#correlationism

[transpondster]

Dr. Sam Mickey discussing Speculative Realism in under 4 minutes.

[qanishque]

[sterwood]

Accordingly, we can reformulate our question thus: what is the condition that legitimates science's ancestral statements? This is a question that seems to be of the transcendental type, but it is peculiar in that its primary condition is the relinquishing of transcendentalism. It demands of us that we remain as distant from naive realism as from correlationist subtlety, which are the two ways of refusing to see ancestrality as a problem. We must bear in mind the apparently unanswerable force of the correlation circle (contrary to the naive realist), as well as its irremediable incompatibility with ancestrality (contrary to the correlationist). Ultimately then, we must understand that what distinguishes the philosopher from the non-philosopher in this matter is that only the former is capable of being astonished (in the strong sense) by the straightforwardly literal meaning of the ancestral statement. The virtue of transcendentalism does not lie in rendering realism illusory, but in rendering it astonishing, i e. apparently unthinkable, yet true, and hence eminently problematic. The arche-fossil enjoins us to track thought by inviting us to discover the 'hidden passage' trodden by the latter in order to achieve what modern philosophy has been telling us for the past two centuries is impossibility itself: to get out of ourselves, to grasp the in-itself, to know what is whether we are or not.

Quentin Meillassoux - After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. That sentence beginning 'The virtue of...' is such a well written sentence. Also: I love Meillassoux.

[sterwood]

Okay, I just typed this out to someone, but I think it's a pretty good summary of my feelings about totality (and spelled out better than my half-awake flailings last night. I'm putting it under a read more so it doesn't clog up your dashes too much. (Also: marxism-leninism-memeism I'm tagging you since you were asking me about how diamet doesn't necessarily involve totality as a category - and I think it's related to what I say about Hegel here: the way he goes about dialectically 'resolving' the subject-object dyad is thoroughly correlational and [because of what correlationism implies] thus betrays a certain idealist core that should be rooted out from diamet in general).

I'll try and state why I think I have such an allergy to 'totality' as clearly as possible. First of all, what 'totality' denotes seems to change from one Marxist author to another, so that's part of my aversion (that it's so ill-defined). Because of that, it matters what type of 'totality' we're talking about. If it's the Levinasian idea of 'totality' (that which congeals the characteristics of the other and denies their infinity) then I'm against it for the same reasons that Levinas is, by and large. If it's the classical notion of 'totality', in which the whole is taken to be 'more' than the parts in some sense I'm against it because this seems to me to be a mistaken mereological relationship: the parts don't form a whole except for through a third party which imagines what that whole should be. The 'whole' isn't - it's ideological. And if it's totality in the sense of "the Absolute" or whatever other thing it's been called throughout history, then I'm against it because I just don't think it exists. It's a category mistake as far as I'm concerned, and ignores the original kernel of difference that makes such a self-same Absolute possible. Finally, if it's totality in the sense of that which grounds the subject-object relation in the Hegelian tradition, then I'm against it because it assumes that 'subject' and 'object' are still workable and separate categories (I've never seen a convincing case of this). It seems thoroughly correlationist to me, and places the whole realm of meaning and of activity into the 'human realm' - thus, it's thoroughly anthropocentric. And I think theory/philosophy/whatever, needs to move away from it's historical anthropocentrism, not just because of its ties to bourgeois Enlightenment thought but also because it's just a mistaken view of how we relate to various ecosystems and environments (it denies wholesale any agency outside of human agency, which I'm just not down for). But also, I just don't see what totality is supposed to do within Marxist criticism. We can still look at the way that literature and other forms of art 'symptomatically' repress history without grounding that history in some sort of social 'totality'. And we can talk about how the economy is determinate "in the last instance" without a notion of an economic totality (or any totality as far as I can see) - determination doesn't need to be grounding in some larger "whole" that allows the determination to take place. The same goes for mediation: my relationship to ideological products is mediated regardless of whether or not the production of such ideological objects is grounded in some larger totality, simply because I don't have any representation of a 'whole' in which it's produced in the first place. Totality seems to be a non-category: it not only can't be represented (it seems like everyone's pretty in agreement about that) but it doesn't seem to actually facilitate Marxist criticism in any way. So not only is it not represented, but it doesn't do anything - so I don't see any reason to keep the figure of thought.

Okay, hopefully this clarifies things a bit.

[luxfoks]

What does materialism ultimately espouse? That everything should be rooted in material life and history, not in abstraction, logical necessity, universality, essence, pure form, spirit, or idea. Thus the true poverty of the new realism is not so much its naive trust in mathematical reasoning and object-oriented architectures but its inability to recognize that the highest order of the absolute, the totality itself, is found in the material history of mankind. To touch the absolute is precisely to think this correlation, not so much to explain it away, but to show that thought itself is the correlation as such, and thus to think the material is to spread one’s thoughts across the mind of history.

Alexander R. Galloway, "The Poverty of Philosophy"

Here I lose Galloway, besides his bizarre equivocation of capitalist object oriented programming languages to object oriented philosophies and his mutual denunciation of both since they are slaves to capitalism or whatever, this philosophical nostalgia for the absolute isn't even amenable to the most intense idealism (e.g. Hegel, Schelling) who admit that the absolute is inaccessible unless it is mediated by some sort of material particular. The "joke" of idealism is that you are "already" in communion with the absolute through the "systematic"  dialectical contingencies of "Being in the World," the organic substance of your spiritual or communal "life-world" or through art or whatever.

How are realists supposed to respond to this? "Ok, I guess I'll spread my thoughts across the mind of history." What does this amount to besides the study and appreciation of history? Realists like Popper want a philosophy that can "inform" scientific practice or produce a worldly philosophy that makes accurate rational predictions. What a realist refuses, strictly speaking, is not the absolute or politics but meaning in general. They refuse the ecstatic significance of the "effect of meaning" preferring what Laruelle calls "the true without truthfulness," truth that adequates or models a "thing" without ontologically deciding its significance. A realist refuses or is at least suspicious of the transparency of being and thought and prefers the prosthetic of science to produce data, information, and models whose accuracy, applicability and predictability are at stake and guide their judgments--this rather than their "significance" which is a bit of a non-starter practically speaking.

A second divide might be between the "moral" and the "ethical": the materialist believes what they believe because they view it as "necessary" according to their given epistemological constructions whereas the realists are Nietzschean, morality is a arbitrary theoretical construction, ethics meanwhile are a set of normative assumptions or priors which can occasionally guide or regulate human actions. The materialist acquiesces to moral demands whereas the realist is perhaps more likely to practically acquiesce to ethical requirements as a sort of reality principle: they see nothing necessary about either morality or ethics. The realists I have known are usually "outcome oriented" or "utilitarian" expressing a "spontaneous ideology of the scientists" which is usually fairly humanist (maybe explaining their occasional infatuation with Buddhism or New Age spiritualism as practical philosophies or a scientifically inflected Christianity) but eerily solipsistic and instrumentalist (they should care for people because it is "probable" that they exist and they will benefit from it or they feel it is simply required of them and will be reciprocated), however, they are just as likely to be social justice advocates. Ultimately they do not even show a commitment to their realism.

It is fairly clear to me at least that these typologies collapse and that a more sociological or social psychological perspective on these "attitudes" is necessary and that one's philosophical outlook in-the-last-instance has little bearing on their political outlook.

Suffice it to say, I think even materialists will be dissatisfied with this somewhat historicist imagining of their philosophy.

[luxfoks]

[W]e must confront directly the fundamental provocation of the new philosophical realism. For, contra the tradition of materialist critical theory since Marx, much of today’s realism claims that ontologies should not be political; it claims that ontological speculations must be separated from political ones. Such choruses are being heard more and more frequently today. I have no doubt that many of the figures associated with today’s philosophical realism would view themselves as politicized souls of some caliber. And the argument is often heard that the uncoupling of the ontological from the political is a neutral act in and of itself and in so doing casts no aspersion as such on the political project. One simply can do metaphysics over here, while doing politics over there. Furthermore, promulgators of such arguments often laud the uncoupling as a feature of realism, not a liability, because it allows the political to persist inside its own autonomous sphere, unsullied by the nitty-gritty questions of Being and appearing. Yet the uncoupling of the ontological realm from the political realm is not entirely neutral, for it arrives less as an innocuous attempt to tidy up the cluttered landscape of philosophical discourse (so that one’s talk of Being will not be tainted by one’s talk of politics) than as an ideological strategy bent unwittingly or not on the elimination of competing discourses. Recall what must be discarded when overturning correlationism. One must discard phenomenology certainly, but one must also throw out social constructivism and the various fields that rely on a social constructivist methodology including much of second- and third-wave feminism, certain kinds of critical race theory, the project of identity politics in general, theories of postmodernity, and much of cultural studies. Phenomenology has a politics, to be sure: beyond the ravages of modern life, the return to a more poetic state of being guided by care and solicitude. Social constructivism has one too: throw out the violence of patriarchy, logocentrism, and all the rest. Have no illusions, this is what is at stake with the recent return to the absolute evident in theoretical discourse from Meillassoux to Badiou, and even evident in other authors such as Žižek and Susan Buck-Morss. To be sure, certain of these theorists understand the stakes and therefore scaffold their newfound universalism with a robust and often militant political theory—Badiou and Žižek, one shall remember, are in no uncertain terms advocating communism, and Buck-Morss herself has a robust political consciousness. Fading violets they are not. The question becomes more pressing however when a philosopher uncouples Being from politics in order to withdraw from the project of political critique altogether.

Alexander R. Galloway, "The Poverty of Philosophy"

I am starting to see the necessity of shifting away from social constructivist methods that emphasize a historical-sociological perspective that emphasizes collective memory, collective trauma and so forth. I am immensely sympathetic to these discourses but they are fundamentally qualitative, literary, and testimonial. They also raise eyebrows from a policy, economic, and legal perspective because it seems like the crimes are so vast and horrible and irreconcilable that reparations, reconciliation and basic justice are impossible. Meanwhile, these discourses are as divisive among their originating groups (who has the right to speak for an entire identity group, the sub altern, etc.) as they are in mainstream political discourse. The drive to "accepting" these discourses and their difficult history and potentially obscurantist theoretical language as valid at least complicates the dimension of meaningful positive political institutional action which would necessarily require some sort of data driven or quantitative perspective. Even if the contentious history of violence and oppression is considered valid and agreed upon (already a difficult battle to undertake) translating it into a solvable problem becomes difficult because it must be translated from a highly conceptual and linguistic mishmash into a line of political action or policy, i.e., from the discursive and the conceptual to the measurable and the "actionable."

Ontology and philosophical "attitudes" like correlationism cannot really do this. Their basic purpose is to dominate and regulate the theoretically "sayable" by positing their objective validity. This necessarily runs aground upon the issues of the differend, philosophical-theoretical politics, and discursive agonism.

Giving up ontology as a battleground for politics might be a fruitful line of action for the academic Left. Their battles should be waged in the field of education (e.g. by changing hearts and minds, imparting the "objectivating" rather than "objectifying" power of science to the masses via a factually grounded discourse), within their institutions, and in "actually existing" politics. Symbolically divesting ontology of the political will "force" a worldly or more practical perspective. This would transform theory into work of policy proposal, quantitatively backed opining, the interpretation of data rather than texts, and persuasion. Philosophy and theoreticism would be abandoned for what I call "wiley" or "worldly theoreticism": a somewhat conniving, factual and data savvy academic discourse aimed at knotting political discourse to sociological and scientific discovery, disciplining the process of opinion making by suturing it to the provisional objectivity provided by econometric and sociological modeling whereby testimony and opining that isn't backed with data is considered invalid.

The "costs" of abandoning political ontologies and historicism are high but one enters a higher stakes field that necessitates a practical approach and where failure and success produce actual rather than purely theoretical consequences.

[grandpasessions]

Consider the following ancestral statement: 'event Y occurred X number of years before the emergence of humans.' The correlationist philosopher will in no way intervene in the content of this statement: she will not contest the claim that it is in fact event Y that occurred, nor will she contest the dating of this event. No - she will simply add - perhaps only to himself, but add it he will - something like a simple codicil, always the same one, which he will discreetly append to the end of the phrase: event Y occurred X number of years before the emergence of humans - for humans (or even, for the human scientist). This codicil is the codicil of modernity: the codicil through which the modern philosopher refrains (or at least thinks she does) from intervening in the content of science, while preserving a regime of meaning external to and more originary than that of science. Accordingly, when confronted with an ancestral statement, correlationism postulates that there are at least two levels of meaning in such a statement: the immediate, or realist meaning; and the more originary correlationist meaning, activated by the codicil.

after finitude meillassoux

[absalomabsalom]

To be a speculative realist, all you have to do is reject correlationism for whatever reason you please.

Graham Harman "brief SR/OOO tutorial" « Object-Oriented Philosophy