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Tag Archives: Graham Harman

Excision Ethos: Flat Ontology and the Posthuman Object/Subject.

Here is another nice post from Dark Chemistry on Graham Harman as smasher of objects, which he opens with a fine quote from one of my articles on Artaud, Deleuze, will to nothingness and literature.

What we witness in this time is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World turning into Rave New World. A world in which the well known and the so called lines between mind and body, fantasy and reality, nature and culture, organic and inorganic, life and death, are not just blurred, but have completely disappeared. And yet, at the same time, these lines are in the process of reappearance.

Here’s another ENCHANTING POST from D.C., referring to a bit of my stuff, and a bit of Badiou, Žižek, and Brassier. … Read More

via Object-Oriented Philosophy

Cyprus – December 26, 2010

Nice first day, starting in Nicosia/Lefkosia, one of the few remaining divided cities in the world, and interesting on both sides. It’s also very easy to cross now for many people, including tourists and most Cypriots, which I believe became the case in 2003. Before that it was said to be a bit more tense. At the far edge of the walled portion of Northern Nicosia (it was the Venetians who walled this city long ago) I struck a deal with a taxi  driver. We went through some spectacular mountain scenery to the northern coast of Cyprus, which is not far away. Great driver, and I may use him again for further explorations of the North in the next few days. Also may have found the perfect place for New Year’s after striking up a conversation with a cafe owner in the North. More on that later…

crossing the border – December 28, 2010

I’m heading over across the border again today, this time to meet one of our philosophy blogger friends. Here’s what the border crossing is like when coming from the southern part of Nicosia/Lefkosia, where I’m staying…

Ledras Street, which is the main artery of the shopping district in the southern part of the city, leads straight into a checkpoint. All of the governmental facilities on both sides of the line are sort of like trailers, or like ticket windows for a theater or circus.

To your right is a Republic of Cyprus facility, but that’s only for when you’re coming back in. They don’t want to see your passport on the way out.

Then you’re in the zone for about 20 or 30 feet, and if you look left and right you can see plenty of damaged/abandoned buildings along the Green Line. The big conflict was in 1974, and I would assume that none of these buildings have been used for anything in 36 years.

Then, on your left, a Northern Cyprus trailer, white and with the image of their flag painted on it. You have to fill out a white visa form. They can’t stamp your passport because there are recognition controversies about the national status of Northern Cyprus. So instead, they stamp the piece of paper.

The northern side of Nicosia is rather different from the southern part. On the North it’s a lot like Turkey, unsurprisingly; the style of the mosques is the same, of course.

It’s also pretty easy to get lost in the northern part, though just like in Damascus you’ll eventually hit one of the old walls and be able to reorient yourself that way. But a couple of times, the twisty streets had me turned around so that I was shocked to come upon buildings that I thought were many blocks behind me. It had a sort of urban “Blair Witch Project” feel to it.

Neither the northern nor the southern part of the old city is especially large, but you can easily spend several hours wandering around the northern part.

When leaving, the Northern Cyprus authorities do ask to see your passport and visa. In most cases they type your passport number into a computer. They let you keep the visa, which is reusable for periods of, I believe, up to 3 months. They do stamp the visa upon exit, though, which would make me somewhat self-conscious about going in multiple times per day; as a result, I’ve only made one trip per day to the North.

The Republic of Cyprus trailer then appears 20 or 30 feet later, and they also want to see your passport and visa before allowing you back in. To my surprise, they didn’t check my rather large bag the first time. I had read that they are very strict about cigarette smuggling and so would examine any tourist bags carefully. That didn’t happen.

Since 2003 this has all been a lot less tense, apparently. My understanding (and this is just what I’ve heard) is that the only people who have problems crossing are the Turkish immigrants in the North who want to cross into the South. The original Turkish Cypriots reportedly have no problem.

I’ve wondered a bit if Nicosia was the inspiration for China Miéville’s much weirder divided place in The City and the City.

fun time in the North – December 28, 2010

Fun time in the North today thanks to Cengiz, who BLOGS HERE, did his Ph.D. in the U.K. at East Anglia, and wrote THIS BOOK in English along with a couple of fictional works in Turkish.

We dipped into Northern Nicosia bohemia for a bit, then had a nice long meal in a village outside Kyrenia, then nargileh (a.k.a. shisha) at the Kyrenia waterfront itself. Lots of talk about the current state of SR.

It was nighttime, of course, but here’s how beautiful Kyrenia is by day. This is the waterfront where we smoked the nargileh.

Cyprus cultural note – December 29, 2010

In the southern part of the Old City there’s a Starbucks that’s just a plain old Starbucks, sure. But out here at the edges of Nicosia, the chain coffee shops function almost like bars. I’ve never seen anything like this before, so if this is an emerging global trend, it has escaped me until now.

What I mean is, chain coffee shops here are all large, airy, fancy, and seem to function as a young adult dating scene. The music is cool. Everyone’s dressed for show. The stuff on the video screens is stuff you would normally see at a bar, such as runway models on infinite loop.

There are at least 4 chain coffee shops in a row out here that fit that description.

more Northern Cyprus -January 2, 2011

Another nice sightseeing tour of the North today, thanks to Cengiz Erdem (see HIS BLOG).

He’s an especially good host when it comes to knowing very good local restaurants that you wouldn’t have a ghost of a chance of finding if you weren’t a long-time local resident.

But of course, we ended up at the Kyrenia marina smoking apple nargileh (shisha) yet again.

via Object-Oriented Philosophy

The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism

Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (editors)

Download Pdf eBook 

Description

Continental philosophy has entered a new period of ferment. The long deconstructionist era was followed with a period dominated by Deleuze, which has in turn evolved into a new situation still difficult to define. However, one common thread running through the new brand of continental positions is a renewed attention to materialist and realist options in philosophy. Among the current giants of this generation, this new focus takes numerous different and opposed forms. It might be hard to find many shared positions in the writings of Badiou, DeLanda, Laruelle, Latour, Stengers, and Zizek, but what is missing from their positions is an obsession with the critique of written texts. All of them elaborate a positive ontology, despite the incompatibility of their results. Meanwhile, the new generation of continental thinkers is pushing these trends still further, as seen in currents ranging from transcendental materialism to the London-based speculative realism movement to new revivals of Derrida. As indicated by the title The Speculative Turn, the new currents of continental philosophy depart from the text-centered hermeneutic models of the past and engage in daring speculations about the nature of reality itself. This anthology assembles authors, of several generations and numerous nationalities, who will be at the center of debate in continental philosophy for decades to come.

Contents

Essays from:
Alain Badiou
Ray Brassier 
Nathan Brown
Levi Bryant 
Gabriel Catren
Manuel DeLanda 
Iain Hamilton Grant
Martin Hägglund 
Peter Hallward 
Graham Harman
Adrian Johnston
Francois Laruelle
Bruno Latour 
Quentin Meillassoux
Reza Negarestani
John Protevi
Steven Shaviro  
Nick Srnicek
Isabelle Stengers
Alberto Toscano 
Slavoj Žižek

 Authors, editors and contributors

Levi R. Bryant is a Professor of Philosophy at Collin College in Frisco, Texas.  He is the author of Difference and Givenness: Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence as well as a number of articles on Deleuze, Badiou, and Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Graham Harman is Associate Provost for Research Administration at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. He has published the following books: Tool-Being (2002), Guerrilla Metaphysics (2005), Heidegger Explained (2007), Prince of Networks (2009), Towards Speculative Realism (2010), L’Objet quadruple (2010), and Circus Philosophicus (2010)

Nick Srnicek is a PhD candidate in International Relations at the London School of Economics. He is currently working towards a dissertation on the general dynamics of global political change, specifically focusing on the relations between contentious social movements, civil society organizations and international institutions. He has also published work in Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy and Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy.

An Interview with Jane Bennett

by Gulshan Khan

Jane Bennett is Professor of Political Theory and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA. In 1986 she received her doctorate in Political Science from the University of Massachusetts. In the following year her dissertation was published with New York University Press under the title Unthinking faith and enlightenment: nature and state in a post-Hegelian era. Her subsequent published books include Thoreau’s Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild (Sage Publications, 1994) and The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton University Press, 2001). Her new book, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. In 1988 Bennett became an Assistant Professor at Goucher College in Baltimore, where she also became the Elizabeth Todd Professor in the year 2000 until 2004 when she moved to John Hopkins. She has been a visiting fellow at universities in Britain and in Australia. Bennett is on the editorial and advisory board of a number of prestigious journals and book series ranging from Political Theory to Critical Horizons.

Bennett co-edited The Politics of Moralizing (Routledge, 2002) with Michael J. Shapiro and co-edited In the Nature of Things: Language, Politics and the Environment (University of Minnesota Press, 1993) with William Chaloupka. She and William E. Connolly are in the beginning stages of co-writing a political theory textbook, Friends of the Earth: Minor Voices in the History of Political Thought. These encounters have contributed to Bennett’s distinctive notion of ‘vital materiality’. Her intellectual trajectory is also indebted to aspects of the work of Lucretius (1995), Spinoza (1949), Diderot (1996), Nietzsche (1994), Deleuze and Guattari (1987), Henry Thoreau (1968) and Bruno Latour (1993). Her notion of ‘vital materiality’ also builds upon Michel Foucault’s notion of bio-power and Judith Butler’s early notion of ‘bodies that matter’. Conversely, the notion of agency that stems from Bennett’s work makes an important and substantive contribution, away from the politics of performativity associated with Butler and towards a politics of nonhuman matter and agency. She invokes a new and different political imaginary outside the Hegelian and psychoanalytic framework of the subject and object/other. In this sense her work shares a ‘subject matter’ as well an intellectual affinity with Elizabeth Grosz’s (1994) Deleuzian inspired works. Following a long tradition of thinkers who have sought to de-centre ‘the human’ (for example, Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault), Bennett’s emphasis on nonhuman matter challenges the ontological privileging of ‘the human’. However, her approach creatively affirms the necessity of human embodiment, understood as one site of agency within and across a multiplicity of other material bodies and formations. Her notion of agency also seeks to avoid reducing politics to morality, which has implications for the predominant analytical framework that is heavily underpinned by a Kantian conception of moral agency with its emphasis on intuitions, duties and obligations. Bennett’s contribution to political theory with its emphasis on nature, ethics, aesthetics, environmentalism and vitalism is inter-laced with a political interest in the literary writings of Kafka, Coetzee, Thoreau and Kundera, on whom she has published several articles and essays. Her work has clear implications for re-thinking our relations to and engagement with the vitality of nature. 

 GULSHAN KHAN: Jane, thanks for agreeing to this interview. I would like to begin by exploring some of the themes you are currently working on in your new book and issues raised by your paper presented at the ‘Stem Cell Identities, Governance and Ethics’ conference at Nottingham University in 2007.1  I will then move onto questions about your theory about the enchantment of modernity, nature and agency.

You are currently working on a book entitled Vibrant Matter: The Political Ecology of Things (2010), and I find myself drawn to your version of post-structuralism, which does not reduce life or matter to the play of language. Instead, you outline a layered notion of reality and in particular you delineate a conception of matter as a lively force present in all things. You seem to want to challenge our received notions of the distinction between nature and culture. For example, in your article ‘The force of things’ (2004) you confront Theodor Adorno’s (1990) point that we cannot make any positive claims about the ‘non-identity’ between the concept and the thing. By way of contrast, you offer an affirmative account of this non-identity understood as the play of lively animate forces. Can I press you to explain your notion of ‘things’ or ‘vital materiality’ and how it differs from contending versions?

JANE BENNETT: I’m trying to take ‘things’ more seriously than political theorists had been taking them. By ‘things’ I mean the materialities usually figured as inanimate objects, passive utilities, occasional interruptions or background context – figured, that is, in ways that give all the active, creative power to humans. I focus on five exemplary ‘things’ in the book: stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal and trash. Our habit of parsing the world into passive matter (it) and vibrant life (us) is what Jacques Rancière (in another context) called a ‘partition of the sensible’. In other words, it limits what we are able to sense; it places below the threshold of note the active powers of material formations, such as the way landfills are, as we speak, generating lively streams of chemicals and volatile winds of methane, or the way omega-3 fatty acids can transform brain chemistry and mood, or the way the differential rates of cooling organize the unpredictable patterns of granite.

My experiment is this: What would the world look and feel like were the life/matter binary to fall into disuse, were it to be translated into differences in degree rather than kind? And how, in particular, would our political analyses of events change were they to acknowledge an elemental, material agency distributed across bodies, human and nonhuman? Who or what would count as a ‘stakeholder’? How would a ‘public’ be constituted? Would politics become less centred around the punitive project of finding individual human agents responsible for the public problems of, say, an electricity blackout or an epidemic of obesity, and more concerned with identifying how the complex human–nonhuman assemblage that’s churning out the negative effect holds itself together – how it endures or feeds itself? Until we do that, political attempts to remedy the problem are likely to be ineffective.

An ‘assemblage’ is an ad hoc grouping of an ontologically diverse range of actants, of vital materialities of various sorts. It is a vibrant, throbbing collective with an uneven topography: some of the points at which its diverse affects and bodies cross paths are more heavily trafficked than others, and thus power is not distributed equally across its surface. An assemblage has no sovereignty in the classical sense, for it is not governed by a central head: no one materiality or type of material has sufficient competence to determine consistently its trajectory or impact. The effects generated by an assemblage are, rather, emergent properties, emergent in that their ability to make something happen (a blackout, a hurricane, a war on terror) is distinct from the sum of the force of each materiality considered alone. An assemblage thus has both a distinctive history of formation and a finite life span.

To be clear: the agency of assemblages of which I speak is not the strong kind of agency traditionally attributed to humans or God. My contention, rather, is that if one looks closely enough, the productive impetus of change is always a congregation. As my friend Ben Corson helped me to see, not only is human agency always already distributed to ‘our’ tools, microbes, minerals and sounds. It only emerges as agentic via its distribution into the ‘foreign’ materialities we are all too eager to figure as mere objects.

It is, I think, the ‘responsibility’ of humans to pay attention to the effects of the assemblages in which we find ourselves participating, and then to work experimentally to alter the machine so as to minimize or compensate for the suffering it manufactures. Sometimes it may be necessary to try to extricate your body from that assemblage, to refuse to contribute more energy to it, and sometimes to work to tilt the existing assemblage in a different direction. In a world where agency is always distributed, a hesitant attitude towards assigning moral blame becomes a virtue. Outrage should not disappear completely, but a politics devoted too exclusively to moral condemnation and not enough to a cultivated discernment of the web of agentic capacities can do little good. A moralized politics of good and evil, of singular agents who must be made to pay for their sins – be they Osama bin Laden or George W. Bush – becomes immoral to the degree that it legitimates vengeance and elevates violence to the tool of first resort. A distributive understanding of agency, then, re-invokes the need to detach ethics from moralism… Read More

via Para_Doxa

Word from Urbanomic that Volume III of Collapse has sold out and is now available for free online. It includes the much-cited original Speculative Realism conference. Find it here.

via Speculative Heresy

Collapse III contains explorations of the work of Gilles Deleuze by pioneering thinkers in the fields of philosophy, aesthetics, music and architecture. In addition, we publish in this volume two previously untranslated texts by Deleuze himself, along with a fascinating piece of vintage science fiction from one of his more obscure influences. Finally, as an annex to Collapse Volume II, we also include a full transcription of the conference on ‘Speculative Realism’ held in London in 2007.

The contributors to this volume aim to clarify, from a variety of perspectives, Deleuze’s contribution to philosophy: in what does his philosophical originality lie; what does he appropriate from other philosophers and how does he transform it? And how can the apparently disparate threads of his work to be ‘integrated’ – what is the precise nature of the constellation of the aesthetic, the conceptual and the political proposed by Gilles Deleuze, and what are the overarching problems in which the numerous philosophical concepts ‘signed Deleuze’ converge?

Contents

ROBIN MACKAY
Editorial Introduction [PDF]
THOMAS DUZER
In Memoriam: Gilles Deleuze 1925-1995 [PDF]
GILLES DELEUZE
Responses to a Series of Questions [PDF]
ARNAUD VILLANI
“I Feel I Am A Pure Metaphysician”: The Consequences of Deleuze’s Remark [PDF]
QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX
Subtraction and Contraction: Deleuze, Immanence and Matter and Memory [PDF]
HASWELL & HECKER
Blackest Ever Black [PDF]
GILLES DELEUZE
Mathesis, Science and Philosophy [PDF]
INCOGNITUM
Malfatti's Decade [[PDF]
JOHN SELLARS
Chronos and Aion: Deleuze and the Stoic Theory of Time [PDF]
ÉRIC ALLIEZ & JEAN-CLAUDE BONNE
Matisse-Thought and the Strict Ordering of Fauvism [PDF]
MEHRDAD IRAVANIAN
Unknown Deleuze [PDF]
J.-H. ROSNY THE ELDER
Another World [PDF]
RAY BRASSIER, IAIN HAMILTON GRANT, GRAHAM HARMAN, QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX
Speculative Realism [PDF]

“Those who are already familiar with Meillassoux’s writings may prefer to start with the interview and then the excerpts from L’Inexistence divine, which is a much weirder book than you might expect. Who actually predicted Meillassoux would say that justice can come about only through an omniscient and omnipotent Christ-like mediator who then abandons all this power voluntarily once the world of justice is achieved? Religion is attacked not for naivete, but for idolatry and blasphemy. There are a number of such surprises in the book, and watch for the mention of Lucifer late in the day. (He could also have named Captain Ahab in that particular passage.)

The child is also a key concept in the book, though I’ll let you wait until Fall 2011 to read about that.

So is beauty, though in a modified Kantian fashion that I personally wouldn’t accept.

Whether you like or dislike The Divine Inexistence, after reading the 27,000 words I translated, you will have to admit it: Meillassoux has guts. Who expected a new French philosopher, born in the 1960′s and coming from a deeply leftist-materialist background, to come out in favor of a (temporarily) omnipotent Messiah paving the way for a God who suddenly comes into existence for no reason whatsoever?” Graham Harman.

I’m now putting the finishing touches on the manuscript, which means trying to make the writing as clear and interesting as possible. With this project I’ve followed my now near-religious custom of banging out a quick first draft, then revising incessantly. It was my failure to do this that made the dissertation take longer than it should have, and I have a visceral horror of that graduate school era of procrastination and alibis, a night from wh … Read More

via Object-Oriented Philosophy

As I’m finishing up this book, I think the biggest mystery in Meillassoux (not the point I disagree with most, which is his defense of the strength of the correlationist argument) is why he has any concept of laws at all. Hyper-chaos, of course, means that anything can happen at any time without reason. The downfall of the principle of sufficient reason should mean that everything is autonomous and disconnected, not linked in any way with anythin

anything else that happens.But that’s not what Meillassoux says. It is only laws that have no sufficient reason. It is at the level of worlds that the transfinite considerations of Cantor make it impossible to call things probable or improbable.

In the intra-worldly sphere, laws do exist. It is true that these laws can change at any moment for no reason, but they are laws nonetheless, however transient and unreliable. If I pull my keys from my pocket and they turn into a dove and fly from the room, this is certainly possible for Meillassoux. But the more I look at his writings, this sort of ‘chaotic’ event can’t happen directly. What must happen is that the laws of nature governing such things must change– which can happen, of course… Read More

via Object-Oriented Philosophy

Drawing from 18 November 2006 "Truth proc...

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This is a ways off yet, but it should be a terrific event:

Call for Papers: International Conference of the Association for Continental Philosophy of Religion

Thinking the Absolute: Speculation, Philosophy and the End of Religion

June 29th – July 1st 2012 Liverpool Hope University, UK

Keynote Speakers to include Catherine Malabou, Iain Hamilton Grant and Levi Bryant

‘The contemporary end of metaphysics is an end which, being sceptical, could only

be a religious end of metaphysics.’
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude. An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London: Continuum, 2008), p.

Meillassoux identifies the ‘turn to religion’ in contemporary continental philosophy with a failure of thinking. The Kantian refusal to think the absolute leads to scepticism about reality in itself. Ironically, this lends itself to ‘fideism’, the decision to project religious meaning on to the unknowable beyond. According to Meillassoux, a philosophy obsessed with mystery becomes the accomplice of irrational faith. The solution is to find ways of once more thinking the absolute in its reality, severed from its dependence upon a knowing subject, or upon language and social norms. At the same time, new possibilities for thinking religion (exemplified by Meillassoux’s own Divine Inexistence) are emerging.
This conference invites proposals which critically consider this speculative turn in philosophy and its implications for thinking about religion. To what ‘end’ is speculation leading? Does it simply announce the closure of religion and its subordination to a philosophy of the absolute, nature or the ‘All’? Can it open new lines for a philosophy of religion which is not wedded to the Kantian horizon? Is speculation itself open to Kierkegaardian critique as yet another move to position and reduce ethical and religious claims, sacrificing the future on the altar of abstract possibility? Does renewed attention to the canon of speculative idealism offer a way beyond the impasse between relativism and dogmatism?
The organisers welcome proposals which examine the roots and extensity of recent speculative thinking, and which critically consider its impact – direct and indirect – on philosophy of religion. Relevant thinkers and themes might include Quentin Meillassoux on God and the absolute, Alain Badiou’s ontology, Catherine Malabou on Hegel and plasticity, Francois Laruelle’s ‘future Christ’, Iain Hamilton Grant on Schelling’s Naturphilosophie and the thinking of the All, Ray Brassier’s nihilism, the impact of object-oriented ontologies on theology and metaphysics. However, we are particularly looking for contributions which creatively use or depart from the speculative turn to offer original insights into the nature and content of the field.

Abstracts of 300 words for 20 minute papers to shakess@hope.ac.uk or haynesp@hope.ac.uk by end of February 2012.

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via Larval Subjects .

The Simon & Schuster Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs...

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Environment and Planning D: Society and Space volume 28 issue 5 has now been published online and is available here.  Among other pieces, it includes essays by Gary Okihiro, Nicola Ansell, Graham Harman and Trevor Paglen.

via Progressive Geographies

“Absence: Stubborn heaven of the neutral”

Image by DerrickT via Flickr

Zamanın Sonu ve Sonsuzluğun Başlangıcı [1] 

Güneşin 4.5 yıl içerisinde sönmesi neticesinde dünyamızdaki yaşamın son bulacağı yönündeki spekülasyonların son dakika haberi olarak manşetlere taşındığı o mübarek gecede Dr. Lawgiverz bir yıl önce dünyadaki tüm televizyon ekranlarının bilinmeyen bir sebepten ötürü beyazlara bürünmesinin olası sebepleri üzerine derin düşüncelere dalmıştı. Hatırlanacağı üzere bir kitap önce televizyonları takiben bir hafta gibi kısa bir zaman zarfında daha başka ekran mekanizmaları da beyazlara bürünmüş ve haberi gazetelerden okuyan bedbaht insanları tedirginliğe maruz bırakmıştı. Söylemeye bile gerek yok belki ama güneşin 4.5 yıl içerisinde söneceğine dair haberler de tıpkı televizyon ekranlarının beyazlaşması gibi, sadece düşünce treni şeffaf bir duvara çarparak raydan çıkan Dr. Lawgiverz’de değil, haberi radyolarından duyan ve o sırada hiçbir şey düşünmekte olmayan, hatta belki de bir yıldır görsel imgelerden mahrum kaldıkları için psikozun eşiğinde olan sıradan insanlarda da muazzam bir şok etkisi yaratmıştı. Dr. Lawgiverz’in kendisi görsel imgelerden yoksun yaşamayı umursamıyordu, zira ne de olsa onun için, ünlü Fransız filozof Gilles Deleuze’ün sözleriyle ifade edecek olursak, beynin kendisi bir ekrandı.

fmhs

                                                                               fmhs

Dr. Lawgiverz “söz uçar, yazı kalır,” sözünü hatırladı. Bu sözün 4.5 yıl içerisinde anlamını yiterecek olması, onu sarfedilmiş diğer tüm sözlerin de anlamını yitireceği düşüncesine sevketti. Ne de olsa güneşin sönmesi neticesinde dünya ve hatta evren dev bir buz kütlesine dönecek ve dünyadaki her şeyle birlikte kitaplar da yok olacaktı. Yazarların ve sanatçıların eserleriyle ölümsüzlüğe kavuştuğu düşüncesinin ne derece saçma olduğu bir kez daha kanıtlanmış olacaktı böylece. Ölümle yazı arasındaki ilişki elbette ki eski çağlardan beri yazarların ve düşünürlerin kafasını kurcalamış bir ilişkiydi. Maurice Blanchot “ölmemek için yazıyorum,” dediğinde büyük ihtimalle kendisini bir Şehrazat olarak duyumsamıştı. Yazılarımız boşluktan gelir ve boşluğa giderdi. İnsanın ölüm karşısındaki aczi teknoloji vasıtasıyla aşılmaya çalışılmış ve bazı bilim adamları teknoloji sayesinde insanın ölümsüz bir varlığa dönüşebileceğini iddia etmekle kalmamış, bunu kanıtlamıştı da. İnsan ezelden beridir yaşamı ölüme karşı bir direniş olarak görmüş, ölümü altetmek için çeşitli icatlar yapmıştı. Örneğin Dr. Lawgiverz’in yakın bir dostu olan ve Recep Sezgili adını taşıyan bir yazar-bilimadamı, insan beyinlerinin küvezlere yerleştirilerek, bedenin geri kalan tüm kısımları yaşamsal fomksiyonlarını yitirse bile beynin kendisinin hayatta tutulabileceğine ve daha sonra yapay bir bedene (avatar-robot?) yerleştirilerek sosyal yaşama dahil edilmek suretiyle yaşamın deneyimsel yönüne kavuşturulması neticesinde ölümsüzlüğün hayata geçirilebileceğine gönülden inanmış ve yııllardır bu yöndeki çalışmalarını hayvanlar üzerinde yaptığı deneylerle neredeyse kanıtlamıştı. Güneşin söneceğine dair spekülasyonlar şimdi işte onun da tüm bu çabalarını anlamsız kılmış, ölümsüzlük hayalini imkânsızlıklar arenasına dahil etmişti. Dr. Lawgiverz işte bu arkadışını telefonla arayıp güneşin söneceği yönündeki iddiaların gerçekliğini sorgulamaya karar verir. Dr. Lawgiverz’in pek fazla arkadaşı yoktu, o yüzden de kadim dostunun telefon numarasını ezbere biliyordu. Antika kategorisine gireli yıllar olmuş eski model siyah telefonun ahizesini kaldırıp numarayı çevirdi ve karşıdan gelecek, Alo, sesini beklemeye koyuldu. Söz konusu ses çok geçmeden gelecekti.

Telefonun sesini duyduğunda Recep Sezgili endişe içerisinde sigara içiyor ve bir yandan da kahvesini yudumluyordu.

Alo?

Kadim dostum selamlar.

Law?, (belli ki dostları Dr. Lawgiverz’e kısaca Law derdi).

Evet, benim. Haberleri duydun mu?

Duymaz olur muyum hiç; sağır sultan bile duydu haberleri.

Ne diyorsun peki, aslı astarı var mıdır bu iddiaların?

Bilmiyorum, bekleyip göreceğiz.

Ne demek bekleyip göreceğiz, güneş gerçekten sönerse ne bunu görecek insan kalacak, ne de görülecek bir şey. Tüm özneler ve tüm nesneler ebediyete intikâl edecek zira.

Ebediyete mi? Ölümden sonra yaşama inandığını bilmiyordum.

İnanmıyorum zaten. Ebediyetin tecrübe edilebilecek bir şey olduğuna inanmıyorum, biliyorsun ben Kantçı’yım.

Yaptığım çalışmalarla ölümsüzlüğün mümkün olduğunu kanıtladığımı göz ardı ediyorsun.

Sanırım henüz acı gerçeği kabullenemedin. Güneş sönerse çalışmalarının anlamını yitireceğinin farkında değil misin?

Üstüme gelme lütfen. Sen de takdir edersin ki insanın tüm yaşamını bir anda sıfırla çarpması pek kolay değil. Şimdi kapatmalıyım, benim de birkaç yeri arayıp bu sönme mevzuunda bazı teferruatlar hakkında bilgi almam gerek. Umarım sadece asılsız bir iddiadan ibarettir bu spekülasyonlar.

Beni de bilgilendir lütfen.

Tamam.

Bay bay.

Bay bay.

Görüldüğü kadarıyla güneşin sönecek olmasından henüz duygusal olarak pek etkilenmemiştir kurbanlarımız. Belki de bunun sebebi henüz olayın ciddiyetini ve gerçekleğini idrak edememiş olmalarındandır. Olaya gayet soğuk bir biçimde bu denli bilimsel yaklaşmaları ancak bunun göstergesi olabilir.

Her neyse, Dr. Lawgiverz’in mahremine geri dönecek olursak görürüz ki her zaman oturduğu o eski model koltukta oturmuş boş gözlerle karşısındaki beyaz duvara bakmaktadır. O duvar Dr. Lawgiverz’in hayallerini yansıttığı bir ekrandır. Ama bu ekranın ebediyete intikâl etmiş ekranlardan farkı sinema dilinde beyaz perde tabir edilen ve/yani dışa görüntü yansıtmaktan ziyade görüntünün üzerine yansıtıldığı, insanın ekran demeye dilinin varmadığı ama işte kelime kıtlığından dolayı kendisini demek durumunda bulduğu ekranlardan olmasıdır. Dr. Lawgiverz şu anda bir şey hayal etmemekte olduğu için söz konusu duvarda hiçbir şey görmemektedir. Ama tabii bu Dr. Lawgiverz’in beyninin içinde bulunulan zaman diliminde tamamen boş olduğu manasını taşımamalıdır, ki nitekim taşımamaktadır da zaten. Zira Dr. Lawgiverz’in beyninde şu anda düşünce tabir edilen olgular dolanmaktadır. Kendimizi bu olguların akışına bırakmadan önce düşünce kavramının doğasına ilişkin birtakım spekülasyonlar yapmayı uygun bulduğumuzu ve müsaadenizle şimdi bu meşakkatli işe girişeceğimizi bilgilerinize sunmak istiyoruz.

Ünlü Portekizli yazar José Saramago, Lizbon Kuşatmasının Tarihi adlı kitabında, Raimundo Silva’nın çalıştığı yayınevindeki düzeltmenlerden sorumlu editörü Dr. Maria Sara’yı görmeye giderken asansörde aklından geçenleri okuyucularına aktardıktan hemen sonra düşünce üzerine şunları söyler:

“Düşünen kişi yalnızca ne düşündüğünü bilir, niye bunu düşündüğünü bilmez, sanırım, doğduğumuz andan başlayarak düşünürüz, ama ilk düşüncemizin, bütün daha sonrakileri doğuran düşüncenin ne olabileceğini bilmeyiz, düşünceler ırmağından yukarıya, ilk kaynağa doğru gittiğimizde, her birimizin en kesin yaşamöyküsü ortaya çıkar ve bunların akışını izleyebilsek, birden yeni bir düşünceye kapılıp bunun peşine takılarak içinde bulunduğumuz güne varabilsek, başka bir yaşamı seçerek bunu kısaltmadığımız ve söz konusu yaşam bir düzeltmeninki olmadığı sürece, herhalde yaşamımızı değiştirebilirdik, o zaman başka bir asansörde, belki de Dr. Maria Sara’dan başka birisiyle görüşmeye gidiyor olurduk.”[2]

Olurdunuz tabii, neden olmayasınız ki? Lâkin ne yazık ki hayat bir roman olmaktan ziyade rastlantıların gerekliliğinden başka mutlak tanımayan paradoksal bir olaylar serisidir. Elbette ki romanlar da görünüşte rastlantıların gerekliliğini yansıtmaya çalışan bir dizi paradoksal hadisenin zuhruyla vücut bulan oluşumlardır. Fakat akılda tutulmalıdır ki romanlardaki rastlantısallıklar sarmalı bir yazar tarafından kaleme alınmış sanal gerçeklikler olduğu için söz konusu rastlantısallıklar yapay banalliklerden başka bir şey değildir. Yazı doğası gereği yalan söylemek durumundadır; hakikatler ancak yazılanlardaki anlam boşluklarından sızan sonsuzluklar olabilir. Her ne kadar Saramago’nun “düşünen kişi yalnızca ne düşündüğünü bilir, niye bunu düşündüğünü bilmez,” sözüne katılsak da düşüncemizde geriye doğru gidebilmemizin gerçek hayatta da geriye gitmemizi mümkün kılmayacağı söylemeye gerek bile bırakmayacak derecede aşikârdır. Roman yazmanın en iyi yanı da işte gerçek hayatta gerçekleşmesi namümkün hadiselerin dil vasıtasıyla mümkün kılınabilmesine zemin hazırlamasıdır. İşte bu gerçekten hareketle biz de şimdi kurbanımız Dr. Lawgiverz’i zamanda yolculuk yapmış ve olmayan bir gelecekten, romanımızın geçtiği zamana gelmiş bir ölümsüz olarak yeniden kurgulamaya karar verdik. Bu senaryoya göre Dr. Lawgiverz romanımızın geçtiği zamandan, yani güneşin 4.5 yıl içerisinde patlayacağını duyuran ve kimilerinin radyodan duyduğu, kimlerinin ertesi gün gazetelerde okuduğu, kimilerininse halk arasında dolanan söylentiler dolayımıyla bilgi sahibi olduğu o mübarek iddianın ortaya çıktığı günden 5 yıl sonrasından gelmiş bir kişidir. Kendisinin bu durumu O’nu bir ölümsüz kılmaktadır, çünkü güneş hakikaten de sönmüş ve hiçliği tüm evrene olmasa bile güneş sistemine hâkim kılmıştır. Dr. Lawgiverz de tüm canlılar gibi bedenen yok olmuş, fakat her ne hikmetse, bizim de bilmediğimiz ve dolayısıyla da açıklayamayacağımız bir sebepten ötürü salt bilinçten ibaret bir varlık olarak (ruh?) şimdiki zamana gelerek bedenini aramaya koyulmuştur. Dr. Lawgiverz henüz bir ölümsüz olduğunu bilmemekle birlikte, yukarıda zikrettiğimiz sebeplerden ötürü kendisi bilse de bilmese de hâlihazırda bir ölümsüz olması hasebiyle bir ölümlü gibi davranmaya devam etmektedir. Zavallı Dr. Lawgiverz…

Life After Apocalypse - Vladimir Manyuhin

Hatırlanacağı üzere düşünce üzerine spekülasyonlarımıza başlamadan önce Deleuze’ün beyni bir ekran olarak nitlendirdiğini söylemiş ve anlatıda bir sapma gerçekleştirmek suretiyle bir ekran olarak beynimizde zuhur eden hadiseleri, Dr. Lawgiverz’in bilimadamı dostunu araması gibi, siz okuyucularımızın beğenisine sunmuştuk. Takdir edersiniz ki araya giren inanılmaz gerçekler anlatımızın artık asla eskisi gibi olamayacağının göstergesidir. İnsan olan her fâninin aklına durgunluk vermesi kuvvetle muhtemel söz konusu gerçekler biz istesek de istemesek de gerçektirler. Biz ölümlülerin bilincinden bağımsız bir hakikat olduğunu hiç kuşku duymaksızın dile getirebilmemize zemin hazırlayan bu gerçekler, hâliyle anlatımızı oluşturan olayların seyrini değiştirerek, bizimle beraber sizi de yeni mecralara ve maceralara doğru sürükleyecektir. Ne mutlu bizlere ve tabii ki sizlere, ki bu akıl almaz hadiselere tanıklık etmek ayrıcalığına sahibiz. Ne güzeldir hayat, ne anlamlıdır tüm bu kelimeler… 

Ölüm düşüncesiyle yatıp ölümsüzlük düşüncesiyle kalkan, yani bir sabah uyandığında kendini bir ölümsüz olarak bulan Dr. Lawgiverz, az önce de belirttiğimiz gibi, gelecekten geldiğinin farkında değildi önceleri. Lâkin sonraları, bilinmeyen bir sebepten ötürü idrak kabiliyetinde yaşanan muazzam bir patlama neticesinde farkına varacaktı bu hakikatin. Gelecekten gelmiş olduğunun idrakiyle önce paniğe, sonra ise sırasıyla telâş, endişe ve son olarak da sevince, neşeye kapılan Dr. Lawgiverz, kendini içinde bulduğu durumdan, yani şimdiki zamanda var olan bir geleceklilik durumundan bir an evvel çıkması gerekeceğinden habersizdi anlatımızın bu aşamasında. Aslında hem önemli ve saygın bir bilimadamı, hem de bilim-kurgu-gerilim romanlarının ölmeden ölümsüzleşen meşhur yazarı Recep Sezgili’in yazdığı bir bilim-kurgu-gerilim romanının başkahramanı olan Dr. Lawgiverz, şimdiki zamanda var olduğu süre içerisinde bitmek bilmez bir deja-vu’nun aynı anda hem öznesi, hem de nesnesi olarak duyumsayacaktı kendini.

Hepimizin takdir edeceği üzere, roman kahramanlarının ete kemiğe bürünüp şimdiki veya gelecek zamanda var olması ne görülmüş bir şeydi, ne de duyulmuş. Lâkin akılda tutulmalıdır ki şu anda bizler de bir romanın içerisindeyiz ve söylemeye gerek bile yoktur ki romanların zamanı gerçek zamandan farklıdır. Romanlar sanal zamanlarda vuku bulan sanal hadiselerden meydana gelen oluşumlar olduğu için elbette ki gerçek zamanlarda gerçekleşen hadiselerden farklı hadiseler ihtiva edecek ve netice itibarı ile de gerçek hayattakinden farklı mantık kurallarının işlerlik kazandığı oluşumlar olacaklardır. Edebiyat ve hayat arasındaki fark konusunda kestiğimiz bu ahkâmlara anlatımızın ilerleyen bölümlerinde yeniden yer vermek üzere şimdilik ara verip Dr. Lawgiverz ile Recep Sezgili arasındaki ilişkinin ayrıntılarına geçecek olursak diyebiliriz ki bu ikisi birbirlerinin ruh ikizi olmaktan ziyade, aynı madeni paranın iki farklı yüzüdürler. Zira Recep Sezgili, Dr. Lawgiverz’i olmak istediği ve/fakat asla olamayacağını bildiği bir karakter olarak kurgulamıştır. Denebilir ki bu ikisi arasındaki ilişki Fight Club(Dövüş Kulübü) filmindeki Tyler Durden ve Anlatıcı(Jack) arasındaki ilişki gibidir. Hatırlayacaksınız orada kendine Jack diye hitap eden Anlatıcı hayatından hiç memnun olmayan, bunalımlı, bastırılmış ve ezik bir tip olarak sürdürdüğü yaşamdan bıkıp usanmış ve olmak istediği fakat olamadığı agresif, kendine güvenen, özgürlükçü, maskülin bir tip olan Tyler Durden’ı yaratmıştı. Tyler Durden, Jack’in alter-ego’su olarak Jack’in ego’sunu yerden yere vuran kapitalist sisteme karşı baş kaldıran ve hatta bununla da kalmayıp adeta savaş açan anarşist kuvvet formunda zuhur ediyordu. Her neyse, işte Dr. Lawgiverz de tıpkı Tyler Durden gibi, Recep Sezgili’nin bastırılmış ve/fakat bendini sığmayıp taşan bir dere gibi şimdiki zamanla gelecek zaman arasındaki duvarı yıkarak Recep Sezgili’nin hayatına nüfuz eden kural tanımaz, yıkıcı kuvetti. İflah olmaz bir nihilist olan Dr. Lawgiverz bir dizi spekülasyonla Recep Sezgili’nin gerçeklik algısını alt-üst edecek ve yıllardır kendisini tüketen kapitalizme karşı savaş açmasını mümkün kılacaktı.

O Ölümsüz Özne

Dikkatli okuyucularımızın gözünden kaçmamış olduğuna yürekten inandığımız üzere Dr. Lawgiverz sık sık derin düşüncelere dalan bir düşün adamıydı. Adı kurgu açısından gereksiz bir üniversitenin felsefe bölümünde ontoloji (varlıkbilim) dersleri veren ve/fakat son zamanlarda “şiddetli ruhsal çalkantılar” geçirmekte olduğu gerekçesiyle askıya alınan bir felsefe doktoruydu. Sonsuzlukla karşı karşıya kalan beynin derin bir sarsıntı geçirmesinin kaçınılmaz olduğunu Kant’tan beri hepimiz biliyoruz. Hatırlanacağı üzere Kant sonsuzluğun sınırına vardığında geri adım atmış ve yazmaya on yıl ara vermişti. Dr. Lawgiverz de tıpkı işte Kant gibi yaşamdan ölüme, kendinde-şey’den sonsuzluğa, ve hatta düşünecek bir özne olmadığı takdirde düşüncenin var olup olamayacağına kadar her şeyi düşünürdü. O’nun hakkında söylenebilecek daha pek çok şey var aslında, ama biz şimdilik tüm bunları bir tarafa bırakıp Dr. Lawgiverz’in kendini hangi felsefi akıma ait hissettiği konusuna yönelteceğiz dikkatimizi.

Dr. Lawgiverz kendini gerçekçi bir spekülatör olarak görüyor ve Spekülatif Gerçekçilik (Speculative Realism) adlı yeni bir felsefi akıma öncülük eden spekülatif gerçekçilerin grubuna ait hissediyordu sevgili okur. Her ne kadar bahse konu spekülatif gerçekçilerin bazıları özellikle adlandırmanın gerçekçilik kısmından pek hoşnut olmasalar da tıpkı bizim gibi onlar da gerçekçilik kelimesini ikâme edecek bir başka sözcüğün yokluğu sebebiyle bu sorunlu adlandırmaya boyun eğmek zorundaydılar. Meselâ Ray Brassier, terimi icat eden kendisi olmasına rağmen son zamanlarda kendisiyle yapılan bir röportajda gerçekçilik (Realism) kelimesinden duyduğu hoşnutsuzluğu açıkça dile getirmiştir.

Anlatımızın bu noktasında etnik kökeni, dini, dili ne olursa olsun bazı okuyucularımızın şu tür sorular sorması kuvvetle muhtemeldir: “Peki ama bir ölümsüz sabah uyanınca ne yapar? Ölümlüler gibi dişlerini fırçalayıp yüzünü mü yıkar? İşeme ve dışkılama işlemlerini gerçekleştirir mi? Yoksa ölümsüzlerin bu tür ihtiyaçları olmaz mı?” Sanırız bu tür sorular sormakta hiçbir sakınca görmeyen meraklı ruhlar bizim ölümsüz diye nitelendirdiğimiz varlığın ne mene bir şey olduğunu idrak etmekte sorun yaşayan okuyucularımıza ait ruhlardır. Sayfalardır anlatmaya çalıştığımız üzere bizim ölümsüzlerimiz fiziksel olarak değil, zihinsel olarak ölümsüz şahsiyetlerdir. Denebilir ki biz bahse konu şahsiyetleri birer ölümsüz olarak nitelendirirken Kant’ın ortaya attığı  kurucu bir yanılsamaya başvurmaktayızdır. Belli ki ölümsüz derken bizim kastettiğimiz varlıkların ortak özelliği, var oluşlarını kurucu bir yanılsama üzerine inşa etmiş olmalarıdır. Ölümlülerin dünyasına birer ölümsüzün gözleriyle bakabilmek için aşkıncı düşünümü bir yaşam biçimi haline getirmiş olan ölümsüzlerin yemek yemeden, su içmeden, uyumadan, işemeden, sıçmadan var olabilmeleri mümkün değildir. Yeri gelmişken belirtmeliyiz ki ölümsüzler fiziksel olarak ölümlülerden farksız olsalar da, bilinç düzeyinde ölümlülerle en ufak bir benzerlikleri yoktur. Tıpkı ölümlüler gibi ölümsüzler de fiziksel olarak yorulurlar, lâkin ölümlülerden farklı olarak ölümsüzlerde zihinsel yorgunluk asla mümkün değildir.

Benim için de muamma olan bir sebepten ötürü bu noktada birinci tekil şahısa geri dönmenin yerinde olacağına kanaat getirdim. Bununla beraber şunu da itiraf etmeliyim ki az önce yanıtlamaya çalıştığım bu basit soruların varlığı ve onları yanıtlamanın zorluğu beni böyle bir roman yazmaya girişmekle son derece çılgınca, gerçekleşmesi neredeyse imkânsız bir işe kalkıştığım düşüncesine sevk ediyor sevgili lânetlenmiş okur. Ama yazmalıyım, yapmalıyım bunu, zira ben Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson, Deleuze, Badiou gibi düşünürlerin insanötesi varlık koşulları yaratmak yolunda çıktıkları o meşakkatli ve/fakat bir o kadar da zevkli yolculuğu her ne pahasına olursa olsun sürdürmeye vakfetmiş bir insanım kendimi. Kant’ı aşma çabalarının bir ürünü olan ölümsüzlük teorilerini mercek altına almak suretiyle ölümlülüğün ötesindeki bir varoluş biçiminin hayata geçirilmesi sürecinde son dönemlerde öne çıkan Spekülatif Gerçekçilik adlı felsefi akımın baş aktörleriyle el ele, hatta kol kola yürümeliyim nereye varacağı bilinmeyen, engellerle dolu bu engebeli yolda. Tehlikelerle dolu bu garip yolculuğun bir dizi gerçekçi spekülasyon vasıtasıyla gerçekleşeceğini ise bilmiyorum söylemeye gerek var mı, ama gene de söylüyorum işte, belki vardır diye.   

Bu arada Dr. Lawgiverz ise son derece gerilmiştir. Elbette ki bu gerginliğin sebebi sadece acıkmış olması değildi. Tüm insanların 4.5 yıl içerisinde aynı anda ölecek olmasıydı bahse konu gerginliğin sebebi. Bu noktada belirtmemiz gereken bir başka önemli husus da sadece Dr. Lawgiverz’in değil, dünyadaki tüm insanların son derece gerilmiş olduğu gerçeğidir. İnsanlık o kadar gerilmiştir ki adeta işte evrenin âhengi bozulmuş, kâinata sonsuz bir gerginlik hâkim olmuştur. Astronomlar Samanyolu’nun hareketlerinde bir gariplik sezinlemekte, dünyanın çevresinde yıllardır dönmekte olan ve işlevlerini bir süreden beridir yitirmiş bulunan uydular anlamsız rota değişimleri sergilemektedir. Ünlü filozof Platon’un âleme ibret olsun diye hakikati gökteki yıldızlar arasında ararken önündeki çukuru görmeyip içine düşen düşünürden söz ettiği o anlamlı ankedotu hatırlayarak bakış ve düşüncelerimizi uzaydan dünyaya yöneltecek olursak görürüz ki bir anda gelen bu güneş patlaması haberi insanların büyük bir kısmında tarifi imkânsız bir akıl yitimine, yani çıldırışa, bir başka deyişle delirme tabir edilen ruhsal duruma sebep olmuştur. Nasıl olsa 4.5 yıl içerisinde öleceklerinin idrakiyle insanlar, “ha bugün öldüm, ha yarın,” düşüncesiyle tüm tabuları yıkma ve ahlâki kuralları hiçe sayma, ve tüm normlardan sapma eğilimi içerisine girmiştir. 4.5 yıl içerisinde ölecek olmaları gerçeğine tamamen tezat oluşturacak bir biçimde adeta birer ölümsüz gibi yaşamaya başlayan insanlar aralarındaki tüm ideolojik ve siyasi ayrımları bir çırpıda silip atmış, nihilizmi bir yaşam biçimi olarak benimsemiş ve anarşizmin bayrağını yaşamlarının gönderine çekmiştir. Kaos, karmaşa, anlamsızlık ve sebepsiz şiddet her yerdedir. Bunlara ilâveten, birbirini daha önce hiç görmemiş onlarca insanın bir araya gelerek düzenlediği çılgınca seks partileri günün normu hâline gelmiştir. Tüm bunlar yetmezmiş gibi toplu intiharı bir kurtuluş olarak gören ve bunu kitlelere zorla benimsetmeye çalışan gruplar da türemiştir. Dahası, devletler de bu gidişe bir dur demek için ne bir sebep görmekte, ne de bu yönde bir istek duymaktadır. Bilâkis, devlet adamları da ölümlülüklerinin idrakiyle ayakları yere basan insanlar hâline gelmiş ve herkes gibi birer insan olduklarını hatırlayarak az önce sözünü ettiğimiz seks partilerinde başrollerde yer almaya başlamıştır. Hatta bahse konu seks partileri bazı ülkelerde devlet eliyle düzenlenmeye bile başlanmıştır. Bu acı gerçekten para tabir ettiğimiz illet de nasibini almış ve ölümlülük karşısında önemini yitirerek har vurulup harman savrulmaya başlanmıştır. Sanırız bu noktada kapitalizmin ölümle ilişkisini mercek altına almak yolunda keseceğimiz bazı ahkâmlar konuya açıklık getirecektir. Her ne kadar bazı okuyucularımız, değinmek zorunda olduğumuz bu teorik konuları sıkıcı bulacak olsa da, bizler birtakım siyasi mesajlar vermek kaygısı taşıdığımızı açıkça dile getirmekten çekinmiyoruz. Didaktik olmakla itham edilmek pahasına, kimin söylediği meçhul “gerektiğinde didaktik de olunmalıdır” sözünden hareketle ölümün kapitalizmle ilişkisi konulu bir konferansa yönlendiriyoruz şimdi anlatımızı.

Adı kurgu açısından gereksiz bir üniversitenin devasa kongre merkezinde toplanan ve güneşin sönmek suretiyle insanlığı, hayvanlığı, bitkiliği, nesneliği, hatta işte güneş sistemindeki tüm varlığı yok edeceği yönündeki  iddiayı bir grup kapitalistin kapitalizmin gücüne güç katmak ve eğlence sektörüne ivme kazandırmak maksadıyla ortalığa yaydığına inanan ve dünyadaki bu kaygı verici gidişata kayıtsız kalmamayı seçen bir grup komünistin düzenlediği “Ölüm ve Kapitalizm” adlı konferansın ilk konuşmacısı, akıl ihsan olunmuş her fâninin aklına durgunluk vermesi kuvvetle muhtemel olsa da Dr. Lawgiverz’di ey üstündeki lâneti yazgısı belleyen şaşkın okur. Akla zarar hakikatlerin birbiri ardına zuhruyla kasılan bilinçlerin daha fazla kasılmasına gönlümüz razı olmadığından, Dr. Lawgiverz’in konuşmasının anlatımızın kurgusu açısından önem arz etmeyen yanlarını budayıp, sadece hayati ehemmiyeti haiz bazı noktaları iktibas etmenin yerinde olacağını düşündük. Eminiz ki pek çok okuyucumuz bu kararımızı sevinçle karşılamış, içlerine dolan salakça sevinçle ne yapacaklarını bilmez bir vaziyette taklalar atmaya başlamıştır. Kararımızdan hoşnut olmayan okuyucularımıza ise elimizden herkesi tatmin etmenin mümkün olmadığı gerçeğini bir an olsun akıllarından çıkarmamalarını salık vermekten başka bir şey gelmediğini üzüntüyle belirtmek isteriz. Kendilerine burada sizlerin huzurunda söz veririz ki bir dahaki sefere de şimdi sevinç çığlıkları ve taklalar atan okuyucularımıza vereceğiz aynı salığı. Böylece her iki gruptaki okuyucularımızı da eşit derecede ihya etmiş olacağız sanırız. Her neyse, kendini hangi gruba dahil hissederse hissetsin, hiçbir okuyucumuzu sanrılarımızla meşgul etmek istemediğimiz için lâfı fazla uzatmadan Dr. Lawgiverz’in konferansta sarfettiği ibret verici sözlere geçelim isterseniz şimdi hep birlikte.

Dr. Lawgiverz’den Nihilistik Spekülasyonlar

“Değerli konuklar, saygıdeğer yoldaşlar ve sevgili çocuklar,

Konuşmama başlamadan önce hepinize hoş geldiniz demek istiyorum: Hoşgeldiniz! (Yoğun alkış dalgası….Alkışlar…..Alkış yoğunluğunda azalma…. Tek tük alkış….. Sessizlik). Bildiğiniz gibi bugün burada çok önemli bir konuyu mercek altına almak için toplandık. Düşmanın maskesini düşürmek ve dünyamızda oynanan bu çirkin oyunu sonlandırmak gayesini taşıdığımızı bilmiyorum söylemeye gerek var mı. Ama aranızda aramıza yeni katılmış kişilerin de olabileceğini göz önünde bulundurarak, gene de söylüyorum işte, belki vardır diye.

mad birds (deli kuşlar)  böyle küçük bir karenin içine insan dahil hangi hayvanı hapsetseler delirirdi zaten… benim anlamadığım neden akıl ihsan olunmuş bir fâninin, yani bir insanın, böyle bir gif yapmak ihtiyacı duyduğudur… belki de biz bunları yazıp bu iletişimi kuralım diye yapmıştır, kim bilir… aslında anlamsız görünen her şey biz hakkında konuşmaya başladığımız anda anlam kazanır, her ne kadar o şey hakkında son derece anlamsız lâflar sarfetsek de… belki de bir şeyin anlam kazanabilmesinin temel koşulu o şeyin maddi veya manevi dünyada bir etki yaratmasıdır, yarattığı etki hiçbir amaca hizmet etmese de… bildğimiz kadarıyla her etki bir amaca hizmet eder ama, hizmet edilen amacın ne olduğunu biz ölümlüler bilsek de bilmesek de… kendinde-şey (in-itself) olarak bir nesnenin anlamlı olması mümkün müdür acaba? meselâ yazılmış ve/fakat bir yayınevinin deposunda veya bir kütüphanenin ambarında tozlanıp pirelere, güvelere yem olmaya mahkûm olmuş bir kitap, yani hiç kimsenin okuması mümkün olmayan bir kitap kendi içinde, yani dış dünyadan bağımsız bir anlam ihtiva eder mi? hakkında konuşulmayan şeyler var mıdırlar? elbette ki vardırlar, ama bu varlık anlamlı mıdır? anlamlıysa bu anlamın kaynağı nedir? anlamın kaynağı var mıdır? varsa bu kaynak dil midir? yoksa bu kaynak yok mudur? yoksa bu kaynak dil midir? dilse bu kaynak sanal mıdır? sanalsa bu kaynak var mıdır? varsa bu kaynak sanal mıdır? sanalsa bu kaynak sonsuzluğun ta kendisi midir? öyleyse sonsuzluk hiçlikle aynı şey midir? aynı şeyse hiçlik varlık mıdır? varlıksa hiçlik yok mudur? yoksa hiçlik var mıdır? varsa hiçlik yok mudur? varsa da hiçlik yoksa da hiçlik etc…etc… bu gif ve bu kuşlar hakkında bilmiyorum başka ne söylenebilir, söylenebilirse eğer bir şey…  (via lucyphermann, sinatrablue)       

Her neyse, nesnelerin sadece birbirleriyle bağlantıları bağlamında bir anlam kazanmasının şart olmadığını, bilâkis bunun son derece tesadüfi ve tarihsel süreç tarafından koşullandırılmış felsefi bir varsayım olduğunu anladığımda, kendinde-şey’in, yani varlığı hiçbir şeyle ilişki içerisinde olmasına bağlı olmayan, varlığını çevresinden bağımsız ve çevresine kayıtsız bir biçimde sürdürebilen nesnelerin var olabileceğini de anlamış oldum. Zira herhangi bir nesne insandan bağımsız olarak düşünülebiliyorsa, insan da nesnelerden bağımsız olarak düşünülebilir demekti, demektir. Zamanın ve uzamın birbirine dönüşerek tarih-dışı bir var oluşun, yani bir ölümsüzün, zuhur etmesini mümkün kılacak alanı yaratması ise elbette ki yalnızca teoride mümkündür. Lâkin zaten biz de burada ölümsüzlüğü kuramsallaştırmaktan başka bir şey yapmakta olduğumuzu iddia etmiyoruz. Söz konusu ölümsüzlük teorisinin pratikte ne işe yarayacağına ve/yani böyle bir kuramsallaştırma girişiminin politik arenada ne anlama geleceğine ise spekülasyonlarımızın ilerleyen aşamalarında değineceğimizi şimdiden belirtelim; belirtelim ki sabırsız okuyucularımız sabretmeyi öğrenmek yolunda adımlar atmaya şimdiden başlasın. Hatta değinmekle de kalmayacak, liberal-demokratik-militarist-kapitalizm içerisinde yaşayan bir ölümlünün, içinde yaşadığı sistemi değiştirebilmek için kendini neden ölümlü bir nesne olarak görmekten ve göstermekten vazgeçerek, ölümsüz bir özne olarak görmeye ve göstermeye başlaması gerektiğini Alain Badiou’nun hakikat teorisi dolayımıyla açıklamaya çalışacağımızı da sözlerimize ekleyelim; ekleyelim ki hayata geçirmeye cüret ve teşebbüs ettiğimiz olayın boyutları bir nebze olsun açıklığa kavuşsun. Ama tüm bunlardan önce yapmamız gereken daha başka şeyler var; meselâ az önce net bir şekilde adlandırmaktan kaçındığımız spekülasyon türünün adlandırılması gibi…

Öncelikle bu adlandırma işlemini bizden önce gerçekleştirmiş olanlar olduğunu teslim etmeliyiz. Quentin Meillassoux bahse konu spekülasyon biçimine Spekülatif Maddecilik demeyi seçerken, Ray Brassier benzer bir spekülasyon türüne Spekülatif Gerçekçilik demeyi seçmiştir.  İkisinde de aynı kalan sözcüğün Spekülatif sözcüğü olduğu gözden kaçacak gibi değil. Belki de işte bu yüzden biz de az önce spekülasyon terimini kendimizden emin bir biçimde zikretmiş olmamıza rağmen bunun ne tür bir spekülasyon olacağını dillendirmemeyi seçmişizdir, kim bilir.

2007 yılında Londra’daki Goldsmiths Üniversitesi’nde Ray Brassier, Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, ve Iain Hamilton Grant’ın konuşmacı olarak katılımıyla düzenlenen bir konferansta Brassier tarafından ortaya atılan spekülatif gerçekçilik kavramı insan aklından, düşüncesinden, bilincinden bağımsız gerçeklikler ve insandan bağımsız kendinde-şeyler olduğunu ortaya koyan felsefi bir akımdır. Gerek Kıta Felsefesi’nden, gerekse de Analitik Felsefe’den radikal bir kopuş gerçekleştirerek Kant ve Hegel’in uzantısı olan tüm felsefi yaklaşımların, Meillassoux’un Sonluluktan Sonra(After Finitude) adlı kitabında ortaya koyduğu deyimle bağlılaşımcılığın(correlationism) dünyadan bağımsız bir insan veya insandan bağımsız bir dünya tasavvur etmekten aciz olduğunu iddia eden spekülatif gerçekçilik hem yeni bir düşünce alanı, hem de yeni biri düşünme biçimi yaratması bağlamında önem arz etmektedir. İnsan bilincinden bağımsız kendinde-şeyler’in var olduğu noktasında birleşen Brassier, Meillassoux, Grant ve Harman’ın felsefeleri arasında pek çok fark da mevcuttur aslında. Ama biz şimdilik birleştikleri bu ortak nokta üzerinden tartışacağız spekülatif gerçekçileri, özellikle de Meillassoux ve Brassier’i.

Meillassoux’nun Sonluluğun Sonu’ndan bir yıl sonra yayımladığı Hiçliğin Çözülüşü(Nihil Unbound) adlı kitabında Brassier, Heidegger ve Deleuze’ün zaman ve ölüm okumalarının eleştirisi ve Lyotard’ın Güneş Felaketi(Solar Catastrophe) makalesinin bir yeniden okuması üzerinden güneşin 4.5 milyar yıl içerisinde sönerek dünyadaki yaşamı sona erdireceği gerçeğinin insan bilincinden ve düşüncesinden bağımsız bir gerçeklik olarak görülmesi gerektiğini ve bunun da hepimizin hâlihazırda yaşayan birer ölü olduğumuz anlamına geldiğini öne sürmektedir. Her iki yazarda da karşımıza çıkan ortak özellik kendinde-şey olarak mutlağın(Meillassoux) ve hakikatin(Brassier) var olabileceği iddiasını taşıyor oluşlarıdır. Benim için önemli olansa kendinde-şey olarak ölümsüzlüğün veya sonsuzluğun, ölümlü ve sonlu bir varlık olan insandan bağımsızlaşan kimliksiz ve kişiliksiz bir bilincin a-nihilistik spekülasyonları dolayımıyla politik bir amaç için kullanıma sokulabileceği, sokulması gerektiği gerçeğidir. Badiou’nun hakikat ve olay teorisinden hareketle, bir ölümsüzün gözüyle ve bilinciyle tasvir edilen ölümlülerin dünyası mevcut-yapı içerisinde gedikler açmak suretiyle yeni hakikatlerin zuhur etmesini sağlayacaktır kanaatindeyim.

İnsanın ölümlü bir varlık olduğu ise, söylenmesi bile gerekmeyen bariz bir durumdur. Ölümlü bir varlık olan insan, olmadığı bir şeye, yani bir ölümsüze dönüşmeye heveslidir. Çeşitli devirlerde çeşitli şekiller alan söz konusu ölümsüzlük hevesinin doruğa çıktığı Romantizm dönemi günümüzde kapitalizm tarafından yeniden diriltilmeye çalışılmakta ve bu yolda çeşitli gıda ürünleri ve hap formuna sokulmuş bitkiler piyasaya sürülmektedir. Zararı herkes tarafından bilinen alkollü içeceklerin üzerinde bile “hayat güzeldir,” “hayata içelim,” şeklinde ibareler görmek mümkün hale gelmiştir. Slavoj Zizek’in Nietzsche’nin “insan hiçbir şey istememektense, hiçliğin kendisini ister,” sözünden hareketle verdiği Diet-Cola ve kafeinsiz kahve örnekleri insanın hiçlik istencini, olmayana duyduğu arzuyu gayet net şekilde deşifre eder niteliktedir. İçi boşaltılmış, varlık sebebinden arındırılmış ürünler sağlıklı yaşama giden yolu asfaltlama çalışmalarında kullanılmaktadır. Lâkin akılda tutulmalıdır ki ister şekerli, ister şekersiz olsun, kola son derece zararlı bir üründür ve sadece şekerden ve kafeinden arındırlmış olması onun sağlıklı bir içecek olduğu manasını taşımaz. Tüm bunların ölümsüzlük konusuyla ilgisi ise şudur: Ölümsüzlük bir ölümlü için olmayan bir şeydir. Ölümsüzlük ölümden arındırılmış yaşamdır. Gelinen noktada kapitalizm insanlara ölümsüz yaşam vaad etmektedir. Matematiksel adı sonsuzluk olan ölümsüzlük ölümlülüğün bittiği yerde, yani ölünen noktada başlar. Sonsuzluk kavramının başı sonu olmayan bir süreçten ziyade, başı sonu olmayan bir durumu anlattığını akılda tutarsak diyebiliriz ki ölümsüzlük ancak sonsuz boyuttaki bir çelişkinin dünyamıza yansımasıyla zuhur edebilir. Sonsuzluk veya ölümsüzlük birer süreç olmaktan ziyade birer durumdur, çünkü süreçler başı sonu olan sürerdurumlarken, durumlar durağan ve zaman dışı olgulardır. Zamandan ve uzamdan bağımsız bir varoluşsal durum olan ölümsüzlük felsefe tarihi boyunca ölümlü insan bilincinin tamamen dışında konumlanmış bir kendinde-şey olarak düşünülmüştür. Oysa biz biliyoruz ki aslında ölümsüzlük insanı çevreleyen değil, bilakis insanın çevrelediği bir boşluktur. Şu anda ölümsüzlüğü düşünmekte olduğumuza ve/fakat bu söylediklerimizin doğruluğunu kanıtlayacak hiçbir dayanağımız olmadığına göre demek ki ölümsüzlüğün düşüncemizin kendisini sürdürebilmek için kendi içinde yarattığı bir boşluk olduğunu teslim etmeliyiz. Boşluklar olmayan varlıkların yokluğunu doldurduğuna göre diyebiliriz ki düşünmek ölüme ara vermek, yaşamda boşluklar yaratmaktır. Ölümlü ne demektir? Bir gün ölecek olan, yani ölümden kurtulmuş olmayan. Peki ölümsüz ne demektir? Artık ölmesi mümkün olmayan, zira hâlihazırda ölmüş olan, bu vesileyle de işte ölümden arınmış olan.

Ölümlülüğü sömürmek suretiyle gücüne güç katan liberal-demokratik-militarist-kapitalizmin ölümün ortadan kalkmasıyla kendi içine dönük bir patlamaya, çökmeye(contraction) maruz kalacağından hareketle diyebiliriz ki yaşamı olumsuzlamaktan ziyade olduğu gibi olumlayan materyalist bir gerçekçiliğe, yani aşkınsallığa öykünen, ölüm dürtüsü ve yaşam dürtüsünün tahakkümü altındaki kapitalist-gerçekçilikten, kendinde-şey olarak öteki’nin içkin olduğu komünist-gerçekçiliğe doğru bir yönelim hem mümkündür, hem de gerekli.”  

Yokluk Olarak Varlık

Bu yazılar şu anda okunmakta olduğuna göre demek ki bu yazıları yazan, belirli bir zamanda ve belirli bir uzamda konumlanmış bir özne söz konusu olmuştur. Söz konusu öznenin kendini anlatmaktan ziyade O diye adlandırdığı bir hiçliği anlatıyor oluşu ise ancak yazının öznesinin kendini nesneleştirerek olmayan bir özneye dönüştürmek çabası içerisinde olduğunu gösterir. Peki ama söz konusu özneyi içinde bulunduğu çabadan ayıran nedir? Öznenin kendisi olmadan içinde olunabilecek bir çaba da olamayacağına göre, neden bu özne kendisinden bağımsız bir çaba olabilirmiş gibi kendisini çabanın nesnesi olarak göstermek ihtiyacı içerisindedir? İşte bu soruyu yanıtlamak maksadıyla, bir nesne olarak yazarın kendisi üzerine ahkâm kesebilmek için kendisini aşan bir özneye dönüşmesi gerektiğini dile getiren Kant ve bir nesne olarak yazarın kendisi üzerine ahkâm kesebilmek için kendisini aşan bir özneye dönüşmesi gerekmediğini, zira kendisini bir nesne olarak dile getiren söz konusu yazarın kendisini aşan o özneyi zaten hâlihazırda içinde barındırdığını kaleme alan Hegel’in felsefeleri üzerine bir takım spekülatif düşünceler üretmeye niyetlenen ve bu yolda Kant ile Hegel’in karşılaştırmalı bir okumasına girişmesi gerektiği aşikâr olan O’nun dünyasına giriyoruz şimdi hep birlikte: Ben, Sen, O, Biz, Siz, Onlar…

O, Gilles Deleuze’ün deyimiyle bu kitabın yazarının kavramsal personası, Fernando Pessoa’nın anlam dünyası bağlamında ise söz konusu yazarın heteronomik kişiliği, yani dış-kimliğidir. Olmayan bir şey olarak var olan O bu kitabın yazarına içkin bir dışarıda konumlanmıştır, çünkü O bir ironisttir. Bu kitabın yazarının içindeki bir dışarı, veya işte bir şey olduğunu zanneden bir hiçin içindeki hiçbir şey olan O, kitabın aynı zamanda hem nesnesi, hem de öznesidir. Belli ki bu kitabın ironist yazarının kavramsal personasının, yani O’nun derdi, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Derrida, Badiou ve Zizek gibi düşünürlere de dert olmuş olan aşkınlık(transcendence) ve içkinlik(immanence) arasındaki ilişkidir. Öncelikle Kant ve Hegel’in felsefeleri arasındaki benzerliklerden ziyade farklılıklara değinmek istiyor O. Daha sonra ise konuyu güneşin 4.5 yıl içerisinde söneceği yönündeki spekülasyonlara bağlamaya çalışacak büyük ihtimalle. O, lâfı fazla uzatmadan diyebilir ki Kant’ın aşkınsal(transcendental) idealizmini Hegel’in spekülatif idealizminden ayıran fark, Kant’ın kendinde-şey’i tarif edebileceğimizi, Hegel’inse kendinde-şey’den ancak neticeler çıkarabileceğimizi dile getirmesinden kaynaklanan bir farktır. Kendi anlam dünyamız bağlamında yeniden yazacak olursak diyebiliriz ki Kant bizim birer ölümlü olarak ölümsüzlüğü tarif edebileceğimizi söylerken, Hegel ölümsüzlük düşüncesinden ancak ölümlülüğümüzün anlamı hakkında çıkarımlar yapabiliriz demektedir. Zira Kant’a göre ölümsüzlük ölümlülüğü çevreleyen bir durumken, Hegel için ölümsüzlük ölümlülüğün içindeki bir boşluktur. Bir başka deyişle Kant için ölümsüzlük özneyi aşkınken, Hegel için ölümsüzlük özneye içkindir.

Ne aşkınsal idealizmi, ne de spekülatif idealizmi tasvip eden O henüz adlandıramadığı, fakat tanımlayabildiği yeni bir spekülasyon biçiminin şemasını çizmeye yeltenmekten başka çaresi olmadığını çok geçmeden idrak edecektir. O’nun tasavvur edebildiği kadarıyla söz konusu spekülasyon biçimi Kant’ın ve Hegel’in idealizmlerinden radikal bir kopuş gerçekleştirerek kendinde-şey’in düşünceden ve bilgiden bağımsız olarak var olabileceğini kuramsallaştırmaya yönelik olacaktır. Aşkınsal olmayan bir dışarı ve içkin olmayan bir içeri, şeklinde özetleyebileceğimiz kendinde-şey’in konumunun zamanın ve uzamın birleştiği yer olduğunu söylemeye ise bilmiyoruz gerek var mı, ama gene de söylüyoruz işte, belki vardır diye.

Kendinde-şey olarak O kendini ifade edebilecek ve kendinden farkını dile getirebilecek bir spekülasyon biçimini hayata geçirebilmek için kaçınılmaz olarak Kant ile Hegel arasında, Deleuze’ün deyimiyle bir ayırıcı-sentez(disjunctive-synthesis) işlemi gerçekleştirmek zorundadır. Zira bir ölümlünün kendini bir ölümsüz olarak tasvir edebilmesi ancak Kant’ın düşünümsel yargı(reflective judgement) ve Hegel’in spekülatif diyalektik stratejilerinin materyalist bir felsefe anlayışı içerisinde bölünüp aşkınsal ve idealist yanlarından arındırıldıktan sonra spekülatif ve materyalist yanlarının yeniden birleştirilmesiyle mümkün kılınabilir.

Her ne kadar ölümsüzlük düşüncesini hayata geçirebilmek sinir ve damar sisteminin bozguna uğratılmasını gerektirir gibi gözükse de, işin aslı hiç de öyle değildir. Zira az önce de belirtildiği üzere ölümsüz şahsiyetin ölümsüzlüğü fiziksel anlamda sonsuz olmak anlamına gelmekten ziyade, ruhsal veya şuursal anlamda sonsuzluğu idrak edebilecek bilinç düzeyine ulaşmış olmak demektir. Fâni bir bedende, fâni olmayan bir düşünceyi barındırabilecek kudrete erişmek olarak da nitelendirebileceğimiz bu var oluş tarzı özellikle 20. Yüzyıl sonu ve 21. Yüzyıl başında Deleuze ve Badiou gibi düşünürlerin kafasını kurcalamış spekülatif bir teoriler demetinin ürünüdür. Benim, olmayan şeyleri varmış gibi gösterme eğilimi içinde oluşumun sebebi ise söz konusu olmayan şeylerin var olduğunu düşünmemdir. Dikkat ederseniz cümlemi “olmayan şeylerin var olduğunu bilmemdir,” yerine “olmayan şeylerin var olduğunu düşünmemdir,” diyerek noktaladım. Zira ben bilmek ve düşünmek mastarları arasında dipsiz bir uçurum olduğu kanaatindeyim. Dipsiz bir uçurumun varlığından söz etmiş olmamın maksadı, siz de takdir edersiniz ki, olmayan bir şeyin var olmasının ne anlama geldiğini bir metafor aracılığıyla göstermek arzusunu taşıyor oluşumdur. Elbette ki benim sözünü ettiğim her şey salt benim tarafımdan söz konusu edildikleri için kanıtları kendilerinden menkûl hakikatler değildir. Bir metafor olarak “dipsiz uçurum” olgusu boşlukla dolu bir varlığı ifade eder. Fakat şu da bir gerçek ki dünyada dipsiz uçurumlar namevcuttur. Dünyada olmayan olguların varlığından söz edebilmemiz bile fiziksel dünya koşullarında var olması imkânsız olan pek çok olgunun düşünsel düzlemde mümkün olabileceğinin göstergesidir. Zira düşünce doğası gereği metafiziksel bir olaydır ve vazifesi maddi bir olgu olan dil vasıtasıyla fiziksel dünyada boşluklar oluşturmaktır. Tabii burada dil vasıtasıyla derken sakın dili ve aklı araçsallaştırdığımızı sanmayın. Aklıda tutun ki burada bahse konu düşüncenin fiziksel dünyada dil vasıtasıyla yarattığı şey boşluktan başka bir şey değildir. Boşluk yaratmaksa bizim projemiz bağlamında bir amaç olmaktan ziyade bir araçtır. Yani buradaki amaç dilin araçsallaştırılmasına karşı dili boşluk yaratmakta kullanılan bir araca dönüştürmek suretiyle amaçla aracın rollerini değiştirerek kendilerinin ötekisine, yani birbirlerine dönüşmelerini sağlamaktır. Birbirlerine dönüşen amaç ile aracın birbirlerini yok etmesinin kaçınılmaz olduğunu söylemeye ise bilmiyoruz gerek var mı. Varılmak istenen nokta şudur: Sonsuzluk özne ile nesne, amaç ile araç, neden ile sonuç arasındaki ilişkinin anlamsızlaşarak ortadan kalktığı, böylece de işte varlıkları birbirleriyle ilişkilerine bağımlı olan bu kavramların bizzat kendilerinin yok olduğu, zaman ile uzam içindeki bir boşluk formunda zuhur eden o malûm içkin dışsallıktır. Özneye içkin aşkınsal bir kavram olan sonsuzluk mevcut-egemen varoluş biçiminde kısa-devre yaratarak mevcut-egemen düzenden bir kopma yaratır. İşte Alain Badiou’nun Varlık ve Olay adlı kitabında boş-küme olarak nitelendirdiği söz konusu sonsuzluk bizim O adını verdiğimiz ölümsüz öznedir.

Kendinde-şey olarak O kendini ifade edebilecek ve kendinden farkını dile getirebilecek bir spekülasyon biçimini hayata geçirebilmek için kaçınılmaz olarak Kant ile Hegel arasında, Deleuze’ün deyimiyle bir ayırıcı-sentez(disjunctive-synthesis) işlemi gerçekleştirmek zorundadır. Zira bir ölümlünün kendini bir ölümsüz olarak tasvir edebilmesi ancak Kant’ın düşünümsel yargı(reflective judgement) ve Hegel’in spekülatif diyalektik stratejilerinin materyalist bir felsefe anlayışı içerisinde bölünüp aşkınsal ve idealist yanlarından arındırıldıktan sonra spekülatif ve materyalist yanlarının yeniden birleştirilmesiyle mümkün kılınabilir. Bunu da ancak bir ironist, aynı zamanda hem kendini aşan, hem de kendine içkin anlam dünyalarına kapılar aralayan ironisiyle yapabilir, ki nitekim işte yapmıştır da zaten.

the door of perception (via lucyphermann)

Notlar

[1] Bu metin henüz yazım aşamasında olan yeni kitabımın ilk hâlidir. Büyük ihtimalle 2-3 yıllık bir süreç içerisinde dallanıp budaklanacak, serpilip açılan bir halı gibi yayılacaktır önümüze. Söylemeye gerek var mı bilmiyorum ama adı bile henüz belli olmayan yeni kitabın bir özeti niteliğini taşıyan söz konusu metin son derece yoğun, sıkıştırılmış bir taslaktan öteye gitmemektedir. Okuyucudan ricam metni bitmiş bir ürün olarak değil, inşası süren bir yapıt olarak gören gözlerle okumasıdır. C.E.

[2] José Saramago, Lizbon Kuşatmasının Tarihi, çev. İpek Babacan (İş Bankası Kültür: İstanbul, 1989), 178.

Is Deleuze a Speculative Realist?

At first it might seem he is. If Bruno Latour is on the right track with respect to speculative realism, as Graham Harman and others would argue, then it might seem that Deleuze is on the right track as well for there are a number of areas where their philosophies converge in significant ways – especially concerning events, multiplicity, and their embrace of an ontological monism. I cover much of this in Deleuze’s Hume. It would also seem that De… Read More

via Aberrant Monism

Mark Fisher has been writing an acclaimed blog as k-punk for some years now. Focussing on culture, especially music and literature, and politics. His writing also appears in the New Statesman, Frieze, The Wire, Sight and Sound and FACT. A founder member of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, he now teaches at Goldsmiths University and the City Literary Institute in London.

In November last year he published his first book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, and also edited a collection of texts on the death of Michael Jackson, The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson, both published with Zer0 Books.

Rowan Wilson: Your blog, k-punk, is one of the leading blogs for cultural analysis. When did you first start writing it and why did you start?

Mark Fisher: Thank you. I started it in 2003. At the time, I was working as a Philosophy lecturer in a Further Education college in Kent – I reflect on some of my experiences there in Capitalist Realism. I was then quite badly depressed – not because of teaching, which I enjoyed, but for a whole series of long-term reasons – and I started blogging as a way of getting back into writing after the traumatic experience of doing a PhD. PhD work bullies one into the idea that you can’t say anything about any subject until you’ve read every possible authority on it. But blogging seemed a more informal space, without that kind of pressure. Blogging was a way of tricking myself back into doing serious writing. I was able to con myself, thinking, “it doesn’t matter, it’s only a blog post, it’s not an academic paper”. But now I take the blog rather more seriously than writing academic papers. I was actually only aware of blogs for a short while before I started mine. But I could quite quickly see that the blog network around Simon Reynolds’ blog [see the RSB interview with Reynolds] – which was the first network I started to read – fulfilled many of the functions that the music press used to. But it wasn’t just replicating the old music press; there were also sorts of strange, idiosyncratic blogs which couldn’t have existed in any other medium. I saw that – contrary to all the clichés – blogs didn’t have to be online diaries: they were a blank space in which writers could pursue their own lines of interest (something that it‘s increasingly difficult for writers to do in print media, for a number of reasons).

RW: You’re almost one of the elder statespeople of blogging now. How has it changed since you started?

MF: Blogging networks shift all the time; new blogs enter the network, older ones fall away; new networks constitute themselves. One of the most significant developments was the introduction of comments; a largely unfortunate change in my view. In the early days of blogs, if you wanted to respond to a post, you had to reply on your own blog, and if you didn’t have a blog, you had to create one. Comments tend to reduce things to banal sociality, with all its many drawbacks.

Yet blogs continue to do things that can’t be done anywhere else: look at the way that Speculative Realism has propagated through blogs. Originally coined as term of convenience for the work of the philosophers Ray Brassier, Graham Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant and Quentin Meillassoux, Speculative Realism now has an online unlife of its own. This isn’t just commentary on existing philosophical positions; it’s a philosophy that is actually happening on the web. Graham has his own blog, Object-Oriented Philosophy, but there are a whole range of Speculative Realism-related blogs, including Speculative Heresy and Planomenology. Reid Kane of Plamomenology has gone so far as to argue that Speculative Realism is “the first avatar of distributed cognition”, that, in other words, there is a natural fit between SR and the online medium.

RW: You were one of the co-founders of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), described by Simon Reynolds as the academic equivalent of Apocalypse Now’s Colonel Kurtz. Who did you form it with and what was its purpose?

MF: The main driving forces behind it were Sadie Plant and Nick Land. But Sadie Plant left quite quickly so the CCRU as it developed was much more shaped by Nick Land. Nick’s 1990s texts – which are to be issued in a collected edition this year, by Urbanomic, who publish the Collapse journal – are incredible. Far from the dry databasing of much academic writing or the pompous solemnity of so much continental philosophy, Nick’s texts were astonishing theory-fictions. They weren’t distanced readings of French theory so much as cybergothic remixes which put Deleuze and Guattari on the same plane as films such as Apocalypse Now and fictions such as Gibson’s Neuromancer.

Jungle was crucial to the Ccru. What the Ccru was about was capturing, (and extrapolating) this specifically British take on cyberculture, in which music was central. Ccru was trying to do with writing what Jungle, with its samples from such as Predator, Terminator and Blade Runner, was doing in sound: “text at sample velocity”, as Kodwo Eshun put it.

RW: The writing of the Ccru seems very different to your current style. Are you still involved with the Ccru – and indeed is it still operating?

MF: It was never formally disbanded but then again it was never formally constituted. It’s odd because, it’s only a decade on that the stuff is starting to get published in book form. As I said, Nick’s texts are just about to be published. Steve Goodman (aka Kode9) has just had his book Sonic Warfarepublished on MIT Press. As for the change of style, I suppose a number of things happened. One was the slowing of the UK cyberculture that had inspired the Ccru throughout the 90s. Gradually, the exorbitant hypotheses of the Ccru seemed to have less purchase on a culture that increasingly seemed to correspond more with Jameson’s ideas of retrospection and pastiche. In the 90s, it was possible to oppose a vibrant cyberculture to the malaise which Jameson identified. But in the 00s, the blight of postmodernism spread everywhere.

Also, I found that, as I started teaching regularly, and as I got used to writing for an audience – and there’s no form of writing that makes you as aware of having an audience as blogging; print publications just don’t compare – I rediscovered rhetoric, argument and engagement. The exhilaration of the Ccru-style was its uncompromising blizzard of jargon, text as a tattoo of intensities to which you just had to submit. But it’s hard to maintain that kind of speed-intensity for longer writing projects; and I found that I enjoyed producing writing that was expositorier and which tried to engage the reader rather than blitz them. I like Zizek’s line that the idiot he is trying to explain philosophy to is himself; I feel the same. Much of my writing now is me trying to explain things to/for myself.

There were also political schisms. The Ccru defined itself against the sclerotic stranglehold that a certain moralizing Old Left had on the Humanities academy. There was a kind of exuberant anti-politics, a ‘technihilo’ celebration of the irrelevance of human agency, partly inspired by the pro-markets, anti-capitalism line developed by Manuel DeLanda out of Braudel, and from the section of Anti-Oedipus that talks about marketization as the “revolutionary path”. This was a version of what Alex Williams has called “accelerationism”, but it has never been properly articulated as a political position; the tendency is to fall back into a standard binary, with capitalism and libertarianism on one side and the state and centralization on the other.

But working in the public sector in Blairite Britain made me see that neoliberal capitalism didn’t fit with the accelerationist model; on the contrary, pseudo-marketization was producing the pervasive, decentralized bureaucracy I describe in Capitalist Realism. My experiences as a teacher and as trade union activist combined with a belated encounter with Zizek – who was using some of the same conceptual materials as Ccru (the Freudian death drive; pulp culture, technology), but giving them a leftist spin – to push me towards a different political position. I guess what I’m interested in now is in synthesizing some of the interests and methods of the Ccru with a new leftism. Speculative Realism has returned to some of the areas that the Ccru was interested in. What I’m hoping will happen in the next decade is that a new kind of theory will develop that emerges from people who have been deep-cooked in post-Fordist capitalism, who take cyberspace for granted and who lack nostalgia for the exhausted paradigms of the old left.

RW: One of the most exciting things to happen in publishing last year was the development of the Zer0 Books imprint. Can you explain how that came about and the purpose of the project?

MF: The imprint was set up by the novelist Tariq Godard. He asked Nina Power and me if we’d like to do books, and we suggested a range of other people. What we wanted was to produce the kind of books we’d want to read ourselves, but which weren’t being published anywhere. In mainstream media, the space that had drawn Tariq and myself towards theory in the first place – the music press, areas of the broadcast media – had disappeared. Effectively, that kind of discourse had been driven into exile online. So part of what Zer0 was about was harvesting the work that has been developed on the blog networks. Zer0 is about establishing a para-space, between theory and popular culture, between cyberspace and the university. The Zer0 books are a reminder of what ought to be obvious, but which the imbecilic reductionism of neoliberal media would like us to forget: serious writing doesn’t have to be opaque and incomprehensible, and popular writing doesn’t have to be facile.

RW: Your first book, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, was published by Zer0 in November. Why do you think that capitalism, even in the wake of the financial crisis, has such a grip on our consciousness?

MF: I’m not sure that it has a grip on our consciousness so much as on our unconscious. It shapes the limits of what we can imagine. It does so because it has enjoyed 20 years of unchallenged domination, blitzing our nervous systems with its intoxicants, paralysing thought. Put at its simplest, capitalist realism is the widespread idea that capitalism is the only “realistic” political economic system. The response to the financial crisis only reinforced this belief – it was (on every level) unthinkable that the banks could be allowed to crash. The problem is imagining an alternative that anyone believes could be actually attained. Which isn’t to say that an alternative can’t ever come about; in fact, after the financial crisis, we’re in the bizarre situation at the moment where everything – very much including the continuation of the status quo – looks impossible.  But this is already an improvement from how things seemed only two years ago. The financial crisis forced capitalist realism to change its form. The old neoliberal story was no longer viable. But Capital has not yet cobbled together much of a new narrative, or come up with any economic solution to the problems that led to the crash in the first place. It’s as if capitalism has suffered its own version of shock therapy.

RW: How is your argument different from that put forward by Fredric Jameson in his work on the culture of postmodernism?

MF: Well, as I say in the book, in many ways what I’m calling “capitalist realism” can be contained under the rubric of Jameson’s theorization of postmodernism. Yet the very persistence and ubiquity of the processes that Jameson identifies – the destruction of a sense of history, the supersession of novelty by pastiche – meant that they have changed in kind. Postmodernism is now no longer a tendency in culture; it has subsumed practically all culture. Capitalist realism, you might say, is what happens when postmodernism is naturalized. After all, we’ve now got a generation of young adults who have known nothing but global capitalism and who are accustomed to culture being pastiche and recapitulation.

RW: In the book you move from describing the problems of capitalist society to how it is making us mentally ill. What do you think are the central lasting effects of neoliberalism on our psyches and, with its collapse, how do you see these unravelling?

MF: Neoliberalism installs a perpetual anxiety – there is no security; your position and status are under constant review. It’s no wonder that, as Oliver James shows in The Selfish Capitalist, depression is so prevalent in neoliberalized countries. Widespread mental illness is one of the hidden costs of neoliberal capitalism; stress has been privatized. If you’re depressed because of overwork, that’s between you and your brain chemistry!

I do think that the financial crisis killed neoliberalism as a political project – but it doesn’t need to be alive in order to continue to dominate our minds, work and culture. Even though neoliberalism now lacks any forward momentum, it still controls things by default. So, sadly, I don’t see the deleterious psychic effects of neoliberalism waning any time in the immediate future.

RW:You identify the madness of managerial bureaucracy, the incessant and pointless ‘auditing culture’, in contemporary public services, specifically education. You discuss how this auditing culture is now, along with capitalism’s PR network, a new big Other, a replacement for God. It’s the ideological matrix that we all cynically dismiss (not just privately – this cynicism is now the accepted public language; see the Guardian’s G2 section for daily examples) but nonetheless remains the binding authority. Why are we not simply able to shrug it off?

MF: PR is not limited any more to specific promotional activities – as I say in the book, under capitalism, all that is solid melts into PR. In so-called “immaterial” labour, the effect of auditing is not to improve actual performance but to generate a representation of better performance. It’s a familiar effect that anyone subject to New Labour’s targets will know all too well.

Neoliberalism reproduces itself through cynicism, through people doing things they “don’t really believe”. It’s a question of power. People go along with auditing culture and what I call “business ontology” not necessarily because they agree with it, but because that is the ruling order, “that’s just how things are now, and we can’t do anything about it”. That kind of sentiment is what I mean by capitalist realism. And it isn’t merely queitsm; it’s true that almost no-one working in public services is likely to be sacked if they get a poor performance review (they will just be subject to endless retraining); but they might well be sacked if they start questioning the performance review system itself or refusing to co-operate with it.

RW: So now we move from the critique to the positive proposals. In an interview with Matthew Fuller for Mute you tentatively suggest that the left needs to come up with a new big Other, one that is more representative of Rousseau’s ‘general will’. How is this to be distinguished from the capitalist big Other and how would it be prevented from becoming reified, a new system of mystical dominance?

RW: Reification isn’t a problem per se; in fact, it’s something we should hope for. Evan Calder Williams, whose book Combined and Uneven Apocalypse is coming out on Zer0, talks of an “anti-capitalist reification”, and I think that’s what we need to develop. It’s capitalism that poses as being anti-reification; it’s capitalism that presents itself as having dissolved all illusions and exposed the underlying reality of things. Part of what I’m arguing in Capitalist Realism is that this is an ideological sleight of hand; it’s precisely neoliberal capitalism’s ostensible demystifications (its reduction of everything to the supposedly self-evident category of the free individual) that allow all kinds of strange, quasi-theological entities to rule our lives. But I don’t think the aim should be to replace capitalism’s fake anti-reification with a “real” anti-reification. Reification can’t be entirely eliminated. I take this to be one of the important lessons that Lacanian psychoanalysis has to teach. Being a speaking subject at all involves a minimal reification; the big Other is coterminous with language itself. But this is very far from being a problem for the left. It’s the left that needs to insist on the reality of something in excess of individuals, whether you call it the “general will”, the “public interest”, or something else. When Mrs Thatcher famously denied the existence of society, she was echoing Max Stirner’s claim that all such abstractions are “spooks”. But we can’t ever rid ourselves of these incorporeal entities – neoliberalism certainly hasn’t. As I argue in Capitalist Realism, neoliberalism hasn’t killed the big Other – for who is the consumer of PR (which no actual empirical individual believes) if not the big Other? The point now – and I would affirm this forcefully, not tentatively – is to invent a leftist big Other. This doesn’t mean reviving authoritarianism; there is no necessary relation between the big Other and a strong leader. On the contrary, in fact, authoritarianism happens when there is a confusion between the big Other (as virtuality) and an empirical individual. What we need are institutions and agents that will stand in for – but cannot be equated with – a leftist big Other.

RW: You talk about the re-formatting of memory that is a symptom of capitalist realism, where history can be altered almost instantly (as in a Philip K. Dick novel) as we stand agog before the supposed ceaseless innovation of capitalism. You were also one of those to start using the concept ‘hauntology’, the idea that there was a cultural meme that acknowledged the collapse of a moment and picks through the remains for the lost futures buried within (it’s probably fair to say that Owen Hatherley’s Militant Modernism, the first Zer0 Book, is operating within this terrain). Similarly, we are in a political landscape littered with ‘ideological rubble’ (as you quote Alex Williams). My suspicion is that for you the ‘moment’ that has collapsed is the politics of ’68, one that was perhaps guilty of the re-formatting of history and memory in its own way, before many of its ideas were taken up by a post-Fordist capitalism. So what is the detritus that you are picking through? What of the discarded remnants of left politics would you dust off? And is it possible to give old ideas new momentum?

MF: I would say that, in many ways, the politics of ’68 haven’t collapsed enough. ’68 is a spectre which still hangs over theory. Yet the forces which ’68 railed against no longer exist; there is no Stalinist Party or State that we need to blow apart with a Cultural Revolution. Which isn’t to say that we should want to return to Stalinist authoritarianism, or that it is possible to do so; the oscillation between these two options is the sign of a failure of political imagination. It’s necessary to go all the way through post-Fordism, to keep looking ahead, especially at times when there seems to be nothing ahead of us. Part of the importance of the concept of hauntology is the idea of lost futures, of things which never happened but which could have. On one level, late capitalism is indeed all about ceaseless reinvention, nothing is solid, everything is mutable; but on another level, it is about recapitulation, homogeneity, minimally different commodities. Some of Jameson’s best passages are about this strange antinomy. Deleuze and Guattari, too, emphasize the way in which capitalism is a bizarre mix of the ultra-modern and the archaic. The failure of the future haunts capitalism: after 1989, capitalism’s victory has not consisted in it confidently claiming the future, but in denying that the future is possible.  All we can expect, we have been led to believe, is more of the same – but on higher resolution screens with faster connections. Hauntology, I think, expresses dissatisfaction with this foreclosure of the future.

So it’s not now a question of giving old ideas new momentum, it’s a matter of fighting over the meaning of the words “new” and “modern”. Neoliberalism has made it seem self-evident that “modernization” means managerialism, increased exploitation of workers, outsourcing etc. But of course this isn’t self-evident: the neoliberals fought a long campaign on many fronts in order to impose that definition. And now neoliberalism itself is a discredited relic – albeit, as I argued above, one that still dominates our lives, but only by default now. Part of the battle now will be to ensure that neoliberalism is perceived to be defunct. I think that’s already happening. There is a change in the cultural atmosphere, small at the moment, but it will increase. What Jim McGuigan calls “cool capitalism”, the culture of swaggering business and conspicuous consumption that dominated the last decade, already looks as if it belongs to a world that is dead and gone. After the financial crisis, all those television programmes about selling property and the like became out of date overnight. These things aren’t trivial; they have provided the background noise which capitalist realism needed in order to naturalise itself. The financial crisis has weakened the corporate elite – not materially so much as ideologically. And, by the same token, it has given confidence to those opposed to the ruling order. I’m sure that the university occupations are the signs of a growing militancy. We need to take advantage of this new mood. There’s nothing old fashioned about the idea of rational organisation of resources, or that public space is important. (The failure to rationally organise natural resources is now evident to everyone; and the consequences of letting the concept of public space decline are equally obvious to anyone living in Britain, with its violent crime and drunkenness, both of which are symptoms of a kind of despair that is as unacknowledged under capitalist realism as it is ubiquitous). Similarly, what is intrinsically “modern” about putting workers under intolerable stress? The pseudonymous postal worker Roy Mayall put this very well in his LRB blog:

We used to be told that there were three elements to the postal trade: the business, the customers and the staff, and that all were equally important. These days we are clearly being told that only the business matters. So now the ‘modernisers’ are moving in. They are young, thrusting, in-your-face and they think they know all the answers. According to them, the future is the application of new technology within the discipline of the market. But the market doesn’t tell us what to do: people tell us what to do. The ‘market’ is essentially a ploy by which one group of people’s interests are imposed on the rest of us. The postal trade is at the front line of a battle between people’s needs and the demands of corporations to make ever increasing profits. That’s what they mean by ‘modernisation’, and it’s not ‘nostalgia’ to remind ourselves that things used to be different.

But the fight will only be won when we can say with confidence, not only that things used to be different in the past, but that they can be different in the future too. I’m hoping that, before long, the neoliberal era will be seen for what it was: a barbarous anti-Enlightenment atavism, a temporary interruption of a process of egalitarian modernization.

RW: At the end of last year you edited a collection of essays, The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson, brought out almost at the speed of John Blake Publishing! What was so important about Michael Jackson’s death that made you put such energy into this project?

MF: Yes, it’s rapid-response theory! There’s no doubt that Jackson’s death arrived at a punctual moment. A whole thirty year reality system had just collapsed with the bank bail-outs. Obama had been elected. There was no-one who personified that thirty year period more than Michael Jackson. In the few days after Jackson died, I found myself watching his videos over and over again. I surprised myself by moved from a position of detached cynicism to feeling increasingly sad. There was something in those videos – particularly the Off The Wall clips – which afterwards disappeared from Jackson personally and from the culture in general. So I listened to Off The Wall and “Billie Jean” obsessively. I probably listened to “Billie Jean” forty times, but it was like listening to it for the first time; there were depths to it I’d never got to before. I wrote a post on my blog which elicited some positive responses; and it struck me that the network around Zer0 – which includes many of the world’s music writers as well as theorists – was in an ideal position to produce a book that could deal with MJ as a symptom. Which isn’t to say that the book is some desiccated analysis that doesn’t engage with the sensuous qualities of Jackson’s music – there are some wonderful descriptions of the tracks and Jackson’s dancing. The book was put together very quickly, but I’m extremely pleased with the results. It was heartening to see what music writers can do when you give them space and let them pursue their interests. There are some pieces in the book – such as Chris Roberts’ and Ian Penman’s – that are so sui generis that it is difficult to imagine them appearing anywhere else.

RW: You’ve had a busy year, what with the blog, teaching, finishing a stint as reviews editor at The Wire, conference papers, marriage, Zer0 and the publication of two books – is it time for a rest now or will 2010 be just as busy?

MF: This is not the time for a rest. On a personal level, a rest is impossible. Most of what I do doesn’t make me much money, so I have to keep working at a furious rate to keep my head above water. On a wider cultural and political level, this is a highly exciting time, not a moment to be convalescing. This year, in addition to the teaching, blogging, freelancing and editing for Zer0, I will be putting out Ghosts Of My Life, which will bring together my writings on hauntology and lost futures; in some ways, it’s the other half of Capitalist Realism. There’s another big project that I’m involved with which I have high hopes for, but we’re not ready to go public on that yet.

RW: And finally, I hope it’s not too late to ask what were your favourite books of last year?

MF: Apart from the Zer0 books – and I’ve almost certainly forgotten something really important – they would be:

Fredric Jameson, Valences Of The Dialectic. A genuinely monumental work that I expect to be referring to for many years.
Graham Harman, Prince Of Networks. A stunning reinterpretation of Bruno Latour’s work that is also Graham’s most lucid account yet of his object-oriented philosophy
Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. Jodi’s sharp analysis of the impasses of the left is also a kind of requiem for much the 2.0 bluster of the last decade.
Slavoj Zizek, First As Tragedy, Then As Farce. Much more focused than some of Zizek’s recent books, this was a reminder of his supreme relevance to the current conjuncture.

RW: Thanks Mark.

Rowan Wilson (22/02/2010)
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Fritz Kahn (1888-1968) (author), Stuttgart,1926. Relief halftone.

When the speculations concerning the extinction of all life on earth as a consequence of an explosion of the sun in 4.5 years hit the headlines for the first time, Dr. Lawgiverz was in a deep meditation, meditating the possible reasons of and the forces behind the sudden whitening of all the television screens in the world about a year ago. Needless to say, the news had come as a shock, not only to Dr. Lawgiverz whose flow of thought was interrupted, but also to the ordinary citizens of the world, who were mostly thinking nothing at all, on the verge of psychosis perhaps, as a result of their deprivation from visual images for almost a year. Dr. Lawgiverz himself didn’t mind living in the lack of visual images, because for him, to use a phrase from the famous French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, the brain itself was a screen. As the attentive reader might have easily recognized, Dr. Lawgiverz was a man of contemplation, although we preferred to use the word meditation to describe his activity on that particular morning a few sentences ago. He contemplated everything from death to life and back. He even contemplated the existence of thought after there was no one left to think. There are many more things to say about Dr. Lawgiverz, but for the time being let us be content with merely saying that we who are not one have decided to leave these to the later parts of our narrative. For we are sure that all shall reveal itself as it is, to you, to us and to all the other mortals who are lucky enough to be witnessing all these speculations, as our narrative unfolds.

Dr. Lawgiverz considered himself a realistic speculator belonging to the group of speculative realists who considered themselves to have initiated a new philosophical movement which they called Speculative Realism. Even though some of them were extremely unhappy with this designation – Ray Brassier, for instance, had recently articulated his doubts about the term speculative realism, which he himself had coined – since there is no other alternative to replace it with, we have decided to stick to that problematic term. Need we say that just like us and Dr. Lawgiverz, the speculative realists too, nevertheless submitted to the naming for the sake of being something and not willing nothingness rather than not willing something, the opossite of which the famous German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would have said if only he was alive. Let us do not hesitate to resurrect all the living and the dead.                                                                             

Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant and Graham Harman were the forerunners of this new philosophical movement as far as Dr. Lawgiverz was concerned, although Meillassoux preferred the phrase Speculative Materialism as he had put it in his book After Finitude. Perhaps now is the time we should talk about another term coined by Meillassoux a little bit, in the way of opening up new passages in and through which our narrative can flow. Correlationism, which is the term coined by Meillassoux as we have already pointed out without naming it in the previous sentence, means simply this: incapability to conceieve of a world independent of human reality, and incapability to conceive of a human reality independent of the world. “Does a reality of the world in itself exist independent of human perception?” is the question Meillassoux asks and answers: yes it does, but we as humans are as yet to speculate on that. We don’t know if it is worth mentioning that our speculations must be realistic, rather than in the form of the ravings of a lunatic, as is probably the curious case of Dr. Lawgiverz. What we mean when we say real is the Lacanian Real. As those of our readers delved into psychoanalysis know, the Real is that which is outside consciousness, and it is here that the term speculation becomes relevant. For how can one talk about that which is outside one’s consciousness unless one speculates on nothing. What is required is analogical thinking, rather than a logical sequence of thoughts, to be a speculative realist who acts out nihilistic speculations. For Dr. Lawgiverz, the Real and the Unbound Nihil are the same side of two different coins.

As for Ray Brassier, it was he who coined the term Speculative Realism at the Goldsmiths conference which had taken place in London in 2007. In his book Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, Brassier had made a very efficient use of Laruelle’s non-philosophy, Nietzsche’s “willl to nothingness” and Lyotard’s essay Solar Catastrophe. Although all these are extremely useful for the development of our narrative, as the reader keen on paying attention to detail might have and should possibly have realised, Lyotard’s Solar Catastrophe is the one that is of exceptional importance for our purposes which are yet to be calarified.

            When Brassier, following Lyotard,  asks towards the end of his Nihil Unbound, how  thought can think the death of thought, he is clearly, just like Meillassoux, questioning whether a mortal can conceive of a being in the world as not being towards death, but rather as being outside the world and already dead. Against Kant and Heidegger, Meillassoux and Brassier propose an idea of life inclusive of death, that is, a life that doesn’t require the absence of death for its being. The post-structuralist conception of death as an absent presence in the midst of life derives from Kantian and Heideggerian forms of correlationism. In both Heidegger and Kant infinity and death surround life, they are external limits to life. But for Meillassoux and Brassier, death and infinity constitute an internal limit to life, in other words the life of thought is a life driven by death. This must be it, ends Dr. Lawgiverz his flow of thought. 

In his After Finitude, Meillassoux argues that “it is incumbent upon us to break with the ontological requisite of the moderns, according to which to be is to be a correlate.[1] Meillassoux’s aim, as he says in the following sentence, is to break with the correlationist philosophy and become capable of understanding “how thought is able to access the uncorrelated.”[2] This reminds Dr. Lawgiverz Heidegger’s equation of being in the world with being towards death. Needless to say, for Heidegger, being dead is not being in the world, for being of being requires the non-being of non-being, thinks Dr. Lawgiverz. The question is whether death is something uncorrelated or nothing at all.                                  

Noticing that we have unconsciously shifted from the past tense to the simple present tense, a wave of depression engulfed us. But since we don’t want to bore you with our personal problems and the reasons of this engulfment, we would now like to get back to the past tense as if nothing happened, or rather as if something didn’t go wrong. As we were saying earlier on, the news had come suddenly, as it generally does. Dr. Lawgiverz heard it on the radio, as probably many others did, due to the lack of televisons and their screens. The reporter was reading the headlines from the newspapers in the morning news program with a very excited voice which was and remains the voice interrupting Dr. Lawgiverz’s flow of thought: “According to the spokesman of The World Scientific Research Institude, who was an eminent astrogeologist, the sun will explode in 4.5 years, extinguishing all life on earth. The spokesman said, ‘we are convinced that this solar catastrophe will take place in 4.5 years and we regret to inform you that there is nothing that can be done to prevent it and save the human kind from extinction.”

So once again, thought Dr. Lawgiverz, nothing to be done, Beckett was right after all, disaster after disaster, from bad to worse, when will it all end? This question was pointless as it was obvious that it would all end in 4.5 years, but perhaps out of shock, perhaps not, Dr. Lawgiverz had asked it anyway.

(c) Cengiz Erdem. Mortal, All Too Mortal. Cyprus, January 2010.


[1] Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude, trans. Ray Brassier (Continuum: London, 2008), 28

[2] Meillassoux, 28

This interview was conducted by Bram Ieven to accompany the Dutch translation of Ray Brassier’s essay ‘Genre is Obsolete’. It was published in the printed edition of nY # 2, as part of a feature on Noise (2009). 

 Bram Ieven – Your work has a fairly unique position within the field of contemporary philosophy. On the one hand you are critical of much of recent philosophy, which you reproach for its hostility toward major developments in contemporary cognitive sciences that demonstrate how consciousness can be explained as a natural phenomenon triggered by neurological processes. In Alien Theory (2001) you describe this philosophical hostility to neurosciences as a form of ‘reactionary philosophical protectionism’ and you urge philosophy to ‘emphasize – rather than minimize – the corrosive power of scientific reductionism.’ (21) On the other hand, specifically in your more recent work, you are equally critical of certain forms of reductive naturalism. Such a naturalism you argue in Nihil Unbound (2007), risks being ‘impoverished metaphysics’ (25). Instead you propose a speculative realism that avoids both these pitfalls. Could you elaborate on this philosophical stance a bit? ✎ 0

Ray Brassier – My stance is not particularly original: it’s indebted to the work of several more genuinely original philosophers. The confluence of their influence in my thinking represents my attempt to address what I see as the fundamental issue facing contemporary philosophy: how does human experience fit into the world described by science? Contemporary philosophers can be sorted into two basic camps: in the first, there are those who want to explain science in terms of human experience; in the second, there are those who want to explain human experience in terms of science. The former argue that science cannot explain human experience because there’s something about it that will always resist scientific explanation. The latter maintain that the explanation of experience will require us to revise both our understanding of it and our relationship to it. As I see it, this dispute about what ‘human experience’ is and our relationship to it lies at the heart of contemporary philosophy. I side with those in the second camp who insist that we can attain an objective perspective on our own subjectivity. Philosophers in the first camp dispute this on the grounds that to explain experience objectively would be a contradiction in terms which would only ‘explain consciousness away’ and ultimately alienate us from the subjective core of our own humanity. Some philosophers in the second camp try to defuse such worries by insisting that it’s perfectly possible for us to reconcile our humanity with science’s objectification of experience. My own view is that despite its fundamentally reactionary tenor, the objection above registers a genuine difficulty, and that it is unrealistic and a little panglossian to insist that we will remain ‘human’ much as we are now even after the explanatory ‘reduction’ of experience. My conviction is that the sources and structures of human experience can and will be understood scientifically, but this integration of experience into the scientific worldview will entail a profound transformation in our understanding of what it means to be human—one as difficult for us to comprehend from within the purview of our current experience as the latter would have been for our hominid ancestors. However, while I remain fundamentally committed to a naturalistic perspective which defers to science’s ultimate epistemic authority, I think it’s a mistake to hypostatize the entities and processes invoked by current science as though they were immutable metaphysical realities. We know that scientific theories constantly supplant and replace one another, and that if the history of science is anything to go by, even our best current theories will probably turn out to be fundamentally mistaken or deficient in some regard, much as their predecessors did. Some cite this as a reason not to invest science with any fundamental epistemic authority. I think this is an overreaction. The fact that our best current science will probably turn out be only partly true does not license the conclusion that it is all wrong and that it has no authority whatsoever. There is a world of difference between something’s being partly true and its being all wrong. (The fact that science has allowed crafty apes with opposable thumbs to grasp even a tiny part of the truth about reality is astonishing—indeed, the more we learn about ourselves from science, the more astonishing our capacity for science becomes.) As I see it, science is slowly and painstakingly excavating the deep structure of a reality whose fundamental features may turn out to bear little resemblance to the kinds of entities and processes with which we are currently familiar. Consequently, it would be a mistake to let current science dictate our account of the ultimate structure of reality. That’s why naturalism as a metaphysical doctrine which states that whatever is real must fall within the ambit of actually existing scientific theory strikes me as mistaken. I would like to maintain a commitment to science’s ultimate epistemic authority while resisting the dogmatic temptation to enthrone the entities, mechanisms and structures postulated by contemporary science as ultimate realities. ✎ 0 This is not to say that we cannot draw ontological consequences from science: on the contrary, we can and we should. But the relationship between science and metaphysics is complicated: science says nothing about how to tell the difference between what is and what is not ultimately ‘real’. It becomes difficult to let science dictate metaphysics once we acknowledge that what science says is real continues to undergo fundamental revisions. That’s why I endorse a ‘transcendental realism’ according to which science knows the real but the nature of this ‘real’ is not strictly speaking objectifiable. The basic idea is that we know the real through objects, but that the real itself is not an object. ✎ 0

Bram – You were the driving force behind the Speculative Realism conference (London 2007), which brought together you, Graham Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Quentin Meillassoux. The name ‘speculative realism’ was quickly picked up to designate a supposedly new wave in philosophy, but you quickly became more critical of it. Why is that? ✎ 0

Ray – The term ‘speculative realism’ was only ever a useful umbrella term, chosen precisely because it was vague enough to encompass a variety of fundamentally heterogeneous philosophical research programmes. But people have started to pick up on it as though it was the name for a new philosophical doctrine or movement, like ‘logical positivism’, ‘existentialism’, ‘structuralism’, or ‘deconstruction’. In this context, the vagueness which was initially useful is beginning to generate more confusion than clarity. There is no ‘speculative realist’ doctrine common to the four of us: the only thing that unites us is antipathy to what Quentin Meillassoux calls ‘correlationism’—the doctrine, especially prevalent among ‘Continental’ philosophers, that humans and world cannot be conceived in isolation from one other—a ‘correlationist’ is any philosopher who insists that the human-world correlate is philosophy’s sole legitimate concern. Anti-correlationism is by no means a negligible unifying factor—but our alternatives to correlationism are fundamentally divergent and even incompatible in several regards. The first problem is that the word ‘speculative’ actually means something quite specific in the context of post-Kantian Idealism: it refers to a type of philosophy (of which Hegel is perhaps the supreme exemplar) that proceeds on the basis of the ‘speculative’ identification of thinking and being, or mind and reality, thereby repudiating both empiricist naturalism and Kant’s Critical philosophy. My naturalist proclivities make me quite uncomfortable with these associations, unlike Meillassoux or Grant, both of whom explicitly avow this post-Kantian speculative paradigm, even if only to lend it a singular ‘materialist’ twist. Harman’s stance is not strictly speaking ‘speculative’ either in this regard, fusing as it does the influences of phenomenology and Bruno Latour. Yet nor is it in any sense ‘materialist’, a tendency he abjures on the grounds that it entails privileging one allegedly fundamental stratum of reality over all others. ✎ 0 The term ‘realist’ is no less in need of disambiguation. We’re all realists about quite different things. Harman espouses a Latour-inspired ‘democracy of objects’ according to which science has no particular cognitive authority when it comes to discriminating between reality and appearance and no object can be said to be any more or less real than any other. Grant and Meillassoux retain versions of the appearance-reality distinction, but in very different philosophical contexts. For Grant it could be construed in terms of the difference between natura naturans and natura naturata, while for Meillassoux it is indexed by the difference between phenomenal and mathematical properties. I think it safe to say that neither Grant, nor Harman, nor Meillassoux shares my commitment to epistemological naturalism, or my sympathy for ‘reductionist’ accounts of subjective experience. I think they would view it as a mistake to begin philosophizing from the contrast between the ‘manifest’ and ‘scientific’ images of reality as I do, and as result their realism tends to be more catholic and ecumenical than mine, especially where subjective experience is concerned. By way of contrast, my sceptical stance towards phenomenology leads me to endorse a more austere, revisionary brand of realism that tends to undermine the reality of subjective experience, at least as ordinarily construed. Thus, given that we don’t agree that philosophy must be ‘speculative’ or about what ‘realism’ entails, the expression ‘speculative realism’ has become singularly unhelpful. ✎ 0

 Bram – What would you propose as an alternative? ✎ 0

Ray – Nothing: the label has done its work in terms of signalling possible alternatives to correlationist orthodoxy. Grant, Harman, and Meillassoux have each coined terms to describe their respective projects. My own could be characterized in terms of a new compact between metaphysics and epistemology: transcendental realism in the former and revisionary naturalism in the latter. There is a reality that transcends the bounds of possible human experience set out by Kant, but we are learning that it is populated by ‘things’ about which it is proving increasingly difficult to say ‘what’ they are using the resources of sense currently available to us. We will have to forge new vocabularies to be able to say what these things are. Admittedly, this still has a ‘speculative’ ring, but I would like to insist that metaphysical speculation be constrained by scientific knowledge. ✎ 0

Bram – The kind of realism that you defend, while certainly not hostile to reductionism, always insists on the fact that reality is far more complex than we surmise. An essential point you keep returning to when it comes to the deep structure of reality is ‘that there’s much more going on, and that it turns out to be more complicated’ (324), as you remarked during the Speculative Realism conference in London. You seem to be interested in a surplus of complexity. This also appears to be the main point in your essay on noise: instead of understanding noise as a lack of information or structure, you take noise to be a surplus of structure and complexity, as an ongoing superimposition of incompossibles. ✎ 0

Ray – Yes: I agree that there is a link and what I find particularly interesting about ‘noise’ is its informational density. In this sense, I think it prefigures (in a sense yet to be determined) the sort of challenge to intelligibility which will accrue with the gradual objectification of experience. Just as noise makes you work to decipher information by overriding familiar cognitive-classificatory sluice-gates, the objectification of experience will force us to make sense of ourselves in a quite unfamiliar and even fundamentally foreign conceptual register. Basically, I think that people who accuse science of reducing and attenuating what they consider to be life’s richness and complexity are completely mistaken: it’s quite the opposite: our conception of reality has been immeasurably enriched by scientific understanding and it’s rather our subjective experience of the world that is reductive and impoverished in comparison. But the point is not just that science enriches and amplifies our understanding of reality, but that it uncovers the truth. Noise has no such epistemic valence—it does not yield the sort of cognitive information that provides the basis for true or false judgements; but there is something of fundamental epistemological interest about the way in which it interferes with default cognitive schemas and perceptual Gestalts—epistemological in the sense that it challenges the way in which we relate to experience, rather than operating at the level of the content of experience. ✎ 0

Bram – In some of your essays (including ‘Genre is obsolete’) your ideas on philosophy and neurosciences are intricately related to the dynamics of contemporary capitalism. In an essay on subtractive ontology and capitalism you write: ‘Integrated global capitalism is constitutively dysfunctional: it works by breaking down. It is fuelled by random undecidabilities, excessive inconsistencies, aleatory interruptions, which it continuously reappropriates, axiomatizing empirical contingency. It turns catastrophe into a resource, ruin into an opportunity, harnessing the uncomputible.’ (57) It strikes me that this definition of capitalism is somehow connected to what you write on noise in your essay ‘Genre is obsolete.’ Do you see a similarity between capitalism’s stochastic dynamic and ‘noise’ – or would you rather say that noise and capitalism are each other’s opposites? What is the relation between noise and capitalism? ✎ 0

Ray – This is a difficult question. The suggestion that capitalism is somehow ‘like’ noise could easily be construed as some sort of dubiously Romantic aestheticization: capitalism as sublime, unintelligible phenomenon, etc. The passage you cite is problematic because it lends itself to such an interpretation. Basically, I do not think it at all illuminating or useful to construe capitalism as some sort of sublimely turbulent natural phenomenon. It’s important to bear in mind how, for all its seemingly unfathomable, impersonal complexity, global capitalism continues to supervene on the banal personal and psychological traits of the dealers, brokers, traders, executives, managers, workers, and shoppers, who are not just its dispensable machine parts but its indispensable support system, without which it would simply not be able to function. ✎ 0 There’s a temptation to hypostatize capital as though it were an impersonal, wholly autonomous agent subsisting quite independently of the myriad of little human subjects who compose it. This strikes me as a mistake. Here I think a sober appreciation of the mechanical banality of the processes through which capital reproduces itself might obviate this tendency to mystification: this seemingly fantastic, supra-personal complexity is not due to some mysterious self-moving cause or superhuman agent but an effect generated by the myriads of micro-processes that compose it: it is neither more nor less mysterious in its operations than any other complex, multi-layered emergent phenomenon. This kind of emergence and complexity are banal and ubiquitous. ✎ 0 I think there is an important dis-analogy between noise and capitalism in that noise as I understand it is precisely not complex in the way in which capitalism is alleged to be: the sort of emergent complexity exemplified by self-organizing systems is relatively uninteresting. The fetishizing of complexity in the sense of self-organization, along with emergence and irreducibility, etc., is part and parcel of the neo-vitalist tendency to prefer mystification to explanation, so prevalent today. What I consider to be interesting about noise is its dis-organizing potency: the incompressibility of a signal interfering with the redundancy in the structure of the receiver. Not transduction but schizduction: noise scrambles the capacity for self-organization. ✎ 0

Bram – What, if anything, could be the role of an aesthetics of noise in your work on neurosciences and capitalism? ✎ 

 Ray – I am very wary of ‘aesthetics’: the term is contaminated by notions of ‘experience’ that I find deeply problematic. I have no philosophy of art worth speaking of. This is not to dismiss art’s relevance for philosophy—far from it—but merely to express reservations about the kind of philosophical aestheticism which seems to want to hold up ‘aesthetic experience’ as a new sort of cognitive paradigm wherein the Modern (post-Cartesian) ‘rift’ between knowing and feeling would be overcome. In this regard, I would say that there can be no ‘aesthetics of noise’, because noise as I understand it would be the destitution of the aesthetic, specifically in its post-Kantian, transcendental register. Noise exacerbates the rift between knowing and feeling by splitting experience, forcing conception against sensation. Some recent philosophers have evinced an interest in subjectless experiences; I am rather more interested in experience-less subjects. Another name for this would be ‘nemocentrism’ (a term coined by neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger): the objectification of experience would generate self-less subjects that understand themselves to be no-one and no-where. This casts an interesting new light on the possibility of a ‘communist’ subjectivity.

References

Ray Brassier, Alien Theory. The Decline of Materialism in the Name of Matter. 2001.

Ray Brassier, “Nihil unbound: remarks on subtractive ontology and thinking capitalism.” In Peter Hallward (ed.). Think Again. Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy. Continuum: London 2004, 50-58.

Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound. Enlightenment and Extinction. Palgrave Macmillan: London 2007.

Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, “Speculative Realism,” Collapse III. Urbanomic: Falmouth 2007, pp. 307-451.

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