The kind of repetitive compulsive behaviour of the death drive, the mimicry of the inorganic, the collapse into the imminence of exteriority is not something that's driven by a certain pathology of consciousness is something which is operated by the external imposition of the object on the subject. So in the same way that the insect mimics its own food as
an evolutionary strategy and then ends up being eaten itself and actually being absorbed into its own exteriority. Scientific thought mimics the inorganic object. So the scientific type of thought mimics the inorganic, or mimics its own death, mimics the death of thought. So in a way, Brassier is kind of inverting Adorno's point, where he's following Adorno's point, but refusing to recuperate it back into some kind of narrative of reconciliation.
Could one, because you have the image of the eternal recurrence. as a version of the composition of the people that keeps us what we are, but slowly but slowly extincts us. But this would be part of Nietzsche's, the similar operation in Nietzsche, which is to recuperate nihilism back onto the side of life, right? Because the thought of the eternal return is this challenge where we face the highest point of nihilism in order to be able to overcome it and to create this new form of life.
But for Ray's work, there isn't an overcoming as such. There's just a kind of affirmation of this vector of becoming inorganic, of exteriorization, of collapse of the internal into the external. So for Ray, philosophy becomes an operation of the death drive. It's not an overcoming. Yeah, I mean, one of the first figures of science, maybe, I just made this up, the myth like the Prometheus, who steals the fire in order to make man something, instead of arresting the animal.
You know, he's punished with the terrible punishment of having his liver pecked out every day by the ego. And the punishment is not to have his liver pecked out, but the punishment is actually that the liver will grow back every day, so that the ego can come next day and eat it again. And so maybe that's an image of how science is. I think this is a respect because I have a friend who recently changed his liver. Right. And he has to self-careize his medicines. He has to eat medicines that makes him weaker in order to survive. So you have to lower your immune system for the body not to throw out the liver. Right. But then that's still about survival.
still it's still like that's still in the sense in the you're still talking about this operation of the death drive which is to create this to deaden a part of itself to create this crust so that it can survive well nihilism in Adorno's account is the kind of cancerous growth of this crust so that it basically kills the whole organism. The whole organism becomes assimilated to the inorganic. But isn't that also, I mean, eventually our extinction will be the only means of survival, paradoxically.
How? How does that make sense? We can self-weak, I mean, these medicines that we eat in order to become weaker in order to survive. It's some kind of tolerance. But for Brassier, that's exactly not what he wants to say. He doesn't want to say, you know, it's not like a kind of rationalist homeopathy, that if you take a bit of science, then it will make you feel bad, but eventually you'll get better. it's not that we have to use instrumentalized science in a more subtle way in the service of life it's that we have to follow this process of exteriorization as far as possible
without knowing whether it has any affinity with our survival or not Yeah, but if you accept the idea of entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, this would eventually, it doesn't matter how much we think that we rationally insist on surviving, it would still, science, the truth, according to Brassier, would still come out on top. Yeah, I guess. How do you mean? On top? On top of what? I mean, on the side of not the compulsion to repeat in order to survive, but the necessity
of the territorialization towards extinction. Yeah. What's the question? Is that a question? My question is, how do you think, or how do Ray Brasier think, this truth of scientific thought that does not repeat compulsory in order to create the crust to assure survival at all costs. How does it think that apart from the entropy or like the fact that organic life is constantly involved?
Because I think that when the Lord says that Nietzsche's eternal reoccurrence, Nietzsche says that the eternal reoccurrence is about the reoccurrence of the same. But then the Lord says, yeah, he doesn't really mean what he says, because he really means that the eternal reoccurrence is virtuality. And the eternal reoccurrence is not the return of the same, but of difference, of differential difference. So it's not the dialectical difference, that on the one hand side and on the other hand side, and then the synthesis. But the differential difference that makes things move by and through difference in order to develop. Yeah. So you're asking kind of what is the energy behind this potency of the object to create
this drive towards the organic? So far as you think it's outside of the drive, that drive or the propulsion to repeat for the sake of survival. Harness to survival, yeah. Yeah, I think that's a good question, but it's not what I can answer. Yeah. Sorry? It mustn't be answered. Why? And then we sort of re-inscribe again. Right. Yeah, you re-inscribe a kind of meta-vitalism. Yeah. Yeah. But it seems to me that there's also a...
The maintenance of sub-activity is always homodevising. So... And then we can, this is of course very obscene what I'm going to say now, but so, the maintenance of subjectivity, or the opportunity for the individual to orientate or coordinate him herself in space and time, is maintained. So I know that I am myself, however I know that this is bogus, that this is some kind of construct that we have to differentiate us from some sort of general unethical soup of existence, right?
Within this concept of correlationism or thought, where the objects are spinning around subjects, we can introduce, what have we, to be really perverse, Judith Butler, that sort of brings us the opportunity to say, and there's no core to the subject, so you can be a little bit whatever you want. True, not true. No, no, of course I know. And you're always inspired, but it gives you the opportunity to get to the nice. But to what extent? Only to an extent that is already formulated by capitalism, by general forces of society and so on.
How I understand Brzezigerian from this point of the dilatant level is that Brzezigerianism is also a way of saying that towards a radical heterogenization. Only by our own extinction can we consider a radical heterogenization which is not from here to many but from many to many. Yeah, but as I'll talk about a little, I think there are problems with the possibility of generating any kind of experimentalism, any kind of consequence from what Brassier does.
I think that's a kind of core problem, because the philosophical work tends towards a kind of Gnosticism, which would be simply a kind of refusal to participate. So turning it into an experimentalism in that respect, into some kind of transformational practice, is problematic in the end. I mean, either we're going to be turned into something else or we're not, and any kind of voluntarism on that level is problematic, of course. So, just to finish off, then Brassier is rejecting Adorno's suggestion that thought can reach
a kind of maturity by reconciling itself with its natural history and with myth, with myth as a transcendental condition for scientific rationalism. That is, by enveloping scientific rationalism within human history, by denying thereby science any ontological status, any status as a science which talks about something which is and which would be without us. instead for Brassier in scientific rationalism we encounter an alien force that comes from outside the compass of human history and which compels us to think a natural history but a natural history whose irreflexive nature
renders it completely unamenable to the kind of reflexive commemoration that's recommended by Adorno we find that this alien was already inside us. And returning to Meosu here, the time of science cannot be reconciled with any correlationless position for which objective reality is constituted through some more originary condition of manifestation. For scientists who study black holes or light from long-deceased stars, experience, life, consciousness, myth, history, are themselves minor spatio-temporal occurrences. Thought, history, myth, sacrifice are all things with a beginning and an end within this spatialized conception of time. And so none of these things
can possibly condition the objects about which science speaks. So for Brassier, we defeat transcendentalism, the notion that philosophy is about conditioning, by acknowledging that the trauma of science, the trauma of scientific thought which is named in nihilism, or whose social ramifications are named in nihilism, but which, Ray wants to reclaim the word nihilism for the kind of core conceptual trauma that science involves. So this trauma indexes something unconditioned by human thought, something that has no interest in common with human survival, human health, or human instrumentality. Brassier ultimately finds Meissu's rationalist
escape route from correlationism unsatisfactory, because it already assumes an absolute difference between thought and being, and a philosophical privileging of time. So there's a critique of Meissu in Brassier as well. And it's finally in the work of another French philosopher, Francois Laruel that Brassier believes he can fulfill the requirements of the realism which he's looking for, a realism that's robust enough to withstand correlationism and the assaults of post-Kantian philosophy and to uphold the autonomy of the object from thought. And in Laruel, thought no longer reaches out, whether via correlation or, as in Mayasu,
via intellectual intuition to the object. Instead, objects impose themselves unilaterally upon thought, and thought is compelled to accord with an object that is prior to it. And not only the object, but also myself, what thinks in me, cannot be reconciled with my own experience of thinking. this is again the schizophrenic cogito in a new form what thinks in me is not the self which I experience as thinking the object thinks through the subject what's thinking is an object, is something else
and this is obviously why we find it so difficult to reconcile our own experience with what a neuroscientist tells us, because they're telling us what's thinking is this thing. But Ray wants to uncover the philosophical possibility of thinking, of thinkingness, not to ward it off, not to evade it. So the object thinks through the subject, and the reality of the object is the ultimate determinant for philosophical thought itself. Not the privileging of time, not the meaningfulness of death as a horizon for human experience,
and not the transvaluation or the epiphany which brings nihilism over to the side of life. Against the philosophical privileging of time, Brassier sets the Einsteinian objectification of space-time, neither correlated nor dependent upon thought, and offering no privilege to existential temporalization. Against any transcendentalization of its anthropological meaning, he insists on death as an originary purposelessness that compels all purposefulness. So all human instrumentality is compelled by this object which has no interest in common with us. an un-life which seizes life
but which cannot be grasped by life but which haunts it as this kind of unilaterally inflicted trauma necessarily incommensurate with any lived experience and thus utterly, utterly meaningless. And you get this necessarily incommensurate with lived experience and with the manifest image. So it's not that we can understand this reality and then we can somehow generate a new meaning out of it. It's categorically meaningless, incommensurate with our manifest image and unable to be absorbed into it. So just as the return to the inorganic state played out in the pathological repetition of Freud's death drive
can't be understood as teleological since death cannot be said to be of the living. So the imminent death which scientific ontology entails for the thinker can't be said to belong to the thinker. It's not an achievement of human thinking. It's not an achievement of individual thinking. The scientific will to know in Brassier is the equivalent of repetition in the traumatic neurosis. It's a continued attempt to bind something which is void, something which is unconditioned, something which is a trauma that comes from outside. it impinges upon us and in the process it corrodes our own image of ourselves so whereas for Adorno and for other philosophers
the type of conceptualisation of the real that we get from science and conceptualisation that's primarily spatial numerical, atemporal must be an artefact of another deeper kind of thought it must be a pathological outgrowth of the relation between the human and the life world, of time and history. For Brassier, the human and its world and its history is just one of the productions of this dead, inert substrate that's indexed by science's subtractive or negational conceptualization. In repudiating philosophy's attempts to contain the corrosive power of scientific rationality within some other logic or framework that reinstates the manifest image, he certainly takes a kind of delight
in exacerbating the horror that philosophy feels at the usurpation of its reflective mode of thought by this blind alien thinking this thing from the outside he exacerbates this idea of science as a kind of trauma for human thought the encroaching of a mode of death that threatens everything that made human life worthwhile with extinction it's not a death that makes sense of our world, the death of the individual that shapes our horizon and moulds our projects, as in Heidegger, but an impersonal death. And as Ray says, the philosopher is already dead. It's an anticipation of our own extinction, but it's also the knowledge that we're already extinct.
We're already not what we thought we were. We're already not differentiated in the way we thought we were. so contra Adorno's claim that the human produces scientific rationality through a pathological exacerbation of sacrificial logic mimicking the inhuman and irreflexive exteriority of nature in order to master it but unwittingly resulting in the catastrophe of nihilism for Brassier the task of scientific enlightenment and thus of nihilism is to reveal the interior experience of the human the manifest image, as nothing but a mask for a nature that's devoid of reflection, devoid of interiority, and devoid of differential consciousness. So who's the true figure of the dialectic of enlightenment?
That is, the usurpation of the emancipatory project of enlightenment by the tendency to scientific rationality and its catastrophic results. according to Brassier the hero is not as Adorno would have it, Homer's Odysseus who uses a cunning and instrumental reason to survive the mythic terrors of his journey but then returns only to inhabit his own myth as the king, the figure of enlightenment is instead the fly human reason in Brassier's words human reason revealed to have been an insect's waking dream. And we're just going to see,
I think, the appropriate segment to finish off. All right. We can't trust the insect. I'd like to become the first insect politician. You see, I'd like to, but I'm afraid to... I don't know what you're trying to say.
I'm saying... I'm saying I'm an insect. Who dreamt he was a man. I loved it. But now the dream is over. And the insect is awake. Shall we break there? A space to show this piece of work by Amanda Beach, which is very closely related to Ray's book and hopefully to continue a little the conversation we had about speculative realism
and art. But first, I just want to kind of draw out some questions about Brassier's work. Firstly, kind of returning to this question of style. So Brassier says, thinking has interests which do not coincide with those of life. Philosophy should be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. He refuses the instrumentalization of thought in the service of the human image. And it's a very uncompromising book and it almost constitutes,
the book itself I think, almost constitutes what Nietzsche would call a selective test. It constitutes something which concentrates this challenge of nihilism to such an extent that it means that some readers might be so horrified by it that they would, in the face of it, prefer to live with the much gentler half-truths and the accommodations that make life possible. and indeed that make the enjoyment of philosophy possible because in a sense it's not an enjoyable read, it's not something that makes you feel better. And of course, yes, one can always choose life and one can always choose the manifest image, but Brassier makes it very difficult.
In fact, you could say the whole operation of the book is to make it difficult for us to do that, to make those accommodations, to continue with that management of the images. Because the accusation is that in doing so, one always will be choosing against thought, against philosophical probity. However, this then delimits philosophy in a certain way, or delimits philosophical thought. So if we grant that Brassier has identified the fundamental philosophical importance of nihilism, that is the importance of nihilism, the conceptual core of nihilism beyond its cultural ramifications over which so much has been written.
But does philosophy then have to be purified of any reflections on those cultural consequences? And here we return to this question which I began with about the difficulty of creating manifestations, of creating material objects, of creating any kind of work that tries to digest these truths. Because there's a kind of fundamental tension at work in what Brassier is doing. On one hand, he's saying the scientific image presents us with something that's absolutely
inimical to the manifest image of the human. It absolutely corrodes and destroys the manifest image, there's no compatibility at all. But on the other hand, there seems to be this idea that in some way, if nihilism is identical to the core of enlightenment, then the enlightenment project can be carried further by going further into this corrosion of the manifest image. And in that case, the question becomes, do we only do this in philosophy? Do we only do this in thought? Or are there cultural practices that could result from this?
Is there something that could actually transform the human? So in other words, there's a tension between the idea that we mustn't instrumentalize this for human survival, but on the other hand, this conceptual core, once we grasp it, has some potential for transforming what we are. And certainly, if philosophy refuses to take ownership of this question, then what happens? We abandon history, we abandon the human project to the vicissitudes of capital's exploitative deployment of both the manifest and the cultural images and the scientific image.
Capitalism has no problem in using both the scientific image and the manifest image of man in order to develop and extend the exploitation and the subjectification of humans. And Brassier has promised to write more on this connection between capitalism and nihilism and on the cultural ramifications that this logic of nihilism might have. And I think his current project is an attempt to bring together eliminative materialism, that is, the elimination of the folk entities of the manifest image and historical materialism, the Marxist perspective.
So there is, in a sense, a kind of call for action here. If the manifest image can't be defended, and if the scientific image opens up for us this kind of vista of speculative thought, then there are possibilities for a radical transformation of human culture. And it is most speculative. The neuroscientist philosopher Paul Churchland himself contemplates this possibility of a cultural shift towards understanding ourselves in terms of the scientific image rather than the manifest image. So he says there isn't necessarily this complete break, but we can actually begin to understand ourselves in these new terms and that will transform the
way in which we think about ourselves and each other. And to a certain extent one could say that in small ways we already do this. So for instance, if I go on a roller coaster and I say I had a real adrenaline rush, then I'm speaking in terms that are drawn from the scientific image. I'm attributing my state to a chemical reaction rather than saying I felt completely over the moon or some kind of more traditional way of saying it. But then in a sense these kind of scientific images do just become images. I mean, they become imported into culture, and we don't really know what they mean. I mean, who of us really knows how adrenaline works?
But Churchland has spoken about this, and Brassier develops this a little in his book, as a cognitive catastrophe. The idea that there could be a widespread cultural transformation that realized what Churchland calls the plasticity of mind. and Churchland's concept of the plasticity of mind is important that we do have the potential to reinvent the way we think. But how would this happen? It would have to happen through some kind of practices, right? Some kind of cultural collective practice. So the question would be, what might that be? And in the cultural arenas which might engineer this kind of shift, whether it's in the world of art or the world of participatory political activity.
We find plenty of nostalgia and we find plenty of appeals to the manifest image, but we don't find any signs really of a collective effort to precipitate the human race headlong into the adventure of nihilism. So then the danger becomes that the philosophy of nihilism becomes a kind of Gnosticism that we can think, we're here together, we're thinking this core of nihilism and these consequences of the scientific image, but we're unable to bring this over into life. And of course, in a certain sense, Brassier is saying, this is what we don't want to do. We don't want to instrumentalize it in the service of life. but it seems like we're even unable to
unable to kind of explode this it's like Brassier has provided us with this dynamite this conceptual core but we don't know how to light the fuse all we can do is think it but we can't really make it happen so the cultural flesh of the human becomes unequal to the conceptual rigor mortis that he's imposed on us. So although he warns us against sacrificing the stringency of thought to practicism, to the impatience for political intervention, he doesn't want practicism to be primary. In the end, I think, as it stands, the project still leaves us in the position of being a walking embodiment of this problem of nihilism.
That is to say, we might understand what Bressier says, we might become enlightened, that is to say we might become already dead. But then we go away and we still go shopping. We still talk about selves, we still talk about emotions. So what could these practices possibly be that would take it forward? So I think there is... We still write books called Nihil Unbound. Right. So there is a kind of reserve in Brassier's work that characterizes him as a thinker, He reserves himself, he limits himself to a certain conception of philosophy, and he's
not yet willing to, until he's conceptually constructed the apparatus for doing so, he's not yet willing to go as far as to say, this is how we can overturn the manifest image in reality and not only in thought. And you can think of scattered examples in which one can have an experience of this. So for instance, there's a very interesting experiment where the neuroscientists stimulate a part of the brain that makes someone cry. Okay, so the person starts crying, and then they ask them, why are you crying?
And every time the person will have a reason for crying, they'll be thinking about a particular thing. So they'll be thinking about something terrible that happened in their life or something they're sad about. I think this is a very interesting experiment from the point of view of having a lever to kind of tease apart the manifest image and the scientific image. You've affected this thing, you've made something happen in this thing which is the brain, and then the meaning comes afterwards. And we all know that our making sense of phenomena, our making sense of sense data, comes after the reception of the sense data. And Nietzsche already had said this, that we make sense of it afterwards.
And this goes back to what we were talking about with Hecker and the construction of the sound object. So this kind of experience, which has been had by a very few rare people who have taken part in these kind of experiments, introduces an experiential dimension to this disjoining of the manifest image and the scientific image. So that's the question I kind of would leave open is what kind of cultural experimentation could accelerate this destruction or this corrosion of the manifest image. And we have to remember, you know, the manifest image is not like a knockdown straw man, it's
an incredibly powerful tool for humans. Not only is it an incredibly powerful tool for humans, but it's an incredibly instrumental tool for capitalism. Capitalism uses whatever it finds, and what it finds is the manifest image, and it uses and amplifies that. And this goes back to what we were talking about yesterday with the kind of banal realism that's prevalent in culture. The idea that we're really reaching the real because we're watching two people arguing on TV. the idea that that's as far as the real goes and that that's realism when you speak about capitalism
does that mean that you somehow think that using the scientific image could be anti-capitalism well what we know is that capitalism exploits both the manifest image and the scientific image, of course. That seems reasonable, but I just wasn't sure. But certainly our subjectification under capitalism uses as some of its key operators the entities of folk psychology and the manifest image. We have to be selves in order to consume.
We have to project certain entities and certain qualities and states into the other people we encounter in order to participate in society. But of course, I don't think there's any program. It's an experiment, this is the point. There's no way of knowing what the experiment will result in. But I think for Brassier, the question is, what's the manifest image ever given us? Why do we want to conserve the image which we've had of ourselves for thousands of years? Why not this experiment? If we don't experiment on ourselves, then capitalism will experiment on us.
But we are over capitalism, so whatever we do, we will be doing the experiments of capitalism on ourselves. Possibly, but it depends whether you align capitalism with the scientific image, as Adorno does, or whether, like Brassier does, you think that the scientific image comes from outside. right so it's whether you know it's an experimentation with this alien thought that comes from outside human history there will be anti I think Mark is coming to speak
isn't he and Mark Fisher wrote this book called Capitalist Realism which is about this kind of regime of the banal real in capitalism and the apparent inescapability of this model of reality. And I think this experimentation in the service of the scientific image would certainly be anti-capitalist realism because it would break down some of the kind of key concepts that are at work in this kind of correlationist paradigm of what's real and reality being always sent back to the banal spontaneous image of the human. Could one expand on this or could it be helpful to take the root via the concepts of mind?
we haven't really wasted time speaking about consciousness. Some people are prone to distinguish between human consciousness and other kinds of consciousnesses, like animal consciousness, for instance. Do you think it could be a way of understanding the manifest image more thoroughly or like outside of the ubiquitous power of capitalism by also letting oneself be informed by other kinds of consciousnesses than the human one. I mean, because I think with my human consciousness that the other kind of consciousnesses would have a different manifest image, maybe.
Is that stupid? Yeah, but we don't, how would we ever have access to any other consciousness, the manifest image of any other consciousness? Maybe through science. Yeah, but through science we can know, like for instance, that the bee sees the flower in only two colors, but we don't have access to how the bee experiences itself, if it does. We can only have access to our own manifest image, really. We can only document our own manifest image. And human culture, in effect, is the documentation of our manifest self-image. I thought maybe more like in terms of what we just saw before the break.
I want to become the first insect politician. Or I want to become the first insect choreographer. Yeah. Because that might force us to do something with our precondition state. Yeah, totally. Well, that would be the question of, you know, what kind of experiments would allow you to discover the insect inside yourself? Totally. Yeah. The one that discovers the insect inside you is more you or the insect inside you, but must be a third consciousness. And it seems to me that an interesting task now is not to imagine an other world,
but to invent the possibility of another kind of imagination for the possibility of a third world to come into me somehow. So that when we think about this sort of, I know that we scientifically, from scientific experiments we know that these, the C's like this, and immediately we translate it into our own image, our own contrast. So we are fucked in the first place. But in the recent novel from China Mierville, which is called Embassy Town, there is a somehow human people, or humans, and then there's another kind of existence called the hosts.
And when the humans and the hosts met for the first time, they couldn't whatsoever communicate. The humans could understand that the hosts acknowledged that the humans were there, but there was absolutely no connection. Then they realized that the hosts are not speaking with a voice that points in the direction, to say, I'm speaking to you, and then I say, look to your left, and you have an understanding of this, and it's affinity to how language operates in that way. But the hosts were speaking with two voices at the same time. So, but that was not in the sense of, like, schizophrenic, but rather on top of each other. But it was only by merging the two sounds that their language appeared.
But not then as a direction, but rather in the sense of the opening in between. So not as a harmony, but the opening in between the notes with the sounds. Then the humans figured it out and started to do recordings of two voices at the same time. But the hosts didn't understand anyway. But because the language was not understood as directional, but rather as an opening to the soul. Whatever now this is, right? So then the humans needed to invent somebody that could be the ambassador, so the one in between humans and the host, but with languages that were absolutely incompatible.
So then they invented the twins, one egg twin became the interlocutor, or whatever, the communicator, in the sense of becoming exactly identical, the one speaking the one voice, the other speaking the other voice at the same time, and sort of starting to, you know, organize a one consciousness, and then it was possible to communicate with the host. So somehow, I think this Shainemir Vil is fairly interesting in how he sort of makes, how he doesn't make speculative thoughts from speculative realism totally banal, but puts them into a other kinds of context and actually some of being a philosopher
but writing in another another through another kind of medium but what interests me in this story is this how to speak with aliens without making you under the alien and without correlating without correlating without producing a one yeah but having to produce a third entity who becomes autonomous from both, yet dependent on both sides. And that is the kind of interesting moment of how we have, that there's also something that's necessary that has to die within us for this third to acknowledge. And of course, it will still be correlative, but there's another capacity that we have,
that operates with a big power, etc. In a completely diagonal way. Isn't that in a sense what contemporary art has tried to do in acknowledging the contingencies of its material allowing the contingencies to speak in a kind of in aleutary or practices which use chance is actually tried to create this these third objects which which would allow that kind of contingency to speak not always successfully but I think that I share this very naive image of contemporary art, and I cherish it, that I do. But I think that contemporary art is just about business and markets.
Yeah, well, of course, because it becomes captured into another register of correlation, yeah. But that aside, I mean, it's about markets and business, so definitely that's what contemporary art tries to do, is to set up practices that force us to invent new kinds of subjectivity, new kinds of modes of reception. And not then in the sense of making exhibitions or dances that are absolutely chaotic or hyper-weird, but rather exhibitions and pieces and all that, of course I can go into an exhibition and say, this is just hocus-pocus, to get about it, let's go for lunch, right? But if I'm sort of entering in that performance with sincerity or with faithfulness to the event that it forces me to invent most of the experiences,
the experiencing that is forward to me. I think it's interesting what you said about reconnecting to the idea of externalization when constructing those rules or practices or whatever that could be something third. Because if we think about game rules as an externalization of human consciousness that then becomes autonomous. then where is the alien-ness
it's in what we have killed of ourselves then but it's not coming from an absolute outside or is it I'm getting, I have problems with inside and outside now can you sort this out is it coming from an absolute outside Well the question is, as in Maire-Su and in Brassier, is where can we locate this point within the correlation where it communicates with the outside. It's not that we completely strip away the correlation, it's that we find this point, singular points where we can, where this communication is possible, which is I guess the idea of
the embassy. Or do you have a problem with the concept of inside and outside? I guess so, yes. Because if we externalize something that then becomes autonomous, then it still came from us somehow, and it's a part of our history of thinking. And then also at the very moment where you try to establish something as absolutely alien, what are you then doing in terms of delimiting human consciousness? Maybe one way of putting it would be to...
It seems that the idea of imminence is a little bit too lean and mild of a concept for this hyper-chaos or transversal movement in between the two that creates a third third that is neither mine or someone else's but a new instance. So the attempts that has been made with pan-pantism, pan-logicism, pan-psychism that suggests an immanent universe where there is no outside seems to this line of thought a too homey kind of an idea.
Yeah. So I think we have to face the confusion around inside and outside again somehow. What or what? Well, I guess in Brassier's work it's a question of coming to terms with the fact that the internality has a genetic history in this exteriority, right? And that it still belongs to it. That's, yeah.
Well, I'm thinking about the scientific experiment which they are doing here in Stockholm. I don't know so much about it, but the experiment is that they put, you put one hand here and somehow a hologram, I don't know exactly how it works but that pain can be stimulated even through not like which is not your hand because you believe it's your hand so in this way what's the correlation between the self and the body of yourself in this way like it's an alien hand in a way and but it has i mean you experience pain yeah
i don't know where to go with that but when you say like yeah there is a genetic connection to the outside like through evolution then like yeah The thing about these experiments, I mean these experiments are kind of at once seen very profound but also kind of culturally trivial, like it's not clear how you could do anything with them, you know, how you could create any kind of cultural difference or shift because they're just these kind of very isolated individual things.
And you know, it's something like the advent of television is obviously something that's this kind of major cultural shift which has changed our way of perceiving images, has changed our sense of reality, but all of that has been recuperated back into reinforcing and bolstering the manifest image. So the question is, you know, how could there be some kind of widespread practice or technology or, you know, something that would enable that to enable the manifest image to be disturbed or disrupted in such a way that it couldn't be recuperated again. This is not an answer to your question, but it's another question.
How does this concept of radical otherness relate to, for example, in the sense of Levinas or someone else that speaks about otherness but in a very cultural sense? Are there common denominators or absolutely not and how? I think not because the other is always another for me. The other is essentially a correlational concept. So for instance in Larawell you don't have the other, you have what he calls the one, which is the reality as prior to any imaging of it, as prior to any creation of world,
which isn't the same as the other, because the other always occurs within the world. So I think it's, yeah, I definitely think in speculative realism it's an attempt to to get away from this kind of dialectic of the self and the other, and the kind of reflexive production of identity between self and other. Because that would just be correlationism again. In that case, I think there is something almost colonialist in these rhetorics, because Because it assumes that we could somehow change ourselves through the encounter with another
that is not dialectical but sort of like outside our perception and thus colonizable. It is a white space somehow. But in Brassier's account, it's the outside that's colonizing us, that's already colonized us, right? It's not a kind of voluntaristic, we can go out there and conquer the outside. It's that the outside is already like bored through us, it's already inside us. But why then this question, how can this concept of otherness change? Right, well that's my question, I should make that clear. not necessarily a race question.
And why do you ask it? But there is no territory outside us. The outside is not territory. It's uncolonizable in a sense that there's absolutely no compatibility to our concept of world. I'm of course speaking about the rhetorics, not that I think that this otherness is actually conceived of as a spatial thing that I have understood but somehow I find it I guess I still have problems with science and the rhetorics of science because of what it has done to humanity and then like how how does realist speculative
realism take responsibility for that rhetoric? Yeah, well I mean it depends whether you, you know, is Einstein to blame for Hitler? blame for Hitler? Is science itself a political agency in that sense, that the scientific image can be held responsible for its instrumentalization in the service of the manifest image, which essentially is what drives the kind of disasters of world history? Or do you hold science itself