Becoming Is the Alchemical Ontology, Jamming, 05/07/2018

The other day, I was revisiting a short book by my colleague Elizabeth Sandifer. Recursive Occlusion is a little book about the mysticism of Kabbalah and Tarot, in a framework of exploring the Doctor Who story Logopolis.

Her work has always been a bit strange, which is one of the reasons I like her work.

Anyway, it reminded me of one of the original thematic images of her ongoing epic work of commentary, TARDIS Eruditorum – the solution to alchemy as material social progress.

The vision of progress we’re talking about here is fundamentally rooted in freedom – overcoming the bullying authoritarian attitude of social, political, and moral conservatism. Fundamentally, it’s the freedom to transform – to live differently than others, experiment with different kinds of relationships and identities. A constructively queer identity – opposed to nothing but the refusal to accept difference.

Against the Day is a beautiful book. It
depicts, a tad fancifully, a time in human
history that amounted to a technological
and ethical crossroads. The years between
the 1889 World's Fair and the outbreak of
the First World War was a moment where,
but for a few contingencies, we could
have ended up living in a very different
world. Would it have been better? I
have no idea, and I don't think Pynchon
does either. But given where we've
ended up, any possibility is worth
trying. Or at least imagining.

To jump from this to ontological thinking seems utterly barmy, but it can be done. Jussi Parikka gives it a very good shot when he weaves his concepts for a geological philosophy using, among other tools, artistic criticism and commentary.

Alchemical thinking is an attitude of awe, fascination, and love for the powers of substances to transform into one another.

Parikka illustrates this with images from Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, which is one of my favourite novels. He chooses images that show a transition in society that’s ethical at its core, but also political, moral, economic, and ecological. It’s the transformation of alchemy as our attitude to the world, into chemistry.

He interprets these images to mourn how contemporary attitudes that embrace industrial technology refuse the need for magic. The transformation of one substance into another now requires no mysticism, no ethical consideration at all. You routinize it, regularize it, and industrialize it.

The shorthand that’s often used for this is the transition to full capitalism. But that’s not quite accurate. Parikka describes a transition that I think has already changed by now.

Alchemy was a research discipline that included mysticism and ontological philosophy alongside its empirical studies of how to transform substances. Chemistry – and the capitalist economics that fuelled the institutions of industrial chemistry – stripped the divine and philosophical from its research discipline, replacing it with a techno-industrial framework of understanding and practice.

Parikka gives us a quick description that offers a shade of Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt. As work became labour, alchemy became chemistry, and a practice of mysticism becomes an assembly line.

Yet care wasn’t entirely stripped from chemistry. You could argue that ethics was transformed, but that the ethical still emerged from the practice. We were offered “Better living through chemistry,” after all. The goal of industrial chemistry was to build a better life for people, to build some kind of material social progress.

There are different capitalist economics in place now. Ask the folks who used to work at Dupont Labs, until a few years ago. We might need other concepts.

Geology's Founding Lie, Research Time, 04/07/2018

One pleasant piece of history I learned from Jussi Parikka’s The Geology of Media was the founding of the science of geology itself. It’s not too old, after all.

James Hutton developed the basic concepts, essential theories, and analytic methods of the science of the composition and dynamics of rocky planets over the late 18th century. Hutton wasn’t too well-known for most of his own lifetime, but his legacy is pretty well staked these days.

Charles Lyell brought geological science to the mainstream by the mid 19th century. The explosion of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory certainly helped. It was a beautiful moment of synergy.

Perhaps the greatest achievement humanity will ever manage is
destroying ourselves. We're making the planet we live on utterly
unfit for us to live on it. One oil slick can cover thousands of
square kilometres and destroy billions of living creatures,
countless ecosystems decaying into dust. One stupid accident
among thousands. We've made ourselves epochal, burning
ourselves to death in a fire that consumes a whole planet.

See, one of the reasons why Hutton’s scientific work wasn’t widely accepted was because most people* couldn’t conceive of the Earth being billions of years old. This is a very strange kind of mind-set to get into, because such a thing is taken for granted now.

* In Western cultures, anyway. This scientific work happened at the heart of the globe’s colonial economy at the time, in Europe.

Even if you’re a dedicated Young Earth Creationist, you live in the influence of the conception of Earth and the cosmos as billions of years old. It’s the consensus view of your enemy, the secular culture of science.** You may not believe in the billions-year-old Earth, but you live in a society where that’s the common sense view of most people.

** I don’t use terms like these – “secular culture of science” – as actual elements of how I understand scientific practice and institutions myself. I’ve studied science philosophically and sociologically for too long to accept such a broad term as that. But vague terms like this are, to my knowledge, how extremist Biblical Creationists think of science.

When James Hutton was alive, things were totally different. The notion that the Earth was billions of years old was strange and terrifying. There also seemed to be no need for it. No other process on Earth required millions and billions of years to unfold.

Hence, why Lyell had a much easier time promoting this idea when The Origin of Species hit, and as Darwin himself followed this up with the rest of his works exploring the processes and implications of life being an evolutionary process. The geological concept of the billions-year-old Earth was the physical companion to Darwin’s biological work.

When I was a kid, I used to hear the old Christian ditty, "He's got the
whole world in his hands!" It's a beautiful thing to believe in, but it's
a lie too.

The Terror

Why do I title this “Geology’s Founding Lie,” then? The lie isn’t that the Earth is billions of years old. That’s true, no matter what some other folks want you to believe. The lie isn’t a matter of straight fact, but of scalability.

When you think of Earth as only a few thousand years old – maybe six to seven thousand like the Biblical Literalists, maybe a few thousand more – human existence is of massive consequence. If Earth is so young, then most of the planet’s history is humanity’s history too.

Human significance is obvious on a young Earth because we’ve pretty much always been here, as dominant over the planet as we are. We can very easily believe that the planet is here for us. If Earth is the same age or only a little older as civilizational humanity, then it’s easy to believe that we’re at the centre of Earth’s story.

Geological science introduced a conception of deep time. Accepting geology as valid meant that we had to accept human insignificance on Earth. Earth was no longer for us – its existence was now alien to human needs and histories. You have to learn to let yourself be dwarfed in all aspects.

The lie was that the immense vastness of the planet in time dwarfed humanity in all aspects. You see where I’m going with this. The popular and intellectual conception of humanity, as the Victorian concepts of secularism dominated the reflexive thinking of Western cultures, was that the Earth dwarfed our powers as well.

Earth was so vast that human activity – even the industry driving unprecedented technological development – could never cause the planet real harm. Vastness meant resilience, movement and change so slow as to approach eternity. At least relative to human activity.

This is Parikka’s conclusion on researching this idea in the popular and intellectual culture of the first years of the Holocene era – comparing human existence to the depth of planetary time made us appear entirely insignificant. But that appearance was false in one awful aspect.

The terrible truth of our ecological crisis is that our powers can radically transform the Earth. This aspect of human existence really does achieve geological vastness. And we’re completely unprepared to reach that planetary level of power.

How to Turn an Image Into a Concept I: Living Earth, Composing, 28/06/2018

Jussi Parikka's book The Geology of Media is one of several books that have come out in the last decade exploring aspects of our global ecological crisis with an old image. The living Earth.

I’ve come across different aspects of this in Tim Morton’s work, as well as others in his broadly-related crew of thinkers – Ray Brassier, Graham Harman, Ian Bogost, a few others falling under the name speculative realists.* A variety of creative – and in Bogost’s case, delightfully bizarre – fundamental pessimists about the future of humanity.

* They all went to the same conference in 2007 that had “speculative realism” in the title, and appeared in an essay collection with that phrase in the title.

I hope the insane billionaires of the world will be happy to invest the
massive fortunes they've squired away in building inter-planetary
mining infrastructure by the end of the century. Because that's when
we're going to run out of all the metals that make computers work.

I mean, the most thoroughly absurd stance in ecological philosophy in the 21st century is optimism. So the image of a brutalized, raging, vengeful Earth – whether radically alien or hauntingly personal – is a constant.

But there are other, more impish, perspectives as well. I remember reading Jane Bennett’s book Vibrant Matter during research for my last big book. She built a curious outline of an ontology she called vital materialism – major components were a return to vitalist biological theories and a quirky extrapolation of metallurgy.

Another book that delivered on almost all its potential, but petered out a little. Still excellent, if not quite great – fascinating ideas that weren’t tied together quite as profoundly as they could have been.

Parikka himself offers another set of sources for this image of the living Earth – an important one for him is the history of geology. Geology is, in the simplest terms, the historical investigation of a planet’s own development and the essential nature of a planet, along with the techniques for doing all that well.

It’s a science that could work on any planet made mostly of rock, but Earth is where we’ve done the most studies so far. Works just as well for other planets, moons, and asteroids – but for now such studies are prohibitively expensive, and getting there is a bit of a commute.

Throughout his book, Parikka turns to media theory and art for the
tools to turn the image of the living Earth into a philosophical
concept you can act on (and through). There are many hitches with
this decision, but one of them is that there have been so many
such images that focussing on a single one requires so much
justification that you spend all your time on it and not the analysis.

A lot of the first people to study geology shared a general, kind of vague image that served as their very rough framework for understanding how Earth worked as a system. Scratch that – it was a framework to understand THAT Earth worked as a system. This was the living Earth – that the generation and dynamic fluxes of Earth’s processes were its life processes.

Not as an organism like us. No one seriously thought they’d find igneous analogous to kidneys or lungs. If you describe these early geologists that way, you’re just doing it to dismiss their ideas from relevance by making their interpretive frameworks sound too plainly ridiculous.

Here’s how they thought, in brief. Having dynamic internal processes that generate themselves – one powers the other, the other powers the first – is a necessary and sufficient condition for being alive. For being a life.

It didn’t imply anything ontologically or physically – it didn’t mean necessarily that a planet would have a geological circulation like an animal’s cardiovascular system. The implication was ethical – that the Earth deserved the respect that you’d accord any living thing.

For example, take my personal favourite utterly barmy image of the
living Earth in popular culture – Mogo! The Green Lantern that's a
sentient planet! Mogo is pretty much the only thing I like about
Green Lantern proper, mainly because of its core premise that our
hero is a narc.

That’s different from the other common idea about respecting the Earth – philosophers use words like alienation and sublimity. Because the Earth is so much more powerful than a person – storms, floods, earthquakes, volcanos, massive mountain chains, vast oceans, etc – we respect it because it dwarfs us. We respect Earth because we’re so insignificant compared to it and casually destroyable in the face of it.

A geologically-inspired philosophy for our current crisis can’t inspire respect for the Earth through fear. Our processes – the grotesque pollution of mining and e-waste, the overflowing dumps of nuclear waste – are enough to strike fear into the Earth. We no longer need to fear the Earth – we need to fear ourselves.

That begins from understanding Earth as something which we harm. Not something we wreck, the way an angry toddler wrecks a plastic toy or a train set. You wreck something, and all that matters is the money to replace it and the mess you made. Earth is something we harm, the way a psychotic toddler yanks a kitten’s tail or pulls her ears to hear it scream.

Harm is to inflict suffering. And we need to learn how to understand the Earth as something we can inflict suffering on. Not suffering like an animal – any more than the Earth has blood and breath. No – There is suffering. Earth suffers.

Ambition to Change the World, Composing, 25/04/2018

So I’m going to take a quick break from going through Paul Patton today. The note that I want to follow up yesterday’s “Mapping Thought” post with, it has a lot to do with the ontology of virtual multiplicities. And I don’t really have the energy tonight to translate that out of mad crazy technical language.

So I thought I’d post a few thoughts about another project I’m working on, which will help me wrap my head around the shape of what I need to write.

This month, I officially joined the team at Ghubril Ltd, a startup think tank specializing in program evaluation for the global NGO and United Nations sector. We produce regular publications – policy papers and white papers – and sell subscriptions to receive them direct.

Explore the website, which I’ll link here again for the second time, and you’ll see the kind of subject matters we work on. We push progressive policy – we do research on different pathways to create a healthier, stronger, freer human civilization that lives in greater harmony with the ecologies of Earth.

This month, our papers all revolve around climate change and related ecological issues. In a way, I have it very easy this month, because I already wrote a book about all this.

My own paper for this month revolves around how you actually make a sustainable society permanent. It needs a complete transformation of the culture. And the best route there is activism. It’s also the slowest-moving of all the methods you could use.

President Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic embraced by
Richard Nixon, who was Vice-President of the United States at the
time. Trujillo was one of the many brutal dictators the US
government supported as part of anti-communist geopolitical
strategy. He was responsible for brutal repression of dissidents, the
mass murder and ethnic cleansing of Haitians and other black
people from Dominican territory, and on a personal level,
regular sexual assaults against young Dominican women as if
the country's population were his own personal harem.
Trujillo was also a dedicated environmentalist, expanding
protected natural lands in his country and ordering a large-scale
reforestation campaign.

You can use the laws of your country, of course. But that runs into the problem that countries only have jurisdiction over limited amounts of territory. If Canada becomes the greenest* country on Earth, we’re still in a lot of trouble if the United States’ government grows more indifferent to ecological sanity.

* Political and economically.

And law is an inherently coercive tool as well. It encourages resistance, as part of the natural human instinct to rebel – against authority, against some perceived popular consensus. We’re all punks at heart. It’s just the content that varies. It’s why Paul Ryan can love Rage Against the Machine, and listen to the songs as if they’re about him.

The only way to guarantee that a society will change in a particular direction is the transformation of people’s very moralities. What Nietzsche called the transvaluation of values.

Now, I’ve known plenty of Nietzsche scholars in my time. And many philosophers who’ve followed in the tradition that Nietzsche began. But it’s very difficult to find concrete policy prescriptions for the transformation of popular morality. So I feel like I’m standing on my own here.

So where I’m still trying to punch through as a writer of a policy paper here is this. How do you explain the difficulty of activism as a strategy, while also making clear that activism is the only strategy that can be genuinely successful at all?

It means explaining the ontology of society. It’s not that sociological-scale events and bodies are entirely determined by the psychological and individual-scale. That would reduce the social causally to functions of the individual, which won’t work at all.

But the social is constituted through the relationships among individuals, across all the channels that humans use to communicate with each other. There’s a constant feedback loop of influence across the two scales, each individual being a quantum constituting the entire social field in action together.

From another angle, the difference between the social and the individual is epistemic, a matter of knowledge and investigation. The specific scientific techniques that investigate individual-scale events can’t work to investigate social-scale events. Same goes for techniques for social investigation and the individual scale.

So here’s where I stand. The concept that I’m working with is explaining how the individual / psychological functions as the quantum constituent of a social field. Meanwhile, the phase difference from individual to social – from quantum to field – requires different sciences to deal with each.

Which is fine. Now how do I explain this as a matter of policy prescriptions for process models?

I’m writing this at 23.00. I need to sleep on this.

Tony on Gil II: How Politics Begins in Thought, Jamming, 05/03/2018

As the principle has been received popularly these days, it’s been kind of a shit show. A disaster. The centrepiece of contemporary reactionary conspiracy. And at the centre of some serious anti-Semitism too.

Yet it is actually true that radical social and political change begins with culture, with how people understand themselves. That includes what resources they have available to understand themselves, whether or not they use them.

Here’s how Antonio Negri put it in his essay on the thought of Félix Guattari – The best way to deal with the death of Man is to celebrate the self-creation of people.

Is nihilism the only response to the impossibility of universal
knowledge?

So what does that actually mean? Let’s unpack it.

The “death of Man” is the old way of thinking about the birth of what’s called postmodernism. There was once, so the story goes, a universal concept of the human that everyone could believe in – the living embodiment of universal reason itself.

Faith in the Man of European culture as the highest yet expression of universal reason peaked in the 19th century, as this image of the universal Man justified the global imperialist occupations of the time. But it was also the heart of Westerners’ conceptions of themselves as individuals and as a culture. Even subordinated people like women, the poor, or well-off members of racialized groups believed it.

But the scientific underpinnings of this self-image – Western Man as the most advanced organism on Earth – began to slip as the implications of the truth of evolution began to be understood in popular culture.

Life developed contingently, and reason was fundamentally instrumental, if not a spandrel. The Western image of Man was teetering from his superiority’s justification. Not only was there no purpose in Nature itself, but such a purpose wasn’t the dominion of Earth and all other peoples.

Frankly, it's easier to think of yourselves as the highest achievement
of the human race when you have everyone who's different from
you treating you like a divinely appointed king.

I’m not going to get into the details of what effects came immediately from this crisis of faith in Western Man. We’ll be here for the length of a thousand* dissertations. I want to get to the last few decades, when the broadly existentialist tradition that flowed from this idea finally started getting creative about how to handle it.

* At least, just to get a vague sense of all that was going on.

Think about the contemporary creative approach in terms of knowledge. What kind of systems of thought and investigations could you use to achieve genuinely universal knowledge?

Here’s the kind that was the only sensible answer to that question during the heyday of that concept of Man – a single, simple field of knowledge that encompassed all the variety of Earth. Lay aside Denis Diderot’s actual thinking, and consider the popular image of the original Encyclopedia – all the facts and truths of the world in a single compendium. One house of knowledge.

If you lose the possibility of that achievement, then you lose your bearings. Compared to that one all-enfolding universality, everything else falls short. I mean, of course it would. Less than perfection can never be perfect. By that standard, no human knowledge can measure up. True may as well be false, good and evil are meaningless, there’s no right or wrong.

But only the fool says in his heart that because there is no universal, there is no truth or good. It only means that there’s no universal, truth, or good.

Jomo Kenyatta in a gathering of Mau Mau liberation fighters. What
was good for Kenya wasn't good for Britain, living demonstration
that not every approach to the world can harmonize together.

This doesn’t reduce to any of this “Good for me and Good for you” relativism that you hear from self-entitled 18-year-old dudes taking their first philosophy course and trying to get the prof to justify their dickishness. At least, that’s where I always heard it.

See, that relativism shut people up in themselves – in their own subjectivity – much deeper than they really are. It ignores the fact that we all share a material world. So our different conceptions of truth and good – as individuals, as cultures, as mass media empires – will overlap and influence each other.

We live in society, in relationships with each other. We all figure out similar problems in the ordinary and profound parts of our lives. We communicate.

We harmonize a whole bunch of different approaches to the world. They overlap and reciprocate ideas, among so many other ways of influencing each other. The best way to organize how to get as many approaches to knowledge as possible working together is so that everyone who has something productive (or at least potentially productive) can contribute to the overall project for knowledge and truth.

The only approaches not permitted are those that denigrate and devalue other approaches. It smacks too much of the false arrogance that there’s one universal truth, and that of course there’s one Man that expresses it.

Being Without Existing, Composing, 05/02/2018

It’s a basic rule of thinking decently-well that you shouldn’t apply concepts from scientific fields to moral or political thinking, and vice versa. But . . . .

The most famous example of these cross-domain applications gone horribly wrong is social Darwinism. There are plenty of opportunities to read up on how this popular interpolation of a scientific idea to a political imperative caused horrifying human disasters. Please read the links – they’ll open in separate tabs.

Riffing on a hilarious misinterpretation I've heard from too many
old conservative academic philosophers – Deleuze as simulacra.

Aside from the horrifying political consequences of the most notorious example, it’s just bad form epistemically. You can’t make a straight translation of abstract scientific concepts into a moral imperative. Especially when your example gets all the actual principles of the science totally wrong anyway.

Even Gilles Deleuze, well known philosophical weirdo, would say so. One of the major principles of his last book, What Is Philosophy?, was that scientific knowledge was mathematical and referred to specific situations – philosophy operated very differently.

But . . . . there’s a way to carry scientific concepts into other domains of thinking. It’s a process of abstraction.

Identify the most fundamental aspects of a scientific concept, abstract them into a diagram – so hold onto the complexity, but without the specificity – and experiment to see where else that abstract diagram makes sense.

You aren't so much drawing a conclusion – like the social Darwinists did – as you are an investigation. Where else can this concept apply fruitfully?

Where’s an example of this actually working? Then we can see, in specific terms, how that process of thought works. Well, Deleuze developed one – how the abstract structure of the scientific concept of the infinitesimal and the strange attractor can make sense of the existence of impossible ideals.

That’s a weird and dense thing to say. So what do I mean? In Leibniz’s calculus, an infinitesimal is the smallest possible differential relation. No differential – a dynamic relationship of ∆x/∆y – can ever reach zero. That’s just zero. But their smallest possible relationship is an infinitesimally small difference.

The thing is, infinitesimal quantities can’t exist. They definitely can’t exist in experience, because our perceptual powers give out at sizes of objects and movements way bigger than the infinitesimal. They can’t exist in reality either – the smallest any physical fluctuation can be is about 1.6x10^-35 metres. Way longer than infinitesimal.

All you have to do for your dream to become reality is become a
god. That's well beyond the realm of possibility, but sadly, it's an
ideal that all too often guides our actions.

Infinitesimals can’t exist materially, but they exist as asymptotes in reality – you approach it, and can get closer and closer to it, but never actually reach it. It’s infinitely far from you, or infinitely small. An unreachable target that guides the trajectory of your approach.

And that’s what a moral ideal is – an unreachable target that nonetheless guides your real action. An ideal is real without existing – it’s the principle that provides the underlying logic of your action.

Any ethical act or project you work on will always be disappointing and an utter failure if you treat your ideal as achievable – if you think that a practical action plan will actually make an ideal come true.

Best case scenario, you’ll be disappointed when your ambitious plans to make the world a perfect place fall short of what you aimed for. Instead of pride in what you’ve achieved, you’ll feel ashamed that you couldn’t have done more.

Worst case scenario, you’re Mao Zedong leaving tens of millions dead and a nation of a billion horrifically traumatized. Yeah, that’s fine.

The function of the moral or ethical ideal in human thought is to be the asymptotic attractor for our lives – it governs our development without itself ever being a real state of affairs.

Now ask how such an ideal can be used for the betterment of humanity or for brutal destruction. What facilitates its progressive uses? What facilities its destructiveness?

That right there is what Utopias is about. I think I’ll start the introduction this weekend.

No Rest in This World or the World to Come, Research Time, 25/01/2018

If you're wondering why the puppy is here, it'll
become important later. Right now, the puppy
wants to remind you of an old Talmudic saying
which was the closing sentence of one of
Salomon Maimon's first books.
Scholars of wisdom have no rest in this
world, or in the world to come.

You know what I love about Salomon Maimon? He was a dirty, smelly, drunk who sat in a bar for years, barely employed, pretty damn poor – but he could still get an essay out to one of the leading philosophers of the era to make an incisive critique of his work that still stands up centuries later.

Maimon was a scholar of Torah and Talmud for most of his life – teaching, writing essays on the great Jewish theologians, commentary on Kabbalah, textbooks on the Jewish religion and the Hebrew language, and works of original philosophy.

But Christian-descended people know him best for his critique of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Why his critique became so famous is actually a beautiful story.

Maimon was a fairly minor figure in German intellectual circles of the time, but knew some of the well-connected folks. Maimon knew a guy named Markus Herz, who also knew Immanuel Kant. Maimon read the Critique of Pure Reason shortly after it was published, and had some brilliant critical things of his own to say about it.

He wrote these ideas in a fairly long letter, which Herz passed along to Kant. Kant read it, and it blew him away. He publicly thanked Maimon, and praised him in public appearances as one of the only critics of his new work who was actually picking up what he was throwing down.

That any intellectual at the top of his game in creativity and public profile would do that is remarkable. That Kant would do that to a pretty obscure Jewish person – in 1780s Prussia, where Jews were pretty deeply racialized and persecuted – is a moment of ethical beauty.

I'm not exactly a Kantian, or a devotee of his philosophy. But I have a lot of praise for him as a person.

Maimon is the subject of an essay in Deleuze’s Philosophical Legacy, the book that’s been inspiring my last few posts – even the ones that got more than a little weird and creative. So what was the main idea in Maimon's thinking that could be said to have influenced Deleuze’s thinking most?

After a fashion, we can't see it if it doesn't move either.

It’s an understanding of how perception works that broke radically with what was taken for granted in the intellectual and scientific culture and knowledge base of Maimon’s time, the last decades of the 18th century.

Kant’s discussion of perception – and pretty much every philosophical and scientific discussion of perception – rested on an assumption that appears pretty common sense. Assume that you see things in the world.

I'm not making some kind of skeptical argument. I’m talking about objects. I see a tree. I see a bus. I see a field of grass. I see a fence. I see a puppy. I see a person. When I see a puppy, I immediately experience the puppy as a whole.

Each of these wholes in our perception – the puppy, the fence, the tree, the bus – is a stable identity in our experience.

Here was Maimon’s alternative. We don’t see wholes with stable, unambiguous identities. We perceieve actions, movements, fluctuations of differences, changes, that our perceptual apparatus – the sense organs and nervous system – assembles into what we perceive as objects.

A puppy comes into our room. We first perceive the puppy through changes. Where there was silence, there’s now skittering and yipping. Where there was an empty room, there’s now this beige-and-white speckled vision. A faint odour of dog breath creeps into your nose.

There isn’t just that one change. The whole scene continues to fluctuate. Barks alternate breathing, paws pound the floor in rhythm. The shape of the dog in our field of vision grows larger as it approaches. Its legs and ears flop and fly about. At every instance, we perceive changes.

Our real experience of the material world isn’t the objects in it – it’s the changes in it, the differentials, the fluxes. You look at pretty much all contemporary science of perception – with input from neurology, medicine, biology, robotics – and they’ve pretty much proven Maimon’s argument. At least in a kind of essence.

Our world is material and real, but what’s most material – most easily grasped by an organism in perception – are its changes, its movements.

The Relief of Reading Brilliant Work, Jamming, 07/01/2018

As you can tell from some of my posts involving his work in the past, Richard Dawkins annoys the hell out of me.

He’s the unfortunately self-appointed intellectual leader of the obnoxious, smug (and borderline racist* these days) New Atheist movement.

* No, seriously. He actually has gotten pretty ignorant-old-man racist.

Not all atheists can be as whimsically humorous as the New
Zealanders. Unfortunately, most of them are enormous jerks and
bullies.

I’ve been waiting for someone to come along and write the perfect polemic of Dawkins and all the cruel, demi-bigoted ideas he’s been spreading through Western popular culture. My wait is at last over.

That author’s name is Morteza Hashemi, my colleague at the Reply Collective, and the book is Theism and Atheism in a Post-Secular Age. I deeply hope that his publisher makes an affordable softcover edition available and promotes it reasonably well.

Like any genuinely effective polemic, it does more than just act as a polemic. For one, Hashemi’s takedown of Dawkins’ and Daniel Dennett’s arguments against God’s existence are also insightful and efficient accounts of a dangerous and very popular misconception of how scientific knowledge works.

He labels it well as the myth or ideology of “economy and coherence.” It's a delightfully straightforward way of labelling a perspective on science that I’ve always had trouble putting a concise name to.

It’s the notion that the greatest benefit of scientific knowledge – apart from its truth, of course – was that it was simple, reductive, and ultimately rested on only a few principles. Science as a long, unified story of progress that would ultimately lead to a universal Theory of Everything™ simple enough to fit on a t-shirt.

That vision of science has, over the last couple of decades of conspiracy theories, gotten scientific institutions in a lot of trouble. Because once research was published and reached popular consciousness on how science works and has actually developed, reading that throws the “economy and coherence” concept into the bin.

I feel sad for Bruno Latour. He doesn't have to beat himself up over
how other people have used and abused his work.

Or at least it should. The feelings of regret among researchers of science history, sociology, and philosophy are because of an unfortunate unintended effect such research – works by people like Thomas Kuhn, David Bloor, Bruno Latour, and others in these traditions.

A) How you should understand this research.
1. “I believe science is true because of its economy and coherence."
2. Reads about how scientific fields actually diverge and diversify.
3. “It seems science doesn’t need to be economical or coherent to be true.”

B) Here’s how too many people understand this research.
1. “I believe science is true because of its economy and coherence.”
2. Reads about how scientific fields actually diverge and diversify.
3. “It seems science isn’t economical or coherent.”
4. “Therefore, science mustn’t be true.”

You see what happened there? You hold onto the ideology of economy and coherence as the standard of truth, instead of letting the empirical research show you that it isn’t. This is how revanchists and people with billions of dollars invested in oil companies want you to think.

The petroleum billionaires want you to think scientists are all con-men because they don’t want to waste the money they’ve invested in petroleum. The revanchists want you to believe their extremist Christianity over more pluralistic ethical views about religious belief and its more complex place in human knowledge.

Latour likes to blame himself, because he published so much empirical research on how scientific institutions and knowledge functions. But there’s no reason (other than perhaps watching too much Hannity), to choose (B) over the more empirically faithful (A).

If the plurality of scientific knowledge makes it all a lie, then we never would have developed industrial society in the first place, you wouldn’t be able to read this, and I wouldn’t be able to write it. Let’s move on.

On What There Isn't, Research Time, 22/12/2017

Here’s another takeaway from the chapter in What Is Philosophy? about the nature of science – Atheism is ridiculous.

Now, I’m not talking about the many different schools of thoughtful, philosophically rigorous, conceptually beautiful atheism that people have discussed and believed in for millennia.

Forget about Bertrand Russell’s arguments for skepticism. Forget Nietzsche’s disturbingly ethical rejection of Christianity, on grounds that it was a morality that made people weak and resentful. Leave the Hellenic Cynics behind.

He's just so smug. Frankly, all the trolling jerks and fascists are so
insufferably smug. Have fascists ever been quite so irritating as
they are today?

I’m going to come back to Spinoza, because of course I am.

Think about that shrill atheism of people like Richard Dawkins.* Dawkins own second, longest, and most annoying wave as a public intellectual began with his advocacy for atheism in the early 1990s. Deleuze was writing What Is Philosophy? He knew who Dawkins was, and would have heard talk of his new books.

* Canadian politics sidebar. Do you think Jordan Peterson might be shooting to become the Richard Dawkins for the revanchist set? Dawkins courted a populist college kid atheism of thinking religion was stupid. Peterson’s demo simply thinks the same about women’s rights. I think a severe category shift just happened.

Science and religion don’t need to be hostile to each other. They are pretty much all the time, but it’s not necessary.

I think the secret is in the ideology of Western science that’s grown up around it for the past couple of centuries. It goes – Science can investigate the entire universe, discovering the truth in the material world and proving religion empty dogma. The Galileo Myth, you could call it.

Galileo the person is totally absent from this mythic version of him so many of us learned, if not in school, then on PBS. His estate eventually licensed his image for use in the cleaned-up PIXAR-perfect movie version of his life.

The general method of science is to describe the world as it is in the greatest possible detail. Its domain is the entire universe.

Deleuze has the very rare clarity to say that this means science will inevitably fragment disciplines fractally ad infinitum – and that’s great! We need scientific knowledge to find out more and more about the world. We need scientific knowledge to help us figure a way out of this economic-ecological-political clusterfuck we’re in as a global civilization.

Pictured: A proper atheist. I only wish official portraits of
Spinoza depicted him as how brown he really was. The
man was born in Amsterdam to a family of Portuguese-
Jewish immigrants. Put him in a time machine, he would
likely fit in fine walking around Marrakech or east LA.

But that truth contradicts the today’s cult of populist atheism. Because populist atheism has two founding Myths – Galileo and Einstein. Well, more like Galileo’s Myth and Einstein’s Word.** E=mc2

** Fitting that the Man be Catholic and the Word be Jewish. Moses heard the Word and Christ had become the Man.

The ideology of populist scientific atheism has twin foundations. 1) Science’s truth stands against religion’s dogmas; 2) The most universal truth of science will be simple enough to put on a T-shirt.

I remember reading Stephen Hawking talk about the theory of everything having as simple a heart as E=mc2. These days, I can’t believe someone apparently so smart could be so naive.

When you understand the world in more and more detail, it doesn’t make things simpler. It makes things more complicated. There are so many domains of knowledge – what there is to be learned gets denser and denser. Each scientific discipline is a different domain of knowledge.

Real scientific investigation – discovering more about the world – will never unify all the domains because such an investigation moves in the opposite direction as simplicity and unity.

Empirical knowledge expands and proliferates – even the most arcane theoretical work relies on the empirical reality of having to make sense of our everyday world.

What about religion? God isn’t something you find like you find the Higgs Boson, building an experiment to detect God by a predicted ancillary affect. God isn’t even something you find like your car keys, remembering that they slid off the table where you threw them coming home and you thought you’d pick them up later.

You want to know how you discover God? Read Spinoza. Second time you read it, start with Book One. First time you read it, start with Book Five and go backwards. You find God in learning more about the world, and how to move with ease, happiness, and joy within it.

You realize that when a real atheist says, “I believe only in material reality,” he is literally saying, “I believe only in God.” Substance. Material reality, of which we’re each a flickering little quirky process.

On What There Is, Research Time, 21/12/2017

When Neil DeGrasse Tyson opens his mouth about philosophy, he usually doesn’t know what he’s talking about. If I was going to make this a pissing contest, I’d tell him what a better grasp many philosophers have on the core concepts of the sciences and scientific knowledge.

I could cite him plenty. I’ve known several specialists in philosophy of science who also have bachelor’s degrees in different sciences. An old McMaster colleague has a degree in physics, the department has run a joint degree program in philosophy and mathematics, a friend from my doctoral program has a biology degree, and my old friend Johnny Five has a colleague with a degree in microbiology.

These days, I feel like Bill Nye has simply lost his
touch. He's less an advocate for science, and is now
just one more talking head.
Nice poster, though.

We don't fuck around.

Maybe that’s why philosophy is such an unpopular subject, a tradition that Tyson and Bill Nye shit on. Philosophers don’t even fuck around enough to do children’s entertainment and become national icons of education.*

* John Dewey would be enraged. He might even furrow his brow.

Gilles Deleuze has plenty to say about science, which is actually very insightful in his weird way. Remember that extended riff I went on about his idea that philosophy was about catching hold of chaos? In What Is Philosophy?, he contrasts science.

Scientific thinking is rooted in mathematics – as Deleuze terms it, functions. You use mathematics to plot and describe quantities, intensities, and differentials. You end up with specific measurements. Even in the many situations and disciplines where you deal in probabilities, you’re still dealing in ranges or numbers.

A mathematically indefinite limit is still an infinitely more sane number than the kind of thinking Deleuze calls chaos in this context – ideas changing so infinitely fast that they change completely in the moment of grasping.

Deleuze says philosophy is thinking in terms of what a process can do – its potential, its virtual existence – the limits and frameworks for all that a process or machine** can achieve. Philosophy’s domain is purely about the structure of potentials. At least that’s one reading of this very complex book.

** Same difference, really.

Science, as he contrasts it, is about the actual. Sciences are mathematical ways to describe different domains of actual existence – how things are right now, what they become, what they can become, and the likelihood of their becoming.

Properly speaking, philosophy and the sciences are partners. Historically, they were united in a single, multifaceted discipline. But the different sciences proliferated, differentiated, developed more complex knowledge in more unique domains.

We understood enough about the world to realize how many unique approaches to knowledge were needed to understand more of the world. So now we don’t have ‘natural philosophy’ anymore. We have a discipline that’s purely conceptual.

Rather, we have many disciplines that constitute together a human knowledge practice more profound than any single tradition within it – whether you start with Parmenides, Kongzi, Moses, or the Vedas. The creation of frameworks for understanding and thinking.

Now we also have the sciences – the detailed, mathematical knowledge of what is. They can exist in a positive feedback loop, each informing different aspects of the other’s practice. In philosophy, that’s what a lot of us do explicitly. How about the sciences?

The Shock of Your Own Inadequacy, Research Time, 06/11/2017

No, this post isn’t about the first time you experienced erectile dysfunction and get your minds out of the gutter.

Really, I’m taking a second pass at the idea I was talking about earlier this weekend. That idea of alienation coming up in The Human Condition. It’s useful and intriguing, and I want to make sure I have a good handle on how to express it. I think I have a better grasp on the how right now.

When I was a young boy, I read Steven Hawking's A Brief History of
Time. There, I read that the ultimate goal of science was to develop
a theory of everything, a mathematical system that could explain
and predict every phenomenon in the universe in simple formulae.
Hawking should be ashamed of writing such propaganda.

Mathematics are, in some context, important to all sciences. Calculus, geometry, statistics, plain old arithmetic – whatever. If you want to give a quick and dirty one-sentence* definition of science, call it ‘Systematic knowledge emerging from understanding mathematical descriptions of things, systems, and processes.’

* Inevitably inadequate, but making an accurate-enough gesture for us to say that, yeah, it’s true I suppose.

Put that in your introductory-level philosophy of science textbook and smoke it.

Okay, that was the last joke. So Hannah Arendt tries to explain how a profound alienation from nature, the world, and our experience can arise from how central mathematics is to our knowledge.

The mathematical tools of the different sciences give us a better ability to understand natural processes – atomic energy fields, cellular and organic processes, ecological development, cosmological events – than we can get from our ordinary observation of the world.

Go to the typical grade school example – which I don’t think ever gets unpacked the way it really deserves – of geocentric vs heliocentric models of the solar system. We look up in the sky and we see the sun and other heavenly bodies circling us.

But describing their actual motion in our sky takes some convoluted math. So Copernicus, Erasmus, and others developed a heliocentric model with simpler math. It was always an as-if hypothesis just to ease up on the headaches astronomers suffered.

If I could focus on one of the many philosophical and metaphysical
screwups of Christian thought, it's that the common interpretation of
Noah's myth in this tradition is that creation exists for us as we are.
The meaning of the rainbow is that everything is illuminated already.
I much prefer the Jewish tradition, which is much more honest about
how we still have to work for our knowledge.

Mathematics is a technological creation – it’s a human tool, a complex assemblage of symbols and rules. So any knowledge that we produce with mathematical tools isn’t a direct encounter with the world – mathematics mediates our knowledge of the world.

That was fine when we were just coming up with imaginary models to simplify our models of a more complex world – the migraine-inducing calculations of planetary paths in the geocentric model. But then it turned out that the mediated abstract models of visceral experience were true, and our ordinary experience of the world distorted how nature really was.

Arendt talks about Galileo and the astronomical tradition that followed him, but Robert Boyle and the Royal Society’s development of the experimental laboratory was equally important. Mathematics was the symbolism, and the laboratory was the institution and site, of mediated knowledge.

Mediated knowledge was much more effective, more powerful, than knowledge through direct experience of the world. Necessary conditions of humanity’s industrial revolution included that mediated knowledge.

Our own tools, techniques, and technology were the medium of that knowledge. This was a profound cultural shock to the Europeans who developed the modern epoch of mathematics and the institution of the laboratory. My debt here is to my SERRC colleague Steve Fuller’s philosophical history of knowledge.

The power of mediated knowledge over direct experience of the world
was such a shock to Medieval Christian European society that its
success felt like falling back into the Cave. A God whose nature
requires complex mathematics and wrangling results out of a
laboratory to understand isn't nearly as kind and close to us as
Medieval Christian thinking held. All the philosophical attempts
to overcome mediation in knowledge – I think of Hegel's Absolute
and popular evangelical literalist disdain for science – you can
understand as desperate refusals to accept a distant God.

Before this cultural realization of the power of mediated knowledge, Europeans had a view of the world in which every moment of ordinary wandering through the world brought you closer to God.

The medieval Christian conception of worldly knowledge was that our world was creation. Creation was God’s expression, and humanity was the element of creation who God made creation for.

Creation’s purpose was for humans to understand it and live harmoniously in nature. So the popular conception of nature in European Christian culture was as an open book. Creation was something through which we understood God and our relationship to Him. We’re built to understand creation intuitively because creation was made for us.

The success of mediated knowledge demonstrates that creation wasn’t made for us. The most accurate knowledge of the world emerges from using these complicated tools, technology that requires years of training and education to use properly. The world is much more opaque than an entire sub-continent’s culture of our ancestors understood.

People in Medieval Christian European culture thought of themselves as Fallen, that they had to work to understand God and creation again. The success of technology – mathematical symbols and the laboratory – in understanding the world demonstrates to a Medieval European Christian that we’re Fallen much farther than we thought.

We may as well have Fallen into hell.

Is Alienation Inevitable or Escapable? Jamming, 05/11/2017

Alienation is a word with many different meanings. We use it – the ideas and images it evokes – to unpack a lot of fairly different concepts. That versatility makes the word very useful, but also very dangerous because it’s so easily misunderstood.

Here are a few examples.

What we take to be a hallucination, an illusion, is in fact the real.
What appears solid is a practical instinct that more careful
observation shows has very limited scope and application.
Real knowledge shows us that everything is connected,
interdependent, flows into each other, can sense each other.

When I brought Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity to Palgrave a few years ago, one of the proposal reviewers kept talking about marxism. Now, I was using the word ‘alienation’ in an environmental philosophy context.

It’s a book on environmental ethics. But some folks, they see a word that has some deep marxist associations and they fly straight to marxism. The conversation with the reviewer turned out fine.

A lot of academics are surprised when I write back to journal and book line editors telling them their reviewers didn’t know what they were talking about. But it’s surprisingly effective.

So what’s underneath all those different definitions of alienation – the orthodox marxist, the popular lefty, the environmentalist / ecological, and other philosophical approaches? Think about it this way – What’s the experience or the state of mind that all these technical conceptions of alienation describe different aspects of?

There’s a passage in The Human Condition that, as far as I can tell, nails this description. Arendt talks about the peculiarly modern chasm between the nature of the world and our experience of it.

The last few centuries of research institutions have discovered more about the universe than we’ve ever known before. We’re able to observe planets orbiting stars all over our galaxy. We’re investigating the smallest, most elusive particles in our universe.

We’ve developed such comprehensive knowledge of how life works on a molecular level. We’re on our way toward a similarly comprehensive knowledge of life ecologically. All of that builds our medical knowledge. We understand the processes and flows by which our planet holds itself together and pulls itself apart.

Confronted by the ALie Nation
The subjects and the citizens
See the material religions through trauma and numb
Nothing is related
All the things of the earth and in the sky
Have energy to be exploited
Even themselves, mining their spirits into souls sold
Into nothing is sacred, not even their self

And I’m being way too quick about these different venues of knowledge. Only listing them to blow your minds a little by reminding you of how powerful our knowledge has become.

We’re learned an enormous amount about the universe. But it’s put pretty much all our experience to the lie. When we walk on the Earth, it feels solid to us. But our ground floats on a globe of molten rock – liquid. Objects feel solid, but they’re composed mostly of empty space, kept separate by electromagnetic fields.

Really, it would be more accurate to describe reality as the interaction – integration, interpenetration – of fields instead of objects. That we’re a dynamic reality where everything is constantly in flux. Alienation rises in us because our reality feels different to us.

We experience solid bodies. We experience stability, not flux. Flux, change, dynamism all tends to disturb us. But that’s the way the world really is.

So we’re left with another example of the traditional distinction in Western philosophy. Really, it’s the distinction that defines Western philosophy – one problem running through the entire tradition. Appearance and reality.

That chasm is our fundamental alienation. Something that we’re supposed to or actually do experience as a harmony turns out to be a chaotic discord. The solidity of the world is an illusion. No, not an illusion – a lie that we tell ourselves and convince ourselves from our earliest experiences.

A lie into which we’re socialized from birth. Our knowledge that gives us so much power also shows that the harmony we felt with the world is utterly unreal. As Arendt quotes Werner Heisenberg, all we have are our instruments and ourselves.

Expecting the world to be one way, we discover that it’s totally different. The ways we understood the world – so common that it feels intuitive, that we raise our children instinctively to believe in the world this way – are actually nonsense. Our subjectivities schizz from the world.

How do you heal this wound in our knowledge and self-conception? It may be as easy and as difficult as throwing that false instinct away. Understand the world as energy, flux, flow, and interdependence, multiplicity without hierarchy or rank. See what you can become then.

And We Could Move the Earth, Research Time, 03/11/2017

Archimedes is a part of the Western cultural imaginary about the nature of science, knowledge, and scientific power. Get me a lever long and strong enough, find me the right place to stand, and I can move the world. That’s the image.

Now, I’m about to take over as Digital Editor of Social Epistemology. So it’s not like I actually believe this is the way science and scientific knowledge actually works.

Human knowledge, technology, and power have definitely moved the world. It’s moved the world into a distinct geological epoch – the Holocene era, blip in the planet’s history that it is. It’s moved the world into remarkable extinction event as well, as we drown so much of the Earth’s creatures in our toxic waste.

But scientific knowledge doesn’t need to understand the world from some point of perfect objectivity to do its work. The view from nowhere not only doesn’t exist, but it was never necessary in the first place.

I write this so that I can draw out of Hannah Arendt’s writing about this idea something that I can use in my own philosophical work. She talks about an “Archimedean moment” in the history of Western science, from which we realized that view from nowhere.

Yet I think she also understands that this “Archimedes” image doesn’t refer to scientific practice itself. Scientific practice and technological development is far more complex than the popular image of it all.

That’s where I pick up Arendt’s thread on this image of Archimedes. The popular image of science remains this ludicrous, inaccurate one of the view from nowhere. The point of pure objectivity where our knowledge is pure in its truth.

Even that popular image misunderstands Archimedes’ words,* ignoring their directly practical character. Knowledge is how he moves and changes the world, not simply understanding it in some purely abstract sense.

* I doubt Archimedes himself ever said anything precisely like that. Same with the Eureka! moment. The idea, the image, the cartoon that appears in our popular culture is most important. 

No, what matters is the image of the Archimedean point or moment. The image that fixes our belief in human knowledge as aiming for pure objectivity is part of our popular culture. It isn’t true about the nature of knowledge, but it’s popularly believed to be true. We shouldn’t confuse the two.

Arendt writes about how that popular belief has informed popular attitudes about science and knowledge for centuries. She cites a philosophical explanation of Galileo’s experiments. But she could just as easily be talking about the public relations campaign of Robert Boyle and the Royal Society to keep their research from being swept up in the violence of England’s politics at the time.

I also want to keep an eye on Arendt’s explanation for what Galileo’s experiments actually did, her philosophical account of it. Copernicus’ sun-centric model of Earth’s system was conceived and used simply as a mathematical tool. It was a way to simplify planetary mathematics.

Only when Galileo made his telescopic observations of the planets did Copernicus’ model turn out to be so inconveniently true. He didn’t prove it true like a demonstration of logic. He discovered facts which established heliocentrism as a fact.

His telescopes were the long and strong levers that, in popular consciousness at least, moved the world. Which seems to be where it really counts.

Do We See the World or Our Maps of It? Research Time, 31/10/2017

I’ve had a pretty tough day this week, and as I’m writing this post, it’s only Monday. Monday night while I compose a quick Tuesday morning post.

But while I have a lot of work to do for tomorrow for different projects, I need to get some thoughts down here today. If only to collect my thoughts at the end of that long day.

Spoiler for the Edgar Wright film The World’s End – when the body-snatching aliens leave Earth at the end of the movie, they send a planet-wide EM pulse that fries every piece of electronics in the world.

Every hard drive, phone, appliance, and presumably also all the machines keeping people alive in hospitals. Millions die, and the world collapses into a dystopian nightmare. Nick Frost’s ending narration describes his little farming community in England, where they know nothing about the rest of the world.

Nowhere in the world knows anything about anywhere else. How could they? They couldn’t communicate with anyone. In my business communications classes, I talk about the different norms and possibility spaces for web conference conversations, global phone calls, and emails that can cross the Pacific in minutes.

At the end of the movie, that world is all over. The whole world is a mystery again.

A map of the Earth drawn in 1570. We've come a long way since then.

In one of the later chapters of The Human Condition – chapter 35, if you want me to be exact – Hannah Arendt talks about how the world has been made less mysterious. Exploration, settlement, globalization, the simple act of mapping – global cartography with more and more detailed measurement.

Yet those maps are still maps. They’re representations, abstractions. They cut away so many details of living experience to achieve that crystal clarity of the map. Anyone who’s lived anywhere can point you to the clear difference between the experience of wandering around somewhere and studying it by a map.

No matter how detailed that map is – doesn’t matter if the Google Street View car is leading the way and feeding all its new data to your phone in real time – it’s never as detailed as real experience.

Yet the map has incredible power. All our scientific representations have remarkable power to change our world – any reckoning with modernity, the all-too-brief Holocene Era, the Holocene extinction, has to develop an adequate concept of that power.

It’s a paradoxical power – incomplete, inadequate to the complexity and visceral nature of real experience, yet able to encompass such a more comprehensive grasp of the world’s real complexity. Consider for a moment how difficult it is for a single human to wrap their head around all the content – let alone the implications and broader meanings – of our data sets about the world.

We need our computers to interpret these massive amounts of data, to sort them and organize them so we can create our graphs and illustrations. The raw statistical data of our measurements of the world are, on their own, too much for a human consciousness to process. We need our tools.

Those tools – maps, data sets, interpretive algorithms – are how we squeeze meaning from all the information that’s beyond the powers of human consciousness to experience.

Arendt calls it the view from nowhere. Thomas Nagel did too, and wrote a book about it. But what it really is, is the view from the machine – a computer and its software programs is obviously a machine, but even a simple map is a machine. It returns to a fundamental tension in human existence.

Our experience is the most intense way we have of engaging with the world – plunging forward, arms out, grappling with the complex mess of this web of events. But our power in the world only comes from stepping back from that complexity, letting our machines wrestle with reality and shape it into a form that our consciousness can wrap itself around.

Our most powerful actions are a result of delegating our own powers to machines.

The Poetry of the Mind, Dawg, Composing, 25/05/2017

So what is conceptual writing? I can actually say what it is with pretty reasonable confidence.

It begins with very careful writing. Paying attention to the precise meaning of every single word. But this isn’t the same as adhering to detailed definitions. Because the meaning of every word isn’t universal – it varies by context.

And I don’t mean in the relativist sense either, because I’m not talking about any absolute truth. I’m talking about how we understand facts.

So for the same reason that the terminology and central images of scientific disciplines differ – why a solid to a physicist isn’t the same kind of thing as a solid to a geologist – the meanings of our words will shift with our problems. That doesn’t make what we learn and discover while investigating these problems any less true.

Listen to the Earth, and see what you can find.

A scientific discipline isn’t the same as what it studies. Geology isn’t the same thing as the Earth, after all. But if you ask a geologist what he studies, he might say something different. He’ll have his eye on the Earth, but he’ll possibly say he studies geology.

But that’s the discipline – the framework of knowledge and body of facts. In a way, conceptual writing is about creating new frameworks of knowledge. Start with facts that you already know, knowledge you trust reasonably well. I work in philosophy, so let’s take established facts about the history of philosophy – texts and traditions.

Now experiment. Within reason, of course. Always within reason. But try to understand things in slightly different terms. Play with the ideas, try to make a new tradition. That’s what I’ve been doing when I’ve thought about the tradition that builds a political philosophy out of the ethical materialism of Machiavelli and Spinoza.

Plenty of other folks have done it too. Like Antonio Negri, Chantal Mouffe, Louis Althusser. Find your own way into those ideas, and let them guide your own development in thinking. Write a lot of different drafts, riffs, and reflections. Kind of like a blog that’s updated nearly every day for close to four years.

I’m still deep in the experimental stage – still wandering through different texts looking for more tools. But with each pass around the ideas, you refine them, find more subtlety and nuance, new features and new powers. Then when you feel you’re ready for something definitive, lay out the narrative in a general guide.

Then you fill it all in. Like an outline for a book that literally grows more and more detail as you write. Like it wasn’t written from beginning to end, but as a single block of exponentially expanding detail from every point.

The end product is this massively complicated, weirdly baroque figure. It might be a whole new way of thinking.