which all relations between
intelligence and what is intelligible should be integrated. One cannot be a philosopher
without engaging with the history of philosophy—and I do agree with Brandom that
philosophy has a history rather than a nature or a mere past—or the comprehensive
ambitions of philosophy. Once we look at the deep history of philosophy, we see such
distinction are ephemeral trends. Once we conjecture about the ambitions of
philosophy, we notice that all such distinctions are obstacles impeding the true vision
of philosophy as such. Individual philosophers do not need their own weapons, for
philosophy is the ultimate weapon system. Sure, philosophy has been enfeebled by its
own fanatic institutional habits, but virtually nothing on this planet can shed off its
prejudices and escape the cage of human dogmas without adopting a certain degree of
philosophizing. Look at the current state of science in America, those who wear the
badge of science-mongering like Neil deGrasse Tyson. These are the errand boys of
the neoliberalist politic. Having dispensed with the labour of philosophizing as either
an antiquated way of doing science or a waste of cognitive resources, they think that
science should carry the torch of radical enlightenment. But they are slaves of their
own unconscious metaphysical assumptions if not the very inoculated people who in
reality do the most dogmatic kinds of philosophy when defending science or attempt to
derive ways of good living from scientific facts. Their so-called “scientifically
informed” way of living is a jumble of bad mysticism, entrenched dogmas, and the
farce of flattening the distinction between facts and values.
While I am pro-science to such an extent that I am afraid my fellow philosophers
might accuse me of scientism, I believe that science without philosophy is akin to what
Hegel called a bad consciousness. Even though I have been formally brought up in the
way of science, I am ready to claim that science without philosophy is more like an
immature genius savant who is neither capable of knowing what it actually does nor is
it able to communicate to other people what its latest discovery is. This is what I call
the poverty of politically manhandled and malnourished science in the age of hatred
for philosophy. This is just one example. On the other pole, we see people who call
philosophy a distinctly white and exploitive discipline. But who are these people that
call us the recruits of the tyranny of philosophy or the master discourse? They are
precisely the last strands of a decrepit western civilization which does not even know
what it should do when faced with minor calamities. Long before the western
enlightenment became a loved and then a hated paradigm, we Africans, Middle
Easterners and Asians began to develop sophisticated philosophical systems
encompassing the ways of life as well as the ways of doing science and knowing.
Science and the way of reason as we know them today are unimaginable without the
coordinated and borderless conversation across continents, between those who are now
considered the exploited and those who are identified as working on behalf of the
exploiters. This is why I insist that philosophy should not be associated with this or
that population, but the very force that should terminate in thought, once and for all,
the very condition of exploitation. As such, the political struggle to concretely remove
the conditions of exploitation is an extension of the labour of conception. Without this
labour, all political actions, even the egalitarian ones, are mantraps for humanity.
Philosophy, once untethered from all its specious limitations, is the vehicle of future
intelligence. But given the fact that intelligence is an illusion without the labour of the
intelligible—the criteria of intelligibility pertaining to reality, the explanatory work
involved in what we call an intelligence, or the recognition of other possible
intelligences—philosophy should be acknowledged as a program by which we expand
and renew the link between intelligence and the intelligible. In this sense, philosophy
reinvents mind or intelligence by constantly demanding us to make new worlds and
new universes of discourse, to see intelligence as an exploration of reality of which it
is a part. Being is a designation of theory and discourse. Talking about Being without
theoretical structure or predication within a universe of discourse is meaningless.
Thus, I consider Parmenides and Plato, the progenitors of theoretical structure (the
intelligible) as ultimately philosophers of Being who are far more subtle and insightful
than their materialist or atomistic counterparts. I believe that even the Eleatic
doctrine that thinking and being are one has been misinterpreted. Rather than eliding
or confounding the distinction between thinking and being, the Eleatic thesis proposes
that Being is ultimately a designation provided and constituted by thinking.
Philosophy’s compulsion to think, thus, signifies the expansion of the realm of Being,
the renewing link between intelligence and the intelligible through which we can
indeed think of new forms of intelligence and correspondingly an intelligible reality in
excess of thought. This is the main premise of Intelligence and Spirit. Mind as the
dimension of structure or the organon of structuration is also what gives Being or
reality its true import. What we call general intelligence implicitly begins with this
admission, to expand the conception or form of intelligence, we must expand the
notion of Being or reality. But such an expansion is solely the fruit of the toil for the
intelligible and the objective.
Fabio Gironi: Among the many formulas you use I find one particularly enlightening:
philosophy would be a productive “compulsion to think,” a compulsion common to all
rational minds or intelligences. What is the outcome of this compulsion?
Reza Negarestani: The main theme of Intelligence and Spirit which is connected with
the philosophical compulsion to think is that intelligence, broadly understood, is the
organon of worldmaking (to use Nelson Goodman‘s term); our resources of world
representation are indebted to the worlds we make and the domains of discourse we
put forward. Making an unrestricted universe of discourse—the universe under which
many worlds can be seen as one and the one world can be addressed as many
alternative worlds—defines what philosophy as the true medium for the cultivation of
intelligence is. Only to the extent that we can toy around with our existing world and
make new ones, can we represent the world anew, to delve further in an abyssal
reality. The ways of worldmaking are many. Sometimes they involve reduction,
sometimes pure construction. To engage with philosophy as that which enriches or
reengineers reality one must integrate Heraclitus, the destroyer of worlds, and
Parmenides, the builder of worlds. This is how philosophy becomes the craftsman of
the mind under whose way of thinking all allegedly completed totalities will be
revealed as incomplete and new alternatives can be imagined even if the reality of our
world appears to be final and inevitable. This why I think Intelligence and Spirit is
more than anything is a deep dive into the history of philosophy with no prior
commitment to the current distinctions. Its aim is to resurrect that nasty bug we call
the itch to philosophize. But this time the bug is more resistant to anti-philosophical
pesticides. It is armed with theoretical computer science (the philosophy of
computation), complexity and cognitive sciences as well as a renewed commitment to
the future intelligence whoever or whatever it might be. For this reason, what I call
philosophy of intelligence is philosophy itself, but one that is in the process of
achieving its concrete self-consciousness. If philosophy begins with the truthcandidate—i.e., a plausible and tentative datum—that thinking is possible, then
philosophy of intelligence is about the full elaboration of such a possibility. It is then
essentially an answer to the question of what can be done with thinking, and more
importantly, what kind of transformations do we undergo in concretely answering this
question and what is ultimately born out of thinking about thinking, or as we begin to
investigate both the presuppositions and consequences of the possibility of thought.
Fabio Gironi: This compulsion towards worldmaking is a process that also feeds back
upon the human or the mind that does the thinking, a creative intelligence part of the
intelligible world that is re-made. A crucial commitment of yours is indeed a precise
form of rationalist inhumanism, obviously to be differentiated from anti-humanism (of
various post-Foucauldian varieties) and trans-humanism (or technologically-enhanced
humanism), but also from more refined forms of speculative post-humanism keen to
abandon any constraining element of humanist normativity. If I am correct, the key to
understand your inhumanism is a conception of reason as an abstract computational
tool or universal blueprint for action, multiply realizable in various substrates and thus
unbound by human biology. This has momentous and seemingly contradictory
consequences: on the one hand the erasure of the natural/artificial distinction, when it
comes to the production of thought and the understanding of what the “humanity” who
bears it is (and can become) turns a scientific research project like that of AGI into an
intrinsically philosophical problem (in fact, only quantitatively different from the
Platonic project). On the other, your stance also opposes those neuroscience-fuelled
attempts to predict the obsolescence of all of our normative concepts of reason in light
of future discoveries about our neuro-physiology. At the core of this vision there exists
a dialectic between constraints or conditions (be it biological or normative) and
freedom. How do you conceptualize the freedom sought by the rationalist inhumanist,
and what is the price of such freedom for “the human?”
Reza Negarestani: Nelson Goodman argues that every worldmaking is a remarking of
the available world. The worlds which are made are re-cognized worlds. In other
words, there is no such a thing as a new world without its continuity with parts and
elements of old worlds. World-versions can sometimes be made by construction of the
available worlds and sometimes by their reduction to more elementary components
which can be once more put together under a different integrative schema. But
reduction is neither a unique nor an indiscriminate method. There is no ur-world—
neurological, physical, etc.—to which such versions can be fully reduced. The talk of a
total foundation, as Goodman remarks, is not a philosophical or even a scientific talk.
It is a talk that should be bestowed upon and consigned to theology. The reason I am
referring to Goodman’s work is because I think there is a parallel between ways of
worldmaking and thinking about intelligence, specifically the future intelligence as a
world of cognitions. To reduce the idea of a future intelligence to an ultimate
foundation—whether under the name of biological homo sapience or sentient
intelligent behaviours—is a theological way of thinking. It is not philosophical or
scientific. In the same vein, the construction of worlds for the sake of multiplicity and
diversification—to imagine possible worlds of intelligence disconnected from this
world of ours—is also a theological thesis, albeit one that is put forward under the
rubric of technology or technological deep time, the new paradigm of theological
tyranny. Ways of worldmaking are, at their core, the ways of knowing. Imagining
different kinds of intelligence does not engender a future intelligence, just as the
posthumanist penchant to welcome all possible alternatives to the human allows no
escape from human quandaries and its entrenched dogmas. Intelligence without the
labour of intelligibility is a conservative humanist scam. Thinking about a future
intelligence requires both the recognition of our limitations and abilities for explaining
why we call something intelligent — or what involves in calling something intelligent
and the hard work to, in a piecemeal manner, overcome such limitations — and to
augment our theoretical and practical abilities in order to renew the link between what
is deemed intelligence and the intelligible reality. Without these criteria, imagining
different worlds or intelligences is nothing more an exercise in negative theology and
what Kant calls enthusiasm, vagary or whimsicality.
If we think about the ways of worldmaking as the ways of imagining new kinds of
intelligence then, as you say, there is no way to envision a future intelligence without
the dialectic — or more generally the back and forth movement — between the
existing constraints of cognition and computation, and the possibility of thinking of an
intelligence that is not exactly limited by our local and contingently given conditions
of constitution. Freedom is therefore a consciousness of established limitations as well
as the understanding that what intelligence ought to do and think once having shed
such limitations, once it graduates from passivity of accepting its given conditions to
crafting entirely new and more objective, but also broadened, conditions. The price of
such freedom is great. It involves risk, and a gambling informed by the current
variables. But I would say that this is exactly the risk we humans have taken so far
against all odds of a purported fixed nature, and the the judgement of ancestors and
tradition. If we entitle ourselves to such a gamble, then there is no good justification to
deprive a future intelligence—whether it is a new generation, i.e. our children, or
something different—of making this informed gamble. Absent this risk which is
constitutive of our own self-conception, we should put an end to our so-called life. To
live an intelligible reality always involves risk, we either assess the very nature of this
risk and make informed decision to the best of our capacities or we die as that species
which could make fabulations about other kinds of world but was ultimately unwilling
to take risks in its own world. This is why, for me, what is called posthumanism for a
good part is simply a different face of conservative humanism: You can dream of other
intelligences—aliens, angels, superintelligences, gods, etc.—how they can evolve,
what might be the consequences of their so-called reality, but still you are not willing
to even imagine a new world for humans or rethink what it means to be human, and
what might be the consequence of such a concrete and thoroughgoing renegotiation.
Fabio Gironi: I began with an attempt to demythologize Reza the prophet and here
we are, discussing the existential imperative of a future computational refashioning of
human nature. So, let us close on a lighter note: what does Reza the man do for fun
when Reza the philosopher takes a break?
Reza Negarestani: As you well know philosophy is, without question, a demanding
exercise, particularly so from the psychological point of view. Short of some sort of
balance in the philosophical ascesis, one sooner or later either gives up on
philosophizing or worse starts romanticizing about the depression and the
psychological afflictions which usually come with philosophy. It’s not that I
equivocate thinking hard with being depressed, it’s just that philosophy robs us—for
the better—of the tools by which we can psychologically deceive ourselves about
ourselves and the world that surrounds us. I don’t see how one cannot sink into the
depths of depression without strategies of self-deception. So yes, I try to do things
other than philosophy—in order to do more philosophy in the long run, without being
burned out. I do cooking, gardening and daily chores which are not explicitly fun but
put me in a different mood. Other than these, I particularly take great pleasure in
playing video games. Even given the current adolescent culture around them, to me
videos games are like supercolliders where literature, cinema, art, the concept of play,
philosophy, and many other things are fused together. It’s essentially what you might
define the prototype of a popularized and popularizable medium which philosophy
currently lacks. A guiltier pleasure of mine is riding particularly sinister rollercoasters.
Other than being engineering marvels, rollercoaster rides suspend thinking and with
that all anxieties that derive from your being slowly disillusioned. The brain locks into
a different mode which I find equally refreshing. I’m afraid that’s about it.
Philosophers don’t typically have a great or an expansive sense of fun.
Fabio Gironi is an IRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Philosophy,
University College Dublin. He previously studied at the University of Rome “La
Sapienza,” the University of London, and Cardiff University, where he obtained his
Ph.D.
Reza Negarestani is a philosopher. He has contributed extensively to journals and
anthologies and lectured at numerous international universities and institutes. He is
the author of Cyclonopedia (re.press, 2008) and Intelligence and Spirit (Urbanomic /
Sequence Press, 2018).