Monday, July 30, 2012
Philosophy as virtuous excrescence
In this post on Stengers I asked how what she wrote on situating methodologies compares to Bryant's and Wilber's notions of methodological pluralism. In my research this morning I came up the following, from Gabriel Catren's chapter in The Speculative Turn, "Outland Empire":
"Philosophy therefore depends on what Badiou calls it systematicity, i.e., its capacity of globally compossibilizing the different local procedures--such as science, art or politics--in the horizon of a general economy. Local thought procedures are by definition...partial and unilateral.... Philosophy can be defined as a non-local procedure whose aim is to unfold a concrete and polychromatic experience of the real. If each mode of thought forces the mediation of a certain dimension of doxa and labors inside a given prismatic projection of the real, philosophy is endowed with a systematic or global degree of variation.... A philosophical experience depends upon a stereoscopic co-deployment of the complimentary intentional goals defined by the diverse local procedures....[which] exceed[s] that of which the local modes of thought are capable.
"Far from being an abstract survey, an 'empty transcendence,' an encyclopedic classification...the philosophical system opens up a polyphonic horizon of labor toward the effective production of diagonal or non-local forms of enacting and expanding experience.... In other words, each concrete mediator...is 'nothing more than a part alongside other parts, which it neither unifies or totalizes'.... Analogously, the idea of producing a total work of art capable of synthesizing all the existing arts brings forth nothing but a new artistic form among others, an 'operatic' whole which co-exists with the local arts and is 'contiguous to them,' a virtuous excrescence through which the set of artistic forms productively avoids its impossible totalization.... In other words, the philosophical system is a delocalized concrete machine capable of connecting and articulating the various local abstract machines...in a non-hierarchical way so as to set in place a generalized constructivism, a general musaic of thought" (345-6).
It seems that musaic is a neologism combing music and mosaic, quite nice, as in a musical composition that weaves various local themes and motifs, but is itself not an assholon composition of everything. I also like its characterization as a "virtuous excrescence."
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Going back to the post on alethetics Bryant grants plural frames/methods. The Borromean knot is used as a sort of meta-frame to organize the frames, in that any particular suobject will interpret (frame) another though its 'imaginary,' and communicate to another thorough its 'symbolic.' Here though Bryant contradicts himself from earlier posts on rhetoric, or what I call rhetaphor, since all suobjects, in communication, use 'signs' (frames) which are then interpreteted (framed) by another. And both of these aspects are entangled with a suobjects 'real' withdrawn, which itself is framed by what it is and is not based on its particular and unique endo-relations.
ReplyDeleteAlso of interest is that this Borromean meta-knot is itself just one of a plurality, i.e., there is not one true meta-frame: “There is no one borromean knot.” Or as Catren said above, it “brings forth nothing but a new artistic form among others, an 'operatic' whole which co-exists with the local arts and is 'contiguous to them.” Holons, yes. Assholons, no. Emergent developmental levels, yes. Better developmental syntheses that organize local methodologies, yes. One best meta-methodology due to its privileged access to involutionary metaphysical essences, no. Involution as Edwards' and Levin's integration and downward causation-change of what came before, yes. Better metaphysical interpretations (frames, philosophies) as to what constitutes an integral methodological pluralism based on the foregoing polydoxy instead of monistic metaphysical dogma, absolutely (pun intended).