There’s a very interesting discussion of the merits of Marxism and an Anarchist-Green politics set out in John Zerzan’s book Twilight of the Machines (which I’ll admit to downloading, not reading!) over at the (Dis)loyal Opposition to Modernity. As I understand from the gloss in the DOM post, Zerzan views technology as inherently alienating and destructive and proposes its relinquishment in the interest of human autonomy and the planet (this gloss may need nuancing, obviously!).
Unlike some technophilic left-liberals, I treat relinquishment as a serious moral response to the incompatibility of technical modernity and political transparency. This is because modern technological systems are post-geographic and post-cultural – that is, any invention or device can be replicated in multiple contexts with inherently unpredictable results on the rest of the system (think, for example, of the global impact of Tim Berners Lee’s invention of hypertext for cabal of physicists at CERN). If modern technological systems are inherently unpredictable, then they are inherently uncontrollable. So even if we replace capitalist forms of ownership with a more rational way of allocating resources we’ll still be “living on this thing like fleas on a cat” (to quote Dr Gaius Baltar,)
The only options to verminous status I can conceive are relinquishment or a kind of anti-technological theocracy that artificially restricts the dynamism of self-augmenting technological systems (SATS). Both solutions are arguably based on a self-defeating ideal of sovereignty or autonomy. As Martin Hägglund argues via Derrida, there is no decision without the spacing between now and then – meaning that we can’t live without chancing the worst. The Anarcho-Green is thus a wrong-headed, philosophically naïve death-obsessive but, as fantasies of self-immolation go, his a relatively intelligible one.
Metaphysical Realism (MR) is not one claim but, Putnam argues, a package of interrelated claims about the mind-world relationship. The key components of MR are 1) the independence thesis; 2) the correspondence thesis; 3) the uniqueness thesis. The independence thesis states that there is a fixed totality of mind independent objects (the world). The correspondence thesis states that there are determinate reference relations between bits of language or mental representations and the bits of the world to which they refer. The uniqueness theory states that there is a theory whose sentences correctly describe the states of all these objects. This implies a singular correspondence between the terms belonging to this theory and the objects and properties that they refer to (Putnam 1981, 49). As a package it is cohesive. One needs mind-independent properties and objects as objects/properties to correspond to. There must be some unique total fact about these objects if there is to be one correct way in which a theory can represent this total fact.
We can imagine this theory being expressed in a language consisting of names like “Fido” and “Shlomo”, property and relation terms like “…is a dog”, “…is a cat” or “…is father of…”, as well as all the quantificational apparatus that we need to make multiple generalizations: e.g. “There is at least one thing that is a cat” or “All dogs hate at least one cat”. Of course, since this is the one true theory we might expect it to contain enough mathematics (e.g. set theory) to express the true laws of physics, the true laws of chemistry, etc. However, for this to be one true theory each true sentence that we can derive from it – e.g. “Shlomo is a cat” – must hook up with the world in the right way. For example, “Shlomo” must determinately refer to a unique object and this object must have the property referred to by “…is a cat” (this property might be the set of all cats or it might be universal property of catness – again, depending on the metaphysical facts). [i]
An assignment of referents to terms along these lines is called an interpretation function. The set of objects, properties, relations, etc. that are matched up to terms by a particular interpretation function is called a model. Putnam’s account of metaphysical realism then, in effect says that metaphysical realism is the claim that there is a unique description of the world hooked up to that world by a single true interpretation function (matching names to objects, property terms to properties, etc.).
The uniqueness of the corresponding interpretation function is crucial here because if there were more than one good way of interpreting the terms of the one true theory, there would be alternative theories, each one corresponding to a different interpretation function for the constituent terms of its language.[ii] In that case, there would not be one correct description of the world. But if realism comes down to a commitment to there being a God’s eye view of the world – a uniquely true theory which picks out the way the world is – then realism would have to be rejected.
What is the virtue that makes the one true theory unique? Well, to count as the one true theory, it would, at minimum, need to satisfy all the “operational constraints” that ideally rational inquirers would impose on such a theory. For example, if one imagines science progressing to an ideal limit at which no improvements can be made in its explanatory power, coherence, elegance or simplicity, then the one true theory would have to be as acceptable to ideally rational enquirers as that theory (Putnam 1981, 30).
Putnam’s argument against realism is that given a theory that satisfies this ideal of operational virtue there would always be a second equally good theory that can be constructed by giving the sentences of the first different interpretations. Further, he argues, that there is nothing beyond operational virtue that might distinguish the first theory from the second because there are no mind-independent semantic facts that specify the right interpretation. If this is right, then there cannot be a one true theory that completely describes the world.
The argument begins with a theorem of model theory.[iii] The model-theoretic notion of a theory is that it is a language L under a given interpretation function I which maps the terms of L onto a universe of objects and properties (properties are treated as sets of objects. For example, the relation of fatherhood would be the set of all ordered pairs, the second member of which is the son of the first member.). The theorem states that for every theory T1 (consisting of a language L under interpretation I) it is possible to gerrymander a function J that interprets each term L “in violently different ways, each of them compatible with the requirement that the truth value of each sentence in each possible world be the one specified” (Putnam 1981, 33, 217-218). The basic idea is that under these “permutated” interpretation functions, the sentences that come out true in T1 in a given possible world would come out true in T2 in that world.[iv] The two theories T1 and T2 would not differ in assignments of truth values to sentences in any possible world and – being expressed in the same words – would have exactly the same structure, so each would be as simple and as elegant as the other.
However, metaphysical realism is committed to the view that even an ideally confirmed and simple theory could be comprehensively false because truth is “radically non-epistemic” – that is truth is a matter of whether a sentence corresponds with the world, not of how well confirmed that sentence is. This is, of course, the position that Descartes is committed to in his Evil Demon thought experiment. The semantic facts that give my beliefs reference to a possible world are unaffected by the existence or nature of the mind-external world. Putnam’s version of this realist conceit is the science fictional notion that we might be brains in vats being fed simulated experiences by a mad neurophysiologist. Thus, according to metaphysical realism, even a theory T1 that is operationally ideal and irrefutable for vat brains could be still be false (Putnam 1978, 125). However, unlike Descartes, Putnam argues that this conceit is incoherent. If T1 is consistent it is possible to find an interpretation function that maps the language of T1 onto a model containing elements of whatever world happens to exist – even if that is vat-world. So under this interpretation T1 comes out true, not false (Putnam 1978, 126).
It can be objected that this would not be the interpretation “intended” by the vat brains (or the ensorcelled Descartes, if one prefers). But T1 would be operationally as good as it gets for the envatted. It would inform their practices of inference and prediction in just the same way that it would were it true. There seems to be nothing beyond these practices of judgment and inference that could fix the meaning of terms like “cat” or “dog” – though these are clearly not sufficient to give uniquely determinate meaning.
Some philosophers have argued that uniquely intended interpretations can be imposed by our contents of our beliefs or ideas. For example, maybe my idea of a cat and actual cats shares a mysterious essence of catness which “exists both in the thing and (minus the latter) in our minds” which, in turn, fixes the reference of property terms like “cat” (Putnam 1983, 206; 1981, 59-61). Putnam argues that this response makes recourse to a magic language of self-interpreting mental-signs: it states, in effect, that there are mental representations that just mean what they mean irrespective of how the world is or of their role in inference. Here Putnam is in agreement with the French deconstructionist, Jacques Derrida. For Derrida, as for Putnam, a sign is a mark that acquires it meaning by being used differently from other signs, whether the mark is spoken, written or occurs in the brain or in some purely mental medium (if such a thing exits). A particular inscription or brain state or sound only counts as a sign insofar as it functions or is used differently from other signs. The obvious candidate for “use” and “function” here are the roles of signs in inferences and in interpretative practices. But these, as has been seen, are unable to fix a unique model for T1.
So it does not matter whether we are talking about mental signs or signs in language: they derive meaning from their differential functioning. For Derrida this has the complicating consequence that any mark must be “iterable”: i.e. can be lifted from its standard contexts and grafted into new ones, thereby acquiring different functions (Derrida 1988, 9-10). However, for our purposes, the important consequence is that appealing to “inner” or mental signs to fix the intended meanings of T1 seems to presents us with exactly the same problem of indeterminacy as we had with T1 itself (Putnam 1978, 127; 1983, 207).
If this is right, then the realist claim that an ideally confirmed theory could be false just comes down to the claim that there are self-standing minds or self-standing languages whose meanings are fixed regardless of how things lie in the world. But if Putnam is right, there are no self-standing meanings in this sense. Descartes thought experiment in either its 17th Century Demonic version or its modern Neuro or Simulationist versions is incoherent.
But, Putnam argues, this means that the idea that truth is non-epistemic is incoherent. To suppose that our beliefs could all be false, no matter how well they conform to experience and canons of enquiry makes no sense (Putnam 1978, 128-130). And (assuming the soundness of Putnam’s model theoretic argument) this also means that the idea of a privileged, God’s eye view of the world – MR -is incoherent. There is no single theory that uniquely corresponds to the nature of a mind-independent world because there are always other interpretation functions with which to generate new theories with the same degree of epistemic virtue. Thus the assumption that the world has an intrinsic nature independently of how it is construed from the standpoint of a particular theory or form of life is as much an ungrounded superstition as the notion of substantial forms.
Rather than aspiring to the idealized God’s eye view of metaphysical realism, Putnam argues that we should recognize that truth, reference and objectivity are properties that our claims and experiences have in virtue of “our” practices of inference, confirmation and observation. To say that the sentence “’Cow’ refers to cows” is true is not to make a claim about some determinate relationship – reference – between word and world but to say something about the situations in which a competent speaker of English should use the term ‘cow’ (Putnam 1978, 128, 136). From within the shared practices of English speaker, this fact just shows up as an a priori truth. But this (as Kant also claimed) does not reflect some impossible insight into the mind-independent nature of things, but simply reflects our acculturated understanding of what is appropriate to say, when (137). Even the metaphysical structure of the world is – according to this view – a perspective that reflects the background understanding and interests of creatures who share the relevant concerns and practices. Reference is, as Putnam puts it elsewhere, a “matter of interpretation” which presupposes “a sophisticated understanding of the way words are used by the community whose words one is interpreting” (Putnam 1995, 119). So, by the same token, there can be no ready-made totality of objects of reference since (again) this presupposes the discredited God’s eye view:
[From] my “internal realist” perspective at least, there is no such totality as All the Objects There are, inside or outside science. “Object” itself has many uses, and as we creatively invent new uses of words, we find that we can speak of “objects that were not “values of any variable” in any language we previous spoke (The invention of “set theory” by Cantor is a good example of this.) (Putnam 1995, 120)
References
Derrida, Jacques (1988). Limited Inc. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (trans.),Evanston Ill.:
Northwestern University Press.
Putnam, Hilary (1978). Meaning and the Moral Sciences. Routledge & K. Paul.
Putnam, Hilary (1981). Reason, Truth, and History. Cambridge University Press.
Putnam, Hilary (1983). Realism and Reason: Philosophical Papers Volume 3. Cambridge University Press.
[i] We can summarise this state of affairs as follows:
“Fido” —> the object Fido
“Shlomo” —> the object Shlomo
“…is a cat…” —> property of cattiness
“…is a dog…” —> property of dogginess
“…is the father of…” —> relation of fatherhood
[ii] For example, we can imagine a deviant interpretation function that maps up terms in the “wrong” way:
“Fido” —> the object Fido’s shadow
“Shlomo” —> the object Shlomo’s shadow
“…is a cat…” —> property of being the shadow of a cat
“…is a dog…” —> property of being the shadow of a dog
“…is the father of…” —> relation of fatherhood
[iii] The branch of mathematical logic that examines the formal relationships between languages and the models assigned to them under interpretation functions.
[iv] Suppose T1 has an interpretation function I that includes the first set of assignments given above (“Fido” refers to Fido, “Shlomo” refers to Shlomo, etc.) whereas T2’s interpretation function has the second. Thus the sentence “Shlomo is a cat” says that the object Shlomo is a cat in T1 whereas the same sentence say that a particular shadow is the shadow of a cat, which also happens to be true.
There’s a fascinating post over at M-Phi, asking whether Godel’s use of numbers to code formal relations of derivability in his proof of the incompleteness of arithmetic can be generalized to logical systems which don’t “contain” arithmetic. Not coincidentally, it includes a link to an interesting paper by Paul Livingstone on Derrida, Priest and Godel which looks at the role of syntax in marking the undecidable elements of texts in deconstruction. New APPS will be hosting a symposium on the paper next week.
Derrida’s reading of Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem Mimique is central to Livingstone’s discussion, but as an aid for those who are not familiar with either, I’ve posted a brief commentary on it from my dusty PhD thesis (It was entitled: The Metaphysics of the Deconstructive Text, if you have to know!).
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Rodolphe Gasché compares Derrida’s philosophical project with Husserl’s program for a logical grammar. Logical grammar, in its Husserlian sense, is only derivatively concerned with the structure of language. Syntactic distinctions between linguistic elements are of interest to logical grammar to the extent that they are indicative of the a priori laws governing the composition of intentional contents in cognitive or expressive acts. For example, in Logical Investigation IV Husserl distinguishes between complete, or ‘categorematic’, expressions which express a complete propositional content or a singular presentation, and non-independent, or ‘syncategorematic’, expressions whose senses contribute systematically to independent meanings but which do not express thoughts or refer to objects. Examples of syncategoremata are: ‘but’, ‘between’, ‘The sister of…’, ‘…implies…’. Among the a priori laws that Husserl has in mind would be that a syncategoreme cannot concatenated with a definite article.[1]
The parallel between Husserl and Derrida, according to Gasché, consists in a common concern with formal or, in Derrida’s case, quasi-formal structures which account for the articulation of elements into discursive wholes. For Derrida, as for Gasché, Husserl’s project is limited by being oriented by semantics: in particular, the values of truth or reference. Thus sentences that are necessarily false, such as ‘The circle is square’, are meaningful, but, according to Derrida, are presumed meaningful because their grammatical form ‘tolerates the possibility of relation with [an] object’.[2] Derrida’s project, according to Gasché, extends formality beyond the domain of semantics or logic, to structures which resist either phenomenological or semantic interpretation.[3] He illustrates the quasi-syntactical character of différance, trace and the other infrastructures with reference to Derrida’s reading of part of Mallarmé’s prose poem, Mimique, in ‘The Double Session’:
La scène n’illustre que l’idée, pas une action effective, dans un hymen (d’où procède le Rêve), vicieux mais sacré, entre le désir et l’accomplissement, la perpétration et son souvenir: ici devançant, là remémorant, au futur, au passé, sous une apparence fausse de présent...[4]
Though hymen contributes to the imagistic content of the poem, Derrida suggests that its structural role is as a syntactic place holder which resists onto-grammatical categorization. Although formally a noun – and thus a categoreme in Husserlian terms – Derrida argues that the role of hymen in the poem is largely independent of its meaning but is, rather, determined by its relation to entre, ‘between’: ‘Through the “hymen” one can remark only what the place of the word entre already marks and would mark even if the world “hymen” were not there. If we replaced “hymen” by “marriage” or “crime”, “identity” or “difference”, etc. the effect would be the same, the only loss being a certain economic condensation or accumulation’.[5] The putatively independent hymen is thus textually dependent upon the nominally syncategorematic entre, an element whose ‘signification’ is itself dependent upon its placement. In addition to its grammatical equivocation, hymen is also a ‘between’ of temporal phases of action and cognition (entre le désir et l’accomplissement, la perpétration et son souvenir: ici devançant, là remémorant, au futur, au passé) without being temporally situated (sous une apparence fausse de présent). The indeterminacy of this locus (which, for Derrida, cannot without violence be interpreted as ‘eternal’) can nonetheless be articulated with respect to more or less stable lexical values (devançant, re-mémorant, futur, passé, présent, etc.).
Mimique thus demonstrates, in microcosm, the process by which language extracts a surplus of meaning without being informed by a prior relation to some domain of objects. This is the sense in which, for Gasché, Derrida’s investigations can be considered as a generalization of Husserl’s project:
The system of these infrastructures as one of syntactically re-marked syncategoremata is a system that escapes all phenomenologization as such; it constantly disappears and withdraws from all possible presentation. In privileging the syntactical in the sense in which I have been developing it – suspended from semantic subject matters of whatever sort – the general system spells out the prelogical conditions of logic, thus reinscribing logic, together with its implications of presence and evident meaning, into a series of linguistic functions of which the logical is only one among others. [6]
References:
D Dissemination, Barbara Johnson (trans.),
(1972; London: Athlone Press, 1981).
SP Speech and Phenomena, David Allison (trans.),
(Evanston Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973).
TM Rodolphe Gashe, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection
(London: Harvard University Press, 1986).
[1] Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, IV, pp. 501-503.
[2] SP, p. 99.
[3] TM, pp. 248-249.
[4] Cited in D, p. xx.
[5] Ibid., p. 221.
[6] TM, p. 250.
There’s an instructive debate going on between Graham Harman at Object Oriented Philosophy (henceforth OOO) and Levi Bryant over at Larval Subjects (henceforth LS) about whether Derrida’s work is serviceable for realism. OOO is emphatic: not only is Derrida not a ‘plug and play’ realist, his work has no realist application at all. Unlike Heidegger – whose account of withdrawal can be given a realist spin in Object-Oriented circles – Derrida’s position is not amenable to realist use or even to creative abuse. Here’s OOO:
I think it’s simply madness to call Derrida a realist. His entire argument makes sense only by identifying realism with onto-theology and hence with parousia/presence. He reads the concept of substance as the foot soldier of onto-theology. His critique of the proper is a very frank critique of realism. His theory of the trace is another anti-realist maneuver, not a realist one since that would open the door, in his view, to the “transcendental signified.”
There’s obvious textual support for OOO’s position. Derrida does claim in Of Grammatology that infrastructures like trace and différance provide a condition of possibility for presence and ‘onto-theological’ thinking without being presences or grounding entities themselves. Indeed, for Derrida, they provide the invisible underside or ‘tain’ of all thought, reflection or representation.
The term Différance, like its cognate infrastructural markers ‘trace’ and ‘supplement’ and ‘iterability’, is an economical allusion to structures of negation, co-involvement and co-implication within general textuality. Textuality, for Derrida, should not be identified with language. A text, according to Derrida, is any structure that can be characterized by such operations and relationships. For example, any text will have to consist of elements that are minimally repeatable: ‘A sign which would take place but “once” would not be a sign: a purely idiomatic sign would not be a sign’ (SP, 50) Language is the paradigm of this, but Derrida argues that even the neural memory trace within Freud’s prototype theory of neural networks has to be reactivatable to do its job – though each reactivation alters the relative amenability to stimulation that differentiates it from other memory traces (WD). Derrida’s analysis of the neural trace in ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ meanwhile refers to his earlier analysis of Husserl’s account of temporal awareness. Again, this requires any ‘now’ to be implicated with a retained past while potentiating a not yet determinate, novel future. Thus as Derrida claims in ‘Signature Event Context’ structures like spacing, trace and iterability are invariants. They extend to all representation, to all experience (LI 10).
Derrida’s claim about general textuality may all seem like an excessively subtle way of saying that meaning and content cannot be instantiated in formless pap. However, the infrastructural account has the virtue of extreme generality. It is something very much like a textual ontology – even if JD never conceded this.
Enter LS who makes the central point that iterability (one of the textual infrastructures) requires that entities cannot be dissolved into their relations. Since he is an object-oriented philosopher he frames this as a claim about objects: ‘For Derrida, it seems, any object can be severed from its relations to other objects.’ This is important because Derrida is usually cast as an arch-holist. But it is obvious to anyone who reads him carefully that this is not the case. LS is alluding, of course, to passages such as following one from ‘Signature Event Context’:
Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the usual sense of this opposition), in a small or large unit, can be cited, put between quotation marks: in so doing it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner that is absolutely illimitable . . . This citationality, this duplication or duplicity, this iterability of the mark is neither an accident nor an anomaly, it is that (normal/abnormal) without which a mark could not even have a function called ‘normal’ (LI, p. 12).
So while Derrida may not be a realist, it is clear that he cannot be a holist. No text is exhausted by its passing affiliations. This also means that Derrida cannot be a relativist since relativism requires relativization to some constraining super-context. Iterability says, in effect, that there is no super-context: all contexts are fragile and open. ‘Mass’ may play a different role in Newton to the role it plays in Einstein (for whom there is both relativistic and proper mass) but this does not mean that the two terms are just their respective theoretical roles. Can this point be generalized to get us something like realism? Well, we need to ask: ‘Realism with respect to what?’ Both LS and OOO use the idiom of things or objects. So if LS is right and iterability requires that things be reusable from context to context and Derrida is committed to iterability, then Derrida is committed to things. Ergo, he’s a realist about objects. But OOO is probably right to insist that Derrida’s no thing fan.
However, it may be that Derrida has ontological commitments to things other than things. An iteration like my quotation/mention of ‘if’ in this sentence is an event. For texts (in the general sense) to work there need to be events that are both differentiated and repeatable. What makes this further ‘if’ a token of the same type as this ‘if’ is not its instantiation of a common signifying essence but its iterability. So Derrida is committed to events and he’s committed to relations of repetition between event instances. This means that he’s committed to repeatable events, of course. But there are different models of repetition. Here’s Nelson Goodman: ‘
Repetition as well as identification is relative to organization. A world may be unmanageably heterogeneous or unbearably monotonous according to how events are sorted into kinds (WWW, 9).
THIS is relativism: repetition is relative to organizing scheme. But it’s clear that Derridean repetition cannot be scheme-relative in this sense because that would limit iteration to super-contexts and iteration is ‘absolutely illimitable’. So, as I argued long ago in RQRR, we have to say that Derridean repetition is real repetition. Since repetition occurs to events, these must be structurally repeatable. Derridean events are repeatable particulars, however, not abstract events of the kind posited by Ronald Chisholm. So Derrida is a) not a relativist and b) he is ontologically committed to repeatable particular events and their repetitions. So Derrida is a realist with regard to events and their repetition. However, these occurrences are realized they occur independently of organizing schemes or concepts. They are mind-independent, then, insofar as their occurrence does not depend on the constitutive activity of subjects and language users.
Abbreviations:
Derrida:
LI Limited Inc., Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (trans.),
(1977; Evanston Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988).
OG Of Grammatology, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (trans.),
(London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
SP Speech and Phenomena, David Allison (trans.),
(Evanston Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973).
WD Writing and Difference, Alan Bass (trans.),
(1967; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).
Others:
WWW Nelson Goodman, Ways of World Making (Indianapolis: Hacket, 1978).
RQRR, David Roden, ‘Radical Quotation and Real Repetition’, Ratio (new series) XVII 2 June 2004, 191-206.
Transcript of a paper given at Nottingham University’s Psychoanalysis and the Posthuman Conference, Sept 7, 2010.
Mankind’s a dead issue now, cousin. There are no more souls. Only states of mind.[1]
Since emerging in nineties critical theory, transhumanism and cyberpunk literature, the term ‘posthuman’ has been used to mark a historical juncture at which the status of the human is radically in doubt. Two main usages or, if you will, two distinct posthumanisms can be discerned over this period.
Transhumanists, futurists and science fiction authors regularly concatenate or hyphenate ‘post’ and ‘human’ when speculating about the long-run influence of advanced technologies on the future shape of life and mind.
By contrast, for cultural theorists and philosophers in the ‘continental’ tradition the posthuman is a condition in which the foundational status of humanism has been undermined. The causes or symptoms of this supposed crisis of humanism are various as the bio-engineered ‘clades’ ramifying through the post-anthropoform solar system of Bruce Sterling’s 1996 novel Schismatrix. Posthumanism, in this diagnostic or critical sense, is expressed in the postmodern incredulity towards enlightenment narratives of emancipation and material progress; the deconstruction of transcendental or liberal subjectivities; the end of patriarchy; the emergence of contrary humanisms in post-Colonial cultures; the reduction of living entities to resources for a burgeoning technoscience, or, if some theorists are to be believed, all of the above.[2]
In this paper, I will argue that these two usages do not only reflect divergent understandings of the posthuman – the speculativeand the critical - but reflect a foreclosure of radical technogenetic change on the part of critical posthumanists. This gesture can be discerned in four arguments which occur in various forms within the extant literature of critical posthumanism:
- the anti-humanist argument
- the technogenesis argument
- the materiality argument
- and the anti-essentialist argument
All four, as I hope to show, are unsound.
Analysing why these arguments fail has the dual benefit of preventing us from being distracted by the anti-humanist hyperbole accruing to theoretical frameworks employed within critical posthumanism - such as deconstruction and cognitive science – but, more importantly, contributes to the development of a rigorous, philosophically self-aware speculative posthumanism.
* * *
Contemporary transhumanists argue that human nature is an unsatisfactory ‘work in progress’ that should be modified through technological means where the instrumental benefits for individuals outweigh the technological risks. This ethic of improvement is premised on prospective developments in four areas: Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Science – the so-called ‘NBIC’ suite. For example, improved bionic neural interfaces may allow the incorporation of a wide range of technical devices within an enhanced ‘cyborg’ body or ‘exo-self’ while genetic treatments may increase the efficiency or learning or memory (Bostrom and Sandberg 2006) or be used to increase the size of the cerebral cortex. The wired and gene-modified denizens of the transhuman future could be sensitive to a wider range of stimuli, faster, more durable, more intellectually capable and morphologically varied than their unmodified forebears.
Just how unrestricted and capable transhuman minds and bodies can become is contested since the scope for enhancement depends both on often hypothetical technologies and upon hotly contested metaphysical claims. Among the prospective technologies which excite radical transhumanists like Ray Kurzweil are the use of ‘micro-electric neuroprostheses’ which might non-invasively stimulate or probe the brain’s native neural networks, allowing it to jack directly into immersive cognitive technologies or map its ‘state vector’ prior to uploading an entire personality (Kurzweil 2005, 317);[3] the elusive goal of ‘artificial general intelligence’ – the creation of robots or software systems which approximate or exceed the flexibility of human belief-fixation and comportment; or, perhaps less speculatively, improvements in processor technology sufficient to emulate the computational capacity of human and other mammalian brains (Ibid. 124-125).
Among the metaphysical issues that trouble all but the most facile of transhumanist itineraries is the scope of functionalist accounts of mental states and processes. Functionalist philosophers of mind claim that the mental states types such as beliefs or pains are constituted by the ‘causal role’ of token states within a ‘containing system’ rather than by the stuff that the system is constituted from. The causal role of a token state is defined by the set of states that can bring it about (its inputs) and set of the states that it causes in turn (its outputs). The substrate on which that state is realized is irrelevant to its functional role.[4] Some philosophers of mind – David Chalmers, say – are functionalists with regard to representational states like beliefs or desires, but not with regard to phenomenal states, like having a toothache or seeing pink. If Chalmers is right, then we can never produce artificial consciousness purely in virtue of emulating the kinematics of brain states. However, if we accept the accounts of philosophers with (however divergent) functional analyses of the property of state consciousness like Daniel Dennett and Michael Tye the prospects for artificial consciousness seem somewhat brighter (Dennett 1991). Given a sufficiently global functionalism, a simulation of an embodied nervous system in which these constitutive relationships were actually instantiated would also be a replication lacking none of the preconditions for intentionality or conscious experience regardless of whether they were implemented with biological material as this is currently understood. For radical transhumanists influenced by functionalist and computationalist approaches in the philosophy of cognitive science, then, neural replication opens up the possibility of copying the patterns that constitute a given mind onto non-biological platforms that will be inconceivably faster, more flexible and more robust than evolved biological bodies (Kurzweil 2005).
These radical augmentation scenarios indicate to some that a future convergence of NBIC technologies could lead to a new ‘posthuman’ form of existence. Following an influential paper by the computer scientist Virnor Vinge, this ontological step change is sometimes referred to as ‘the technological singularity’ (Vinge 1993): an epochal ‘discontinuity’ resulting from positive feedback exerted by technical change upon itself (Bostrom 2005, 8). Characteristically the scenario is painted in terms of the creation of artificial super-intelligence – intelligence being the variable considered most liable to affect the rate of technical growth. Vinge claims that were a single super-intelligent machine created, it could create still more intelligent machines, resulting in a growth in mentation to plateaux far exceeding our current capacities. Lacking this intellectual prowess, we cannot envisage some of the ways post-singularity intelligences might re-order the world. A post-singularity world would be constituted in ways that cannot be humanly conceived. If it could be humanly conceived it would not be the genuine article. The idea of the singularity, then, is that of a principled limit on human cognition, and predictive power, in particular. It is homologous, in many respects, to Immanuel Kant’s idea of the thing-in-itself, which lacking any mode of presentation in the phenomenal world of space and time must necessarily elude systematic empirical knowledge.
Commitment to the possibility of a singularity nicely exemplifies the philosophical position of speculative posthumanists. Posthumans in this sense are hypothetical ‘descendants’ of current humans that are no longer human in consequence of some augmentation history.
For speculative (or pre-critical) posthumanism, a technically mediated transcendence of the human constitutes a significant ontological possibility.
Speculative posthumanism is logically independent of the normative thesis of transhumanism: one can be consistently transhumanist while denying the ontological possibility of posthuman transcendence. Similarly, speculative posthumanism is consistent with the rejection of transhumanism. One could hold that a posthuman divergence is a significant ontological possibility but not a desirable one.[1]
Critical posthumanists such as Katherine Hayles, Andy Clark, Don Ihde and Neil Badmington do not contest the potential of NBIC technologies or advance principled arguments against enhancement (Clark is a warm-blooded, moderate transhumanist according to my taxonomy) but argue that speculative or pre-critical posthumanism reflects a philosophically naïve conception of the human such that the posthuman would constitute a radical break with it. This position is clearly implied in the title of Katherine Hayles’ seminal work of cultural history How We Became Posthuman. For Hayles, the posthuman is not a hypothetical state which could follow some prospective singularity event, say, but a work in progress: a complex and contested re-conception of the human subject in terms drawn from the modern ‘sciences of the artificial’: information theory, cybernetics, Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life (Hayles 199, 286).
One example of the intellectual tendencies that inform this new cultural moment is so-called ‘Nouvelle AI’ (NAI). Where the manipulation of syntactically structured representations is the paradigm of intelligence traditional AI, NAI draws inspiration from computational prowess exhibited in biological phenomena involving no symbolization, such as swarm intelligence, insect locomotion or cortical feature maps. The guiding insight of NAI is that the preconditions of intelligence – such as error-reduction strategies, pattern recognition or categorization – can emerge in biological systems from local interactions between dumb specialized agents (like ants or termites) without a central planner to choreograph their activities.
If human mentation ‘emerges’ likewise from millions of asynchronous, parallel interactions between dumb components, Hayles argues, there is no classically self-present ‘human’ subjectivity for the posthuman to transcend. Mental powers of deliberation, inference, consciousness, etc. are already distributed between biological neural networks, actively-sensing bodies and artefacts (Hayles 1999, 239).
I have christened this ‘the anti-humanist objection to posthumanism’ given its striking similarities to the deconstruction of subjectivist philosophy and phenomenology undertaken in post-war French anti-humanisms – Derrida’s in particular (Ibid. 146). Hayles’ proximate target, here, is the putatively autonomous subject of modern liberal theory. The ‘autonomous liberal subject’, she argues, is unproblematically present to itself and distinct from the conceptually-ordered world in which it works out its plans for the good (Ibid. 286). The posthuman subject, by contrast, is problematically individuated, because its agency is constituted by an increasingly ‘smart’ extra-bodily environment on which its cognitive functioning depends and because of the open, ungrounded materiality – or ‘iterability’ – of language which is both arrested by the context of embodied action and infected by its opacity (Derrida 1988 152; Hayles 1999, 264-5). The decentered or distributed posthuman subject is no longer sufficiently distinct from the world to order it autonomously as the subject of liberal theory is required to do.
But is this right?
Let’s suppose, along with Hayles and other proponents of embodied and distributed cognition, that the skin-bag is an ontologically permeable boundary between self and non-self (or exo-self). Proponents of the extended mind thesis like Andy Clark and David Chalmers argue from a principle of ‘parity’ between processes that go on in the head and any functionally equivalent process in the world beyond.[5] The parity principle implies that mental processes need not occur only in biological nervous systems but in the environments and tools of embodied thinkers. If I have to make marks on paper to keep in mind the steps of a lengthy logical proof, the PP states that my mental activity is constituted by these inscriptional events as well as by the knowledge and habits reposing in my acculturated neural networks.
However, given the parity between bodily and extra-bodily processes, this cannot make the activity less evaluable in terms of the rationality standards we apply to deliberative acts. Even if the humanist subject emerges from the summed activities of biological and non-biological agents, this metaphysical dependence (or supervenience) need not impair its capacity to subtend the powers of deliberation or reasoning liberal theory requires of it.[6] Derrida’s more systematic deconstruction of the semantically constitutive subject nuances this picture by entailing limits on the scope of practical reason in the face of the ‘outside’ or exception which infects any rule-governed system (Derrida 1988, p.152). The rule or desire is always precipitate, in this way, but there is a difference between being ahead of oneself and being be-headed. The posthuman, in Hayles critical sense of the term, is not less human for confronting the fragile, constitutively precipitate character of cognition and desire.
This is not to say, of course, that there is no merit in the model of the hybrid self that Hayles presents as ‘posthuman’ or that it has no implications for pre-critical or speculative posthumansim. On the contrary, a ‘deconstruction’ of the classically constitutive subject of post-Cartesian thought is, I have argued, a useful prophylactic against immaterialist fancies or transcendentally inspired objections to the naturalizing project of cognitive science (Roden 2006). However, the naturalization of subjectivity and mind is at best a conceptual precondition for envisaging certain transcendent posthumanist itineraries involving the emergence of artificial minds from new technological configurations of matter. It does not represent their culmination.
There are two other objections that may potentially survive this analysis. Firstly, it could be objected that critical posthumanism – like the extended mind thesis – shows that the human is “always already” technically constituted. In her contribution to a recent Templeton Research Seminar on transhumanism Hayles argues that transhumanists are wedded to atechnogenetic anthropology for which humans and technologies have existed and co-evolved in symbiotic partnership. Not only would future transhuman enhancement be a technogenetic process; but so, according to this story, are comparable transformations in the deep past. Human technical activity has, for example, equipped some with lactose tolerance or differential calculus without monstering the beneficiaries into posthumans. One of the proponents of the extended mind thesis, Andy Clark, has framed the technogenesis argument against posthumanism particularly clearly in his book Natural Born Cyborgs:
The promise, or perhaps threatened, transition to a world of wired humans and semi-intelligent gadgets is just one more move in an ancient game. . . We are already masters at incorporating nonbiological stuff and structure deep into our physical and cognitive routines. To appreciate this is to cease to believe in any post-human future and to resist the temptation to define ourselves in brutal opposition to the very worlds in which so many of us now live, love and work (Clark 2003, p. 142).
‘Natural born cyborgs, as suggested, are already dealers in hybrid mental representations which exploit both a linguistically mapped environment and our multifariously talented brains. This is significant because our capacity to ascribe structured propositional attitudes to others arguably presupposes the capacity to use language to represent their contents. Representing the contents of beliefs is necessary for evaluating them and it is independently plausible to suppose that, as Donald Davidson argues in his essay ‘Thought and Talk’, having the capacity to evaluate beliefs is part of what is required in a believer (Davidson 1984).
Clearly, if we restrict the evidence base to cases where augmentation has not resulted in a species divergence or something very like it, then we will induce that this is not liable to happen in the future. However, some pre-human divergence had to have happened in our evolutionary past and it is at least plausible – given the ‘natural born cyborgs’ thesis – that technologies such as public symbol systems were a factor in the hominization process. Given a pre-human divergence has occurred in the past, perhaps due to evolutionary pressures brought about the development of simpler symbolization techniques, why preclude the possibility that convergent NBIC technologies might prompt a similar step change in the future?
I have argued elsewhere that a cognitive augmentation that replaced public language with a non-symbolic vehicle of cognition and communication might – assuming Clark’s account of hybrid representations – lead to the instrumental elimination of propositional attitude psychology through the elimination of its public vehicles of content. Post-folk folk might, arguably, be opaque to the practices of intentional interpretation we bring to bear in ‘our’ – i.e. ‘human’ – social intercourse and thus might well form initially discrete social and reproductive enclaves that might later seed entirely posthuman republics.
Another of Hayles’ objections to standard posthumanists visions of transcendence is their supposed elision of the materiality of human embodiment and cognition: the materiality argument. The fact that computer simulations can help us understand the self-organizing capacities of biological systems does not entail that these can be fully replicated by some system by virtue of implementing a sufficiently fine-grained software representation of their functional structure.
It is true that some posthumanist scenarios presuppose that minds or organisms can be fully replicated on speculative non-biological substrates like the computronium or ‘smart matter’ imagined in Ken MacLeod’s Fall Revolution novels. However, this objection applies to a fairly restricted class of posthuman transcendence itineraries: namely those involving the replication ofexisting minds and organisms in computational form. Although Hayles provides no arguments against pan-computationalism or global-functionalism, it might well be the case that synthetic-life forms or robots, being differently embodied, will be differently-minded as well (who knows?). In this case, the materiality of embodiment argument works in favour of the pre-critical posthumanist account, not against it. On the other hand, she may be wrong and the pan-computationalists right. Mental properties of things may, for all we know, supervene on their computational properties because every other property supervenes on them as well.
I turn, finally, to an objection that is perhaps implicit rather than explicit in the arguments of Critical Posthumanists to date but is worth considering on its own, if only for its speculative payoff. I refer to this as the anti-essentialist argument.
The anti-essentialist objection to posthumanism starts from a particular interpretation of the disjointness of the human and the posthuman. This is that the only thing that could distinguish the set of posthumans and the set of humans is that all posthumans would lack some essential property of humanness by virtue of their augmentation history. It follows that if there is no human essence – no properties that humans possess in all possible worlds – there can be no posthuman divergence or transcendence.
This is a potentially serious objection to speculative posthumanism because there seem to be plausible grounds for rejecting essentialism in the sciences of complexity or self-organization that underwrite many posthumanist prognostications. Some philosophers of biology hold that the interpretation of biological taxa most consonant with Darwinian evolution is that they are not kinds (i.e. properties) but individuals. Evolution by natural selection is a form of self-organisation involving feedback relationships between the distribution of genetic traits across populations and their phenotypic consequences in particular environments. An individual or proto-individual can undergo a self-organizing process, but an abstract kind or universal cannot. Thus, the argument goes, evolution happens to species qua individuals (or proto-individuals) not species qua kinds. To be biologically ‘human’ on this view is not to exemplify some set of necessary and sufficient properties, but to be genealogically related to earlier members of the population of humans (Hull 1988).
Clearly, if biological categories are not kinds and posthuman transcendence requires the technically mediated loss of properties essential to membership of some biological kind, then posthuman transcendence envisaged by pre-critical posthumanism is metaphysically impossible. [7]
Underlying the anti-essentialist objection is the assumption that the only significant differences are differences in the essential properties demarcating natural kinds. But why adhere to this philosophy of difference?[8] The view that nature is articulated by differences in the instantiation of abstract universals sits poorly with the idea of an actively self-organizing nature underlying the leading edge cognitive and life sciences. A view of difference consistent with self-organization would locate the engines of differentiation in those micro- components and structural properties whose cumulative activity generates the emergent regularities of complex systems.
For example, we might adopt an immanent ontology of difference for which individuating boundaries are generated by local states of matter: such as differences in pressure, temperature, miscibility or chemical concentration (Delanda 2004). For immanent ontologies of difference –that of Gilles Deleuze, say – the conceptual differences articulated in the natural language kind-lexicons are asymmetrically dependent upon active individuating differences (Ibid. 10). A Deleuzean ontology is obviously not the only option here: any ontology which reconciles the existence of real or radical differences with the lack of transcendent or transcendental organizing principles would do.
In short: we can be anti-essentialists and anti-Platonists while holding that the world is profoundly differentiated in a way that owes nothing to the transcendental causality of abstract universals, subjectivity or language.
Conclusion:
I have argued that critical posthumanists provide few convincing reasons for abandoning pre-critical or speculative posthumanism. The anti-essentialist argument presupposes a model of difference that is ill-adapted to the sciences that critical posthumanists cite in favour of their naturalized deconstruction of the human subject. The deconstruction of the humanist subject implied in the anti-humanist objection may itself be a useful prolegomenon to a posthuman-engendering cognitive science; but it complicates rather than corrodes the philosophical humanism that critical posthumanism problematizes while leaving open the possibility of a radical differentiation of the human and the posthuman. The technogenesis objection is weak, if conceptually productive. The elision of materiality argument is based on problematic assumptions and, even if sound, would preclude only some scenarios for posthuman divergence.
Of these, the anti-essentialist objection seems the strongest and most wide ranging in its implication. Our response to it suggested that it might be circumventable with an immanent ontology of emergent differences such as Deleuze’s ontology of the virtual. However, a consequence of embracing locally emergent differences in this way is that there can be no adequate concept of posthuman difference without posthumans. For it is surely a consequence of any such account that a science of the different cannot precede its historical emergence or morphogenesis, even if only in simulated form. This implies that the posthuman is at best a placeholder signifying a possibility that we cannot adequately conceptualize ahead of its actualization. However, this does not preclude a theoretical development of the implications of the posthuman insofar as we can conceptualize it.
Moreover, the emptiness of the signifier ‘posthuman’ has an ethical or, perhaps, ‘anti-ethical’[9] consequence that arguably should be considered more fully in the light of Derrida’s remarks about the precipitate character of thought. If the speculative idea of the posthuman is a placeholder for differences that are determinable only via some synthetic process – such as the creation of actual posthumans, modified transhumans, or a range of simulations or aesthetic models (as in cybernetic art) - these differences can be determined only by progressive actualization. Thus posthumanist philosophy is locked into a dialectically unstable preterition, falling between speculative and synthetic activity. To understand what it as yet undetermined, it must attempt – however incrementally – to bring it into being and to give it shape.
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Clark, Andy (2003), Natural Born Cyborgs, (Oxford OUP).
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Clark Andy, Chalmers David (1998), ‘The Extended Mind’, Analysis 1998 58(1), pp. 7-19.
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_____(1995). The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press.
_____(1989)‘Folk Psychology and the Explanation of Human Behaviour,’ Philosophical Perspectives 3, pp. 225–241.
____(1981), ‘Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes’, Journal of Philosophy 78(2), 67-90.
Cilliers, Paul (1998). Complexity and Postmodernism. London: Routlege.
Davidson, Donald (1984) ‘Thought and Talk’, in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford, Clarendon Press), pp. 155-170.
Deacon, Terrence (1997), The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Human Brain (London: Penguin).
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_____(2004), Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy, London: Continuum.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix (1992), A Thousand Plateaus, Brian Massumi (trans.). London: Athlone.
Derrida, Jacques (1986), Margins of Philosophy, Alan Bass (trans.). Brighton: Harvester Press), pp. 209-271.
___(1988), Limited Inc. Samuel Weber (trans.). Northwestern University Press.
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Daniel, Dennett (1991). Consciousness Explained. London: Penguin.
Fukuyama, Francis (2002), Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (London: Profile Books).
Hayles, N Katharine (1999), How We Became Posthuman: Virtual bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
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Jones, Richard (2009), ‘Brain Interfacing with Kurzweil’, http://www.softmachines.org/wordpress/?p=450, Accessed08.09.2009.
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Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick (1994), The German Ideology, C.J. Arthur (Ed.). London: Lawrence and Wishart.
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[1] Sterling (1996), p. 59.
[2] This appears to be the position of Rosi Braidotti in her recent plenary address to the 2009 Society for European Philosophy and Forum for European Philosophy Conference in Cardiff.
[3] For a rather less sanguine commentary on the state of the art in non-invasive scanning see Jones 2009.
[4] By analogy, any system could count as being in the state White Wash Cycle if inputting dirty whites at some earlier time resulted in it outputting clean whites at some later time.
Parity Principle. If, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a process which, were it to go on in the head, we would have no hesitation in accepting as part of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is (for that time) part of the cognitive process.(from Clark and Chalmers (1998) p.XX)
[6] The notion of supervenience is frequently used by non-reductive materialists to express the dependence of mental properties on physical properties without entailing their reducibility to the latter. Informally: M properties supervene on P properties if a thing’s P properties determine its M properties. If aesthetic properties supervene on physical properties, if x is physically identical to y and x is beautiful, y must be beautiful. Supervenience accounts vary with the modal force of the entailments involved. ‘Natural’ or ‘nomological’ supervenience holds in worlds whose physical laws are like our own. ‘Metaphysical supervenience’, on the other hand, is often claimed to hold with logical or conceptual necessity.
[7] This objection is overdetermined, further, by the fact that the possibility of successfully implementing radical transhumanist policies seems incompatible with a stable human nature. If there are few cognitive or body invariants that could not – in principle – be modified with the help of some hypothetical NBIC technology – then transhumanism arguably presupposes that there are no such essential properties for humanness. Transhumanism might still be consistent with an etiolated historical essentialism which holds that any being descended from from a member of soe hypothetical ancestor population is human.
[8] David Hull points out that the genealogical boundaries between species can be considerably sharper than boundaries in ‘character space’ (Hull 1988, 4). The fact that nectar-feeding hummingbird hawk moths and nectar-feeding hummingbirds look and behave in similar ways does not invalidate the claim that they have utterly distinct lines of evolutionary descent (Laporte 2004, 44).
[9] In her address to the Cardiff, SEP-FEP conference, ‘The Ethics of Extinction’ Claire Colebrook argued that while ethos implies habit, place and environment, situations of catastrophic change (e.g. climate change) imply the need to overcome these rooted modes of action and affect. Hence the prospect of humanity being superseded by non-humans requires an anti-ethics which imagines or simulates the radically non-human.
[1] Although some hold that the singularity is ‘beyond good or evil’, one might hold that certain posthumans would be worse off than even the most miserable human; a possibility that could warrant anti-transhumanist policies such as technological relinquishment or pre-emptive species suicide.
Over at Larval Subjects Levi Bryant has reasserted his contention that Derrida is some kind of linguistic idealist. Here’s a representative quote:
To me it seems that Derrida’s core thesis is that reality is structured by the signifier for humans. At the heart of this claim are the two central theses of structuralist linguistics that 1) signifiers are differentially constituted (hence all the stuff about differance and the trace), and 2) that signifiers only refer to other signifiers. As Lacan articulated the latter point, “the signifier represents the subject for another signifier”. Within this framework, then, the referential function is undermined as language only refers to language, never to world. Derrida constantly explores the limits of language– hence his interest in Levinas –but only, it seems to me, as opening on to an Other that exceeds all possibility of being articulated in language.
Methodologically, the conclusion that follows from this is that talk about the world can only ever be talk about talk or language. This can take the form of the analysis of texts, of speech, of the semiotics of clothing, etc. But working in the background is always the thesis that reality is a signifying construction. To talk about an object such as the telephone on my desk is thus not to talk about my telephone, but about a signifying construction (here reference should be made to Derrida’s discussions of manifestation and phenomena vis a vis Peircian semiotics in Of Grammatology). So sure, Derrida talks about hospitality, cosmopolitanism, friendship/fraternity, etc. (whoever suggested otherwise), but isn’t this always on the horizon of a nominalism where reality is linguistically constructed and where we are inextricably trapped within language? Put a little bit differently, of course Derrida talks about objects all the time (coins, cats, dogs, weapons, etc), but he can do this because all of these objects are texts. His dialectic thus unfolds perpetually around a play between the trace of an Other perpetually withdrawing from language and unreachable and the text of being that’s a signifying construction.
Aping high Derridean style, I should declare the absence of a position before considering these claims in detail. I began losing interest in any systematic take on Derrida’s work around the time Spectres of Marx was published in English. Here was a text purporting to be about Marx which seemed unable to address Capitalist social structure and dynamics. Bien pensant left-liberal sentiments and utopian longing are no substitute for thought-through philosophy or empirically responsive social theory (Writing a PhD on Derrida and Metaphysics also had a marvelous prophylactic effect).
I still think early Derrida is an interesting philosopher, but in the way that John Cage is an interesting composer. Derrida’s published work contains a functional assortment of tools, arguments and strategies – a kind of philosophical entrencher. There may also be a systematic philosophy in there as well. But where it emerges, it tends to be extirpated Terminator-style by the engine before it can grow up and mount the anti-machine resistance.
And that’s a good thing!
Let’s take Derrida’s putative linguistic idealism as a case in point. What form might it take? Levi claims that Derrida is a nominalist:
Derrida talks about hospitality, cosmopolitanism, friendship/fraternity, etc. (whoever suggested otherwise), but isn’t this always on the horizon of a nominalism where reality is linguistically constructed and where we are inextricably trapped within language? Put a little bit differently, of course Derrida talks about objects all the time (coins, cats, dogs, weapons, etc), but he can do this because all of these objects are texts.
Davidson, Donald, (1986). ‘A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs’, in Ernest LePore (ed.) Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson (Oxford: Blackwell).
Derrida, J. (1988). Limited inc. Samuel Weber (trans.). Northwestern University Press.
Roden, David. (2004), ‘Radical Quotation and Real Repetition’, Ratio: An international journal of analytic philosophy, XVII/2 (2004), pp. 191–206.
There’s an intriguing piece on Robert Brandom and Jacques Derrida by Duncan Law here. The upshot of his piece is that there is a parallel between Brandom’s deontic account of semantic rules and Derrida’s notion of iterability. Thus Brandom claims that objectivity in rule following is constituted by our capacity to evaluate certain performance as inferentially correct rather than by the existence of objective semantic rules. Meanwhile Derrida’s iterability argument shows that objective reference (the relationship between ‘signifier and signified’ we insist on speaking Structuralese) is constituted by the structural possibility of repetition by different time-bound subjects, rather than by the existence of semantic relations between signs and referents. Law thinks, however, that Brandom’s position is superior because ‘vulnerable to empirically-based contestation in a way that the concepts of differance or messianicity aren’t’.
My qualifications for commenting on Brandom are few, being based mainly on acquaintance with the secondary literature. However, Derrida I can claim to know pretty well, so I’ll confine this post to a brief demurral from this transcendentalist reading of deconstruction. It’s fairly tempting to read Derridean deconstruction as a kind of ‘re-tooled’ phenomenology. But Derrida’s arguments undermine phenomenology’s claim to uncover the constitutive conditions of objectivity. They do this, roughly, by showing that the structures which phenomenology takes to constitute the relationship between subject and object (temporality, say) can’t be phenomenologizable at all if they are to do their constituting.
From this, we might want to infer that ‘differance’, ‘iterability’ and the like are just deeper transcendental conditions, churning away in some abscess beyond the reach of theory, objectivity, etc… This reading might be warranted by passages where Derrida apes the rhetoric of transcendental philosophy. But the idea of iterability as an ultra-transcendental wheel only works if we attach credence to phenomenological givenness being what determines objectivity in the first place. Derrida (if his arguments go through successfully) has already undermined this claim: subjectivity (surprise surprise) ain’t up to the job! So what we are left with are topic-neutral structures such as iterability and supplementarity with no special appurtenance to phenomenology, or to anything else. Their main philosophical interest lies in their capacity to make theoretical openings in areas like ethics and semantics, but these can be appropriated in a realist, metaphysical spirit, as I’ve attempted to show here , for example.
Derrida’s iterability argument may have an advantage over Brandom’s due to its extreme abstraction. As I’ve argued elsewhere, whatever its transcendental inspiration, the logic of the iterability argument is absolutely general. Derrida puts the first premise of the IA with uncharacteristic pith in Speech and Phenomena (50):
‘A sign is never an event, if by event we mean an irreplaceable and irreversible empirical particular. A sign which would take place but “once” would not be a sign; a purely idiomatic sign would not be a sign.’
Metaphysically this is plain and simple fare: all it presupposes is the ideal repeatability of meaningful states (and not just linguistic items).
The argument applies with strict generality to any kind of ‘text’ (e.g. mental representations). Moreover, whereas Brandom, on my limited understanding of him, requires the semantic content of a term to supervene on its normative status within a given community, Derrida’s argument is equally compatible with normativist and dispositionalist theories of rule following. If the meaning of a three place open sentence like ‘…+…=…’ is conferred by the disposition to apply it to the triples {1, 1, 2}, {1,2, 3}…, etc. it still remains true that the open sentence in question must be have an identity transcending each event of its application. This is true, even if, as C.B. Martin and John Heil have argued, the fact of being disposed to apply the predicate to this infinite set of triples and not some other is ontologically primitive and irreducible to any list of its actual or counter-factual manifestations.
Tracing the implications of the full-dress iterability argument for the rule following debate, though, would take a much longer post than this. I’ll try to return to this topic later in the year.
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