The perennial problem with science, though, is that its practitioners can often (unwittingly or otherwise) turn it into something that resembles religion a great deal more than it properly should. Religious conviction is, after all, in no way the sole province of the pious: when ‘rationalism’ or pure science simply takes the place of the divine, reason necessarily takes on many religious characteristics. I tend to believe that this is because scientists generally make rather weak philosophers (with the evident exception of the greats, and likewise anyone who practised science when it was still literally ‘natural philosophy’). But we ought to consider Einstein’s famous aversion to the notion of God playing dice as indicative of a certain onto-theological prejudice, one which intrudes into the proper domains of both philosophical science and scientific philosophy (‘pseudo’ or otherwise). This prejudice is simple, and eminently understandable. In fact, it is the fundamental prejudice of the understandable itself: It just has to make sense! Which is a decent metaphysical presupposition for a scientist to hold, so long as they’re not dealing with any of the touchy, nondeterministic situations in which things just don’t entirely make ’sense,’ or at least ‘common sense’ and uncritical intuition begin to fall apart.

The solution to this tetchy problem of scientific reasoning is, I think, philosophy. And I shall set out a very brief argument for why in the paragraphs to follow. You’ll notice, however, that I’m not going to be quoting anyone in particular. Unfortunately, contemporary philosophy is often just as problematic as science or religion. This is fairly clearly expressed in Dawkins’ review, but also in The Selfish Gene, where he has relatively few kind words for philosophers, suggesting that “Philosophy and the subjects known as ‘humanities’ are still taught almost as if Darwin had never lived. No doubt this will change in time.” (lost the citation, too lazy to look it up.) This is really an excellent point, even if it casts its net a little wide of the mark. Philosophy is still in many ways stuck in a pre-Darwinian idealism, a basic anthropocentrism that is anathema to what we know about evolution: this, I think, is often especially true of analytic philosophy, specifically when it attempts to leave its comfort zone of formal logic and make some claims about the real world. (Of course, I’m being over-general here myself, and the greatest philosophers in the analytic tradition have some extremely compelling insights.) Analytic philosophy, particularly when it stays within its comfort zone, isn’t really problematic for scientists, although they may tend to be rather uninterested in what it has to say. Continental philosophy is (as Sokal, Bricmont, et al. love to remind us) equally problematic, tending as Deleuze states to introduce all manner of theological fictions and transcendental breaches within reality, occasionally coming to oppose itself in principle to all manner of materialistic, scientific, realistic thinking.
Hubris is the problem not only of every Heraclitean, but of every scientist. Science discards one onto-theological fiction (namely, God) over the course of its ‘naturalistic’ inquiries, and yet it tends to uncritically position itself upon the very throne so recently vacated by theology. Why is Dawkins so opposed in principle to the work of continental philosophy? (or rather, why does he, the critical reasoner, so quickly and unquestioningly take Sokal and Bricmont at their words about an entire discipline?) Oh, pooh pooh, French philosophers tend to use mathematical concepts rather casually, and they often fail to express themselves in your closely-held ‘common sense’ vernacular. The appeal to common sense is a necessary component of any demagogy (a term which I deploy in the most classical sense here) and so I don’t begrudge Dawkins his manner of speaking. But one would expect from a scientist a little more attention to principles. Scientists (for those who know Kuhn, I would specify here ‘normal scientists’) are saved from their own flights of fancy by their hypothetical/experimental methodologies, but once they enter a more decidedly thetic, philosophical mode of discourse their proclamations become increasingly less worthwhile. For this is what Dawkins really does when he argues so vehemently for the applicability of science to the ‘God hypothesis,’ and the delusional quality of religionists and Continental philosophers alike: he takes a philosophical position! He, along with so many other ideological scientists admit, all the while, their ignorance of ‘high-flown’ philosophy – by which they (perhaps unbeknownst to themselves) mean anything that doesn’t fully disavow Hegel’s tradition – but they begin to make claims for a sweeping materialism which is, itself, a philosophical presupposition and not a scientific fact.

Why is this so? Here I might appeal (for a more specialized audience, a more specific and certain finite readership) to an arithmetical result like Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem or a logical one like Tarski’s indefinability theorem; admitting all the while, like Dawkins confronted with philosophy, that I don’t yet grasp the complete formal significance of these results, or the true mathematico-logical significance of the ‘ungraspability’ of logical and mathematical meaning to which these results refer. But I do comprehend what I take to be the definite philosophical-conceptual meaning of results like these, which is simply that from withinone formal, rigorous system for determining meaning, truth, facts, evidence, or …, one cannot justify the system’s methodological assumptions. In order to demonstrate this more concretely, we might refer to the practical (if not theoretical) irreducibility of the ‘human sciences’ to the physical sciences, or of any particular physical science to any other. Generally speaking, in order to study phenomena (empirically or otherwise), one must accept certain basic axioms which cannot, by definition, be ‘proven’ as true within the system or by any particular observation-theorem complex. As creationists love to remind scientists, science excludes creation and divine intervention by method and not by virtue of any absolute confirmation of God’s inexistence. Dawkins has his own dogma, it seems. This is very much of a piece with the dogma that leads him to follow Sokal and Bricmont in refusing to grant any validity to the obscure philosophies of people like Deleuze and Guattari. Of course, as I said, I’m not intending here to lend any credence to the creationist argument! As presented by theology, the God hypothesis is eminently absurd, and its predictions are testable. They have been tested, and they have been refuted, simply by the unerring success of the materialistic method: science doesn’t exclude divine intervention by method for no good reason, as creationists might like to believe. We might remember that science began as natural philosophy, as the work of very religious men! The scientific tradition has discarded the hypothesis of divine intervention simply because divine intervention can’t explain shit. It doesn’t happen.
But while considering the relative merits of science vs. creationism and ‘common-sense’ philosophy vs. obscure French philosophy, we might gain some useful insights by thinking a little more about the meaning of Gödel and Tarski’s proofs. ‘Analytic philosophy’ — in the least formal (ie. ‘philosophical’) sense, as that brand of philosophy which dominates the Philosophy departments of Anglo-American universities — seems to have inherited from Frege and Russell a methodological tendency to privilege our intuitions of common sense over the sublime and the paradoxical. (Russell and Frege inherited this intuition in turn from Plato, but that’s another topic altogether.) Indeed, the entire logicist project is essentially a holocaust of paradoxes: mathematics and geometry, which seemed to have been functioning in perfect rigor since the days of Homer and the Upanishads, found themselves beset with paradoxes at the end of the nineteenth century, an infestation of the aporetic for which logicism offers the Final Solution. And indeed, their project met with a great deal of success. Totalitarianism of this kind, especially in fields that require logical rigor, isn’t a bad idea – in fact, it’s almost necessary. After Gödel’s tumultuous proving, the logicians eventually died out (though a few remain), and arithmetical logic worked out a compromise with the infinite and ineffable in the form of ZFC.

But the onto-theological spirit of the logicist aspiration lives on, it seems, in the palpable loathing with which scientific thinkers and analytic philosophers often confront the aporetic and paradoxical manner of speaking which Deleuze, Derrida and their ilk have inherited from Spinoza, Hegel, Heidegger, Levinas, … (and all kinds of other roguish folks in a line that stretches back to Zeno). Dawkins, Sokal, and Bricmont are only the tip of the iceberg here. Chomsky’s vitriolic reaction to Derrida, assuming it’s not apocryphal, is evidence enough, and it’s something that deserves a lengthy reading in conjunction with ‘Postulates of Linguistics’ from Mille plateaux. (Chomsky calling Derrida a ‘postmodernist’ is for me evidence enough that he’s got no idea what he’s talking about.) The disciplinary divide between analytic and continental philosophy has always been for me one of the most productive ways of understanding the work of both traditions. Right now, actually, I’m working with Levinas’ Totality and Infinity and Cantor’s set theory, and seeing how great analytic philosophers like Adrian Moore have brought the work of people like Wittgenstein and Quine into conversation with Heidegger, Levinas and Derrida is as instructive as it is inspirational. Derrida’s aporetic monologues are not intended to undermine reason or logic, nor are they utterly incommensurable with a thoroughly logical rationality. (This, for me, is especially clear when reading Rogues.)

Wittgenstein and Gödel’s introductions of nonsense and paradox into logic show how logic and common sense are in themselves incomplete, a set of axioms whose worth cannot be proven from within their system. And as Moore’s dialogue with Derrida in the Ratio conference whose proceedings are collected in Arguing with Derrida (“usually ships in 1-4 months”!!!!) so usefully demonstrates, logical-scientific thinkers need not always confront paradoxical ones with their guns ablaze. As much as they may wish to save their cherished doxa, or present them as incontrovertible truths, this is not only an unjustifiable totalitarianism of reason, but a fundamentally irrational prejudice. How’s that for a paradox? And so the creationists do conceal a grain of truth beneath their theological arguments, the very same grain of truth that led Einstein to believe in a God (who didn’t play dice). Materialism, physicalism, logic: none of these methods can justify themselves from within themselves. This is the domain of the philosophical claim, and it will always remain the sovereign domain of philosophy. When scientists intrude upon that domain – which is indeed their right, for methodological pluralism is the only proven path to truth – they still, unfortunately, tend to consider themselves to be ‘doing science.’ And so they expect that the French philosophers like Derrida whom they deride should simply speak in their language, in the language of (their) common sense, when in fact Derrida’s entire project is to show (and here I follow Moore in appropriating Wittgenstein’s terminology) his readers the paradoxes and aporias that erupt within every system of sense – whether ‘common,’ ’scientific,’ or ‘philosophical.’ If it weren’t for these aporias, common sense would neither exist nor would it progress. But these paradoxes, inherent to any system of doxa, must serve to remind us that no method – however ‘common sense’ – can aspire to justify itself. Science can and should retain the materialist hypothesis because it works very well in its domain, and yet scientists could lose some of their hubris by recognizing materialism as just that: a hypothesis. It stands beneath all the specific theses and theorems of science, but science cannot itself prove that hypothesis. (The very fact that scientific thinkers sometimes think it can, treating it as absolute and inviable, proves that they’re not philosophers. Any real philosopher knows that materialism is a position that demands justification.) But as science expands to include things like cognitive science, it must begin (and indeed it has begun) to reflect on its method to a much greater extent, and not simply because of the recursive structure of cognition and expression. A good first step in this respect would be to consider its attitude towards paradox in general, and toward the aporetic style of French philosophy in particular. Ultimately, we must conclude as philosophers that Sokal, Bricmont, and Dawkins don’t oppose the philosophers they deride for any good scientific reason, but simply because of their own ill-considered philosophical prejudices. Dawkins is right to be suspicious of philosophy and its latent transcendentalism, but this doesn’t mean that he and Chomsky and Sokal and Bricmont are entitled to discard in principle a huge portion of the discipline. As the vulgar response would go, I don’t tell them how to do science. (Nor does Derrida, although Irigaray certainly does, in as far as I can tell the most idiotic and puerile fashion.) The paradox here is equally evident, and it’s a bad one: the kind of ‘intervention’ that Sokal and Bricmont make into the discipline of philosophy justifies in principle the very same interventions they critique, including the very perceptive ones of philosophers like Latour and Feyerabend.

Once again, this is not an attempt to undermine scientific hypotheses, but simply to demonstrate the sense in which they can be said to function. Myself, I have no intention of remaining within the kind of pre-Darwinian, idealistic and anthropocentric tradition dismissed in such a cavalier fashion by Dawkins and his ilk. But this does not entail that I accept the blind dogmatism and evident lack of philosophical sophistication of he and his cohorts. Instead, I think that the answer to the problem of philosophy pointed out by Dawkins is to be found in the very philosophy he so blindly discards, especially in the work of Deleuze. In the work of his interpreters (de Landa, for instance), we see expressed in Deleuzeanism an incredibly useful ’scientific’ philosophy. This brand of philosophy, one which I’m currently enjoying a great deal, points toward a philosophy of the future (cf. Agamben, ‘Absolute Immanence,’ and Dan Smith’s excellent piece in Between Deleuze and Derrida). Such a philosophy might be considered in equal parts post-darwinian idealism, and post-idealist materialism: a philosophy which recognizes the evolution and materiality of ideas themselves (in the Kantian, Platonic, or as far as I know any philosophical or colloquial sense you might choose), in spite of the fact that our techniques and technologies for analysing the matter and evolution remain (and perhaps shall always remain) inadequate in many respects. This is what Dawkins discards when he so blindly accepts the polemic of Sokal and Bricmont! Alas. I can’t suppose that I’d convince such a demagogue with my petty philosophy. In my eyes though, it’s just one more little affirmation of Feyerabend’s epistemological anarchism, showing (like Mill showed so long ago) that it’s never a good idea to close off debate, even if only by accepting a given methodology as universally valid.

Also: I’m really digging the idea of reviews of reviews, after having seen a couple really terrible film reviews in recent weeks. Perhaps I’ll work up the inspiration to write some more of these!

Here’s a fun little discussion to take a look at, from the blog of Kirk Cameron’s ‘Way of the Master’ sidekick, Ray Comfort. I came across it through pure serendipity, because it’s linked back on the same CNN page from the article I wrote about last night.

Fundamentalist religion is a fascinating thing. It’s great for sparking atheist vitriol, and the necessary counterblasts of religious vitriol. Yet in the process of polemicization, atheists and advocates of religion tend to lose sight of the actual issues at stake. Putting my sanity at risk, I decided to throw a couple of pennies into the debate, and I thought I’d re-post my comments here for the edification of a rather less polemical crowd. I love reading when religionists and anti-religionists play with intensely philosophical ideas and pretend that they’re the first to come up with such notions. Religion and philosophy have long toyed with each others’ ideas, but it seems that religionists have now fully lost touch with the philosophical origins of their concepts.

Oh “Cypress Christian,” I particularly loved when you came up with your pat observation that “I love how they try to wriggle there way out of a straight forward question.” Apart from the funny there/their homonymy, we have the absurdity of trying to call Kalam’s cosmological argument ’straight forward.’ Since well before the time of Parmenides, this has been one of the most fundamental metaphysical questions ‘in existence.’ What does it mean to exist, and must all existing processes have a first cause? If one accepts the principle that they do, then indeed, you are 100% correct: the universe must have a first cause.

Unfortunately, this is just about the least straightforward of all conceivable questions. It’s absolutely not some creation ex nihilo of William Lane Craig, but simply one formulation of perhaps the most ancient problem of metaphysics. It might be prima facie simple, but it conceals all kinds of premises that don’t stand up to even the most cursory scrutiny. So here we go, I’m going to provide you with two refutations of the Kalam argument as proposed by religious folk, and then one tentative affirmation of its conclusions that almost certainly won’t lead in a direction they’ll like.

The first refutation stems from a denial of the initial premise : “Everything that begins to exist has a cause.” In the discussion, ‘Justin’ is already onto this line of reasoning. He says: “Name one thing that “began to exist” other than ‘the universe.’ Be careful that you do not refer to something that is simply a rearrangement of parts.” Logic tells us nothing without empirical premises, and there is no empirical confirmation for this premise of the Kalam argument. Phenomenological: yes; empirical: no. As Justin states, all that ‘exists’ in our actual space is a rearrangement of preexisting parts. Science shows that ‘everything which exists’ has no proximate cause for its existence but physical necessity and favorable circumstances. Given that I’m fairly sure religious ideologues don’t want to conclude that God is simply a handy name for physical necessity and favourable circumstances, this can’t be what Christians mean by cause. Their argument is thus inevitably circular, insofar as given the implied definitions of ’cause’ and ‘existence,’ the cause for the existence of the universe is also the cause for the material existence of every existing thing. With this argument, you’re essentially trying to infer the structure of the universe from the structuring of matter, on the basis of a false analogy. (cf. Aristotelian onto-theology). Faith is irrational: this isn’t really a bad thing, either, although some twisted ideologues might think so.

The second refutation stems from a denial of the conclusion, even with a hypothetical acceptance of its premise: I think ‘Justin’ must be a philosopher, because once again he comes around to a wonderfully nuanced argument. “The universe, as the sum of all that exists, cannot have a cause because its cause would not exist by definition.” This is essentially the non-affirmation of negative theology: “God is not,” because working from the vulgar definition of being, God must ‘be’ something which is *beyond* existence, ‘otherwise than being.’ If you want to argue that there is a first cause of the universe, and you accept the conventional physicist’s definition of the universe as totality of existence, then the cause of the universe simply, necessarily, does not exist. Justin then goes on to state that “nothing has ever been observed appearing de novo, regardless of causality… Since we have no idea whether or how it is that things “pop out of thin air” (as you say), we cannot say that a cause is required for those kinds of events.” Setting aside the question of quantum phenomena, logical arguments actually never prove the existence of God for this precise reason: the Universe appears, even to the physicist, to be a creation ex nihilo. The trouble is, we have no idea whether such spontaneous creation has anything like a ’cause,’ or what that ’cause’ could conceivably look like. We simply don’t know anything about causality prior to the Big Bang, or about anything prior to the beginning of the Universe as such.

So when Cypress Christian attacks Justin’s argument, his polemicization blinds him to the truths immanent within both of their positions. He claims that Justin’s position is essentially that “yes, the universe did begin to exist and everything that I’ve seen that begins to exist has a cause. But since I’ve never seen anything begin to exist out of nothing, as the universe must have (since it’s not infinite), then there just can’t be a cause. Although there is a perfectly logical explanation on how something could come from nothing (as it seemed to have done), we can’t say for sure so therefore I don’t believe it.” He says that as though it were somehow inherently inconsistent. Really, it’s little more than a concise statement of the state of contemporary cosmology, although, again, most contemporary physicists do observe particles popping in and out of existence all the time. The last sentence is particularly fun. There *are* a number of interesting possible expanations for creation “seeming to have come” ex nihilo, first and foremost amongst which would be the claim that the creation of the universe was just a favorable conjunction of physical circumstances on a dimensional plane beyond ourse. The universe ’seemed to come’ from nothing indeed, and may well have come from something specific: not the divine will of God, but a physically predictable phenomenon, at least with an adequate physics.

However, this leads us to the third possible solution to your beloved Kalam argument: we might even agree with it. Philosopher and Talmudic commentator Emmanuel Levinas’ beautiful Totality and Infinity is perhaps the finest philosophical argument for why science is by essence incomplete, and why the implied hopefulness of Justin’s position (‘one day we’ll interpret the causality of the universe scientifically!’) might not be justified. Since, as I said above, we simply know nothing of pre-universal causality, scientific reason gives us absolutely no reason to discard the ‘God hypothesis’ out of hand. There might, after all, be an omnipotent and omniscient Creator whose divine will caused the creation ex nihilo in the Big Bang: only a complete physics could tell us otherwise, and physics, like all scientific theory, is very much incomplete. So the tenacity with which religionists hold on to their God is in many ways justified and certainly not incompatible with science, even though the polemics of both sides might lead us to question these facts.

Why do such polemics persist?

The answer is about as straightforward as any philosophical solution can be. Scientists disagree with theology because it’s fundamentally incompatible with their view of nature. Religionists reject science out of hand because it’s not yet capable of refuting the real essence of their argument from causation. Here we can reach a compromise dissatisfying to both sides, and therefore just. Reason can never refute God’s existence, any more than it can prove it. Kierkegaard was well aware of this truth when he described the ‘leap of faith’ phenomenon, fundamentally beyond reason and fundamental to all religious thought (whether ‘fundamentalist’ or otherwise). You religionists have already made your leap of faith, and unlike so many dogmatic atheists, I myself congratulate you for it. Indeed, I wish I was capable of such a leap, as I’m sure do many materialist scientists, however unconsciously. The problem arises when fundamentalists attempt argue from the perspective of this leap and disguise its conclusions in the language of reason, as rational or logical premises. They’re trying to rationalize an irrational decision, which is an essentially human impulse, but in this case woefully misguided. Science is an incomplete system of truths, founded on essentially nothing but the hope of a complete truth ‘to come,’ thus constructing for itself its own proper messianism. Religion, by contrast, is a relatively ‘complete’ system of falsehoods, founded on one profound truth, really little more than a question: the universe exists, and so there must be some reason or sufficient cause, however ineffable, for its existence.

And so here is no natural opposition between science and religion. Unfortunately, scientific reason is incompatible with religious theology. Perhaps you’re familiar with another argument, at least as old as that of Kalam. (I don’t really feel like checking dates.) It’s called the Epicurean Paradox, and it was a favourite of David Hume. It goes like this: “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?” Like any atheist, I agree wholeheartedly with the conclusion derived at from this paradox: God is neither able nor willing to exclude so-called ‘evil’ from this world, most likely because he operates in a dimension which transcends our categories of ‘Good’ and ‘Evil.’ Note, however, that this paradox says nothing of causation, only of the attributes which are to be ascribed to the cause. The Epicurean Paradox discards not the concept of a first cause, but the name ‘God’ for this cause, with its metaphysical baggage of nonsensical and inconsistent attributes. (I might add that, thanks to my modern understanding of l’arbitraire du signe, I would answer the final question of the Paradox simply as follows: we may as well keep calling the first cause God, suitably defined. It’s a good a name as any!)
Oh, ‘Cypress Christian.’ I apologize for dragging you so far out of your league. Here’s a philosophical argument that’s just as ’straightforward’ as yours ostensibly was, but I’d love to see you in the process of wrapping your head around this one. Your argument from causation certainly is onto something: and that something is the incompleteness of reason. Your religion, and its entire theology, is onto nothing: your image of God is incompatible with the image of the world He created. Thus science has always forced theology to adapt, even though it has never succeeded in troubling the God Hypothesis quite as much as it hopes. I’m coming around to religion myself, but certainly not any conventional theological one: my God, like that of Meister Eckhart, is not. He is not good, He is not evil, He is not just, nor does He have any of the analogical attributes you ascribe to Him. He does not exist, ought not rightfully even be called ‘he:’ it is simply the a priori cause of existence, eternally beyond ‘being.’ Thus my God is not in any way incompatible with the (non-)Gods of science. We know almost nothing of its attributes, and yet we can begin to draw inferences from physical science about this ‘Deus Absconditus’ and the necessary reasons for its decision to abscond.

Interestingly enough, we’ve come now to the premises of a much more productive debate. It’s silly – as philosophers at least since Kant have observed – to debate about the substance or attributes of the Divine. This can only lead to antinomies and absurdities. What we can argue about, as philosophers, scientists, and religionists, is whether, and to what extent, we can know God. This, unfortunately, won’t happen as long as scientists and religionists think they’re debating about substance or attributes. They’re really talking about epistemology, and unfortunately for fundamentalist religion, I think when cast in proper terms, the debate is pretty one-sided. Fundamentalist religion wants to have it both ways: it wants to argue for a faith in God which transcends reason, but then it wants to prove that it’s right to be faithful – using reason. Its implicit epistemology is essentially anti-rationalist. Luckily, for those without decided loyalties on other side of the basic polemic, ideological science doesn’t come out all that much better. It wants to be entirely rational, to make its rational system both complete and ‘total,’ and yet it always wants to deny the fact that its longest-held epistemological premise (that is to say, the knowability of the universe in its totality) still needs to be accepted by the scientist on blind faith.

I’m dying to hear what Mr. Comfort thinks about these ideas himself. My own irrational belief is that most people who are attracted to so-called ‘fundamentalist’ religious movements just don’t have it in themselves to make a real ‘leap of faith’ and recognize it as such: thus I’ll probably get no reply from Ray. Maybe my comment won’t even get posted on his site. It’s so unfortunate that scientific reason appears to have the monopoly on intellectual honesty, because it certainly doesn’t need to be this way. Religion can find a way to argue for the core of its philosophy in the face of materialist science, without resorting to dogmatism and polemicization, even though I’m left believing it never will. Prove me wrong, (religious) folks!

The other two theses constitute about 100 pages of writing. I thought I’d post them up here for the edification of anyone who’s interested in figuring out what the hell is going on between Derrida and Deleuze, but also dogmatic philosophy in general. I’m going to – as I’ve said in a few posts previously – work up some of my ideas about dogmatism into a more ‘bloggy’ format soon. But in these two term papers (!!!) I wrote in December are the real ‘origins’ of these ideas. The first is called ‘The singular Aufhebung,’ and the second goes by the equally cumbersome ‘Difference/Repetition; Sign/Memory.’ They’re term papers which exploded to the length, if not necessarily the coherence of masters’ theses, and so they’re kind of heavy going in some ways. But damned if I didn’t have a lot of fun writing them, and didn’t feel as though I was really on to some good ideas (in spite of being, no doubt, seriously off in places). I’d be super excited to hear comments from anyone who read them, as I’m very interested in how I might chop these up into conference or publication papers. I’m working up some of these ideas for an abstract to send to the Cornell Theory Reading Group conference, ‘The substance of thought’; it’s maybe out of my league, but it’s focused on the exact ideas that I’m throwing around in these theses, so why the heck not! Please, if you read even a portion of these papers, let me know what you think in comments or email! Even if you violently hated them. Cheers!

Cryptography and steganography are now used more widely in practice than at any prior moment in history, and so one might expect to find the self-evident origins of these modern practices in the work of cryptographic pioneers like John Wilkins, Francis Bacon, or Johannes Trithemius. Just as Newton’s alchemical leanings give pause to would-be historians of physics, however, so do the mystical and theological elements of early cryptography confuse the contemporary study of cryptographic history. Trithemius’ texts were for many years thought to deal exclusively with magic and the occult; only recently did we realize he was dealing with ‘occulted meaning’ of a less supernatural type. One can find polyalphabetic ciphers in Trithemius’ work, and the early origins of steganography in the Baconian ciphers. But when we ignore their mystical elements and reduce the work of these pioneers to the practical uses of their ideas, we ignore the crucial interrelation of cryptography and graphy.

Cryptography is writing whose meaning is hidden; steganography is hidden writing. Explicitly conceived cryptographic systems differ from linguistic ones in that they offer a set of formal rules for translating cryptic text into a natural language: cryptographic script, which both hides and presents a given text, is thereby subordinate to a natural language content. Yet any script not comprehended by its reader is, practically speaking, cryptographic. We might state this relativistic position more clearly by saying that a cryptographic text is one whose combinatorial logic is hidden from a given reader; conversely, a natural language is one whose combinatorial logic feels ‘natural’ to its reader. Thus hieroglyphics were cryptographic prior to the deciphering of the Rosetta stone, and the Wadi el-Hol scripts, perhaps the earliest available manifestations of truly ‘phonetic’ writing, remain so today. We might even say that all texts are cryptographic to small children and the illiterate: we are born into a world of cryptograms, which we decipher by our entrance into a symbolic order. This expansion of the term ‘cryptographic’ can extend beyond natural languages as well, into the field of formal systems, which are cryptographic to those not trained in their decipherment.

However, this leads to a further problematic of the term ‘cryptographic,’ in that it partly depends on a binary between those texts whose meaning is evident and those in which meaning is hidden. The normal graphic text aspires to convey its meaning as clearly as possible, while the cryptographic text aspires to conceal its meaning as securely as possible. The aforementioned binary is commonsensical insofar as we must recognize these two differing aspirations, and yet we must simultaneously recognize the real failures of such aspirations. Once one trains oneself in a cryptographic system, it ceases to be encrypted. Thus cryptography and graphy are, like most binaries, poles of a continuum, rather than discrete objects; it thereby also goes without saying that these poles are historically as well as perspectivally contingent.

The above examples indicate the contingency of perspective in this regard. One foundational instance of the historical contingency of encryption is the discovery of frequency analysis by al-Kindi: essentially the birth of cryptanalysis as a formal science. By modeling the combinatorial logic of a cryptographic system in the ‘universal language’ of mathematics, frequency analysis can easily translate between any simply-encrypted text and the natural language text it hides. As a result, centuries of cryptographic texts based on simple substitution are easily deciphered, their graphy no longer cryptic.

This usage of mathematics in deciphering cryptography leads to the questions of meaning raised by Aronofsky’s π: if nature is a cryptogram from the divine, then can the language of mathematics uncover the traces of that divinity (and thus — it is hoped — the divinity itself) by modelling natural processes? Or can we only follow along these traces asymptotically, locked in a ‘golden spiral’ toward the essence of things, but left unable to reach a final essence by the formal constraints of the language which structure our pursuit?

This second interpretation, like Derrida’s essay, makes recourse to the syntax of negative theology: mathematics is perhaps a formal way of presencing absences for the purposes of analysis, just as the True Name is a means of presencing the absent divine and presence itself is a presencing of différance (which itself ‘is not’). In the real world, this presentation of absence constitutes a metaphysical violence which indefinitely postpones meaning, leaving only an endless project of deconstruction. Even though the 216-letter Name, the Shem ha-Mephorash, is well known in our world, we are no closer to the divine. In the narrative context of π, however, it seems that the mechanics of presence can capture the divine absence: Max actually finds the cryptic Name through computation. His mystical cryptanalysis of nature leads to the divine Name, the ultimate ‘key’ to meaning, and yet he still finds himself thwarted. This happens three times: first, by what appears to be chance (the literal bug in Euclid); second, by the antinomy of the pharmakon: since the Name is too long for him to memorize, it has value only as textual representation; and then finally by the very structure of the pursuit, when Sol reveals that the bug in Euclid was really a ‘bug’ in computation itself. Foreign to chance and the pharmakon, in π the electronic computer can achieve what the mind cannot. Euclid reaches the ineffable Divine through formal logical procedures, but in the transcendence from electro-logical presence to divine absence, destroys itself.

So this consistently fantastic blog ‘larvalsubjects’ has recently sparked some discussion with a post entitled ‘Where’s Marx?‘ in which the poster wondered where the classic Marxist materialism might be found in the modern academy. Have we discarded altogether that essential tenet of his historical materialism, that is, the belief that ‘civil society’ is merely a superstructure whose character depends entirely on its ‘material’ conditions of production?

I started writing a comment in response to this lively discussion, but it got a bit out of hand, so I decided to make it into a post-response on my own blog, both to the above post and the excellent response to same at notebookeleven.

I know close to nothing ‘in depth’ about either Zizek or Badiou, and yet I am inclined to agree on the surface with the assessments by the author of larvalsubjects (and also others) that they (specifically Z. the supposed ‘marxist’) each constitute a “perfect example of an idealist thinker or a bourgeois thinker insofar as he seems to hold that it is ideas that drive history, not production that drives ideas.” Thinkers tied to philosophy, the humanities or to psychoanalysis in a disciplined way have to think in this broadly ‘idealist’ way: if it’s only material production that shapes ideas, why study ‘ideas’ and not production? Why not be an engineer or an economist? (But I’m getting ahead of myself.) Not that there’s anything ‘wrong’ with an idealist approach per se, but in order to escape these disciplinary confines we require a seriously ‘nomadic’ thinker like Deleuze, willing to screw their predecessors in the ass a bit. Zizek in particular has always struck me as having perhaps too much ‘respect’ – in a perverse way – for the discipline of psychoanalysis. But this is somewhat beside my own points.

In any case, I would like to prolong this little discussion maybe a bit further by positing that Marx is all over the academy, but in a fragmented, ’spectral’ fashion. Thus ‘commodity fetishism,’ that beautifully-written and nearly-psychoanalytic passage, is all over the humanities, but almost as a ’standalone’ text of sorts. Marx the author has been drawn and quartered by the academy. The influence of the passage (from Preface to the Contributions…) cited in the original post is perhaps most viscerally ‘present’ not in the humanities or any other artsy-feeling department, but in the strictest and most ‘agency-denying’ Economics departments.

When we set aside the obvious love for capitalism implied by neoclassical economics, what could be more Marxist – in the base-superstructure sense – than a rigorous theory of economic interaction that purports to reduce individual agents to pseudorational little machines of desire and satisfaction? Economists try to explain social phenomena with reference *only* to the ‘material’ conditions of production and consumption. Nothing else matters – what’s more Marxist than that? Not to say that economists are somehow the ‘most orthodox’ Marxists, which would be absurd, but simply that we can easily see in Economics this Marxist tendency to view subjective interaction in terms of material economic conditions. Once again Marx is drawn and quartered: economic theory has taken Marxist materialism to heart, and entirely discarded those parts of Marx which gesture beyond capital to a Zion-like promised land of Communist fulfillment. Of course, we could just as easily say that economic theory has developed in an unbroken chain from Smith through Ricardo and onto Keynes and Mises: no Marxist ‘break’ whatsoever. But Marx himself is a part of this chain, even if a radical one. If we are looking for the specific vestiges of the base-superstructure orientation of historical materialism, I think we need look no further than contemporary economics.

This leads to a second clue in the whole ‘where’s Marx?’ quest. The entire question of the ‘material conditions’ of production has been turned on its head in contemporary capitalism. What are the ‘material’ conditions of production for a Microsoft or a Google? Certainly not the same as those of Marx’s ’steam-mill’ capitalists. It’s hard to see any ‘material’ whatsoever in their form of production. The tension within Marx-the-author between his critical, materialist theory and his desire for change is tied to a fundamental tension between form and material (see V. Flusser, ‘the Shape of Things’ for probably the best essay ever written on this distinction). Since – like everyone else – I’m not as close a reader of Marx as I ought to be, I don’t know how exactly he would account for the ‘problem of agency.’ But it is clear, from the hostility to conventional economics in the conventional humanities, that people with ‘big’ ideas don’t like to be treated as functions within a materially-determined superstructure. In the humanities, we are thinkers of form and of Ideas (in the Platonic sense), whereas in the pseudoscientific field of economics, they remain theorists of material – however ‘immaterial’ the processes of capital may become. Capital is pure material, even if we are only really familiar with money, capital of the most purely ‘formal’ sort. Those theorists who propose that change flows only from conscious subjects to ‘in-form’ the material conditions of their reality are no more foolish than economic theorists who propose that those material conditions are the ‘only’ true reality. However we choose to frame the issue, it must be recognized that subjectivity is formed in reciprocal interaction with the ‘material’ processes of capital. The flows of capital decide the conditions of possibility for the constitution of individual (‘larval’) subjects, while those (at least apparently) fully constituted subjects then decide the conditions of possibility for flows of capital. On this conception, it seems that we can see our way clear to sewing Marx back together again, a sort of Frankenstein assemblage of humanities and economics: the economy determines the genesis of actually existing subjects, while those subjects then selectively insert themselves into the flows of capital in order to de- and in-form them according to their own subjective agenda.

Where and what, then, is agency? Certainly not the bourgeois notion of the workman carving the material of society according to an ideal form, but perhaps something more like a stone in a river, a passive agency which reforms the flowing material conditions of its reality. And a stone in a river isn’t much on its own. But the river would be nothing without a riverbed, and enough stones stuck together: well, that’s a dam.

So here’s the absurd statement: Not only were Hitler and the Nazis onto some important ideas, they were ‘geniuses’ of a sort when it came to the Jewish ‘Idea.’ This is not only absurd, but patently offensive to anyone with a reactionary mind. But this sort of reactionary mindset is eminently counterproductive. If we want to actually investigate evil, to understand the structural logic behind its genesis, then we can’t conduct our investigations from the perspective of the goodly thinker, the beautiful soul. Instead, we have to think about the conditions which determine the evil Idea, within its own absurd frame of reference. This is perhaps an ethnography of evil, minus the participant aspect: we have to obtain an emic understanding of what it’s like inside the evil mind, before we can begin to translate it into etic terms, understandable by those of us who are, if not ‘good,’ at least morally unobjectionable.

First: Why do I say that the Nazis were ‘geniuses?’ We are all familiar with the concept of the evil genius, but this sort of notion could be made a bit clearer by thinking about genius in relation to the Deleuzian plane of immanence. Reason is a process which takes place in the plane of representation, actualized in expression and formalized in a language (this would include formal languages, such as logic or mathematics). Reason, as I began to consider in a very preliminary way in last night’s post, is a delimitation and structuration of a differential plane of immanence within the body and brain of the subject, which for convenience we shall refer to as ‘the mind.’ Reason is the law of the mind, a set of social conventions which determines what expressions of that differential plane are acceptable in the context of serious rational inquiry. Genius, on the other hand, is quite different from reason. Genius is the process by which conscious thought directly accesses the mind’s plane of immanence and determines hidden connections between and within things, the genetic logic of a given existing thing; this virtual logic is always covered over in the actual, and inexpressible according to the conventions of representational reason. This is perhaps clearest in the case of the savant: they access the immanent plane of mathematics directly, and can perform feats of computation which seem impossible to those of us shackled by reason. Yet they generally remain unable to understand this process in a rational way, and are barred from the world of ‘real’ mathematics by their inability to ’show their work.’ This is the genius of the idiot, the genius which exceeds all possibility for rational determination. Rational geniuses, by contrast, try to make sense of the connections revealed by their genius in a reasoned way, to ensure that the connections they ’see’ with their genius are not merely figments of their poetic imagination, or worse, of their bad intentions. The most successful rational geniuses ultimately generate a paradigm shift of rationality: the laws of reason are remade in such a way that these hidden connections can now be grasped in the actual. This should make the opposing position of the evil genius clear: they recognize hidden connections, differential Ideas covered over in the process of actualization, but instead of interpreting these connections through the lens of reason (however difficult this process may be), they jump to conclusions. These conclusions are almost invariably not rational ones, but ones shaped in bad faith by their own prejudices and unconscious drives.

This discussion, interesting in itself, should help to illuminate the genius of Hitler, and the process by which it became an evil genius. Deleuze says that all Ideas are problematic. Hitler was therefore absolutely correct that the Jewish Idea ‘poses a problem;’ the problem posed by Hitler is how exactly he determined the Jewish problem in such a way that it led to a barbaric and unquestionably evil solution. The problem of the Jewish Idea is simple: why be a Jew? This formulation of course leaves a great deal unsaid, and so we ought to formulate it in a proper rational way as follows: why is it that the Jewish people have remained a Jewish people in the Diaspora, instead of assimilating? The genius of Hitler was that he recognized the problematic character of the Idea which structures the Jewish race as diasporic; the evil of Hitler is that the problem was formulated according to a logic in which the Jewish difference was necessarily subordinate to the unitary historical identity of the Germanic people.

This is not evil in itself, but evil in that it is absurd. The Jewish Idea not only pre-exists the Germanic one, but is eminently superior in terms of the depth of its historical ‘identity.’ While the Germanic race is a fictional pastiche of differential Ideas, both genetic and social, the Jewish race is perhaps the archetype of racial identity. Indeed, the Jewish problem can be more accurately formulated in these terms: why does the Jewish race seem so different? The answer lies precisely in its identity: Western (that is, European) culture is constructed in terms of various fluid identities which barely conceal an underlying play of difference. ‘We’ have progressed from intermingling tribes, to aristocratic families, to ‘peoples’ of the Germanic, Italian, Iberian, etc. type, onto this silly fiction of the nation-state, none of which are truly ’self-identical’ concepts, and yet we constantly proclaim the unity of these identities in a sort of reaction-formation on a grand scale. The Jewish people, constructed through centuries of subjugation by these fluid, territorialized identities, emphasizes its own difference from these constructed identities as a means of preserving its own internal cohesion. The result is an enduring ‘culture,’ a group identity far stronger than that to be found within these European pseudo-identities; thus it only makes sense that in the most intensive moments of the process of European identity-construction, Europeans have always sought to exclude or subordinate the Jewish identity.
Thus we are led past the Jewish ‘problem’ to its equally problematic cases of solution. Why be Jewish?
It should be noted that the Jewish Idea is no less problematic from within than from without, and indeed only takes the form ‘Why be Jewish’ from within. The various schisms within contemporary Judaism make it clear that different factions of Jews have very different solutions to the problem of Jewish identity. The first solution is the orthodox one: Be Jewish because of the will of YHWH, be Jewish because you are part of a Chosen People. This is an extremely strong solution, so long as people remain within their theological mindset; indeed, this solution, and the strict separation it has long entailed, is in part designed to keep the race within that mindset. Yet as intercultural barriers have broken down and more Jews have been secularized through European dissemination, this solution has become less persuasive. Thus we come to the solution of the less-orthodox and non-observant Jew: Be Jewish because you are, be Jewish because you are born into this identity and its entire history stands behind you. Thus a religion becomes an ethnicity. I don’t think of myself as a non-observant Catholic, but a non-Catholic, yet non-observant Jews tend to continue their self-identification as such. This is because Catholicism is a European pseudo-identity, an inferior simulacrum of the Jewish Idea, while Judaism in every form still understands the essence of identity-formation. I am not implying here that either mode of identity is superior – I enjoy the fluidity of my Europeanesque pseudo-identity – but simply pointing out the different cultural attitudes towards the concept of identity, and identity of the concept. The third solution that jumps out, perhaps simply because it is the most radical, and the only one acceptable from a Eurocentric perspective: stop being Jewish. This is assimilation, the radical negation of a given identity in favour of a self-made one. Of course, the (mass and individual) conversion of Jews to Catholicism has a number of interesting implications w/r/t the (forced or willing) trading of a ‘real’ (or at least more fixed and concrete) identity for a pseudo-identity; for now, I’ll move on.

The question implied by the Jewish problem from outside is a bit more contentious: What to do with the Jews? This has been the problem for any political entity which contains Jews within its territory; really this is the same problem posed by any political identity in its process of construction when it comes up against a pre-existing political identity. Barring assimilation, the process which the Jewish identity has been ‘designed’ to resist, there is one obvious answer: expel them. This was the ’solution’ to the original Jewish problem which made it an international one: if the insecure political identities of Babylonia and the Romans had not expelled the race from their respective territories, then the Diaspora would never have occurred, and the Jewish people would have remained a territorial assemblage. Instead, they became a territorial assemblage separated from its territory; rather than finding a new territory, as many European tribes in similar positions did, they dispersed around the known world, and developed new forms of deterritorialized identity which were nevertheless founded upon the historical territory and its loss. (We might note that the infrastructure of those very empires perhaps facilitated the distribution the Jewish population across a vast territorial expanse, while the resilience of the people and their textual culture served to perpetuate its now-distributed identity.) This process of expulsion merely served – in the eyes of nascent European cultures – to spread the ‘problem’ around; recognition of this factor is another element of Hitler’s evil genius. (I say European specifically because historical evidence makes it clear that most Arabic, Turkish and other empire-formations were in general less hostile to the Jewish identity.) Thus we arrive at Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’ to the Jewish problem: not simply to expel the race from a territory, but from existence. For the Nazis, the Jewish problem and the deconstructive threat it posed to a nascent Germanic identity took precedence over all conventions of morality: the nation above all, this national fiction before the reality of human life. This is the structural logic of anti-Semitism: the persistence of the distinctly Jewish form of identity within the European implies that for the European form to succeed, the Jewish must be eliminated.

The self-evident (at least to anyone who isn’t an anti-Semite) immorality and absurdity of this logic leads to the real final solution to this ‘external’ formulation of the Jewish problem: learn from the problem, without trying to ’solve’ it. Following Levinas, we might propose that genius without evil demands openness to the Other; not necessarily the infinite Other of God, but all those forms of otherness which trouble ideal, ‘totalitarian’ concepts of nation.  In terms of an ‘instrumental’ justification of such openness (rather than a properly ‘ethical’ one), we need not refer simply to the fact that Judaism is one of the richest sources of historical material, or that its past can calerly shed light on the processes of cultural identity-formation in general. Both of these observations are essential in themselves. In a more immediate and concrete way, however,  we must stress the fact that Jewish culture, with its progressive movements of deterritorialization, and reterritorialization, is of central importance to any debate with regard to this supposed ‘postmodern crisis’ of the nation-state. As supranational corporations and subnational multiplicities began to supplant traditional political organization, the question of cultural identity and its relationship to politics, capital, and territory has become absolutely essential. We must question not only the apparent novelty of these territorial displacements, but also the fundamental premises of cultural identity, along with that totalizing impulse of political ‘unity’ which still persists. Until ‘we Europeans’ open ourselves fully to the value of the Jewish identity and its history in this light, the Jewish ‘problem’ will remain dominated by the pseudo-question of whether one ought to be anti- or pro-Semitic, along with all those absurd and often violent ’solutions’ which stem from such a question.

“Apparatuses are… not superhuman but subhuman — bloodless and simplistic simulations of human thought processes which, precisely because they are so rigid, render human decisions superfluous and non-functional” (Flusser 74).

In honour of Vilém Flusser, who in his later years refused to purchase any books, instead quoting from memory and the books that were given him as gifts, this shall be a sparsely cited essay on the nature of the human condition. My goal is not to respond to Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography, but rather to undertake a certain sort of exegetical expansion, whereby I shall be using some snippets of his work to trace the framework for my own thoughts. Flusser’s notions of the system and the apparatus are incredibly useful ones, and yet their implementation in this work might make these very concrete and analytically distinct categories seem quixotic and ambiguous. And so, in the tradition of Flusser’s own philosophical investigations, as well as Deleuze’s philosophical technique of ‘buggery,’ I will be employing Flusser’s concepts in a more analytically specific fashion that is at once implicit in Flusser’s text and altogether my own.

When Flusser states that the photographic ‘universe’ functions as a “feedback mechanism for the reprogramming of society,” it becomes immediately clear that his interest in photography extends well beyond the basic issues of artistry and mimesis spoken to by theorists of the photographic content like Sontag, Barthes, or most others. His text is one which, rather tellingly, contains no images; the ‘content’ of the image is entirely bracked in Philosophy of Photography. This is in part a McLuhanesque move, in that Flusser is seeking to ‘bracket’ the question of content in order to interrogate more thoroughly the nature of the photographic form and its social context; to consider the place of photography at what McLuhan, following Bernard Lonergan, called the ‘empirical level of perception.’ This is necessary because of the same classic opposition of form and material to which Flusser speaks in The Shape of Things. As creating beings, humans are necessarily posed to ignore form in favour of content; the particular table simultaneously obscures the tableness of the table, and its table-function — it becomes a wooden platform for putting things on, and the change in patterns of human existence marked by this form, ‘table,’ are obscured as somehow ‘natural.’ But the table is the furthest thing from natural, indeed, as opposite to nature as a ‘thing’ can be. And this leads us to the implicit question of Philosophy of Photography, which is the relation of the human being to the apparatus.

The table is no apparatus, however, but instead a structure. And the system, it seems, is something of an entirely different character. And so before we can begin to consider the relation of the human to the apparatus, we must situate these disparate but similar concepts in a more coherent framework.

The first premise of that framework is this: that the condition of humanity is a condition of precarious balance between Nature and the System, two poles which (like all binary oppositions) are not in fact opposite. This is to say, that the distinct nature of human Being, rather than Being-as-such, comes from the fact that our Being is not entirely reducible to Nature. Rather, human history is the story of naked apes carving out an Other to Nature, that first and totalizing system which accepts no such Otherness. The structure and the apparatus are both distinct subsets of the larger set of systems.

First, though, the system itself requires definition. The system is simply put, a human strategy which overlays nature and regiments an organic chaos according to the functions and positions of its component parts. The human in a biological sense is merely a complex of systems, with the endocrine and central nervous systems being themselves merely the functions of the system of evolution, itself dependent on a position within the solar system, and ultimately the system of the universe itself. The system is a natural order; one must recognize first, however, that the system as such is not the product of Nature, but the product of the human encounter with Nature. Nature itself has no systems, or types of being, but merely is; all order which is supposedly seen ‘in’ nature comes from a human systematization of the precession of natural states. The significance of the system is that humankind is compelled to impose meaning on nature; we cannot relate to nature qua nature, but must regiment it according to our own notions of order. The system is therefore an organic development, the primary instantiation of which was language, or more specifically parole or speech, whereby humanity ‘naturally’ regimented an array of utterances into a system of intersubjective signification, which is the foundation for all future systematization.

If parole is the primary instance of the system, however, then langue is the primary instance of the structure. The system is an organic human construct overlaid upon a natural state of affairs, and although the system of language provides the foundation for both system and structure (the system of parole represents the metaprogram by which all systems are programmed), structure has its own distinct character. Structure is a synthetic human construct with no relation of equivalence to any natural state, exemplified of course by writing — graphein. Parole is an organic system which is nevertheless too chaotic for the needs of a centralized and regimented society, and which thereby needs to be supplemented by the inorganic rigidity of the structure of writing. And so, as the system of speech underpins the systematization of the natural world, so too does the structure of writing underpin the structuration of the human world (to borrow Giddens’ useful term). The structural equivalents to the nervous system and solar system are the structures of medicine and commodities, respectively. Of course, this does not imply that the two worlds are in any sense hermetically sealed; indeed, as I will be going on to show, cross-pollination between these two realms is in fact the problem.

The last concept at issue is that of the apparatus, the definition of which is quite simple: an apparatus is a functional structure. So whereas structures like language, commodities, or medicine are generalized structures which we as human subjects effectively inhabit (to paraphrase Le Corbusier) and which enable a wide array of activities, apparatuses are specific structures to which we relate in a capacity of use, or equipment (Zeug). The apparatus is a teleological structure, one which serves to make ready some object in the world. This of course begs the question — to ‘make ready’ for what? This is the problem which Flusser seeks to address in Philosophy of Photography.

The answer, it seems, is that the apparatus serves to make the world ready for further structuration; “as they extend they reach further into the natural world and tear objects from it more powerfully and quickly than the body could do on its own.” (23) There is at once something tremendously underwhelming and tremendously problematic about this discovery. The underwhelming part is that this ‘tearing-from-nature’ is what defines the human condition; our very ‘unnaturalness’ is our natural place within the world. To be human is to systematize and construct meanings from the chaos of the natural world, and to propose that we should somehow allow ourselves to be determined by ‘our nature’ is in this sense delusional. And yet to propose the opposite is perhaps even worse.

This is why I say that the human condition is one of a precarious balance. The anxieties expressed in our postmodern parables about robot uprisings and the like stem from a realization that in a world governed by the logic of the structure, the robot is the ideal. And so while none of us pine for the days of swinging from trees and picking lice from our acquaintances, and thus ought not to argue for a regression to a natural system, we must recognize that human conduct is increasingly governed by structural logic. As Flusser states, “previously the tool was the variable and the human being the constant, subsequently the human being became the variable and the machine the constant” (24).

The image which opens this piece is Matthew Barney’s Field Emblem, a symbol which he uses throughout his work. The oval bisected by a straight line represents the culmination of Barney’s almost Lettrist drive toward symbolic purity; the line in effect represents the imposition of a human conception of order onto a natural state of affairs. I use the symbol here for its profound evocation of the overall human condition as described by Flusser. That is, the human condition is one in which we must walk the middle path between the monkey and the robot, a condition of balance between our organic nature and the Other to nature we have carved out for ourselves. The structure is a subordinate form of system, constructed by humans for instrumental purposes; when the contingent structures of human organization are elevated above the organic systems from whence they came, we run the risk of making the entire system of human beings subordinate to its own structures.

I will get into photography stuff more specifically in my paper, using these preliminary definitions as my starting point.