Note on a note of Simondon

Note on a note of Simondon

In the section on Descartes in Simondon’s “History of the notion of the individual” is hidden a long footnote that is extremely important for understanding Simondon’s conception of the individual. What connection it has with Descartes, and why Simondon chose to insert it at this place is not clear. Due to an unfortunate editorial choice in the translation (in vol. II of Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Individuation), the footnotes are turned into endnotes, so many readers of the translation may miss endnote 95. The note is appended to a discussion of Descartes’ “provisional morality” in relation to Corneille’s play Le Cid. In the text itself Simondon describes the individual’s capacity to act in such a way as to transform the situation in which that action first appears as “the paradoxical aspect of the individual” (p. 566). To the word ‘paradoxical’ is appended the note in question, which I here give in full (pp. 703-705):

That according to which individual reality is not just ambivalent but consists of an internal duality that establishes an essential relation in it: in each of the points of view from which it can be grasped, the individual consists of the relation of two aspects: ontogenetic and phylogenetic, interiority and exteriority, substantiality and evental characteristic, freedom and determinism, aseity and participation, profound instinctivity and hyperconscious rationality. This ambivalent duality could be called the problematic or self-problematic nature of the individual: the individual does not encounter difficulties, he is a difficulty to himself; he calls himself into question and is his own problem; he encounters himself on his own path. As one of the clearest aspects of this self-problematic nature, let us cite the analogy of the meaning of life and the meaning of death, of the coming-to-be and passing-away of individuality. Individuality is circular causality, confrontation of oneself with oneself, affirmation and negation of oneself by oneself: every tendency is twinned, capable of being inverted through the suppression of one of the two branches; it is impossible to adopt either monism or dualism, which would be a suppression of recurrence, because there would no longer be but a single term or two isolated terms. There is neither one nor two terms but a term in the process of splitting [en train de se dédoubler] and two terms in the process of unifying [en train de s’unifier]. The individual is the ongoing relation of unity and duality.

The individual’s individuality is precisely transindividual, for the individual affirms its individuality by opposing its action to its substantiality (sacrifice, sympathy), but this sympathy and this sacrifice couldn’t exist without a relative substantiality of the individual at the start. Action moves [se meut], but it moves starting from a point that becomes a point of departure because action distances itself from this point. Relation has the status of being vis-à-vis the terms, and the terms find their value as terms in the act that establishes relation.

In this sense, it would be false to say that the individual is merely information. It is in fact auto-position of information, condition of information. Information can be posited only relative to a point of view, and there is no point of view except through individuality. The transductive reality of the individual depends on the fact that the individual possesses within itself an allagmatic dynamism that consists in its unity and its plurality, as well as the fundamental bipolarity of its tendencies. Furthermore, in the individual’s relation to other individuals and to nature or technical beings, the individual is invested in a transductive relation.

Finally, a third allagmatic rapport permits the first two rapports to exist and is conditioned by them: the allagmatic rapport between interiority and exteriority, between the interior transductive rapport and the exterior transductive rapport. Neither of the two initial rapports of interiority or exteriority would be stable without the third, which is the rapport of two rapports. But this latter would not exist without the former. There is simultaneity of three rapports. The transductive relation between the first two rapports is manifested by a link of analogy between their dynamic and static structures: these two rapports are transpositions of one another. But analogy is nothing but the symbolic aspect that reveals a transductive activity. In its reality, the rapport is transductive relation; it expresses itself externally as an analogical rapport. Analogy is the symbolic expression of transduction; analogy does not constitute transduction but merely expresses it. Plato’s study on this subject doesn’t just have methodological value, even if it is inspired by the technical paradigm of artistic imitation or the minting of coins based on an archetype: it supposes the transductive relation between the source of knowledge and the subject who knows, between the Good and the soul, between the Sun and the eye; the object is what materializes and mediates the transductive relation of knowledge. This transductive relation is asymmetrical in Plato, because the Sun and the eye, the Good and the soul are analogues without being on the same level in the order of beings. But we should note that based on the fundamental asymmetry between the model and the painting, between the idea of the shuttle and the shuttle, Plato seeks a symmetrical relation: the soul is sister of the ideas and not just analogue of the Good. The eye veritably emits a light that will encounter the light that comes from the Sun and the object.

(The footnote appears on pp. 437-438 of the French text.)

I highlight this footnote because it’s a sort of condensation of the entire book Individuation (vol. I of the English translation). Many of the themes and concepts first mentioned in the introduction to Individuation appear here: transduction, analogy, relation as having the status of being, etc. This text is, to my knowledge, the clearest statement that Simondon makes about the relationship between the human individual and the transindividual: “[t]he individual’s individuality is precisely transindividual”. It’s through willingness to sacrifice one’s life (“substantiality”) that one affirms one’s individuality to the highest degree; what one is as an individual is constituted in part by one’s relation to something outside oneself. (I’m not sure what the reference to ‘sympathy’ means here.) More generally, even aside from situations of sacrifice, the human individual is only constituted through its relation to something outside itself, that it relates to precisely by so constituting itself.

This text is also remarkable as being one of the most dialectical passages in Simondon’s works. Simondon is ambivalent about dialectics in Individuation: he criticizes dialectics (e.g., on pp. 15-16, 111, 364), which he identifies with the “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” schema, but elsewhere (p. 315) he seems to use the term to describe his own account of individuation. In the footnote, he doesn’t explicitly use the term ‘dialectics’, but his depiction of the individual as one term becoming two and two becoming one is easily seen to be dialectical in nature. (Compare with the classic Maoist formula, “one divides into two”.)

A note on translation: I’ve highlighted some of the reflexive verbs (se dédoubler, s’unifier, se mouvoir) that appear in this passage. French reflexive verbs are hard to translate into English, as what are syntactically reflexive verbs are often, as in these cases, semantically middle voice verbs. The middle voice has only a marginal existence in English, so French reflexive/middle voice verbs generally have to be translated as either English reflexive verbs or passive voice verbs. The reflexive translation (e.g., “splits itself”, “unifies itself”) tends to suggest a greater sense of agency than the French text, as if the subject of the verb were a conscious agent performing the action, whereas the passive voice (“is split”, “is unified”) has a more static meaning than the French. The French reflexive/middle voice has instead the sense of a process or action, but without calling attention to the subject who performs it, which can’t be conveyed in any straightforward way in English. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the translation choices here, but I wanted to call attention to a nuance that doesn’t come across very well.

Real vs. ideal grounding

In response to the recent explosion of literature on the metaphysics of grounding, some authors (e.g. Daly 2012, Wilson 2014) have expressed skepticism about the coherence or usefulness of this concept. One question that does not seem to have been raised, however, is: how are grounding claims to be established? If one examines the literature, the answer seems to be: by pointing. A handful of stock examples (Socrates and his singleton, a disjunction and its disjuncts) are constantly repeated, but the reader is simply expected to concede the obviousness of the grounding claim. However “intuitive” these claims may seem, pointing to such examples is clearly not sufficient to establish the claim that there is a relation of metaphysical dependence between these entities. In particular, this ostensive method of establishing grounding claims fails to eliminate the possibility that the dependence in question is conceptual. It is clear that in order to grasp the concept <singleton of Socrates>, one must also grasp the concept <Socrates>, and hence that there is a relation of conceptual dependence between the two. But this does not imply that there is a relation of metaphysical dependence between the objects of these two concepts. To see this, consider the concepts <square root of two> and <two>. It is obvious that one must grasp the latter in order to grasp the former, but it is certainly not obvious that the latter grounds the former, i.e. that the number √2 is metaphysically dependent on the number 2. The number √2 is after all simply a real number, and has no intrinsic connection with the number 2; it can even be referred to without employing the concept <two>, for example, by the expression: “length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle whose remaining sides are each of length 1”.

Furthermore, metaphysical dependence cannot follow directly from conceptual dependence, as the direction of dependence may be reversed simply by referring to objects using different concepts: thus <square root of four> depends conceptually on <four>, which, if the inference from conceptual dependence to metaphysical dependence were valid, would imply the 2 depends on 4, but <square of two> depends on <two>, which would imply that 4 depends on two. If grounding is irreflexive, as most of its partisans hold, then at least one of these claims is false. In short, I am suggesting that what is “obvious” in the usual examples of grounding is a conceptual dependence, but this is being illegitimately used as evidence for a metaphysical dependence.

The German logical tradition , from which the term ‘ground’ derives, distinguished between ideal and real grounds (principia cognoscendi and principia essendi vel fiendi) as having to do either with “knowledge in the understanding” or “the thing itself outside thought” (e.g. in Ch. A. Crusius’ Entwurf der nothwendigen Vernunft-Wahrheiten, wiefern sie den zufälligen entgegen gesetzet werden [1745], §34 — see my draft translation here). It is essential that some such distinction be introduced in the contemporary grounding literature in order to avoid illicitly passing from conceptual to metaphysical dependence, or from ideal to real grounding claims. The question of how we are to pass from ideal to real grounding has not yet been addressed within the grounding literature, to my knowledge.

CFP: Unconditional Thinking – University of Ottawa Philosophy Graduate Student Conference

CFP

I’m lead organizer for the grad student conference this year. The topic is the contemporary relevance of German Idealism. Keynote speakers: George di Giovanni (McGill University) and Isabelle Thomas-Fogiel (University of Ottawa/Paris I).
Send an abstract to dephilosophia (at) gmail (dot) com if you’re interested. (Link to full CFP above.)

CIA paid two psychologists $81 million to design their torture guidelines

This is from the just-released summary (pdf) of the US Senate report on the CIA’s torture program, pp. 11-12.

#13: Two contract psychologists devised the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques and played a central role in the operation, assessments, and management of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program. By 2005, the CIA had overwhelmingly outsourced operations related to the program.
The CIA contracted with two psychologists to develop, operate, and assess its interrogation operations. The psychologists’ prior experience was at the U.S. Air Force Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) school. Neither psychologist had any experience as an interrogator, nor did either have specialized knowledge of al-Qa’ida, a background in counterterrorism, or any relevant cultural or linguistic expertise.
On the CIA’s behalf, the contract psychologists developed theories of interrogation based on “learned helplessness,” and developed the list of enhanced interrogation techniques that was approved for use against Abu Zubaydah and subsequent CIA detainees. The psychologists personally conducted interrogations of some of the CIA’s most significant detainees using these techniques. They also evaluated whether detainees’ psychological state allowed for the continued use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques, including some detainees whom they were themselves interrogating or had interrogated. The psychologists carried out inherently governmental functions, such as acting as liaison between the CIA and foreign intelligence services, assessing the effectiveness of the interrogation program, and participating in the interrogation of detainees in held in foreign government custody.
In 2005, the psychologists formed a company specifically for the purpose of conducting their work with the CIA. Shortly thereafter, the CIA outsourced virtually all aspects of the program.
In 2006, the value of the CIA’s base contract with the company formed by the psychologists with all options exercised was in excess of $180 million; the contractors received $81 million prior to the contract’s termination in 2009. In 2007, the CIA provided a multi-year indemnification agreement to protect the company and its employees from legal liability arising out of the program. The CIA has since paid out more than $1 million pursuant to the agreement.
In 2008, the CIA’s Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation Group, the lead unit for detention and interrogation operations at the CIA, had a total of [redacted] positions, which were filled with [redacted] CIA staff officers and [redacted] contractors, meaning that contractors made up 85% of the workforce for detention and interrogation operations

OPEN LETTER TO BRIAN LEITER: from one just a “guy with a blog” to another

Terence Blake gives Leiter’s idiotic ramblings on “identity politics” in philosophy a far better response than they deserve.

AGENT SWARM

Dear Professor Leiter,

I see that you have devoted two paragraphs to me in a blog post, so I feel that I must respond however briefly. I must admit that I have no idea who you are, despite having visited your blog very occasionally, so I have no particular opinion about your work, of which I am totally ignorant.

I must admit I was a little surprised by your introducing me as “Some fellow … who teaches English in France”. It seemed a little disparaging, as if I had no right talking about Continental Philosophy or anything else much (except the present perfect and infinitive clauses?). I am not totally ignorant of philosophy, as I have a First Class Honours Degree in Philosophy from Sydney University, and a Masters in Philosophy from the Sorbonne. While it is true that I “teach English in France”, I do so in the…

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Schelling’s science of productivity

This is a section of a text I’m going to be presenting at a conference in a couple of weeks. I’d appreciate comments from anyone who may happen to read it.

 

Schelling’s initial conception of naturephilosophy can be expressed by the phrase: critique of grounds. More precisely, this means distinguishing between ideal and real grounds, the confusion of which is according to Schelling characteristic of mechanistic physics. This first stage of naturephilosophical inquiry fits perfectly into the Kantian conception of critical philosophy:

The task of a philosophical science of Nature largely consists in just this, to determine the admissibility as well as the limitations of such fictions in physics, which are absolutely necessary for the continued advance of investigation and observation, and only obstruct our scientific progress when we seek to use them outside their proper limits. (Schelling 1988 : 78)

Critical naturephilosophy is thus an extension of the Critique of Judgment’s examination of the limits of validity of teleological concepts to, for example, the concepts of quality (ibid. : 21) or of force (ibid. : 175). To what extent can the subjective necessity of using these concepts for the “continued advance of investigation and observation”  be regarded as an objective determination of Nature?

An example from Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science helps to make clear the distinction between real and ideal grounds. Against the atomists, Kant argues that matter “fills a space, not through its mere existence, but through a particular moving force” (Kant 2002 : 210) that prevents other “movables” from entering that space; to which he makes the atomist object that we need not posit any such force because it is simply contradictory for two matters to occupy the same space. “But,” Kant replies,“the principle of noncontradiction does not repel a matter advancing to penetrate into a space where another is found” (ibid.). That two matters occupying the same space would be contradictory is a reason for us to hold that this is impossible (ideal ground), but this fact as such has no effect in reality; only a “particular moving force” (real ground) can prevent this state of affairs from coming about.

The first edition (1797) of Schelling’s Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature can be regarded as largely devoted to this critical naturephilosophy, but to the second edition in 1803 Schelling adds the subtitle “as Introduction to the Study of this Science” (Schelling 1988 : 3 n. 1), suggesting that critical naturephilosophy should be regarded simply as an introduction to the science of naturephilosophy itself. It is now necessary to separate ideal from real grounds not only because the former “obstruct our scientific progress when we seek to use them outside their proper limits”, but also in order to make possible a science of real ground as such, naturephilosophy proper. Since what distinguishes real from ideal grounds is that though the latter provide an explanation of what they ground, they do not themselves produce it, the essence of real ground is seen to be productivity. Naturephilosophy as science of real ground therefore means the science of productivity.

This science of productivity is developed systematically in the 1799 text “On the concept of speculative physics and the internal organization of a system of this science” (Schelling 2004; references by page number alone are to this text.). Speculative physics means a system of the concepts of natural science — not only physics in our modern sense but also chemistry and biology —  with productivity as its principle. The concept of productivity, as principle, must itself be made to produce all concepts of what is productive, i.e. all real grounds.

Speculative physics is distinguished from its empirical counterpart in that the latter can treat only of mechanical motion, that is, motion which itself “results only from motion” (195), whereas the former “occupies itself solely and entirely with the original causes of motion in Nature”; or more generally, empirical physics can derive the phenomena of Nature only from other already-existing things, whereas speculative physics “aims generally at the inner clockwork and what is nonobjective in Nature” (196), the unconditioned or “unthinged” (unbedingte) that is the condition of every thing (Ding): “the first inquiry of speculative physics is that which relates to the unconditioned in natural science” (202).

The true contrary to speculative physics, however, is not empirical physics as historically given but “pure empiricism” or “history”, which is merely a “collection of facts, of accounts of what has been observed, what has happened under natural and artificial circumstances” (201) and is therefore not science; whereas in empirical physics “empiricism and science run riot together, and for that reason they are neither one thing nor the other” (ibid.). Schelling here has in mind the employment of such fictions as the ‘gravific fluid’ that would be the cause of Newtonian attraction, the examination of which is the task of critical naturephilosophy. The speculative naturephilosophy therefore provides the foundation for the critical in separating “science and empiricism as soul and body, and by admitting nothing into science which is not susceptible of an a priori construction” (ibid.). It is only insofar as a concept of physics can be constructed in productivity that it can be regarded as having valid objective use and thus as constituting the real ground of a phenomenon of Nature.

For our construction of a phenomenon to be valid, it must be a repetition or re-construction of the “inner construction” by which it is produced in Nature; but the acts of Nature by which phenomena are produced “are never isolated, but performed under the concurrence of a host of causes which must first be excluded if we are to obtain a pure result. Nature must therefore be compelled to act under certain definite conditions, which either do not exist in it at all, or else exist only as modified by others” (196-197). Because of this interaction of natural forces, we can only know the grounds of a phenomenon through an “invasion of Nature” (196) that isolates the contribution each makes to the result, that is, an experiment. Experimentation is a “question put to Nature, to which it is compelled to reply”, a “production of phenomena” (197) in which we “put [Nature] into conflict with herself and set her own forces in motion against her” (Schelling 1988: 57).

“But,” as Schelling remarks, “every question contains an implicit a priori judgment; every experiment that is an experiment is a prophecy”, or is made on the basis of a hypothesis. The hypotheses implicit in an experimental design can be confirmed by other experiments, but these will necessarily imply further hypotheses, which must be confirmed by further experiments, and so on ad infinitum; experimentation by itself can therefore provide us only with knowledge conditional upon other experiments, rather than with knowledge of the unconditioned (197). “Since the final causes of natural phenomena are themselves not phenomenal, we must either give up all attempt ever to arrive at a knowledge of them, or else we must altogether put them into Nature, endow Nature with them” (ibid.).

To put final causes (or rather a final cause) into Nature means to subordinate the study of Nature to an “absolute hypothesis” (197) which can be expressed most concisely as: the existence of Nature itself. This hypothesis maintains that over and above the various natural things that make up the world, there is also Nature itself: we must assume “that the sum of phenomena is not merely a world, but of necessity a Nature (that is, that this whole is not merely a product, but at the same time productive) […]” (ibid.). That Nature itself is productive implies, first, that it cannot be separated into inert matter in which forces are implanted only secondarily (Schelling 1988 : 154-157): “[matter] and bodies, therefore, are themselves nothing but products of opposing forces, or rather, are themselves nothing else but these forces” (ibid. : 156); and second, that we can know Nature only by making our knowledge thereof productive: “our knowing is changed into a construction of Nature itself, that is, into a science of Nature a priori” (198).

If, however, the system of speculative physics is to be more than merely hypothetical knowledge, this hypothesis by which we “endow” Nature with its final causes must be “as necessary as Nature itself” (197). The necessity of this hypothesis must be demonstrated by putting it to an “empirical test”: “as long as there is in the whole system of Nature a single phenomenon which is not necessary according to that principle, or which contradicts it, the hypothesis is at once shown to be false” (197-198). The hypothesis is shown to be necessary by deriving all phenomena of Nature from it; or rather, since this is clearly an infinite task, the necessity of a hypothesis can only be provisionally accepted so long as it has not been falsified.

This extremely classical conception of the nature of science is not satisfactory by the standards of Schelling’s own philosophy. On Schelling’s account, natural science, though it is the science of productivity, itself exists only as product: only the complete deductive system in which all phenomena of Nature have their place is in fact a science. The process of producing this system however is left out of the account. What should the speculative physicist do upon discovering a phenomenon that contradicts her hypothesis? How should she correct her system? Schelling’s remark that the hypothesis must “bear its necessity in itself” (197) suggests that he regards the empirical test as something of a formality: it is in the conceptual demonstration of necessity that the real work of speculative physics lies, and once this has been carried out, there is little danger of falsification. This neglect of the process of correction is particularly strange given that Schelling’s own work is (in)famous for its mutability. Furthermore, it is hardly compatible with the “first maxim of all true natural science, to explain everything by the forces of Nature” even if this has as consequence that “what we call ‘reason’ is a mere play of higher and necessarily unknown natural forces” (195). A more satisfactory account of science will therefore have to study this play of forces, or productive science, rather than science as product, having productivity only in its object.

 

[…] those of us who prize the flux and content of our subjective phenomenological experience need not view the advance of materialistic neuroscience with fear and foreboding. Quite the contrary. The genuine arrival of a materialist kinematics and dynamics for psychological states and cognitive processes will constitute not a gloom in which our inner life is suppressed or eclipsed, but rather a dawning, in which its marvelous intricacies are finally revealed–most notably, if we apply ourselves, in direct self-conscious introspection.”

Paul Churchland, “Reduction, qualia, and the direct introspection of brain states”, in A Neurocomputational Perspective, p. 66

Realism, contingency, and the powers of nature

Quentin Meillassoux has set two requirements for realist philosophy: the rationalist requirement and the materialist requirement (Brassier, pp. 49-50). The former requires “that reality be perfectly amenable to conceptual comprehension”, while the latter requires “that being, though perfectly intelligible, remain irreducible to thought”. For a realist, conceptual thought cannot be essentially relative (to a transcendental subject, to a form of life, etc.); it must be possible for it to be absolute. But at the same time, thought must not be necessary to the being of the world; a world devoid of intelligent life, and therefore of thought, is perfectly comprehensible: thought is contingent. I will hereafter refer to these requirements as the absoluteness and contingency requirements, respectively, since the terms ‘rationalist’ and ‘materialist’ have a number of other meanings irrelevant to the subject.

Meillassoux offers the “principle of factuality”, or the necessity of contingency (Meillassoux p. 120) as a foundation for a form of realism that meets these two requirements. He starts from the principle of the contingency of thought (and everything else), then argues that this principle is itself absolute (Meillassoux pp. 90-98); he then hopes to derive from this absolute principle other propositions concerning the nature of the in-itself (pp. 100 ff.). There are several reasons to be dissatisfied with this strategy, but the most important is its sterility: Meillassoux is not able to derive the possibility of an absolute scientific thought (i.e. the discovery of “arche-fossils”, phenomena that pre-date the existence of thought) from the principle of factuality as he had set out to do, and can only offer the hope that someone will be able to do so (p. 187).

There is another possible strategy that Meillassoux mentions, but drops after only a cursory examination (pp. 93-94). He identifies an “intimate seam in the correlational circle”: the fact that only one of the two constitutive principles of the circle can be “de-absolutized” at a time. If we oppose absolute idealism by insisting on the facticity of the shared structure of thought and the world, we thereby rely on the absoluteness of the principle of facticity; this is Meillassoux’s strategy. Conversely, if we oppose Meillassoux’s speculative materialism by denying the absoluteness of the principle of factuality, we thereby rely on the absoluteness of the correlate. Meillassoux dismisses this second option on the grounds that it makes a certain being or type of being (eg. “Spirit, Will, Life”) necessary. Absolute idealism cannot coherently think, for example, the mortality of the subject, because it makes the subject necessary to the existence of the world. (Indeed, Fichte argues that the impossibility for the I of abstracting from itself demonstrates its immortality.) But Meillassoux does not consider the possibility that his strategy, described in the previous paragraph, can be reversed by absolute idealism: to start from a principle of the absoluteness of thought, and derive its contingency from its absoluteness.

The details of this derivation are not entirely clear to me yet but it will involve three currents of thought in analytical philosophy:

1. scientific realism, including its development into Ladyman and Ross’s ontic structural realism, and the Churchlands’ eliminative materialism. I feel that the combination of these two developments results in something like Andy Clark’s active externalism;
2. scientific essentialism, and in particular the metaphysics of powers developed primarily by Mumford and Molnar;
3. analytical idealism, or the appropriation of German Idealism by analytical philosophers like McDowell and Brandom.

As in absolute idealism, rather than starting from the subject and asking how it can acquire knowledge of the object, we start from knowledge, and derive an understanding of the subject and object. A very rough outline of the strategy:

1. If we can know the world in-itelf, then it must be composed of pure modal structure (power);
2. if we can know knowledge in-itself (and not just the appearance of knowledge, knowledge-for-us, ie. normativity), then knowledge must also be a modal structure (a power);
3. yet if there is nothing but powers, then there must either be an ungrounded power or an infinite regress of grounds which is itself ungrounded — in either case, “reasons come to an end”.
4. so if knowledge is a power (2) and powers are essentially contingent (3) then knowledge is contingent.

I’m quite aware of how unsatisfactory the argument is in this form and I hope to flesh out each of the stages in a way using the three traditions in analytical philosophy mentioned above.

I also hope that this project will shed some light on Deleuze. Peter Wolfendale has pointed out the importance of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR) to Deleuze’s thought (here and here) and I think this shows how we can understand Deleuze better by opposing him to Meillassoux. The promised third part of Wolfendale’s study has never appear though, so the difficult reconciliation of Deleuze’s affirmation of chance and chaos on the one hand, with his acceptance of the PSR, on the other, is left unfinished. I think it will be possible to interpret Deleuze as pursuing the strategy I described above of deriving the contingency of thought from its absoluteness.

References

Brassier, Ray “The enigma of realism”, Collapse III

Meillassoux, Quentin Après la finitude (my translations)

Central Industrial – Tuned To A Dead Channel (AUXCD006)

 

This album came out a few months ago but I only just got around to listening to it. The sci-fi soundtrack music that Auxiliary has been pushing over the past few years is one of the more interesting trends in electronic music today.

From the liner notes:

Central Industrial is the anonymous alias for a couple of well established producers. The project was born from their love of 90’s IDM and Electronica on such labels as Warp, CCO, Morr Music etc. and a general love for all things science fiction. There is an underlying ‘cyberpunk’ theme to the LP, inspired in part by William Gibson’s Neuromancer and titles such as Ghost In The Shell . The title itself comes from the opening paragraph of Neuromancer! On whole, the LP plays through in a seamlessly dark fashion and ignores all rules and restrictions placed upon music by genres and name tags.

If you are looking for something completely different to sink your teeth into this summer, then this might be that LP to make your jaw drop.