Direct Tangent 2.9

Right now I am attacking (ooops, I mean critiquing) the thinker-(non) philosopher Francis Laruelle, and I have to admit that what he is saying is a somewhat difficult concept to convey in words, so, I have to figure that he must have seen that no one else has said what he is attempting to say, and so felt he compelled to say it. And he says it pretty well; I just am geared that way – that way of being able to grasp philsophical jargon – indeed, I had never heard of anyone saying what he has said either, and if they have then they didnt say it well enough – I suppose thats why Laruelle had to come out and say it.

But I am not so geared into desiphering jargon. What I mean by this is the discussion should not be presented as a puzzle, not in puzzle form, as if in reading the essay that is proposing to have disphered a particular puzzle, I have further to disipher the puzzle of the proposition itself; I feel, as a reader, I should be given the Rosetta stone from the start of the proposition, one that concerns not only the probelm but also the problem of how I am being presented with the problem. If the point of offering something significant is to be significant to all humanity then at least the majority should be privy to its meaning without having to invest too much time/money/education into its contruction or presentation. I disagree with the idea that explanation needs be complex or for only those so invested and learned in the jargon (read: discursive technology); I say: leave that to science – and a philsophy attempting to be (modern, contemporary, 2013) science either should be overtly presented and admitted to be a “philsophy of…{fill in the blank}”, in other words a technology and hardly Philosophy, or it is just a mockery of the human potential; it screams, anymore: idiocy. Of course; I have already (in another post) pointed to those people who seem to be writting to a priviledged few, that I think they largely really could give a crap about humanity and they are mere giving institutional lipservice to such an idea: they are really concerned with how they are preceived by others and not so much concerned with benefiting humanity in any way: the capitalist faith keeps them in line and justifies their activity a priori. If the capital investment at UCSC over the past 10 years is any indication, the departement of philsolphy better be being a science – or else!

To make myself (hopefully) a little more clear: I came accross a post-paper that talked about whether propositions exist in space-time, or something lilke that, or maybe it was discussing how propositions are manifested in space time. (I could be wrong for this particular essay because I admit I didnt take the time and read the whole thing, but Im sure there are many many discussion which proceed in just this way.) I couldnt really get into it – I guess because I dont think it is saying anything significant: it is a word game, in the very Wittgensteinian mode. But I gathered it was addressing the question of whether all propositions refer to things in space-time, and in what cases do and do not refer to things in space time; I expect also that such things in space time can also be defined as physical things, as opposed to mental, psychical, metaphysical, ethereal, imaginative and the like things. Now, I gotta say that anyone who is framing possibillity within the realm of space-time is not really being philosophical in the sense that I understand philosophy: they are being methodological: they are playing a game – and not only that: they are playing a game for which there are definitive rules for how to proceed, how to look, what the purpose is, what the goal is (we wont get into the discussion of hegemonic ideology here!). They are merely reworking logic as if logic can find out what is real, and these real things, the group that contains those categories just mentioned, thus are true because logic has do to with truth. Then I have to wonder if they understand that logic is a tool, not a determiner of criterion. Logic does not find for us what is True so far as true may be real, but logic finds what is true given a set of conditions, and the conditions are always presented upon other conditions that are supposed true for the set of conditions that are being questioned. This idea is what Wittgenstien offers us; but just as existentialism has come to be a buzzword that totally misses the meaning of existance, when Witt. says ‘language games’, most people -indeed, many many supposedly learned people – completely missed the bus, and in fact were huffing on exhaust fumes attempting to reap a career out of erudite dellusion.

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It is here that Laruelle find his purchase for what he has to say. The ‘given’ propositions behave as invisible qualifiers for what is being considered or addressed. He presents this by suggesting that the method of philsophy is one of dividing propositions into a condition of either/or, and working out the reprecussions of this primary division along lines of further division until one reaches a point of contradiction. The contradiciton then indicates what must be true. This process is what is ususally known as the dialectical method. The philsophphers have taken the givens as static, as previously presented in the past, different ideas presented by different authors contributing to a progress of knowledge, a cumulating progress, presented now in acedemic learning, so as to allow a further development. But since, I’d say, Kant, everyone has been addressing the same problem and saying the same thing about it using different terms. (I will elaborate upon this some other time.)

Larualle has also found this, (as well, Kierkegaard did too; Zizek I will give the benefit of the doubt, considering he is actually a ‘cultural theorist’) that what occurs through the process known as philosophy, over time, is that the same problems are addressed and answered, but under different terms. The philosophical method does not, and is incapable of, keeping an eye on the ball, so to speak, because the eye itself is moving as the ball moves. Because philosophy is mainly concerned with solving the problem of reality, which is known as a positive solution, terms are taken as being capable of detemining actual things in-themselves, but what occurs over time is that the terms lose integrity for such particular identification and then this situation elicits new terms that are then applied as if to clearify the previous mistakes. The new terms are said to better indicate the actual thing in question, but what occurs in the effort to nail down terms to things, the conditions by which the individual is considering such fixed ideas have also changed; in other words: philosophy proposes its method to be like science, having particular static items for consideration.

Real things are not identified within a static space; which is to say, it is only within the idea of a static universe that an identification of a thing may be presumed stable. Real things are come by because of an economy of meaning that reflects the givien condition of any time. Though one can say ‘keyboard’ or ‘rock’ and have a definite and distinct idea of what that actual thing is, a ‘keyboard’ does not exist in reality in empty space apart from all else: it can only exist in context of meaning with other things. It is thus the philosophical process upon positive things that proposes to find a ‘total’ context, and thus find the True universe. The fact that through such positive philosophical rigor, for probably at least 400 years if not longer, we have found no conclusive truth reeks of a necessary precipitation: this is where Laruelle finds purchase for what he has to say. In fact, it is the complete misconstrual of Sartre’s ‘freedom’ and ‘revolt’ that we have the situation of what I would call ‘Neo-modernism”, or in other terms, the ‘New-materialism’, as if we ever need a ‘neo’ in front of any of these labels for the ‘new’ ideas: another positive assertion of true reality: faith in the true object.

Against this movement Laruelle proposes a project that attempts to find the authenticity that is routinely missed in philosophy; he thus finds “Non-philosophy”, a rigorous application of confronting the truth of existance and being in reality.

My issue with him is why he has to be so damn jargon filled.