Skip to main content

The trouble with ´territorialization´

Reza Negarestani, in particular in bits of the last chapters of his Intelligence and Spirit (chapters 7 and 8), brings together the opposition between natural and artificial (farm and forest, p. 402; causes and unbound sovereignty of thinking, p. 422-3; causal heteronomy and pure autonomy of the formal, p. 376-7; thoughtless natural processes and artificial logical autonomy, p.386) and the one between what is Given (in the sense of the mythical, in McDowell´s use of the capital ´G´) and the spontaneous, for example in the assertion that taking form to conform to experience is falling into the myth of the Given. Negarestani seems to favor a notion of thinking that is progressively autonomous and head towards its artificial medium that brings together language, logic, and computation in order to elicit the commonalities between them that enable a disconnection with its causal support. This disconnecting autonomy echoes the idea of causality through freedom with which Kant asserted the autonomous nature of spontaneity and thought and action. Further, it heads towards the project of a universal realm of the artificial that expresses itself formally in something like what Negarestani calls the dasein of Geist which is this very common element between language, logic, and computation - a characteristica universalis, in the sense of Leibniz. The trouble with this disconnecting autonomy - which escapes from the Given and is increasingly artificial - is that somehow receptivity has to get into the picture. The danger of what McDowell´s once described as a ´frictionless spinning in the void´ (in his Mind and World) haunts the project of thought autonomy that Negarestani pursues. This is perhaps because his emphasis is explicitly on the power of recognizable negation - philosophy, conceived as the game of games (422) is found on the architectonics of negation as the engine of thinking. Negation is a ready-made ticket to the unbound, the artificial, the deterritorialized or, in any case, to what is not currently the case. It is a ticket to a separate realm if it is coupled with the idea that cognition is recognition.

The idea is that about the artificial (and the spontaneous) that takes it to be the opposite (or the complement or the dual) of the realm of causes - and hence the territorialized and the deterritorialized form a totality. The trouble lies maybe in the very opposition between territorialization and deterritorialization - between natural and artificial, between what is attached to the nature of things and what is unbound, between causes and the autonomy of thinking. Perhaps the opposition between physis and techné. Or rather, in the idea that a fully artificial, unbounded, unlimited, autonomous realm is conceivable and attainable. Thinking is perhaps precisely about this border, about this launching platform where an autonomous rocket is about to depart but is still attached to the ground. This is because thinking is crucially open to frictions - it is subject to the Great Outdoors and not close to it; before being autonomous, thinking is responsive. To fully make sure thinking is not going to spin frictionless, thinking has to be challengeable from all sides. Otherwise, it is confined in a gesture of self-recognition that makes all talk about the collective or the impersonal dwindle into a project for the autonomy of a bubble.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hunky, Gunky and Junky - all Funky Metaphysics

Been reading Bohn's recent papers on the possibility of junky worlds (and therefore of hunky worlds as hunky worlds are those that are gunky and junky - quite funky, as I said in the other post). He cites Whitehead (process philosophy tends to go hunky) but also Leibniz in his company - he wouldn't take up gunk as he believed in monads but would accept junky worlds (where everything that exists is a part of something). Bohn quotes Leibniz in On Nature Itself «For, although there are atoms of substance, namely monads, which lack parts, there are no atoms of bulk, that is, atoms of the least possible extension, nor are there any ultimate elements, since a continuum cannot be composed out of points. In just the same way, there is nothing greatest in bulk nor infinite in extension, even if there is always something bigger than anything else, though there is a being greatest in the intensity of its perfection, that is, a being infinite in power.» And New Essays: ... for there is nev...
1 comment
Read more

Talk on ultrametaphysics

 This is the text of my seminar on ultrametaphysics on Friday here in Albuquerque. An attempt at a history of ultrametaphysics in five chapters Hilan Bensusan I begin with some of the words in the title. First, ‘ultrametaphysics’, then ‘history’ and ‘chapters’. ‘Ultrametaphysics’, which I discovered that in my mouth could sound like ‘ autre metaphysics’, intends to address what comes after metaphysics assuming that metaphysics is an endeavor – or an epoch, or a project, or an activity – that reaches an end, perhaps because it is consolidated, perhaps because it has reached its own limits, perhaps because it is accomplished, perhaps because it is misconceived. In this sense, other names could apply, first of all, ‘meta-metaphysics’ – that alludes to metaphysics coming after physics, the books of Aristotle that came after Physics , or the task that follows the attention to φύσις, or still what can be reached only if the nature of things is considered. ‘Me...
Post a Comment
Read more

Memory assemblages

My talk here at Burque last winter I want to start by thanking you all and acknowledging the department of philosophy, the University of New Mexico and this land, as a visitor coming from the south of the border and from the land of many Macroje peoples who themselves live in a way that is constantly informed by memory, immortality and their ancestors, I strive to learn more about the Tiwas, the Sandia peoples and other indigenous communities of the area. I keep finding myself trying to find their marks around – and they seem quite well hidden. For reasons to do with this very talk, I welcome the gesture of directing our thoughts to the land where we are; both as an indication of our situated character and as an archive of the past which carries a proliferation of promises for the future. In this talk, I will try to elaborate and recommend the idea of memory assemblage, a central notion in my current project around specters and addition. I begin by saying that I ...
Post a Comment
Read more