Formalizing the subject (Session 6)

Hello and welcome to the new Center for Research and Practice seminar series formalizing the subject dialectics and cybernetics in Calle Por La Analisa and CCRU with Daniel Sassoloto. Daniel, please take it away. Thank you, Jamie. Welcome everybody. So today, today, today we're going to talk about speculative realism, obviously, obviously, and I'm going to start by just saying a few introductory remarks about speculative realism, and I'm going to be trying to also draw the explicit connections between the speculative realism and the materials that we've been reading, obviously.

Just one of the things, I mean, I'm sure that most of you maybe are already familiar with, you know the SR crowd and sort of the basic positions there so one of the things I want to try to do today is sort of tap this back into the history of the CCRU and the KE and try to see what connections there are that are that are interesting to to look at we have a presentation by Stefano which I believe is going to be mostly centered around maya sue yes can you just daniel sorry yeah can you just advise me just a couple of minutes before the presentation because i need to jump in with my telephone actually because it doesn't work with my laptop i cannot share my screen with my laptop

so basically yeah cool cool thank you thank you very much just a couple of minutes before No worries. Thank you very much. Who's responding to Stefano as well? Hernan. Okay, great. All right, so I'll begin with the introductory remarks and historical background, and then we will, I'll start speaking a little bit about Mea Suu in general, and then we'll jump to the presentation. Now as I said to you, there were two additional texts on top of the panel, the Catrin and the other Mea Suu texts. we won't be getting into those into too much detail because they were optional at the end of the day i realized the reading might have been a little too much and i didn't want to overload anybody but there's an important uh it's specifically with the second maya sue text

is uh important to trace the lingering presence of structuralism and therefore the kea and in his own project i think um so with that without further idea let me just uh project and start talking about this stuff. Okay. Sorry about the flickering, by the way. I know it's annoying. Are you seeing the slideshow? Yes. Great. Thank you. And all right. So the first thing I want to say is simply that, you know, just let's run through the basics in case we are having some niche or don't know the basics. So the speculative realism business begins really

with a conference that was organized in Goldsmiths in April 2007. And the conference itself was organized around the publication of the translation of Kenting Measus after Finitude, which was translated, as you probably know, by Ray Brassier. And as Brassier, who is the organizer of this event explains in the little blurb in the poster, as I'm sure you've got a chance to see, the whole idea behind this conference was the interrogation of the possibilities of realism and the problematic of realism, specifically after Kenton's introduction of this very helpful term, correlationism, which sort of made the realism question relevant within continental philosophy

again. One of the things that of course keeps coming up in the discussion, Harmon mentions it, Ray mentions it, is that the problematic of realism had become somewhat of a taboo topic, if not naive topic, within the continental tradition for various reasons. Not the least of which is because of course as Kenton Mayasu points out in his argumentation of the archifossil correlationism specifically in its quote unquote strong version and we'll talk a little bit more about what that means postulates the idea that the the very idea of a mind independent reality is unintelligible and by extension then the very idea of the problematic of realism the relationship

between realism and idealism becomes a sort of nonsensical question for philosophy in any case. In other words, realism is not a possibility even to be contemplated. Now, much has been said about whether the very origins of this whole debacle, like the diagnosis of correlationism as a suitable characterization of much of 20th century continental philosophy, whether that is a good one, whether in fact even as a reading of Kant, Mea Suh succeeds. But, and you know, we can talk about this as we move along. But strangely enough, and this is something that tends to be overlooked, is that the day before this conference, there was another one-day conference called Weird Realism, Lovecraft and Theory,

which was held by or organized by the Cultural Studies Department in Goldsmiths. It was the day before 26th of April. And that's interesting because I suppose one of the things that maybe the one, I mean, the obvious odd figure, the odd of the bunch would be Harmon insofar as he doesn't have any sort of direct links to either the CA in the sense of, you know, involvement with work surrounding the authors that are involved there, nor really with the CCRU either. but as he mentions in several places including his blog the one thing that binds him to you know land and his followers and so on is a deep appreciation for the philosophical import of Lovecraft and this is part of of

course what he himself appropriates when he defines his own realism as weird like weird realism I guess we can talk about that as well as we move on now the The first thing to say is that, okay, so obviously speculative realism got out of hand as a phenomenon. And what is associated today with speculative realism is generally sprawled across a variety of forms of publications, journals, the blogosphere. Obviously, the sort of original nexus of production was the Urbanomic Journal, right? Specifically, the second edition of the journal was titled Speculative Realism, including essays by all the four, quote unquote, you know, founding fathers, if you want to even call it that, of course not.

And then, of course, the third one, which is where the panel comes from, was even though the issue was devoted to Deleuze, also includes pieces by Neassu and others. but really I mean the so the urban omic project is interesting because as you know urban omic and you know Robin McKay Ray Brassier Ressa many of the people that published there since the first edition also are very much interested in similar questions specifically the first issue which is is devoted to the problematic of science and formalization there's a prominent you know there's very good interview there with Alain Badiou as well. And Bressier is also one of those people that has of course worked very closely on, well specifically on Badiou and Deleuze,

and whose doctoral dissertation like Ian's was directed by Lann. So from the very beginning the Urbanomic Journal was extremely, very much, you know, at the interstices of these two of the influences of these two think tanks of the CA and of the CCRU partially because of Robin Ian and Ray's involvement in it from the very beginning but it's really in the second and third editions that the speculative realism thing it takes place and after and since then a huge number of publications and different forms became organized or to discuss all things as SR. The Speculations Journal being one, of course, the collection The Speculative Turn, a huge roster of books and series. Harmon is good at cataloging the, let's say, the cultural

production that has followed the name SR. And of course, he has been the most enthusiastic sort of supporter of speculative realism as a brand, if you will. Now, this brings me to my next point, which is a very general consideration, which is that, is there really such a thing as speculative realism as a philosophical position or a philosophical, quote unquote, movement, or is it just merely a sociological phenomenon that you can, of course, group under the umbrella and it will target and track a series of thinkers and ideas that have been grouped together because they shared in some competence some of these interests.

But is there really anything deeper that you can say, all right, here's something like a cohesive philosophical position? Now, I presume we are all familiar with where things stand in this camp. Ray Brassier, who organized the conference, believes there is not. And in fact, one of the, those of you who are, for example, familiar with Pete Wolfendale's The Numinous New Clothes, which is this long monograph devoted to a decimation of Graham Harmon's object-oriented philosophy, might have read the postscript that Ray Brassier writes for the book titled Speculative Autopsy, in which he tries to trace back the origins of SR

as again of the conference, the motivations behind it, and in doing so also castigate what he perceives as become a blatant sort of marketing campaign by Harmon's appropriation of the term in order to promote his own philosophy. And in doing so, he makes clear, where I say, not only that he does not identify with SR as a term that is useful to track anything philosophical, but furthermore that the other originary members of the field Ian Kenton do not or did well not only did not conceive of having wanted to start a movement of any kind but that in fact if you look at it closely enough that it doesn't even make sense semantically or syntactically right now

here's a quote from Bressier's postscript, which I think is, you know, written in his usual lazerating fashion. When Ray's not happy, you better, you know, be careful because things get ugly quick. It is true that philosophers taken to represent speculative realism share an antipathy to certain philosophical sensibility characteristic of post-Heideggerian continental philosophy, the fetishizing of finitude voiced with a mannered pretentiousness that is the unfortunate consequence of anglophone writers self-consciously aping transliterated franco-german but impatience with the rhetoric of finitude and distaste for excessively manner mannered prose hardly amounts to a common philosophical agenda the leuzen badu can be credited with rejecting the pathos of finitude long before the evidence of speculative realism their numerous followers share at least

as much with speculative realists in fact the only unequivocally positive commonality uniting Speculative Realism's founding members is their participation in the 2007 workshop of the same name. Yet when Alberto Toscano and I co-organized a small workshop, I should have said that they co-organized it. Founding a new movement was the furthest thing from our minds. Whatever affinities connected the participants, they were too inchoate to be turned into a doctrinal brand, let alone a movement. And I guess I should say in passing that, of course, you noticed, I'm sure, that the, hold on just one second let me I want to maximize the chat oh here we go yeah uh the in addition to the to the big four there is participation in this by Alberto Toscano who uh beside being an

avid translator well not an avid translator I should say but you know besides translating uh Badiou uh is also of course known for having written you know amply on French philosophy and Deleuze himself, his first book, The Theater of Production, has a very, very good essay on Deleuze and individuation and so on. Peter Hallward, who was also, as we know, organizing the form and concept project, which led to the publication of the two-volume collection of the Cahiers, and who runs, well, not runs, but, you know, is curating the website that goes to the Cahiers, that compiles the chaos materials. So, and then there's Dustin McBreather, you know, just very distinct people

that are obviously relevant to the materials we're reading. But going back to Ray's characterization, one thing that sticks out is, of course, this sort of claim that already Badiou and Deleuze were rejecting the pathos of finitude way before and that they share as much as, you know, with anybody associated with SR as the four members are. Now, the one thing I would say is that this is interesting for an obvious reason. As we know, both the CA and the CCRU were very much in the business of trying to get out of the shadow of what they perceived to be the nefarious effects of Heidegger in the academy and in philosophy and so on.

And specifically, not just Heidegger proper, but, you know, the effects that it had had in inculcating a kind of relativistic tendency within theory, within philosophy, and so on. And it is true, of course, both Badiou and Deleuze are, you know, forefathers, in a way, to different attempts to step outside of the shadow of Heidegger. And this is why, you know, Badiou, when he writes on Deleuze, oftentimes he points out that this is the one thing that drove them in close affinity, that they resisted this kind of mournful pathos of the end of philosophy, the limits of thinking that characterized precisely the sort of post-Heideggerian legacy. There might be a question. There's an interview with Vivercier where he says they have all they have in common is antipathy to correlationism. That is right, Darrell. That is right, in fact. Yep.

So let's see. I mean, there's more conversation, but I want to move forward. So just wrapping up some general historical details. So even though SR has continued to be utilized as a name, and in my experience at least, when people that are not terribly involved with this tend to associate it predominantly with Graham Harmon's own version of this more than with the other projects that spun out of it. But in the years that followed the Goldsmiths Conference, regardless of whether there was something deeper uniting all of these thinkers. The fact of the matter is that, so I guess I stand somewhere in the middle between Harmon's position, who claims that to deny the existence of SR is

ridiculous at this point. It is obviously, you know, beyond question, looking at the number of things that have been produced under the manor. And Bressier who says, well, sure, but that doesn't that existence test is just as applicable to tooth fairies. But I guess the pairing generated an interest in these thinkers and the dialogue between them sprung a series of interventions that I think would not be intelligible otherwise. Had they remained in their own paths autonomously, Had this never occurred and been compiled under the urban banner and so on, I don't think that we would have the same sort of intellectual community that has sprung since then.

I'm not even sure we would be here right now. In a certain way, the consequences of this have been bigger than perhaps some would like to think, for better or for worse. I mean, that's to be decided. Obviously, Ray Brassier also is quite skeptical of the way that philosophy gets sort of debated in the blogosphere and the whole virtualized phenomenon of the blogs that were very much part of where all this was transpiring. but regardless the the four original thinkers had their own respective influences obviously the work of Ray Brassier was quite influential not only in bringing the work of Laurel into the English speaking world he was a translator and commentator on Laurel when very few people were really working

on that alongside you know Anthony Paul Smith, Muller Key and a few others but really you know he was a big big part of the of the Laurel you know appropriation of Laurel into the English speaking world and he has to be credited for that but in addition to that of course also the appropriation of sellers who has become an extremely important and influential figure and by extension also the sort of rise of what is now called neo-rationalism right so brassier has this kind of extreme important role both as a de-organizator of the conference or co-organizer sorry, of the conference with Toscano, but also by having brought, you know, sellers, by bringing, you know, this kind of like neorational, neocontient approach, which of course now

people even like Reza follow. And also in a way, you know, serving as a kind of mediator between the two think tanks that we have thought because he was both, his doctoral thesis, as I mentioned, was directed by Land, and he has worked extensively on, as a translator and commentator and scholar on French philosophy, the work of Badiou Deleuze, and so on and so forth. Now, Ian himself was also, you know, his thesis was also directed by Land, and his ontology is, perhaps out of the entire crowd, the most recognizably Deleuzean, even if he wasn't, he's of course primarily indebted to Schelling, and Schelling remains his main philosophical reference. I presume we are all familiar with the fact that, you know, you know, there is a great

deal of overlap, specifically with the machinic ontology that Deleuze and Guattari developed, and the kind of Schillingianism, a philosophy, you know, transcendental physics, whatever you want to call it, that Ian subscribes to. And we'll talk more about that when we get to that. Now, I think there's a discussion going on in the chat room. I think that already dives into Mayasue specifically. Now, so, you know, Ian himself has had quite some influence, specifically the rehabilitation of Naturphilosophie. Schelling, who has always been not terribly sexy, you know, for the continental sort of people at the forefront, has become somebody that, you know,

now people are reading more avidly. You know, probably Ben Woodard has done a great deal of important contributions to trying to tap this back into a whole variety of registers. And much of what is called today, you know, dark materialism, black metal theory, also is very much indebted to natural philosophy and its reappropriation. So also, Ian has the marvelous quality, I suppose, that he has this recondite knowledge of figures that are completely marginalized from, you know from the let's say canonical reading reading list of of people that do theory and philosophy very obscure figures philosophers of science and so on dating from you know weird

periods and that that makes us intellectual production exegetically also very interesting now harman of course has had a very very very widespread effect he actually currently resides in Los Angeles. He holds a position inside ARC. The ARC world has been quite welcoming of him. They have found his work quite useful. Obviously, the quote-unquote four people that at least at some point were closest to him, Timothy Morden, Levi Bryan, Ian Bogost, and himself, the big four of O-O-O-O or O-P. O-P is actually what he goes by. But they all sort of use Harmon's basic, you know, account of objects as a platform to draw different versions of this kind of object-oriented ontology.

And, you know, even though we don't have really much time to talk about all these different versions, what you have with all of them is quite interesting in its own right. You know, you have different degrees of ontological liberalism from more restrictive positions like Levi Bryant, who likes to bring this back to a kind of Deleuzean naturalism, to something like, you know, again, Ian Bogos, who adopts an extremely liberal position, who is not just dualist, like Harmon admittedly is, but who accepts that everything you can talk about is real in just the same sense. You know, this kind of extremely, what Wolfendale calls elsewhere, I think, precocious intolerant. regardless so a lot of stuff you know you know it's been very very much influential

in many ways now the reason why i think the first thing is to to notice where brassier is absolutely right is that to be fair the label speculative and real you know speculative realism is highly ambiguous and it's not clear to me that it serves as a good designator for the four thinkers at all. First of all, because they don't all of them use or abide to the term realism. The Meisou's position is overtly titled speculative materialism. And by that, he has something quite specific in mind. So, by speculative, Meisou means a kind of absolutism, i.e. any position that claims that there is an absolute, that does not abide to the principle of sufficient reason.

Whereas in turn, an absolutism that abides to the principle of sufficient reason, he associates with metaphysics. So the distinction for him is between speculative materialism, which does not abide to the principle of sufficient reason, and a dogmatic materialism, which would. Now, in this sense, none of the thinkers in the – none of the other three figures count as speculative necessarily. Ian explicitly abides to the principle of sufficient reason. okay and harman as far as i can tell explicitly endorses the idea of metaphysics right he's doing metaphysics now i'm not sure uh exactly where he stands with the principle of sufficient reason

but it seems to me that there is at least doesn't quite match what what maya sue has in mind and ray brassier is i mean no sense i can understand where the speculative part comes from so unless you don't use it in this technical restricted sense which may assume uses you know and it doesn't make sense to me to that speculative means much right now with me with the realism bit it's also finicky right because may assume uses materialism right and in contrast because he thinks absolutism is that is the genus of you know you can you can I suppose trade realism with absolutism and these come in two varieties,

Subjectalism and Materialism. That's one of the important sort of distinctions that he draws in that second paper that I sent, which refines his original framework as it's laid out in the panel on After Finitude. Harmon, in turn, rejects Materialism. He doesn't like Materialism at all. Brassier and Grant are overt naturalist materialists. So they agree with materialism, but they understand it to be something completely different. And of course, one of the questions that we have to raise is whether something like what Grant is proposing, which is again, a reversibility between idealism and materialism or realism

in his jargon, is in fact something that counts as materialist for somebody like Brassier or Mayasu because you know this kind of Schellingian imminent ontology or speculative physics explicitly ontologizes thinking as an element in nature is a complete naturalism in this regard and of course it seems rather close to what Mayasu describes as subjectalism vitalism high lozoism and so on so forth a kind of absolutism that identifies as the absolute subjectivity or absolutist subjectivity or an aspect of subjectivity there thereby we'll talk a little bit more about these distinctions in a more organized fashion uh as as i try to

like introduce may i assume but um i yeah and i include just this one quote here in the at the bottom of the page i don't need to read it because i did basically just that's what i just explained to you about how it is that may assume after affinity defines the term speculative, which I thought would be just useful to throw in there. And again, what Ian Grant, you know, names Schelling, well, Schelling himself names speculative physics is speculative, however, in a different sense, not insofar as it suspends the principle of sufficient reason, because of course for Schelling, as for Grant, the question of the ground is still fundamental. The idea that you cannot really establish the

conditions for thinking. You cannot retrieve them. They are inaccessible in some way. And therefore, the question that remains is, is there a ground? Are there many grounds? How do you adjudicate or play around with the question of ground? The question of the ground becomes fundamental. Whereas for Meisoo, the whole point is once the principle of sufficient reason goes away and you're in the realm of contingency where that's the only ground or abyss in any case. There's nothing like a secure ground. Now a couple of things about the relationship to the Achaea and I guess to the CCRU I guess. Now one of the things that I was trying to trace back in this genealogy was the way in which both the CA and the CCRU are raising this kind of more

general question about, well, on the one hand, the CA obviously interrogating what is science, what is the status of science, again with a capital S, right? And one of the things that you get from the description of the Goldsmiths Conference as Ray sets it out is precisely that kind of question. And it's very easily seen in the introductory comments by Brassier, where he comes back to this idea again of the status of scientificity, the status of formalization, whether in fact only formalized languages can be considered to be properly scientific, as Badiou claims. And as we know, the people in the Cahiers following Lacan abide to. On the other hand, there is the status of this kind of attempt to naturalize thinking as part of nature, which is, of course, very much in the spirit of the Deleuzian project.

And the idea of trying to avoid this kind of, quote unquote, transcendental philosophical splitting between thinking and being, which, of course, is the mark, the hallmark of all things, transcendental idealism and, you know, idealism in the 20th century after Kant. and that is very much in the spirit of what Deleuze and then the people following downstream from Deleuze in the CCRU tried to do. It's kind of flattening of cognition into a plane of imminent production in which there's no longer a kind of, let's say, safe cohort where thinking can ward off exteriority, but rather where thinking is itself inscribed within the material order and produce within it. This, again, typical constructivist approach that Deleuze, from the

very, from his very earlier period, if you read his works on Hume and Bergson, you know, he understands empiricism, you know, in a strictly constructive sense. And we'll see why this is important, because one of the things that, you know, these two questions, the status of science and formalization within it, etc. And the other, the question concerning the extent to which the subject can be assimilated or naturalized or inscribed in an ontological domain that thereby places epistemology in a subsidiary role, if not eliminate, eliminates it altogether. That is of course, those two questions remain at the core of the entire panel, right?

They really run through the whole of it. One of the things that everybody is sort of concerned with trying to do is, you know, on the one hand, there's the prospects of a kind of, you know, Brassier's book has been published as well, Night Hill Unbound. and in there he interrogates in a deep meditation concerning like the first chapter of the book concerning the prospects for what is called eliminativist materialism right the work of the church lens for a digmatic that claim like element of it you know naturalist eliminativists do that uh the entire framework of normativity and intentionality that characterizes what wilfrid sellers calls the manifest image of man in the world i.e the framework within which we

understand ourselves as believers, people with intentions, wills, and so on, can be reduced completely or assimilated completely into a causal register describing the structure of the brain, right? Well, whether these prospects are tenable and of elimination. Now, this might seem like a question proper to somebody like the church lens, but in the context of somebody like Ian Grant's Rehabilitation of Naturphilosophie, it comes back in its own way. And it trickles all the way back to the ideas, to the very ideas proposed by Deleuze and then Land and the CCRU, which is this idea that you can somehow trivialize, eliminate, or at the very least undermine

the framework of deliberative cognition that characterizes human thinking by trying to localized these kind of unconscious phenatropisms at the level of either natural function, as in the case of Deleuze, or a kind of abstract machinic function that hacks the human from within and assembles itself into an AI space of the future, you name it. You know the whole letter. Now, but the point is this question of the status of normativity vis-a-vis the material order, nature, or machinic function is, I think, at the core of the entire thing. Now, yeah, I mean, the other thing I wanted to say with regards to Harmon is that, again, he's the odd pick here insofar as he doesn't have any overt links other than the Lovecraft bit.

And the thing that sticks out about Harmon in particular is that he is the one, of course, which makes him a very interesting sort of figure in this, that has his lineage is much more closely aligned to Heidegger, right? so heidegger of course is the kind of figure that everybody's trying to get away from in a way and harman is actually much more congenial to heidegger and he you know he begins with heidegger and phenomenology so it's actually an interesting contrast right where he he is the cat here and i think you know it puts him in a disadvantageous position in a way even though he and ian grant see eye to eye on more issues than perhaps Bressier he does and even though Meissu then wants to say

later to Harmon that there really is no incompatibility between their positions because he's only concerned in talking what is possible and you know what comes across as a fact not what there is so substances are perfectly fine for him but you know it's clear that in another sense nothing could be further apart than Lance, than Ian Grant and Harmon, because on the one hand, you have, you know, a distinctive process metaphysics, a process ontology, right, in which substances or discrete bodies or whatever you want to call it, you know, entities that are, you know, objective in any kind of way are merely retardations of a pure flux of becoming, right? And on the other hand, you have the absolute primacy of objects in relation to which becoming

is always something that occurs to already individuated substance. So at the core, their metaphysical theses couldn't be further apart, even though they see eye to eye in this kind of, well, rehabilitation of ontology and positive metaphysics, I guess. Now, let me just take a look quickly at, I can ask the question about the difference. Well, there's like, I can't read all this right now, but it's like, is the difference between animal sentience and human sapience a qualitative distinction or a question of degree? Can a rock or a table have an experience? That's a good question, of course. I mean, I think it's very

difficult to say that there is not a qualitative shift in the emergence of consciousness. those who I mean I think one of the big questions is whether all you know if you think about it in purely informatic or informational terms is whether there is a crucial distinction to be drawn between information as a ubiquitous phenomenon in nature and something like semantic information is there something like semantic information or that is distinctive of language using creatures or you know or you know that's at the level of language of course never mind consciousness or you know sentient experience now insofar as you're talking about sentience it just all turns on what it needs to be qualitative i guess the problem is exactly how

do you cash in quality without relapsing into essentialism if by qualitative we mean something like you know the postulation of ad hoc you know uh essences or something like that then then sure not but then the question is how do you have a an account of quality that is amenable to you know well I guess in my case naturalization right now sellers for example is an emergent to some of this question and he has a nifty idea of how this happens but I don't think it's a very good answer either way yeah you're right about Wilson being yeah that's what that's one of the projects now let me move a little bit forward

Daniel can you hear me? yeah just a short question because there's on the yeah there stood that Brossier has written about land and I want to know where he has written about land apart from the Fankneumener introduction So actually mentioning Land with his name. So there is this very, so I should, I should qualify that slightly. So he has had a, there was this workshop talk on accelerationism in the year 2010, and which he gave a talk on Nick Land's work on purely philosophical grounds.

That's online. you can find it in youtube just ray brassier neckland and you'll find it and somebody um took the trouble to transcribe it and i know that he has been working and his big project which i don't know what's the status on that because he's been working on that since 2010 or something which is called that which is not or which was called that which is not um in correspondence he said that one of the thinkers that he was addressing and writing about for that project was Lann as well. But I haven't seen anything that there's certainly nothing in print at the moment. And I think, I mean, I don't know exactly where he stands right now, if he's even going to touch that. I know that Ray has been really sort of getting into the other end of the spectrum. He's working on Hegel

and Rican right now. But that transcription from that talk from 2010 is very good. It's probably out of every criticism that I've ever read from, you know, Against Land, the single most persuasive one that I have read so far. And it very much continues with his own criticism of Deleuze and Berkson, which is, of course, something that he has done time and time again. And, you know, honestly, if you have a good argument, you know, to tackle with against Deleuze and Guattari, which he does systematically in the third chapter, in the second chapter, sorry, of his

doctoral dissertation, which I advise you to take a look at, Alien Theory, Ray Brassier's doctoral dissertation alien theory that's also online i can send it later um there brassier takes a pretty hard you know blow at uh the leuzen guattari's machinic ontology so you could probably tap that back into land if you wanted to hard enough um as well but that will be sorry i think that was just like oh no thank you that was a good clarification yeah i i know these texts but i was just curious if there was more. No, not as far as I know. So Jed, just a very brief sort of like if I had to summarize what the four thinkers as positions constitute. So already mentioned Quentin Mayasu,

speculative materialism, immaterialism derived from the suspension of the principle of sufficient reason. And so for Quentin Mayasu, the real is contingency, what he calls absolute contingency or the principle of factality, and the physical mathematical universe composed of signs which describe the structure of this contingent factual universe. And we'll see a little bit more about that when we get to that. Harmon is, of course, object-oriented philosophy. It's a neo-Aristotelian and post-Heideggerian dualist metaphysics of objects. So the real is objects, and objects come two basic kinds. There's real and intentional, or what he also calls sensual objects. Then we have Ray Brassier, and he is a transcendental scientific realist

who endorses the continuity between epistemology and naturalized metaphysics. Now, the idea is here, the real is investigated by science, but not just formal science, and there is an autonomy between epistemology and metaphysics. So you can't just simply naturalize epistemology or ontologize thinking. With this said, of course, as I'm sure all of you know, Bressier underwent a pretty significant shift from his quote-unquote Laurel-inspired account, which he etches out in Night Hall and Bound, and which he still endorses, I suppose, in the Goldsmiths period, to a position which is much more closely aligned to the thinking of Wilfred Sellers.

And I think it is this latter alignment to the thinking of Sellers that is really the catalyst for what we have come to know as neorationalism today. So I won't spend too much time talking about Ray's work, his own work today, because I think we will have a chance to speak about his project and the lineage of his thinking when we talk about the neo-rationalist configuration, to which I belong, I think. I mean, in the sense that I endorse it. I don't get to belong to anything. But finally, then there's Ian Hamilton-Grant, who, of course, endorses a kind of Schillingian Naturphilosophie, and it's a kind of physicalist transcendental metaphysics.

Although, again, physicalism here should be taken with a pinch of salt because one of the things that we get toward the end of his presentation is that he thinks that it is not really so much a question of a single empirical register or formal language doing the ontological trick for us, but how many possible formal systems there could be, how many consistent formal, you know, insofar as there is this kind of like direct commissurability. between the idea and matter, and insofar as matter is ideally structured, the question then becomes, well, how do you coordinate the idea and the world or the dynamisms of material becoming and, you know, the order of ideas? And he doesn't here have a representational theory, of course, he cannot.

And he rather wants to say that, you know, it's a matter of consistency. Insofar as you cannot retrieve the grounds and we'll talk more about this you know when we get to grant but insofar as the only criteria you can offer is is cohesiveness coherence and so the question becomes how many coherent formal languages there can be how many grounds there could be as well um i'm just like taking a look at the panelists you could think this sort of okay anyway so maybe uh like let me actually stop here for a second just just because I think this might be a

good place to have the uh the maya sue uh introduction I don't want to like you know talk about me as soon and then ruin the you know the presentation by having by repeating or saying things that they will say so I'll let I'll let you know the presenter first tell us what they think and then I guess I can fill in the blanks or conflict okay just give me a couple of yeah yeah sorry yeah so yeah I forgot back be right back yeah no worries so yeah I'll take these two minutes to just do some very introductory stuff about I mean I see if that's okay is that okay oh yeah well here's it on so that is okay so let me just very quickly since I we have two minutes

no time to lose crap yeah that that's turning out real well okay anyway so those of you who are familiar with Masus after finitude is basically an attempt to rekindle the early project that Badu lays out and you know other members of the Kaye as well as a kind of like a new attempt to find to found a dialectical materialism where you establish the continuity between formal languages and ontology rather than just simply axiomatically positing this now one of the things that I think I was trying to tell you last time is that not

last time but when we were talking about the Kaye was that at the time of the of course there was this like deep you know deep-seated attempt to try to establish the grounds to say that formalization and mathematics or uh you know something like the the logic of the signifier uh are opposite to a scientific explanation and one of the things that we see is that Badiou at that time thought that he could actually prove that mathematics was ontology and therefore science, the science of being quite mean, but that he gave this up in favor of an axiomatic account. And I think one of the conversations that I think I had with Daryl

was about this precise weird state is that the later Badiou accorded to the axiomatic decision. But what Mayasu tries to do is to kind of like rekindle this earlier attempt to prove the continuity between mathematics and science, which leads them into this kind of speculative digression, which is what the project of after finitude really is. the establishing of contingency within a purely conceptual register, and then the continuity between the formal science or the mathematics and the world as exploring the forms of contingency, you get in the second in that essay that we read. May I assume in the panel, as I'm sure you noticed, mentions this question of scientificity

and formalization, but he also mentions that he hadn't yet quite worked it out. Now in the two years that followed, he sort of elaborated this account, which corresponds to the paper that we all read for. So I'll stop here to... Okay, Daniel, I'm ready whenever you want. Great. Let me just stop sharing and mute myself so nobody listens to my horrible voice. Yeah, let me try just to share the widget. Okay. I just have a document with a couple of quotes because I prefer to give a sort of talk, let's

see. All right. Can you guys see the document? Yes. All right. Is that okay? Is that fine for you guys? Yes. Yeah. All right. All right. Well, I'll be dealing with some questions raised by the speculative materialism trying to highlight some of what I consider to be, let's say, weak points. And I'll be focusing mainly on Meiyasu and his critique of correlationism, and I will touch upon the issues of consciousness, reality, and truth. And maybe I will try to make some remarks on the

question of thought if I have enough time to do so, but I don't think so. Well, before proceeding forward, I need to make two brief premises just to clarify a couple of things. First, I have to say that when I first encountered the few years ago the initial writings of the speculative realism, the panel to be more precise, I honestly appreciated the ethos, so the character of the whole movement and especially the will to do philosophy in one's own name in a Delosian fashion. And I also liked the re-evaluation of the speculative dimension of philosophy, even if I don't quite agree with Meir's own understanding of it, which is quite restrictive for me. And the second premise concerns my own position because I'm not a strong advocate of

correlationism, but I say that I see many issues in the way in which Meiasu carries out his critique of this philosophical position. All right, I'm gonna make a start. So with Meiasu's after finitude, whose arguments are corroborated because he had some passages, new passages, and by the article we had for the reading list for today, we are presented with what he defines as a neo-materialist position, which is somehow built upon the rejection of correlationism, which is the idea whereby we have access only to the correlation of thought and being, object and subject, noesis and noema, and so on, and that they cannot be understood or analyzed apart from one another.

In this view, thought cannot go out of itself and reach the absolute, that is to say cannot see or grasp things as they are in themselves. And it was Kant, for Meyesus, the first who marked such a epistemological impossibility. In his writings, Meyesus uses different strategies to undermine such a position, one of which involves his reflection on the ancestral statements, which I'll be dealing in particular with today. So as I said in my first point I'll try to resonate around more broadly the question of consciousness and I will analyze Mayasus' ancestral argument here filtered through a phenomenological perspective which perfectly embodies the Kantian

spirit. As we can see in the first quote where Husser writes, one must not let oneself be deceived by speaking of the physical thing as threscending consciousness or as existing in itself. An object existing in itself is never one with which consciousness or the ego pertaining to consciousness has nothing to do." So this phenomenological observation clearly involves the correlationist position, and that is granted. So let's now turn to Meyesus' own argument. In a way, we can say that he insists on the counter-intuitive idea whereby events of natural history, as the existence of dinosaurs and Big Bang, depend upon consciousness.

He calls ancestral propositions the scientific theories and statements concerning events anterior to the advent of consciousness or life, and that, moreover, a phenomenological position is necessarily forced to embrace the following thesis. He writes in the after finitude, which is the second quote, an ancestral statement is a true statement in that it is objective, but one was referenced cannot possibly have actually existed in a way in the way this truth describes it. It is a true statement, but what it describes as real is an impossible event. It is an objective statement, but it has no conceivable object, because of course there is no subject or consciousness that can directly testify

the presence of the object, its givenness in a sense. Well it is useful and somewhat interesting to compare Meyesus criticism to one of the most well-known and controversial phenomenological statements of being and time where Heidegger writes, before Newton's laws were discovered, they were not true. Meyesus seems to be inspired by the desire to criticize statements as this particular one. However, just a very superficial juxtaposition between Meyesus' words and Heidegger's reveals some issues in applying the critique of the former to a possible evaluation and consideration of ancestral propositions of the latter. According to Meyesus, a phenomenologist

should accept the truth of an ancestral statement, such as the gravitational law functioned before its discovery, but at once negating that the representation we make of the real reference of the gravitational law is actually valid. In other words, that it truly represents reality itself, because it hasn't, of course, a conceivable object. In this precise account of the alleged aporia of correlationism, I believe there lies a manifold of issues. In the first place, as the Heideggerian passage shows, the phenomenologist does not admit that Newtonian laws were true before they were discovered, as holds Measuz ad hoc proposal of the phenomenological evaluation of ancestral events. Yet, as Heidegger adds in the next passage, it does not follow that they were false,

or even, he continues, that they will become false if ontically no discover the nests were any longer possible. As he states, Such uncovering is the kind of being with the capital B which belongs to truth. So, phenomenologically, we are entitled to make two claims at this point.

First, that the reality of a transcendent efficacy to which the gravitational law in this case refers to is well demonstrated. To put it simply, we can say that the particular reality we are evoking there exists regardless. And second, that we have very good reasons to backdate its subsistence and effective validity beforehand, so before Newton's discovery. Nevertheless, reality does not correspond to truth. Truth and reality are two different things. The truth according to which the gravitational law represents something is something strictly related to the specific scientific representation, pro-temporary validated, which Newton brings to light.

The truth, in fact, depends upon the efficiency with which a representation, so a meaning in some sense, allows one to bring to light a phenomenon, a reality, through which such a representation is consequently verified. Before every representation, as every scientific law emerges and functions, the real reference nominated by the representation itself has, of course, ontological efficacy, so to speak, but it hasn't any kind of conceptual order, so it hasn't any kind of form. It goes without saying that we can't applicate Newtonian laws to events that precede Newton's own discovery. Newton himself did it. But even though everything works and is perfectly fine from a formal standpoint, the representations

we create in order to synthesize such cosmological phenomena, here for example the gravitational law, they are not necessarily true, for they can be substituted by different representations, and it is indeed to have happened with Newton's law, which has been redescribed within a relativistic framework by Einstein. And this is not a discourse of limitation, as Brassier argued, but of falsity. Without going into great depth in theoretical physics, I just limit myself to saying that even if the Newtonian formalization of an empirical phenomenon as gravity works on medium scale, it entails some problems if considered at a macroscopic level. If we were to remain faithful

to Newton's formalization of gravity, empirical impossibilities will fall on from it, for the Newtonian gravitational law does not account for time, but only for masses and distances. If you want further insights into the topic, I can give you the reference and we can truly talk about it. Anyways, this is not a generic exercise of skepticism or shallow relativism, not at all. I myself am an admirer of science, but at the same time I'm aware of its structural limits and of the nature of the procedures scientific theorizing consists of. We can have, in fact, time by time, the best reasons to welcome a determinate representation of ancestral events,

and these reasons allow us to propose brilliant accounts of the past, thereby by permitting us to create useful orientations for the future. The crux of the matter, however, is that here such representations are not facts independent from the world, as if they were things in themselves. They are rather systematic orderings relative to the formal cause, which is consciousness life. Therefore, neither the ancestral gravity, nor dinosaurs, nor Big Bang, all events devoid of direct subjective testimonies are to be conceived of as poor, transcendent realities in themselves. They are not, at the same time, mere subjective inventions. They are the mode, again pro-temporary

validated, through which some current instantiations of consciousness read the past by synthesizing present traces. Let's Let's leave aside the Big Bang, on which controversies are still numerous, and let's take a certain ancestral event as the existence of dinosaurs, and in particular the example of the Triceratops. Well, as far as we are concerned, when the Triceratops dwell in today's Canadian territory, there wasn't any form of consciousness similar to ours that was able to notice and observe its existence. The triceratops is perhaps the dinosaurs of which there exist more fossil service, and so we can consider it as the most eminent candidate representing our knowledge about

dinosaurs. Naturally, in our mental images of the triceratops, there are many conjectural elements, like sounds, colors, behavior, and so on, which can be modified by the ongoing research, or even never clarified. In such a picture, what sense are we supposed to give to the idea that the triceratops owes its being to consciousness, understood as an organizing principle and as a condition of manifestation? Every triceratops, if we consider what we already know as true, was a conscious being. It had sensations and so on. And so when it was alive, it had to a certain degree existence per se. It brought with itself, in other words, the organizing principle and the condition of

manifestation of itself. But naturally, we just have traces of the triceratops, and these traces are composed in scientific synthesis subject to interpretations and conjectures. The history of science is indeed full of episodes in which a well-established interpretation treated as an obvious reality has been subsequently reinterpreted in the light of a paradigm considered to be better than the previous one, and especially in the life of new data and traces. It is therefore obvious that, in principle, many of the consolidated truths about our triceratops could turn out to be different than we used to think. But the role of consciousness goes far beyond this mere perspective of critical epistemology,

which will now be taken for granted. It is rather a matter of understanding that every particular trait, even the most basic one, configures itself as it is only in relation to a form of consciousness, real or ideal. I want to here dive into the topic of traits, adaptionism, and so on, because there would be a lot to say, but it's worth mentioning it. Well, I just want to say one thing of consciousness, because I think I'm running out of time. Well, we can have very good reasons to accept scientific accounts of natural history, but to collocate consciousness within such accounts as if they were as an event among the events, like

we can say the myth of quote-unquote the birth of consciousness, let's say, it's a very dubious operation. A possible way, a possible way to understand the birth of consciousness in historical terms is to conceive it as the emergence of configurations of matter with the capital M that are capable of coordinate themselves in a certain way with other matter, the capital M. Yet consciousness in its proper sense does not coincide with those specific configurations, it is not those substrates, it is instead the form of their coordination and correlation. However, even if the form consciousness can only emerge in matter with the capital M as a particular configuration of matter itself, it remains essential to draw a conceptual distinction between such

form and matter. Also, there will be a lot more to say about this issue, but I think I need to leave it here. Jamie, do you have... Can you guys hear me? yes you okay I think yes thank you I leave it here because because there will be a lot more to say is that okay for you that is okay that is okay it's great and now are none are you ready okay thank you anyway thank you guys yeah thank you that was really excellent thank you very much Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, no, I, I, you made me think quite a bit and that, that quote by Heidegger makes me, it, it, it, it suggests something very important and we'll get back to that. But Hernan, are you ready to jump in?

Yeah, sure. Actually, my approach is going to be to just briefly present Catriona's alternative interpretation of the correlationist circle, maybe as an answer, as an additional critique to Quentin Meliosu's position. So I'll begin with a quote, a transquote of the text that was designed. So, quote, Indeed, the problem is not how to pierce a hole in the walls of the transcendental prison built by philosophy itself, but rather to acknowledge that transcendental reflection is a necessary moment for absolving knowledge from the two human transcendental conditions of research.

The infinite process of theoretical knowledge does not advance by attempting to grasp an uncorrelated absolute through a philosophical ruse capable of discontinuously leaping over the subject's shadow, but instead through a continual deepening of scientific labor seeking to locally absolve it from its conjectural transcendental limitations, expand its categorical, critical, and methodological tools, and progressively subsume its unreflected conditions and presuppositions. So just as a summary of Katrin's point of view, I wanted to add that on these grounds, Katrin will attempt to construct an elastic externalized transcendental framework that

is able to examine degrees of a real, sort of an ever-blooming phenomenal horizon, which is an ungrounded, an infinite correlation absolute. However, he is very cautious to make theoretical knowledge the province of science, of mathematical science which classifies as an infinite endeavor that's regulated by the idea of truth and relieves like philosophy of its metaphysical and ontological function but reassigns it a macro function of composability of being able to see everything at the same time I

guess. So I think his defense is pretty solid and his alternative is very appealing, but he's once more absolutizing correlationism, but making it an infinite pursuit. So anyway, that was what I wanted to say. Thank you, Arlan. So just a brief comment on both of these things. The first thing that struck out uh stefano was that reading that quote by heidegger makes it clear that well he's saying something i mean it's very clear when you read it like that it's saying look it's not that when when he says the truth i mean the quote is exactly what it means it's to say the truth

that you know newtonian the statements of newtonian mechanics become true when the theory is elaborate it cannot mean that the entities or the phenomena described by the theory only came into being when the theory was drafted because what what happens is that it is through the theory that the phenomena shows itself as having been there before the theory or before thinking or so it is simply a definition of how truth works because for for heidegger truth is the uncovering The uncovering of that which precisely once uncovered reveals itself as having preexisted the act of uncovering itself.

So in this regard, at least here, Heidegger cannot be accused of anti-realism because even though he thinks truth is a phenomenon of disclosure, so the truth is just, I mean, he's understanding truth specifically in this way. what gets revealed in truth is the being of the end or like the having being of the entity or the phenomenon prior to its uncovering so in that regard he there's no ambiguity there from heidegger i think though that heidegger wants to sometimes have his cake and eat it because elsewhere specifically in the tool analysis of being in time one of the things that he says

is that it would be a mistake to think that entities that are present at hand, so entities that are discrete objects, properties, say the entity studied theoretically by physics, right? That it would be a mistake to think that they were already individuated as what they are prior to their constitution in present at hand knowledge. So that it would be a mistake to think that, you know, there are these things that are already individuated in the world outside of their being disclosed in the form of presence. Because again, being present at hand is relative to a mode of disclosure, which is precisely what obtains when you have a breakdown or malfunction of practice.

So in this regard, he even says when he's describing the mode of being of the tool, right there is no such thing as a tool there is only an equipamental hole there's only you know and so on so forth so that it would be a mistake to because if if if you make the claim that the hammer or the microphysical particle or the you know the law of nature um pre-exists its disclosure as present at hand then the question is a an epistemological question which is how is it that you know that the object as it exists corresponds to the object as it is and that's precisely the problem that heidegger wanted to avoid to begin with because he wanted

to transform the conditions of epistemic access into conditions of existential ontological individuation and so so he can't have it both ways either he you know transforms the the the Either he claims that there exists pre-individuated particulars before their mode of disclosure, in which case he has to account for how it is that there is a possible correspondence, or else he has to say that no, strictly speaking, there isn't. because the ontological difference is clear, right? Being is not a being, and a being, beings, the ontic domain, is the way that being appears upon the disclosure relative to intentional modalities, right?

So in that regard, I just don't, I mean, so this is where I think there is this kind of latent ambiguity in Heidegger. And in fact, one of the big things that, of course, haunts the Heideggerian project in this regard is the attempt to consolidate a transcendental deduction of transcendental temporality from time, which becomes concentrated in the basic problems of phenomenology, and which reiterates the same Husserlian problem of the division of noesis from extema. The integrity of the essential, the essence of the object from its mode of presentation. how is it that you get modes for the presentation from the being of the object itself um now with

regards to what Hernan said which is the the Catrain uh conception of transcendental philosophy completely I mean that's a that's a very like clean summary of what his project is trying to do it is a kind of correlationism clearly because as you well put Hernan it is simply trying to diversify and to historicize the transcendental as opposed to taking the transcendental as this kind of invariant structures of experience that are you know non-revisable and that are a prorite or innate even what what Catherine wants to do is to say that the transcendental is distributed as it were across the different forms of scientific cognition that do not only encompass you know

as it was for Kant, say, pure arithmetic and geometry, but that covers the entire panoply of scientific discourses, formalized. I mean, this is where things get a little unclear, I think, which is just how much goes in there. I mean, he mentions a wide variety of registers from psychoanalytic to physical. But then the question is, is every vocabulary, every science, every you know what counts as a transcendental every discourse has invariant presuppositions or structures that ground its inquiry right so then the question is well what happens when you have incompatible theories or you know alternative descriptions is every theory a transcendental structure and so on so forth right like what what are the the rules of the game and i'm not sure

that the Catherine has a very that he has a general solution for this because one of the things he wants to say is that the keys in the that he is in the business of trying to do a speculative ontology of physics in particular so I think one of the interesting things that Catherine does the reason why I wanted to introduce him is because he comes out as a kind of there's I know he is another of these cases that's trying to do something like a transvaluation of transcendental philosophy, but in a way that is not, you know, that seems to be squarely within a correlationist spectrum, you know, a correlationist position, a vindication of correlationism that lies somewhere in between a naturalism and a just blunt, you know, sort of psychologism or phenomenological position.

objective ice and phenomenology right now um any questions or any comments on this juncture before we dive back to the first off no all right cool so let me let let me say a few more things about me as soon um and i'll i'll talk about um one second i'll try to introduce a few of the other topics that go around and also try to be briefly critical of maya sue most of you who have heard me speak of this before will will recognize my my critique here so the one important thing that lies in the asus project from the very get-go is the idea as he as he puts it in in

in the panel, he describes this in his conversation with Harmon. How is it possible, this is the quote that I put in the middle, how it is possible that mathematics could be able to describe the world, even a world without humans? This is the problem of science. Are we able to derive to deduce from this eternal ground, which according to me is contingency, the capacity of mathematics to possibly be able to describe a world without humanity? So this is as good a formulation of the kind of how the speculative realist, or sorry, the speculative materialism that Mayasus is elaborating as continues with the project that was following downstream from the Cahiers, right?

which is precisely the question of how it is that formalization secures the possibility of science, and how does it do so precisely so as to avoid the kind of relativistic consequences of kind of Heideggerian thinking. So what Mea-Sus is trying to do is sort of amplify this kind of scope and project, and try to say, how is it that we can establish that mathematics can enable us to think of a world that is asubjective, subjective that is precisely you know not simply a correlate of our thinking or relative to our multitudes you know to our forms of cognition and for him this is a two-step project right because this is woven into the established establishing of contingency as quote-unquote

the eternal ground of being right the only thing that is absolute for me as soon as you know is absolute contingency, it's contingency itself. So what he will do is, first of all, in After Affinitude, he establishes a proof of why contingency is absolute. This is the speculative, that follows from the speculative suspension of the principle of sufficient reason. and second of all what he does in the second essay is try to describe how it is that mathematics pure mathematics describes the different forms of contingent being that have been already established by the speculative suspension of the principle of sufficient reason so first

proof of contingency second proof of how mathematics describes the contingent world And as those of you who took a look at the second essay, this is also where you see an overt attempt to tie this back to a kind of semiotic register that precisely trivializes semantic adjudication or semantic explanation. So one of the things that we saw with Acaille was that in the wake of structuralist linguistics and then structuralized psychoanalysis, anthropology, and then the ontologization of mathematics pursued by Badiou and others, one of the things that attracts Lacan, Miller, everybody to formalization,

formalization the reason why formalization is the the medium by virtue of which science scientific thinking constitutes itself is because it becomes in untranslatable or non-appropriable to the order of the natural language and by extension of ideology or the symbolic so in all words science it stratifies itself or you know science in the sense of either the logic of the signifier or pure mathematics, it stratifies itself, formalizes itself, inculcating an order, an ideography that is not tractable by means of hermeneutic retrieval or semantic adjudication, which belongs to the domain of sense. So there's something about

formal languages that escape the kind of relativistic effects of natural language, precisely and may asu has his own version of this because even though he says he says that it's mathematical physics that describes the contingent universe he also has his he thinks that the general account of what mathematical physics is doing and the reason why mathematical physics describes the you know the forms of contingent being is because mathematics and mathematical physics inscribes or institutes or instantiates an order that is purely semiotic of i.e. what he calls the kino type the meaningless sign which is precisely a kind of

non-semantic reinscript you know a discursive practice that voids the symbol the sign from anything like a referential content or a semantic uh you know characterization or semantic characterization. So before talking about that, it's like just very simply to just to make sure that we know exactly where things lie. This is, again, something that those of you who've been like in my previous seminars will be familiar with, just the basic distinction of Mayasu's reward typology, because I think this, you know, is probably his most lasting contribution and something that everybody sort of has used, even if they don't agree with Mayasu himself. Mayasu's position is the one position that other than maybe, well, I mean, I know Nathan Brown is

very close to Mayasu in spirit. And also, I think Elia Yache, I don't actually know how you pronounce his last name, has appropriated Mayasu's argumentation for some wacky speculative economics but here you go the basic distinction that may assume typology draws us between absolutism and correlation is now absolutism comes in two basic kinds materialism and subjective listen absolutism in general is the thesis absolutism that claims that there is a kind of absolute that is subject independent. So the

absolute is something that exists independently of thinking and of the conditions of experience more generally. And this kind of absolutism, materialism, comes in two kinds. Metaphysical materialism which claims that the absolute follows necessarily from the principle of sufficient reason so the absolute is a necessary entity or principle that is grounded on psr and the principle of sufficient reason is of course the idea that there are these kind of ground level uh entities that you can for for which you can establish necessity uh in the sense of like derive their self-sufficiency, the conditions for existence. In contrast, a speculative materialism is the

claim that there is an absolute that precisely can be derived from suspending the principle of sufficient reason, and so suspending the claim that there exists metaphysical necessity, the necessity of a metaphysical entity. So that's the basic distinction from within materialism, which in species of absolutism. The second species of absolutism is subjectalism, and that is the thesis according to which the absolute is identified with the subject itself or with aspects or qualities of the subject, even as these are disseminated into non-human reality. So the classical example here is vitalism and halosoism, right? So for example, as you know,

vitalism and idealism those are the two major kinds so the former vitalism take bergson for example disseminates aesthetic sensibility and intensity into nature right so for example in those of you who are familiar with de leuze de leuze's early transcendental empiricism the intensive domain of virtual multiplicity is individuating but in order to individuate itself It requires the agency of a transcendental subject, which Deleuze calls the larval subject. And these subjects individuate heterogeneous orders of difference by contracting these, again, pure differential virtual multiplicities and individuating them into actualized bodies.

But this implies for Deleuze a kind of inscription of aesthetic sensitivity into nature. And Deleuze has this theory of how these larval subjects, which populate the world as a whole, have engaged in these things called the encounter, which is the being of the sensible. And they have aesthetic contractions proper. So vitalists disseminate, for example, sensibility into nature. Conversely, idealists, for example, which are the other canonical kinds of subjectalists, disseminate rational thinking into nature. They absolutize thought. And what's interesting about this characterization of subjectalism between vitalism and idealism is that it raises questions about, for example, where Ian Grant would fall.

uh now because ian grant identifies himself as as as or claims for the reversibility between idealism and materialism and you know by extension realism but is he a vitalist is he an idealist is there also a kind of uh you know let's say uh reversibility between the two in his thinking I guess we can ask.

Yes, of course. Well, I think he actually counts. So, Lan has different periods, obviously. But insofar as he, and you could ask like, well, CCRU, Lan, and gang, where do they fall? I think that actually what Lan does is when he disseminates intelligence as this kind of blind machining process solving heuristic into a kind of self assembling machining intelligence that is already operative from right now, he engages in a variation of idealism. But it's not an idealism that transposes the fabric of the concept in the sense of natural language or the idea as Hegel does, for example, or as speculative physics does in Schelling's sense.

but it transposes the the the pure functional heuristics of problem solving machines i namely positive feedback you know uh systems and game theoretical reasoning into nature as a whole uh into you know so this is the interesting thing which is what something that you get from from uh from land which is it's not only that eventually ai comes along and dislodges itself from the human But since once AI comes along, it disturbs chronological time, it has this sort of retroactive effect where it shows itself to have been retrocausally effective all along.

So it wasn't that it emerged in the course of our chronological history, but once it emerges, it sort of like sends our sense of chronological history out of whack and shows itself to have been already there assembling itself at work within ourselves in what we perceive as chronological time. But this requires an inflation and dissemination of a particular form of a particular model of intelligence, of course, which is austere enough, but he keeps reworking this one into the world as such an ontologization or naturalization of problem solving as intelligence. And I think this still constitutes a kind of idealism. Okay, thank you. That's great.

Now, the other big distinction, of course, that's absolutism and its two varieties is correlationism. And that is the thesis according to which thinking has no access to any form of absolute, insofar as one can only think, know things, or think things how they appear to or within experience. So we only know things as they relate to us, never how they are in themselves. and correlationism comes in two varieties first the weak one which is canonically associated with Kant the thesis according to which the in itself cannot be known and strong correlationism is the thesis according to which the in itself cannot be even thought so what's the essential difference

there so I'm sure you know is that whereas weak correlationism thinks for example that take Kant right the thing in itself cannot be known insofar as you can never have an objective cognition of the thing in itself it can never come under a representation but you can think about it and in fact you can even know that it is necessarily theoretically uh you know you can know that it is out there because it's a necessary postulative reason it is a it is a kind of regulative principle that is required by pure reason to make sense of how appearance what appearances are appearances of. So it is perfectly intelligible, even if it is not knowable or intuitable or representable. But strong correlationism draws a stronger divide, of course.

Take the Heideggerian ontological difference. It is not only that being is not knowable, but that being is something that only is intelligible in the sense of what breaks down or what withdraws from all form of intentional disclosure and mediation. Being is not a being, and the being of beings is not the object or the pure limit concept of a cognition, but it's only felt in those moments where the entire network of intentional comportments, verhalten, breaks down, right? So this is precisely what you get in anxiety, profound boredom, which is the moment in which the entire domain of pragmatic and theoretical significances that

organize the world ontically breaks down and reality reverberates with this kind of global refusal. So for strong correlationism, you have this strong, you know, unintelligibility or intractability by conceptual means of being as such. Being can only be thought as, not only as unknowable, but as that which is withdrawn from all mediation. And as you know, one of the things that this strong correlationist thesis is particularly important for a series of, for at least three of the thinkers in fact for all of them in in the speculative realist camp because

graham harman has a version of the thesis of withdrawal that diaracidizes it so that it is in fact with you know this this this feature by virtue of which the being of the entity or the being yeah the being of beings withdraws from the disclosure of thinking or intentional mediation becomes generalized as a principle of mediation between real objects, so that no real objects ever touch one another or relate to each other directly, but in fact they withdraw from one another and can only indirectly relate to each other by means of intentional disclosure. Similarly, Ian Grant has a thesis of withdrawal at work in his own account, even though it's much more closer again to this Schillingian and Deleuzian model,

according to which the conditions for think, there's an asymmetry between thinking and being, whereby thinking does not have access or is not capable of retrieving the conditions for its own production. So that there's this kind of lag or excess of conditions over product, right? There's always an excess of firstness over secondness, which means that thinking can never actually explain the conditions of its genesis or this is what ian uh quotes schelling as saying the lamp of knowledge shines only forward or something to that purpose right um and of course and ray brassier at this point uh who endorses a laurelian position of course conceives precisely of the one as radically

non-tethical, I don't know actually how to pronounce it in English, but as is precisely that which is completely withdrawn from transcendental disclosure, it is precisely a unilateral difference that determines thinking, but thinking in turn does not determine it. So there's this, in a certain sense, radical autonomy of the one from any kind of appropriation within what of course Leroy calls the philosophical decision which is this network or mating of imminence and transcendence within which all philosophy unravels or structures itself so I'm just raising a little bit and we'll get to revisit this this is just a diagram in which you you can sort of like

localize the whole spectrum we have just been saying I'll just briefly mention the derivation of the speculative absolute proposed by Mayasu and what I think the problem is with this proof before moving into Grant and well I'll talk about Harmon first briefly Daniel a question sure no okay well it's two parts actually so I'm not now after what you just presented there I'm not understanding the formalization dimension of the CCRU. I'm also wondering if there is another sense of subject other than Mayo Sue's subjectalism in play in the CCRU.

Okay, so with regards to the first question, the dimension of formalization in the CCRU. so I guess there's at least two parts to this on the one hand like Deleuze and Guattari they want to pursue a kind of flattening of a kind of flat ontology right so then you know Deleuze and Guattari's machinic ontology he overtly adopts this kind of ontology that you know reinscribes the ontology of the virtual elaborated by Deleuze in his earlier work as part of like the self individuating dynamisms of what they call the plane of imminence so rather than having the domain of virtual intensity become this kind of uh heterogeneous order of pure difference that

has to be catalyzed by these larval subjects what you get is this kind of secularized spinosism of a flat plane of self-individuating what they call the plane of imminence that individuates itself it's like you know a spinosis substance but rather than being self-synthesizing in accordance with the principles of the logos what in the what the the principles of individuation that guided are uh cybernetic principles are pure machining principles and if one of the things that we were looking at in the in you know when we were looking at the cc okay but on that point It's like, it is speculative, but how is it formalized? Like, what is the special, the formalization?

Just to say something is machinic, like, what is guiding the machine? Like, what's the structure of the machine? Right. So, if you remember, so this is where the CCRU parts ways from Deleuze and Guattari specifically. Because Deleuze and Guattari have a specific model. So Deleuze first, of course, the differential calculus and then cybernetic theory, right? Now, in the case of the CCRU, however, they, as if you remember with Barker and later, well, of course, there's this whole like question of non-standard numeracies, but Barker has his own sort of quote mechanism to ontology, to formalize an ontology, a hypermaterialist ontology of the virtual, which is what he explains precisely in terms of quote,

unquote, tick system, right? So this is presumably a kind of formalization that achieves precisely the same kind of, I mean, it's still in the same spirit of trying to get outside of the grip of established orders of discourse. But I mean, it's, of course, not an axiomatized system, for example, right? Like, you know, tick systems are introduced with, sure, their own kind of like notation. And surely enough, if you try to like spell them out in words, things become difficult. Like how do you talk about the brackets and the points and all this stuff? But they do not have an axiomatic organization. And so I suppose that's part of the issue because the CCRU uses all these different registers of, again, nonstandard numeracies as the medium for formalization as opposed to legit mathematics,

as opposed to axiomatized mathematics or, you know, any kind of mathematical register. Now, you know, take the two obvious big concoctions, which is on the one hand, the way in which there is this sort of, let's say, ontology of what they call intensive quanta, which is based on the principle of Saigonavism and nine-twinning. now you can say does that really count as formalization i mean what is really formalization if all you're doing is sort of translating this into a kind of ideography that is nevertheless whose only meaning can be cashed out by this supplementary meta you know conceptual apparatus

that doesn't that you know that tells you that this is part of the aoe or the demons or whatever else right and i think that's a perfectly fine critique in fact the same critique applies i think across the board to those who want to i mean there's a big big question here that i think ray brassier points to cleanly which is what is the relation between formal languages and natural languages it can't be the natural languages are like you know but you claims this the early but do things that natural language, concepts, ideology, they envelop scientific formalization and stratification. Then stratification shuts itself by producing a new stratum and so on and so forth. This is just like this dialectical pendular movement of stratification and it's

reintegration. But then Brassier wants to say, okay, but what then about all those descriptive explanatory practices that are part of what we call non-mathematical sciences that are, you know, large tracts of what we describe about the world, brontosaurus and you name it, that are not formalized, right? Are these then merely just, you know, ideological constructions, wild empiricism, called science that are not science? So that is, I think, the core of the, one of the big questions that comes out of this, that relation between natural and formal languages. And therefore,

Or how is it that formal languages can even constitute themselves as playing this ontological role that they purport to have if they are going to be completely divorced from this kind of metaconceptual vocabulary that tells you precisely how it is that formalism does well? You can't do that. You have to actually explain that correlation in a way that is more satisfactory. It says my internet connection is unstable, but I don't know if, am I being listened to? For a moment, you turned into a cyborg voice, but now I think you're fine. Yeah, you're fine now. Cool. So, I mean, this is actually one of the things that shows up in short notice once we start looking at Brassier's sort of first intervention, right, that opens up the panel.

but very briefly just that to rehearse the daryl is that is that is that helpful like uh where uh where did you say brassier is most succinctly describing the formal natural language the difference well no he points to the problem of this articulation between oh no in the panel this in the panel discussion uh following his introductory talk okay so there he raises this question about, you know, what do you do with biology? What do you do with this? What do you do with that? You know, with the large tracts of science that are not formalized precisely. And this is in connection to Maya Sue and Ian's talk that, you know, you can

completely formalize or that the standard of scientificity is formalization. okay so anyway so to briefly rehearse the the the speculative derivation of the absolute so i i reconstruct this argument in five stages this has been polished a little bit from my my former reconstruction so i actually this first step is implicit but it's it's like implicit in the dialectic already so stage one is you have the metaphysical materialist that claims to be in touch with a necessary entity or absolute by appealing to the principle of sufficient reason. That is that one can show that there is some necessary entity or other. God, first mover, whatever you want.

Then step two, the correlationist shows up in the stage and says, object by appealing to what is called the circle of correlation, which means that we can only know how things are for us, but not in themselves. and so that necessity can only be applicable to the realm of appearances. So Kant paradigmatic example, but not to mind independence reality, right? So here the correlationist comes and tells, you know, let's say Kant and Aristotle or Kant, you know, says, hey, you know, yeah, you know, necessity holds, but within the order of the correlation, it can tell us what appearances that necessity obtains within the order of appearances, but you can never actually derive that into an ontological principle concerning what is mind independent. So this is the essential

correlationist move. Step three, then the idealist comes and claims that the difference between how things appear to us, the for us, and the in itself just is the in itself of consciousness. So this is of course what Meisou identifies as the idealist trick of absolutizing the correlation. So the Absolute just is the correlation within which one distinguishes how things appear and how they are. This is his own reconstruction of the Hegelian move, which, of course, is concentrated in his account of perceptual consciousness, or what he calls natural consciousness, which is, of course, that the idea between the in itself and the for us is intrinsic to how it is that consciousness relates to its object, to the object of perception.

That one already distinguishes, that consciousness distinguishes between appearance and truth so as to precisely be able to determine its field of objectivity. So that is just the in itself of consciousness. Consciousness is itself split between the forest and the in itself, where the in itself functions as the standard of truth for what the object really is as opposed to how it could be. So this is to explain the possibility of error for behavior. Random is good on this, incidentally. Stage four, the correlationist comes back and objects, appealing this time to the facticity of thinking. That thinking cannot find a sufficient reason for why the correlation should be at all,

and therefore that it cannot be taken to be absolute in the sense of necessary, metaphysically necessary. We can determine necessity within the correlation, but not the necessity of the correlation. So for example, the classical example that Meia Sue likes to give is, you know, we can understand that everything that appears in the correlation appears under the forms of intuition and the categories of the understanding. but we cannot say why there are 12 categories or why it is that the world appears to us through under space and time or you know with with these particular forms there is this radical factual character to how it is that experience presents itself to thinking that doesn't ground it in anything you know that there's no there's no first principle that there's no principle of

sufficient reason that would allow you to derive these conditions of thought from a first principle. They are just given to you with this kind of radically ungrounded character, without a why, without a reason. So finally, and here is the sly of hand, the speculative materialist argues that this impossibility that the correlation is necessary cannot simply be for us, but it has to be in itself because if the possible non-being of the correlation i its factual character was for us only for us then the correlationist would be just an idealist in other words it would claim that the possible non-being of the correlation is just for consciousness and therefore the correlation

must necessarily be that in other words that the possible not possible non-being of the correlation is relative to thinking it's a cool relational fact so in order for the correlation is not to tip over into idealism it must already accept that the non being of the correlation must be absolute so this is what of course here may assume what he does as he transforms or in trans values from an epistemological limitation, right? That the idea that you can never understand the reasons why, I mean,

you cannot establish why, hold on. I think I'm going in cyborg mode again, right? You are. We cannot determine the reasons for why the correlation should be, but it sounded pretty cool. Okay, so I'm clear now though, right? Yeah. Okay, so facticity's... Yep. Your video is gone, but I guess you're sharing your screen, so it doesn't matter. Okay. But your video is gone just so far. All right. It's back. Okay, cool. So facticity is not just an epistemological limitation, but it's an ontological positive of the principle. Now, this is basically, you know, an interesting sort of argument. And it's

like the, there's this exchange between Harmon and Mayasu, where I think Mayasu makes a really interesting claim here. And I'll just read this out, because he wants to claim that his entire philosophy is a philosophy about the possible rather than the existing. And this is why he thinks that Mayasu and Harmon are close. I mean, Mayasu says that there's no incompatibility between their positions because, you know, of course, Harmon also wants to claim that also does something similar where he transforms epistemological limitation, you know, the withdrawal thesis or, you know, of correlational limitation into a positive ontological feature organizing, you know, the world. And here's what you get with Mayasu. It is not a necessary relation,

but it is a relation. I say laws exist. There are laws. For example, if I'm a Newtonian, I can say there are gravitational laws. I don't deny the existence of laws. I don't deny the stability of laws. Maybe these laws will persist for eternity. I don't know. I just say that it is possible, really possible, that laws just stop working, that laws disappear. They are facts, just facts. They are not necessary. It is not that you say that if something is contingent, you say that it doesn't exist. It is factual. That is all. I fully uphold your right to be a phenomenologist if you want to speak about these things, about things, because you have to describe them. Right. This is very helpful. I'm seeing your work differently now. There are relations, there are relations of something contingent. Yes, that makes a lot of sense. What is strange about

my philosophy is that it is an ontology that never speaks about what is, but only about what can be. never about what there is because this i have no right to speak of now this is something that actually turns out to be a little bit problematic for me because it turns out that in his derivation of the absolute he needs to actually assume something about the existing which is the mortality of the human because as as you noticed the whole point is that in order the the reason why the speculative materialist can come in and hijack the correlationist argumentation and claim that in fact uh facticity cannot just be relative to the subject but it must be absolute i it must

be you know a principle of contingency of absolute of the absoluteness of contingency is because it claims you cannot find reasons for why the correlation ought to be. And this lack of reasons cannot simply be for the subject in pains of idealism. For if it was only for the subject, it only would be... Hello? Eric? Okay, I just had a short question. I wanted to ask if Melasue would say that all philosophies that want to talk about existing things would need to be phenomenology, that there wouldn't be another possible philosophy.

I'm sorry, it's really loud here. Eric, it's a little difficult to follow you because of the noise. I posted a question in the chat. Maybe that's, yeah. I think I heard you that any philosophy that is something needs to be a phenomenology. So I just missed, I guess, that part. But he thinks that basically all you can, yeah, I mean, since you cannot establish the necessity of existing, of any existing being, and all you can do is really just describe how things appear to you as they are factually given to you, the only alternative to a speculative materialist philosophy of the possible that is not, you know, incompatible with the principle of absolute contingency is a phenomenology,

a phenomenological description of what exists. So I think, I don't know if that is the question, but I think that is that, that, that follows. Yes. That was my question. Yeah. So, but to, to get back to this point, because I think this is like the crux of to understand what is problematic about Measue's derivation, which is it begs the question of why not idealism? In other words, all that he has shown us is that in order not to be idealist, we have to accept that we would have to accept that the lack of reasons for why the correlation is absolute rather than relative to us. But in order to show that in fact this lack of our capacity to ground the being of the correlation is absolute, he needs to show not only that we cannot find reasons, but that there are no reasons.

In other words, that it isn't that you are, as it were, foreclosed from establishing the necessity of the correlation because of your transcendental limits or because of your ignorance, but that in fact there are no such reasons for you to be, that there are no reasons for why the correlation should be or not. And in order to establish that, that there are, in fact, no reasons, just appealing to the fact that we cannot ground or access or that we cannot know the reasons won't do. That won't, you know, you can't make that leap. So it just begs the question of why should we, because the idealist could just come back and say, well, just the fact that you cannot ground the being of the correlation does not entail that there are no reasons that are unbeknownst to you that perhaps in the future we could derive the being of the correlation.

You would have to be able to prove that not only that you cannot establish the necessity of the correlation from now, but that there is a proof that prevents you from ever establishing the necessity of the correlation. And that Mayesu has not done. In fact, what Mayesu does in order to patch this up is to appeal to the mortality and contingency of the subject of thinking. he says that we know ourselves to be mortal and therefore we know that the correlation is contingent so this is the quote that i include toward the bottom and it's a very relevant quote because it gives you the clue to understand how he cheats in this proof quote the very idea of

the difference between the in itself and the for us would have never arisen within you that is to say to the uh to the idealist had you not no to the correlation sorry had you not experienced what is perhaps human thought's most remarkable power its capacity to access the possibility of its own non-being and thus to know itself to be mortal what you what you experience in your thought draws its redoubtable power from the profound truth which is implicated within it you have touched upon nothing less than an absolute the only veritable one and with its help you have destroyed all the false absolutes of metaphysics, those of idealism, as well as those of realism. And then there's the second problem, which is that from this presumed establishment of the fact that

the correlation is contingent, he then generalizes this principle into the absolute contingency of being as a whole. But of course, even if Mayasu were to be granted that we know, in fact, the correlation to have no reason for its being, it wouldn't follow from this fact that we know ourselves to be mortal, that everything in the world must be contingent in the same sense or for the same reason, or rather for the same lack of reasons, right? You would need to be able to show that everything that appears to you without you being able to ground it in necessity is not just a matter of, again, ignorance, but that in fact it is a matter of an absolute absence of reasons. So I guess all he could do there is to say that just as we know ourselves to be mortal,

we know everything in the universe to be perishable or to be possibly contingent, but that is to presuppose what he needs to be proving. In other words, that's to presuppose contingency rather than to derive it from facticity. So it turns out that the derivation of the absoluteness of contingency turns out to presuppose the contingency of the agent of thought, of the correlation, rather than the other way around. He makes it appear as if the absolute contingency of being follows from the facticity of thought, from accepting the facticity of thought, But it turns out that the ficticity of thought, in fact, is a consequence premised on the knowledge that we have of the contingency of the correlation. And I think that is really a problem that I just don't see how Measu can get over, at least as far as I have been able to see.

And I've talked to Nathan Brown and to Ray about this. Nathan is very, very amenable to me. And he basically goes, yep, I just don't see how Quentin can get over this one. It seems just like a problem within his account. um i won't get too much into this whole uh keynote type business simply because uh it was an optional text and it would take us too long and we're already kind of running out of time and i want to talk about ian and graham uh quickly although i'll you know i'll speak a little bit more next time the the next question would be for me as to of course how you tap this back to the maths and to then the question of structure, right? Because once again here, what he and what he does in this second paper

and the Kino type paper is try to say that it is mathematics and therefore formalized languages which have no inherent quote unquote semantic content that are opposite to describe the structures of contingent being. So, you know, the absoluteness of contingency gives way to an exploration of what Meyers calls the forms of the factual. And according to him, what mathematical physics does in particular is study these different forms of the factual. It formalizes the forms of contingent being insofar as precisely for him, mathematical physics and the order of this kind of pure, pure formal ideography does not have any qualitative descriptive character.

And so it's therefore subtracted from metaphysical description insofar as metaphysics is considered once again, beholden to the principle of sufficient reason. On the other hand, with mathematical physics and with axiomatized mathematics, you have this purely non-foundational, non-qualitative order of discourse, which is not supposed to be, again, that does not rely on the principle of sufficient reason or anything like that. So, this allows Meissu to basically reiterate Badiou's claim that mathematics plays this fundamental ontological role, but he wants to radicalize the Badiouian claim that mathematics just is ontology, and claims that, in fact, there is, in a certain sense, an even more radical sort of austerity to the mathematical sign,

which does not even allow for it to be translated back into an order of, quote-unquote, pure multiplicity or a meta-ontology of the kind that Badiou wants to draw. Rather, and this is what's very strange about Wenmeyer-Souces, pure mathematical physics institutes an order of what he calls pure semiotics, right, or the kinotype. It's a meaningless sign, and meaningless not only in the sense that it can be translated to an empirical objective language, but that it institutes an ideography that has no intrinsic, even meta-ontological content. So this is what allows him, this austerity, this complete absence of content is what makes it capable of codifying contingent being.

Now, I think this is also a extremely sort of having your cake and eat it sort of program because at the end of the day, he is tapping, quote unquote, mathematical physics and therefore mathematized languages, formalized languages to this metaspeculative register in which he's speaking about contingency, factality, blah, blah, blah. And all of these concepts, right, are after all concepts. They are written by the philosopher in natural language. And so the continuity between these two orders to me is extremely finicky or, you know, wonky.

And in fact, it leads Mea Su toward the end of the paper to directly even ontologize the order of formal languages and this order of the Keno type, which leads to a kind of crazy form of Platonism, according to which the world itself is structured of science itself. The world is nothing but a giant semiotic system. so at this point you have kind of completely i mean it's this is the kind of irony sorry daniel yep sorry a question quick question yeah can i okay does um maya sue address somewhere um russell's reflection on the lebenswelt the life world um directly i mean yeah i'm trying to think

where he might reference that directly i mean it would have i don't think so no i don't think so either i mean he he references husri in the first two chapters of after finitude but that but that's as far as i can tell uh the most direct engagement with husri has to be yeah and when he's discussing the arcafossil but that's yes but that's it yeah nothing more substantive than that okay okay i I just wanted to know. Maybe there is, not to my knowledge. Oh, also, I mean, I would take a look at his thesis because I know that, yeah, he talks more about Husserl there, but it's on the course of being translated by Nathan Brown. So there might be something interesting in that.

Yeah. Okay. Okay, thank you. Cool. So just to wrap this idea up, Here's a quote where he, Measu, tells us about how it is that, you know, again, mathematics connects back to this order of absolute contingency and therefore of the capacity to think of the non-being of the correlation, because of course to think of absolute contingency is also to think of the possibility of the correlations non-being and therefore of the death, possible death of the subject. and gives way to this in turn this kind of semioticized universe uh so here you have like the the irony is that it seems to tip over into this kind of radical form of semi semiotic

idealism almost like let's take a look at the quote here can we found the capacity of mathematics to grant us access to the kingdom of death and then return so as to recount to the living the discoveries of its voyage. The principles of materialism is infernal. It supposes that the hell of the inorganic world, those deep subterranean realms where life and subjectivity are absent, can nevertheless become the object of human knowledge. This pure other of ourselves that is death is available for the materialist before death in the form of a knowledge of what we shall be when we are no more and here's the other quote in the in the middle which is where he gives this kind of like semiotic uh like universe right to count something to associate one line

to any things whatsoever functions in the same way there is no semanticization of signs but only a only semiotization of things and thus the numerical sign will conserve its emptiness in mathematizing the universe having voided the universe of its meaning to the point of making it the typographical variant of its operation i mean this is insane he's saying that the universe has become a typographical variant of the operations of mathematics of the mathematizing of the universe the eternal silence of infinite spaces through which the way of the count wends the whole world can be numbered not by giving meaning to the signs of numbers but by

proposing a rewritten version of their absence of meaning and uh here are you know the essential properties that he associates with the meaningless sign but this is for me where the specter of structuralism is like haunting like the maya seuss project like extremely deeply right this kind of is still like uh you know function assigned to formalized languages and this kind of recalcitrance to translation to to ideology to natural language which leads unfortunately to this inadvertent indiscernible between a kind of bloated platonist you know hyperbolic platonism in which you know you directly identify the world with signs you know with like semiotics becomes

ontology in this regard and materialism so this is a kind of like you know ian grant has his own version of where idealism and realism converge or reverting to another. But here you have a clear ontologization of formal discourse, which, again, I think is very much in tune with the spirit of what the K.A. was trying to do, insofar as it tried to ground science in precisely subtraction from natural language and from that. Now, I want to talk a little bit about Harmon. Anybody wants to say anything right now i mean we have about 15 minutes so we'll probably wrap i'll talk about grant next time and and the and the wrap-up of this but i definitely want to say a few things

about harman uh before that maybe i just wanted to ask a kind of tangential question i was wondering like um if what do you think of melissio uh critique of laurel like using fictus uh pragmatic contradiction because i remember because he claims that uh that laurel's real is still like a correlationist real yeah and i remember like in previous seminars you said that for you laurel was like the uh end point of like critical uh like critical um this lineage of continental critical transcend transcendental thoughts so i don't know if you like yeah with this critique or what do you

think well i'm i'm fairly sure so uh i don't claim to understand larwell very well because i honestly find him almost can i can i comment on this as an ardent larwellian by only no no hard-holding larwellian would ever sue would ever state that larwell is not a correlationist he absolutely describes a scenario of givenness where truth is only uh given over to a receptive perceiver so i mean there's no question that laurel falls within correlationism okay well i mean the way i i have always understood this is that the one for laurel has this radically non-pathic character so it's non-relational but that the reason why i still

think he is a correlationist is because um whereas you know you have this kind of in with strong correlationism you have a vector that progressively makes the conditions of access to the in itself removed from the capability of withdrawal what you have with non-philosophy is a kind of positivization of this limitation where rather than to than to think of um the being of beings and what is radically withdrawn from intangional disclosure or you know the thing in itself or whatever you want or the ilia from for lebanas all the variations of this what you have is uh the one as what is completely withdrawn from any kind of correlational report even the

withdrawal or the you know unveiling or uncovering which heidegger for heidegger is the structure of or unconcealment so you have this incredibly radically non-tethic you know polarity of or reality, which determines the reality and the conditions of Genesis for thinking, of course, but which is itself completely withdrawn from the capacity of philosophical appropriation or conceptualization, right? So that you cannot even engage in a kind of restorative hermeneutic negotiations with it, or you cannot even, you know, define it as this kind of like correlational double that is within the correlation. It's like, it's precisely the other of philosophy rather than, rather than being like, you know,

what is outside metaphysics, what is outside, you know, and it's therefore only there for a kind of post-metaphysical thinking to allure itself toward or something like that. It is what is precisely the radical other of philosophy, that which philosophy cannot by itself think, right? Which is why I consider it to be a kind of like limitrophic point. you know, of correlationism, where it becomes a kind of generic template to diagnose philosophy as a whole. For Laurel, I mean, this is at least Brassier's reading, correlationism just is philosophy, you know, in a certain way, a hybrid of imminence and transcendence. yeah I mean L'Arwell opposes himself to correlationism in this hope of

arriving in a generic reasoning but that itself exists as a superpositional matrix in the real which is mediated through philosophizing or fictioning as he puts it, philofictioning yeah I'm familiar with that I mean again I'm not exactly sure because I think he is also one of these people who wants to have his cake and eat it and to be like yeah sure the wand is outside of the strictures of philosophy but of course i think what he's doing is just philosophy and you know not philosophy i agree with ray on this point again it's non-standard philosophy he gave up the this idea of non-philosophy quite early yeah yeah well not that early i guess earlier than some some still uses non-philosophy and understanding the

abbreviation sometimes i think sure no and i agree yeah i mean once once you want to call it non-standard philosophy again i i think it's even more like it's not as standard as he thinks i mean uh you know one of the things that that i think correlationism including laurel is good at is trying to define these kind of quote-unquote invariant structures so what he does is he he transforms philosophy including the the transcendental eminence distinction into the very transcendental matrix of philosophical constitution of well standard philosophical constitution, the decision, right? And so suspending the decision is what gives way to this kind of non-philosophical practice. Now, with regards to what Measue says about, you know, about

Laurel as a kind of reiterated kind of hyper-Fichtianism, strong correlation, and then of course for Measue, Fichte is the paradigm of strong correlationism. I think he oversimplifies it a little bit but i think i think the answer is just fucking confused about what lorrell is up to everybody else is so um but let's talk a little bit about harman because we we're running out of time so so then with with harman we have something uh different because again he draws he he proposes a different kind of absolutization of uh ficticity that is well not a ficticity in the case but of the circle of correlation in this case than that proposed by the idealists and then the absolute

absolutization of facticity proposed by maya sue so what he does rather is that he generalizes heidegger's tool analysis to realize that it wasn't only that you know theoretical practice theory does not get to the conditions of mediation of the object and does not exhaust the being of the tool of tool being but that all intentional mediation fails to completely exhaust the being of the object and that being itself will withdraw from all intentional mediation so he follows in this regard subiri but i think this is also heidegger insofar as of course the ontological difference means that the being of beings is not only what withdraws from presence

at hand but also from readiness to hand right because of course in the fundamental dispositions the grunge stimun like anxiety you do not only have a breakdown of theory you have a breakdown of any kind of practical engagement the whole point is you're sort of like overwhelmed by the world sort of dying down in its network of significances so what he wants to do is just basically disseminate this kind of radical withdrawing of the being of the object as a ubiquitous feature that obtains between objects in the world, human and non-human alike. All entities in the world are subjected to this dynamic of withdrawal.

He then mentions that his essential sort of move follows from this kind of realization that he credits to Husserl, which is to have inflected the distinction between phenomena and noumena to the phenomenal domain. so it is not only that humans do not know how things are in themselves but that how they but how they appear but that all objects relate to each other through a kind of intentional double and that in fact as you know for Husserl even the intentional object the object of experience is divided between a you know kind of noematic essential element and a noetic

mode of presentation or modes of presentation. So the idea is that any two objects can only relate through an intentional object within which they occur. So these are also called by him sensual objects through therefore a kind of indirect contact or indirect causation which is what Harmon calls vicarious causation. So the idea is that human world relationships are finally a species of object-object relationships. And causal relationships or any relationships between real objects involve these two objects becoming embedded in a third object in which the two objects relate by means of a fourth object, which is the sensual object or intentional object.

There's a diagram that I have where this becomes a lot clearer, I think. um here it is um so to the left hand side you have the model of vicarious causation okay i mean this is as simple as i can make it so r1 and r2 are two real objects let's say the real cat and the real litter box right and these real objects have real qualities right uh blah blah blah now they cannot enter into direct contact with each other but they need to be they need to be they need to have a sensual or intentional object be mediating between them so in order for them to enter into a relationship there they need to be embedded within this third object which is R3 this overarching encompassing

object which establishes the possibility of a relationship between the two and And between the two objects within this relationship, you have S1, which is the intentional object. So S1 enables R1 and R2 to meet within R3. R3 is the relationship, and S1 is the intentional object that enables two real objects to communicate or to mediate. so that is the model of the curious causation that Harman thinks generalizes across the human domain and non-human domain and of course this gives way to a more complicated series of relationships between real objects send

sent what he calls it intentional object in this stage but then he calls it central objects as well elsewhere. In the right hand side, you have this diagram that he elaborates later in which he tries to describe the 10 different forms of relationship and therefore the different quote-unquote dimensions that obtain between real objects and central objects, including their qualities because each both real objects and sensual objects have qualities sensual qualities and real real qualities respectively and the way that these relate to each other and to themselves define different forms of relationality now obviously we don't have

all the time to in the world to go through these um and i i'm also not terribly sure how many of work. But I suppose one of the big things that comes out of this is a question that I've always had since the beginning when I first encountered object-oriented ontology, which is insofar as we are, of course, real objects ourselves to some degree, and insofar as we only can relate to the world through sensual doubles right I guess two questions follow immediately for for this kind of approach the first one is well how do we know there are real objects behind it like the content question right how does Harmon know that

there are all these objects outside of his own sensual presentations in other In other words, since you only relate to the world indirectly through sensual doubles, how do you know that there is a world out there that corresponds to these sensual doubles? What allows you to ever sort of realize that there's a real object behind the sensual mode of presentation? And this is where Harmon's theory introduces the concept of what he calls allure. and this is the role that poetry plays in his account of realism which is that you can know that there is a real object with real qualities that subtend the way it is presented to you

or the way you know and it is presented to any object really because when you relate to an object you realize that no description can ever be exhaustive of its reality. He always likes to give examples that, I mean, here he borrows heavily, again, from literature specifically, where you can have, for example, a good poet will be able to, you know, describe something like, you know, I don't know, what's the example that he gives? I think it's from Lovecraft, something about the wolf on the night or something. And he says, well, part of what makes it interesting is that this phenomenon becomes subjected in history to an infinity of reinterpretations and readings, by virtue of which we progressively sort of penetrate into the reality of this thing that was being described, but that is never quite equivalent to any description.

So this model of hermeneutic, I guess, approximation to literary tax becomes then a general model for how we should understand for harm and the relationship, the quote unquote epistemic relationship between thinking and being. In other words, that we never quite get or exhaust by positive knowledge or by a listing of qualities, the being of the real object or the real thing that we are relating to, but that in principle, this reality is inexhaustible. You could describe it in, as you know, an infinite, an infinite number of ways without it ever having run, run out of new possibilities for approximation.

And what language, what thinking does, just like what the forms of space and what the forms of presentation do, is give you these kind of like surrogates, this indirect means of access to the thing, but which are, again, never exhaustive. So that you have a reiteration of the Heideggerian ontological difference between being and beings in this kind of general sort of ontology. So Harbin is an explicit dualist in this point, right? Because there are these two kinds of objects, intentional objects and real objects, or sensual objects and real objects, right?

and so there are these you know and and of course the other question that everybody always likes to think is well i understand what it means like you know let's go back to this diagram for a second like i understand what it would mean like for me to have s1 in the sense that you know i have a mind so the world is presented to me through these sensual doubles but what does it mean for the you know, for my monster can to be related to the, you know, to the desk wood in which it stands by means of a central double. Now, the way that Levi Bryan, for example, deals with this question is completely different. For him, it's just a matter of selective, a selective relationship

rather than having this weird thing called a central object. So Levi Bryan's own model of object-oriented ontology says that, for example, he uses, he goes back to this example of Deleuze and Guattari, which is the tick, right? The tick is only sensitive to two kinds of information. I think it's what, temperature and light or something like that. So that if the tick is relating to an object, it would have to be an object that has heat emissions or that, you know, again uh radiates light it's only sensitive to this to to being perturbed by those two kinds of information so you have a selective relationship and no object is ever uh capable of being receptive

or perturbed by all kinds of information so that's how he recodes this kind of uh harmanian thesis of withdrawal but but harman introduces this weird thing called the sensual or intentional object which has this almost a kind of panpsychist vitalist ring to it which seems to you know seems to imply that any interaction within objects does not only generate an additional object which is the relationship but generates this weird thing called the central you know the central mediator which enables the curious causation to occur now uh we've run out of time obviously and i was rushing a little bit there at the end so maybe next time uh we we can resume and wrap up talking about harman and then uh talk about grand a little

bit as we delve into next week's business but any questions anybody wants to say or or claims or um perhaps next time we can yeah talk about uh brian some more and i i quite like tristan Garcia, who maybe is not as well celebrated as some of the others, but maps on well to Brian? I think Garcia is really celebrated in France. I think he is definitely one of the most interesting thinkers to come. I mean, he really, I think, is more indebted to Whitehead than to say object or endontology. That's where he gets his model. But he's obviously been in close conversation and dialogue with Harmon as well. And I agree with you about Bryant. I think his ontology is, at least

for my money, the most persuasive version of this that I've heard. Even if Garcia and Bryant's are my favorite of the two. Any other questions or claims? No? Well, I guess that's it for today. sorry i mean we liked a little bit there but uh yeah i mean i guess it was i mean it's four different people that we wanted to talk about so it takes some time so next time i'll talk a little bit more about harman and i'll just uh talk about grant and you know trying to tap this back also into the whole uh ccru and kf business with with the last two thinkers okay great thank you awesome thank you

good thank you thanks everyone see you next week see you next week bye bye