2011 Interview with Adrian
Johnston by Michael Burns & Brian Smith
University of Dundee
Adrian Johnston is well known
for his work at the intersection of Lacanian psychoanalysis, German idealism,
contemporary French philosophy and most recently cognitive neuroscience. In the
context of the current issue, Johnston represents the most complete development
of a contemporary theory of Transcendental Materialism. In the following
interview we explore both the implications of Johnston’s previous work, as well
as the directions his most recent projects are taking.
Michael Burns: At the ‘Real
Objects or Material Subjects?’ conference you closed your paper with the line,
‘materialists and humanists, it’s time to unite: the day is ours’. I was
wondering if you could flesh out what a ‘materialist humanism’ would look like
in the contemporary philosophical climate?
Adrian Johnston: Since the
conference at Dundee last year, I have had a chance to recast what I was
getting at with reference specifically to Hegel. In particular to the section
of the Phenomenology of Spirit entitled ‘Observing Reason’. One of the
things I’m in the process of working out on the basis of these texts, such as
the piece I presented in Dundee, is the notion that instead of us
philosophically having to impose an external check on the sciences, especially
the natural sciences, in order to leave room for some of the things we might be
interested in, and which we don’t feel can adequately be accounted for within
the explanatory methodological frameworks of the sciences, we can, instead,
taking a Hegelian dialectical phenomenological approach, argue that at this
point one can step back and see the natural sciences themselves developing out
of their own resources a sense of their limitations, vis a vis the
things that, philosophically speaking, we are interested in. We can begin to
account for how the sciences, on their own terms, are necessarily incomplete
and that they can actually pinpoint the ways in which they’re incomplete. Hegel
already tries this, when talking about the emergence of the life sciences out
of 17th and 18th century science, going back to Bacon and Galileo, but of
course culminating in Newtonian mechanical physics. Hegel points out how these
disciplines nonetheless have to rely on formulating their own terms; they
develop a distinction between the animate and the inanimate and a notion of
life, but they produce a notion of life out of themselves that they thereafter
can’t contain or can’t do justice to. And, of course, the section on ‘Observing
Reason’ famously culminates in the absurd doctrines of physiognomy and phrenology
as the example of the last attempt to rein in what these sciences have produced
out of themselves back within their own confines. I think that there’s
something very much along these lines that’s going on in an even more striking
fashion with the science of the last few decades.
So, to go back to your
question: In the final lines, or rather the last few paragraphs, of the piece I
presented in Dundee, the idea is that we don’t need to feel at this point
threatened by the sciences as our adversaries. The old phenomenological or
Frankfurt School critical theory narrative about how these disciplines have
imposed this reductive levelling down of rationality and that we have to fight
this is still very much a part of today’s discourse on biopolitics etc. that, to
me, is completely wrongheaded and in fact misidentifies what the problems are
and fails to realize that even if the individual scientists themselves might be
committed to some reductive or eliminative ideology, some sort of crude
scientism, that the sciences themselves, and certain scientists of varying
degrees of consciousness, are aware that there is this weird kind of
dialectical mutation that’s occurring in those disciplines that can be
productively put to work. Continuing to misrecognize and neglect that internal
self-critique perpetuates a false debate that goes back essentially to things
like Husserl’s complaint about the sciences at the start of the 20th century.
MB: You recently published a
paper on the work of Quentin Meillassoux in The Speculative Turn, and in
the paper you seem to take a critical stance towards the lack of engagement
with any notion of social or political praxis in both the work of Meillassoux
and others associated with the label ‘speculative realism.’ Is this a fair
assessment?
AJ: I don’t think that that’s
a fatal flaw. I think certainly there can be movement in a socio-political
direction. And, of course, the person who comes closest to doing so, I think,
is Brassier.
MB: This leads in to a more
general question. Do you have any further critical thoughts on the recent turn
towards a ‘speculative realism’ in contemporary philosophy?
AJ: I just finished a piece
which I had to write for the folks at SUNY Buffalo, at the Umbr(a) Journal,
that involves engaging with John McDowell’s version of neo-Hegelianism, and the
sort of naturalism he’s interested in developing, especially in the second half
of his seminal work Mind and World. He’s an incredibly interesting figure,
and I think that for people who have an investment in speculative realism,
materialism, call it what you will, he’s someone well worth taking a look at. I
think more engagement with analytic philosophy would be useful, since that
tradition has been working on these sorts of problems for quite some time now,
and a number of figures have come up with very sophisticated positions that I
think need to be reckoned with, if one is going to talk about issues having to
do with realism and materialism. The same is true for analytic philosophy of
science. I certainly think that for speculative realism it is not as though its
relative lack of engagement with politics or, more broadly speaking,
socio-cultural issues, is necessarily an inherent limitation; I also feel
there’s a lot of implicit background heavy lifting that’s done by a number of
things having to do with a larger socio-political Zeitgeist. I think you see
this come out much more clearly in adjacent figures to the movement like Bill
Connolly and Jane Bennett who are at the Political Science department at John
Hopkins. It’s much more obvious that issues having to do with concerns about
the environment, for instance, and that old narrative about human hubris and
our excessive Cartesian desire for dominance being part of what’s gotten us
into the pickle we’re in now. I think that a lot of the motifs and the juice,
you might say, that’s fuelling this at a tacit level goes back to those sorts
of social and political issues, but it’s not very clearly avowed and critically
dealt with within the explicit theoretical framework and texts of the
speculative realist movement at this point, as far as I can tell.
Now, this is not a criticism
that’s unique to me. Both Žižek and Badiou have complained about this as well,
and I think that there’s a middle path here that needs to be staked out. You
have, for instance, the anti-scientism of much of 20th-century continental
philosophy, especially with orientations like post-Marxist critical theory
where a whole number of epistemological and ontological babies are thrown out
with the bath water. The sciences are complicit with these very problematic,
lamentable developments in the political and social registers, and therefore
they have to be thoroughly critiqued, or we should find a way of sidelining
them due to their complicity with a number of socio-political developments in
the past century that are indeed to be bemoaned. I think that’s too ‘all or
nothing.’ Our options seem to be either an excessive over emphasis on the
political that leads to a lot of very contentious, if not outright false, claims
about disciplines like the sciences; or, at the other extreme, what I see in
some of speculative realism, where issues in epistemology and ontology are
dealt with in a vacuum. Again, I come back to Hegel, with his manner of looking
at all these things as interlinked moments of each other. He is not necessarily
committed to some sort of organic system on the basis of that, but,
nonetheless, one very much has the sense of the conjunctual status of these
things, how they are co-articulated with each other; or, as Badiou would put
it, philosophy as looking at the manner in which its conditions cross-resonate
with one another and are involved in constellations of compossibility. That,
for me, is a key middle path, whether one thinks of it in Hegelian or Badiouian
terms, and I think that you see deviations on either side. Both speculative
realism and, for instance, McDowell’s Pittsburgh Neo-Hegelianism, represent one
kind of apolitical extreme, but something like Frankfurt School critical theory
represents a deviation in the opposite direction where everything is political,
and politics is so primary that it just blocks out of the picture very
important philosophical considerations, again, of a more epistemological and
ontological sort.
I see speculative realism as
maybe an overreaction, in a certain way. It is an attempt to go back to being
able to do philosophy without always conducting our thought under the shadow of
things like the catastrophe of World War II, looking at rationally administered
societies, etc.; we realize that, no, there are things here which can’t just be
lumped in with those sets of considerations and quickly dismissed.
Brian Smith: Do you see this
overreaction reflected in the renewed enthusiasm for scientific reduction, so
prevalent in speculative realism?
AJ: Yes, absolutely. To me
this is a response that is very much conditioned by what came before, in a
fashion that is problematic: letting one’s position be driven reactively. The
key references here that you obviously have in mind would be the Churchlands
and the new-fangled version of Churchlandian eliminative materialism as
advocated most famously by Thomas Metzinger. Metzinger’s 2003 book Being
No One combines the worst of both worlds, the hyper-technical medieval
scholasticism of certain analytic philosophers with the long-winded,
hulking-tome presentation of German philosophy. I think that’s why the
translation of Brandom’s Making it Explicit was a best-selling book
in Germany; it similarly uses this weird combination of those two styles.
Brassier, of the speculative realist camp, is clearly the most enthusiastic
advocate for that sort of approach, whereas with Hamilton Grant you have a kind
of Deleuzianism read back into Schelling, and of course Graham Harman is
anything but sympathetic to that sort of scientistic position that Brassier
represents. It’s still unclear how Meillassoux would come down on some of those
things. He hasn’t tackled, in the way that someone like Brassier has,what
analytics, following David Chalmers, call the ‘hard problem.’ I would be
interested to see him wrangle with it. I have critiqued him for having some
implicit assumptions in the background about the mind/world relationship, but
we really have yet to see from him, I think, a thoroughly worked-out position
on that.
By the way, I realized that I
went off on a tangent. One thing I forgot to add to the previous thought is the
thing I like about Metzinger: he’s aware that we are unable to believe in the
eliminative materialism of the Churchlands. Even if you read through the
arguments and find them convincing, you are not able to internalize them, to
really take on board in a first-person phenomenological sense which feels
convincingly real and tangible. The Churchlandian position—that you have to
view basically everything that you take to be real as an illusion of folk
psychology, and that the only thing to truly exist are just assemblages of
physical constituents that function in a certain fashion, like your neurons,
and out there in the world there are not things like dogs, cats, mountains,
trees, etc. but just this field of material stuff that then resonates with the
material stuff you are and that’s it—is just not believable. We have a great
deal of difficulty really accepting that this is the case; we’re still left
with our, what you might call in Kantian terms, transcendental or necessary
illusion of much of what we take for granted at the folk psychological level
being ‘real’. The nice thing Metzinger does is to say that we now have
neuroscience to explain why it is that we can’t accept eliminativism as true,
although it is true. It’s one step in advance of the Churchlands because it
includes as part of its neurologically grounded account why we can’t accept the
neurologically grounded account. For me, not only is eliminative materialism a
problematic position on theoretical philosophical grounds; it’s hardly as
though it is the mainstream view of most analytic philosophers of mind. The
Churchlands are not the hegemons of that sub-discipline of analytic philosophy.
Many continentalists really think the only flavour of analytic materialist
philosophy out there is this eliminative variety, and that’s just not true. If
you look at the neurosciences of the past few decades, a lot has happened. Many
developments call into question previous philosophical glosses of those
sciences. Especially since the 1990s, new work points towards the neurosciences
themselves being non-reductive, being much more spontaneously dialectical, in
terms of a dialectical materialism as opposed to a reductive or eliminative
variety. And, I don’t see that reflected in something like Brassier’s stance; I
think he erroneously identifies the Churchlands as standing on firm ground, not
only philosophically but empirically. At this point, they don’t. Really, I
think that the eliminative materialist stance is based, at this point, on a
very dated prior state of those neuro-biological disciplines, and if you take
seriously things like epigenetics, mirror neurons, and neuro-plasticity,
eliminative materialism doesn’t do much justice to these things. Moreover, you
have developments at the level of affective neuroscience which are not really
containable, I think, within the theoretical confines of the eliminativist
stance. And so, for me, I can see why Brassier would want to move in this
direction because it’s to say: here are where the greatest fears of continental
philosophy lie, in this nihilistic reductive materialism, and instead of
fighting it off, let’s embrace it, and praise this as the culmination of
post-enlightenment rational progress. I can see the appeal of that, but I think
that the price he pays is that he has to play into false assumptions and images
about what the scientific and analytic philosophical options are that are
available, and the ones that I think are most promising are not the ones he
goes for. But, in his work since Nihil Unbound, his turn to the
grandfather of Pittsburgh neo-Hegelianism, Wilfrid Sellars, strikes me as
intriguing and full of a great deal of potential. I’m very eager to read what
Brassier will produce in the years to come.
BS: So you’ve given us a
negative critique of those positions. I want to move on to your positive
construction of the subject. But I still want to talk about it in terms of
reductionism. You are interested in the idea of the more than material subject
as coming from a material base, but also at the same time it is influenced from
above, where you draw on the symbolic in Lacan. So the subject is between these
two sides. For you, is the subject a point of resistance against two potential
reductive strategies: between a reduction to a material base, but also a
similar kind of reduction, which would be to say that the subject is nothing
more than a component of the social as a whole?
AJ: Absolutely. I fully
endorse that reading of what I’m up to, or after, and it’s a wonderfully clear
and succinct way of translating what in some of my earlier work I’ve talked
about in Lacanian parlance in terms of the subject as occupying a point of
overlap between points of inconsistency within the registers of the Real and
the Symbolic, in that you have corresponding to Lacan’s barred big ‘O’ Other in
terms of the internally inconsistent symbolic order, you also have at the same
time this barred Real, which would be the idea of the internal inconsistency,
in this case, picking up on only select facets of the Lacanian Real, that
material an sich is itself inconsistent. It’s thanks to the meeting
up of these two points of inconsistency that you have the fullest most robust
sense of subjectivity that I think is very much at stake in Lacanian and
post-Lacanian variants of materialism.
BS: So, to move on from that.
What I want to ask now is broadly how do you sit in relation to someone like
Graham Harman, or Bruno Latour. What is the emphasis that you place on the
human subject, specifically? By that I mean, if we see the subject as coming
from a material base but also being conditioned from above as well, what’s to
stop us extending this into a series of levels, above continually and down
below. Not exactly like, but similar to Harman or Latour, these levels are
black boxes, when we open up each box in the level below we find our material
base actually has its own subjectivity which has its material base, and we’re
the overdetermining aspect of it. What’s to stop us taking levels above and
below and extending it into an infinite series, and entering into a more,
maybe, object orientated realm?
AJ: My answer will be very
provisional; it’s one of those questions that forces me to shoot from the hip,
and those are the best ones.
I think that one of the key
differences is that part of what I’m after, and this is one of the things that
I take from Žižek, is a commitment to the German Idealist traditon. If one
wanted to paint in the broadest of broad brush strokes, one can say that the
lowest common denominator of Kantian and post-Kantian German idealism is this
notion of autonomous subjectivity, and, of course, this philosophical tradition
sees itself as the cultural codification and consolidation of the French
Revolution, among other things. This emphasis, then, on freedom as absolutely
privileged is something which I very much agree with, and in this case, of
course, there’s a real tension between myself and the background that I come
out of (involving, among other things, German idealism as well as Žižek’s
thought) and someone like Harman; one of the things that is clearly part of the
agenda of the wing of speculative realism that he represents is this
anti-anthropocentrism, this wanting to argue against human privilege: we’re not
exceptional we’re just a certain weird set of objects amongst others and so on
and so forth. Going back to Mike’s question, with which we began, I explicitly
endorse the emphasis on the peculiarity of the human that goes back to Pico
della Mirandola’s C15th Ode to the Dignity of Man and look at that as
really the earliest precursor of the certain aspect of the theory of
subjectivity that I wish to defend, and I do think that there is something odd,
exceptional, whatever adjective you wish to use, about us. In fact, for me,
we’re so strange that to do justice to the sorts of subjects that we are
requires modifying our more global picture of being or nature, in order to
consider ourselves as immanent to it.
That, or course, sets me very
much at odds with the object-oriented camp in that I think that we are
exceptional, and that we are exceptional in a way that has to do with freedom,
with the fact that weird structures of reflexivity or recursion are very much
an essential part of the structure of our subjectivity in a way in which
prevents us then being collapsed down to a flat plane within which we’re just
arrayed with other objects, with no acknowledgment or concession that there is
some sort of fundamental difference-in-kind, or some sort of free-standing
status that is established that makes a subject something which can’t just be
considered an object. That, I think, is absolutely essential to my approach.
This insistence, then, that autonomy is a key component of subjectivity, albeit
an autonomy that is immanently emergent out of this level of being, or matter,
or even objects, that then comes to establish itself as thereafter a sort of
self-grounded auto-reflexively relating set of structures or processes, which
you can’t do full justice to if you don’t recognize the kind of self-enclosure
that is established in the constitution of the subject out of this pre- or
non-subjective background--that to me is the big difference between myself and
someone like Harman. As I might put it somewhat provocatively, I’m just not
enough of a self-hating human. It’s what Freud would call moral masochism. I
recently wrote an extended critique of Bill Connolly’s immanent naturalism and
Jane Bennett’s vital materialism. With both of them, their
ecologically-informed political stances drive their anti-humanism, their new
version of what was already part of French philosophy with figures like
Deleuze. For Hegelian reasons, I believe, as Hegel famously puts it in
the1807 Phenomenology, one always has to think of substance also as
subject, something that the Spinozism embraced by Connolly and Bennett
deliberately avoids and forbids.
BS: That affirmation really
reminds one of Sartre. I was wondering to what extent there would be an
agreement between you and Sartre? When I read the Critique of Dialectical
Reason, the main point that Sartre returns to endlessly throughout both volumes
is how there is no group subject. The individual is never dissolved
within a group. Would you agree with that, as Sartre does, in the sense that
it’s just structurally impossible for that to happen or would you perhaps argue
that it’s a real threat that the subject faces and has to resist?
AJ: I am initially tempted to
try and find a way to have my cake and eat it too, with regards to the two
alternatives that you propose. One thing I greatly appreciated about the event
at Dundee was that Sartre came up several times. There was a recognition that
though he had fallen out of fashion for quite some time among the
Anglo-American world of scholars interested in French philosophy, where Sartre
really was deemed passé in part because, I think, he was seen to be too close
to more traditional conceptions of subjectivity, going back to the modern
period, which he’s unapologetic about. His emphasis on radical freedom was
considered to be too voluntarist, decisionist, etc. I’m delighted to see that
interest in his work is reviving. Badiou wants to combine the figures he
identifies as his three French masters: Sartre, Althusser and Lacan--with Lacan
already trying to combine aspects, arguably, of Sartre and Althusser, even if
Lacan was not always aware of being up to that, in those terms. I’m very much
in favour of struggling toward some way of integrating those two sides, and a
lot of my own work is striving for that sort of rapprochement between what
Sartre represents, on the one hand, and what Althusser represents, on the
other. Badiou does an admirable job of attempting to construct a theory of
subjectivity at the intersection of those figures, and I appreciate some of the
more Sartrean sides of him which often draw criticism. But, I’ve defended that
part of his project in print. I am very sympathetic to the project Peter
Hallward, another speaker at the Dundee event, is working out under the heading
of «dialectical voluntarism,» which involves, among other things, reactivating
Sartre and emphasizing the more Sartrean side of Badiou as crucial today. But,
on the one hand, I think there are certain dimensions of subjectivity that are
structurally irreducible to trans-individual group level phenomena or
processes, in the way that you articulated it as per the first alternative of
the two you presented me with in your question.
Also, I think that even if
there’s something there that’s ineliminable, nevertheless, especially at the
level of our experience of ourselves, in our practices, there can be the threat
of, at least experientially, irreducibility being occluded, lost from view--a
sense of dissolution or of being leveled down, reduced away, taken up without
remainder into these non- or anti-individual matrices. I think that’s certainly
a danger and a lot of how we position ourselves could be seen as a reaction to
that threat. Even if it can’t, in the end, just do away with it structurally,
it can so eclipse it from view that de facto it might as well, for all intents
and purposes, be an elimination along those lines.
In the background are some
dawning problems with different uses of the word «subject.» There’s a great
deal of work to be done in terms of disambiguating certain terms that have been
made to carry so much weight and have been loaded with so many different
significations and connotations that sometimes we end up in debates with each
other that are false debates, I think. For instance, the Badiou-verses-Žižek
debate about subjectivity is a false conflict that’s based upon the fact that
you have different parties using the word «subject» in different ways, and that
if you start doing some labour of disambiguation you realize that there’s not
necessarily the impasse or direct conflict that’s seen to be there, when we
were fighting this semantic tug-of-war over this single word. So, this is as
much a call to myself as to anyone else, since I use figures like Badiou and
Žižek together, and draw on other resources and other traditions that speak of
subjectivity. I do think we’re going to have to begin doing some labour to take
that single word and tease out of it the different levels and layers that have
been compressed into it. Hyper-compression has created, in some cases, false
problems. We shouldn’t be spending our time mired in these false debates, but,
instead, figuring out where the genuine bones of contention lie.
BS: So, for example, the way
that you discuss the subject in Žižek and Lacan is closer to the individual in
Badiou’s philosophy as opposed to the subject?
AJ: Yes, although both Slavoj
and I are very adamant that one of the things that’s missing from Badiou is
that you have the stark contrast between, on the one hand, the individual, the
mere miserable human animal, and, on the other hand, you have the post-evental
immortal subject that’s faithful to a given evental truth cause. There’s this
missing third dimension in Badiou, which would be what Žižek is after in many
cases when he talks about subjectivity in terms of the Lacanian subject as a
radicalization of the Freudian death drive, which itself captures what the
German idealists were after, especially Hegel, when speaking of negativity. For
both Žižek and myself there’s a lot that’s involved in this third dimension,
which makes possible the shift from the mere creature wrapped up in interests
of self-preservation, of pleasure, etc., and the possibility of what Badiou
speaks of as subjectivity, this thorough-going fidelity that breaks with that
animal background. Staking out that middle ground as what Žižek has called a vanishing
mediator between these different dimensions is important to me.
MB: My next question has to do
with the notion of emergence. I’ve seen you critique both Badiou and
Meillassoux on different fronts. Your critique of Meillassoux seems to be, and
this is a critique that Hagglund levels as well, that his account of the
emergence of life from materiality is problematic for multiple reasons. In the
same way you critique Badiou for his notion of the grace of the event. I wonder
how much your critiques hinge on the latent religiosity of the terminology
utilized by both Meillassoux and Badiou?
AJ: There are two different
critical strata that I’m playing with here. I think, to begin with, you could
strip out my obvious resistance to religion, you could strip that out of my
critiques of both figures, and there would still be core arguments against their
positions. For example, concerning the Meillassoux piece in the Speculative
Turn, for me the real heart of the critique has to do with looking at the
explanatory price to be paid for endorsing his ontology of hyper-chaos, just at
the level of philosophy of science. As I put it in this recent text on
McDowell, which involves some additional embellishments on my critiques of
speculative realism, the price is, in my view, too high. What you have to
accept in terms of what you allow for at the level even of scientific practice,
and the theorizations based on that practice, strike me as yielding instances
of reductio ad absurdum that problematize Meillassoux’s initial
position. I do weigh it out in a way that stands on its own apart from
considerations of, you might say, religious and, by extension, political
upshots of some of his positions. Now, at the same time, given my increasingly
Hegelian sensibilities, what I demand of myself and others is that one keeps
one’s eye on what might be the unintended reverberations beyond one’s immediate
concerns. Let’s say that one is just zeroing in on a certain set of
epistemological and ontological issues having to do with the philosophy/science
relationship. That’s a good and important project. But, I think at the same
time one has to be sensitive about how these things are inseparably interwoven
with each other; that there are social and political dimensions that are part
of the context that you’re looking at. And, you can ignore those issues, but I
think that it enriches one’s own work, and it’s also being intellectually
responsible, to keep one’s eye on, at least peripherally, the sort of halo of
surrounding issues, topics, and areas where there are inevitably going to be
reverberations, consequences etc. This is where I say that even though
Meillassoux is often compared to Lenin, and especially Lenin’s 1908 Materialism
and Empirio-Criticism, by contrast Lenin does do that. In fact, if anything,
what he’s often criticized for in that text is his brutal crudeness when handling
the history of philosophy. Just on strict philosophical grounds, one can’t
comfortably endorse some of his readings of the relationship between the
different figures of the modern period and how he positions Berkeley, Hume,
Kant, etc. in relation to each other. But, it’s not an ignorant crudeness; it
is a calculated crudeness. To put it in Badiouian parlance, Lenin is wanting to
force certain decisions to be taken in the face of points (as that word is used
in the Logics of Worlds) so as to eliminate any possibility of
fence-straddling--and to do so with an eye to the situation of philosophy in
his time as very much bound up with its wider conjunction. And, I think that
this Hegelian-Marxist approach is something to which I remain faithful, to use Badiou’s
language again.
I know that Meillassoux
wrote Divine Inexistence as his dissertation before After
Finitude; I wrote the piece in the Speculative Turn that you refer to
about two or three years ago. I was only dimly aware of the Divine
Inexistence project through this article that he published in the French
journal Critique, which had this talk of the God-to-come; for me, my
critique, even of the religiosity, is not at all undercut by someone who would
point to it and say ‘Oh well he was already interested in this divine
inexistence material’. The apparatus of After Finitude contains
polemics against fideism, against much of what we readily recognize as involved
in this revival of the religious within the continental philosophical
tradition. One can point to his dissertation, but I don’t think that just
because he wrote Divine Inexistence before After Finitude that
his theses fit together well; I think there’s an internal tension there.
MB: Do you think that it’s
your specific engagement with the sciences that differentiates your account of
how a more-than-material subject emerges from materiality from the accounts
given by Badiou and Meillassoux, for the emergence of events or life? In really
simple terms, there seems to be a similar structure happening there.
AJ: Yes, there’s this similar
structure, although Badiou refuses to tie his version of materialism to the
natural sciences and Meillassoux has yet to expand upon his views regarding
subjectivity. . You’ve heard me use this line before, so pardon me for
repeating the over-used, over-paraphrased Churchill one-liner: I think the
empirical experimental sciences of modernity are the worst basis for
constructing things like theories of subjectivity except for all
those others that we’ve tried from time to time. Along these lines, Brassier is
one of my closest fellow travellers in that both of us are adamant that modern
science is not something to be held warily at arm’s length or even aggressively
checked externally from the standpoint of philosophy; he and I agree that,
instead, we need to, as many of the analytics have done, embrace the sciences,
really accept that they are a fundamental part of our Weltanschauung and
seek in them resources as opposed to problematic points to be resisted,
criticized, rejected, etc. For me, the balancing act of my position, where I
think it represents an alternative, is that, on the one hand, it involves
concurring with Brassier that there is something fundamental about the sciences
and that the progress we make in those disciplines cannot be ignored save for
at the price of some kind of irresponsible intellectual bankruptcy; but, on the
other hand, I don’t think that those sciences necessarily produce, in fact I
think they point in the opposite direction, they don’t produce a reductive
picture where everything can be explained from within the sciences themselves.
I think that the sciences are showing how you can scientifically explain why
everything can’t be explained scientifically, as it were. This goes back to
that Hegelian phenomenological gesture in the section on ‘Observing Reason’ in
the Phenomenology of Spirit that the sciences produce out of
themselves, on their own grounds, an internal delimitation of their explanatory
jurisdictions. You can say that you have an empirical explanatory ground for
why an empirical experimental approach can’t account for everything that you’re
after, which is different from just dogmatically insisting what ultimately
would have to come down to a kind of a priori theoretical dogmatism,
a sort that I don’t think is very defensible, for example, simply saying, “No,
there’s this dimension which can’t be reduced down to that level and that’s
it.” I think that to have a scientific account for why you can’t reduce
everything to the sciences is a way to get what you want, for instance, to keep
what, I will concede, for instance, religion, various kinds of theological
approaches are describing, things that are there, I think, albeit in a very
distorted form or in a kind of dualistic or anti-reductivitst stance. I think
you can get all of that without having to fall back on what, in my view, are
very shaky, a priori, foot-stamping, fist-banging sorts of postulates or
insistences that are threatened by the sciences. My position sounds like having
your cake and eating it too, but I do think that there are good scientific
supports for the idea that a subject that is not itself capturable by the
sciences emerges out of what the sciences are looking at, and I think that
those disciplines themselves are providing the resources for that account,
which I seek to harness in this very Hegelian way too, of stepping back and
just allowing those disciplines to unfold their own resources and then, as
Hegel put it, recollecting the results. But, of course, the picture that
emerges is different from what a lot of people who aren’t sympathetic to this
approach would think, which is that in the end you’re still going to fall into
something like eliminative, or reductive materialism. I don’t think so.
BS: So, you think, in a sense,
this divergence that you get between the subject’s actual behaviour and our
explanation of that behaviour, via the best current scientific model, can be
given a positive account? We are not limited to a simple negative account of
this divergence, in terms of the weaknesses or flaws of our current,
incomplete, science? This irreducibility can be accounted for in a positive
sense, and that’s the role of philosophy, to try and give a positive account of
the way in which science and subjectivity will never completely coincide and
merge?
AJ: Absolutely. Even though
Badiou and I disagree about the nature and status of the sciences and
scientificity, nonetheless, in terms of certain aspects of my approach, I’m
deeply indebted to him. I come back to this idea of philosophy’s role as
putting certain of its conditions in cross-resonating relationship with each
other and exploring their compossibility, and so one of the features of my work
that sometimes gets more attention than others is the fact that I draw on
resources from the natural sciences generally, and the life sciences
especially. For me, it’s never just a matter of fixating upon those
disciplines, it’s about trying to see how those disciplines become
self-sundering, reaching this point where they’re beginning to demarcate their
own boundaries. That calls for work from other sides too., How are certain
resources from philosophy, psychoanalysis, political theory, etc. necessarily
part of this picture as well, and how do we then start constructing the links
between those different domains and developments? That’s very much what I’m
after. There are important contributions that, for example, a Lacanian
psychoanalytic framework brings. It’s not that we have to, in a one-way
fashion, rework Lacanian psychoanalysis, rework the various philosophers and
philosophical orientations that I’m talking about, due to these sciences. It’s
also an issue of asking: how do we have to modify these sciences, or how would
their research programmes have to alter, in light of key contributions from
philosophy and psychoanalysis? The sciences have, in some cases, vindicated us,
and it’s not just a matter of us having to make concessions to them; that’s
part of the rhetoric I was deploying at the end of my talk last year in Dundee.
The dialectical sword slices both ways. The sciences have reached the point
where they are going to have to accept that their interpretations of their data
and their research programmes require significant modification in light of the
contributions, for the past two centuries, we’ve been making on the
philosophical side of things.
BS: Isn’t one of the deepest
ways in which that comes out is that for any reductive programme in science,
and some other traditional approaches in science, there is the fundamental
belief that the Real, or Nature, is in some sense consistent. Whereas what
you’ve always been talking about, in the psychoanalytic aspect of your work, is
precisely that the Real, or Nature, or whatever you want to call it, is not
consistent, and it’s that which is going to be the fundamental shift from the
point of view of science in its relation to philosophy.
AJ: Yes, and there’s a lot of
work to be done in this regard. In addition to McDowell, one of the other key
figures who features in a piece I recently finished is the London School of
Economics’ philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright. I think her work is very
important. She’s published a number of books, but the text that is really
invaluable for my purposes, although it builds on earlier work of hers, is the
1999 book The Dappled World: A Study in the Boundaries of Science. On the
basis of considerations internal to much more analytically orientated
philosophy of science, she argues for a vision of Nature as a de-totalized
jumble of constituents that are not bound together by some sort of seamless
underlying fundamental unity. She pleads for that very much on strict
philosophy of science grounds, claiming that if you’re an empiricist and
realist, then the weight of the evidence should lead you to gamble in the
opposite direction, not to invest your faith in what is a metaphysical article
of faith regarding the ultimate unity, homogeneity, and seamlessness of
reality, its reducibility to basic fundamental laws. Keep in mind that this is
an article of faith that in practice is unprovable, even if all humanity for
the rest of our existence were to spend its time crunching data; we would never
get to the point where we would be able to take just a one-minute slice of the
behavior of a mid-sized perceivable organism, like another human being or even
a smaller animal, to reduce everything down to, say, the quantum constituents
of this organism, and then to show that there’s a seamless linkage that flows
from the base up to the more complex aggregate levels that proves reductionism
is right. Reductionism is a metaphysical article of faith, it’s a gamble, it’s
a hypothesis. Even though a lot people want to be realist about it, at it’s
strongest it’s just what Kant called a regulative ideal, and what he calls
specifically in the Prolegomena the cosmological idea of reason as a
regulative ideal for natural scientific practice. It might be a good heuristic
device and I think it does have its value, at that level, but I think that one
shouldn’t mistake a good heuristic device for a solid basis for an ontology. I
think we’re much closer to what Cartwright calls “the dappled world” or what
you point to, for which I use Lacanian and Badiouian language, when I speak of
this not-One, non-All nature as our best picture of nature. I think that there
are both psychoanalytic and philosophy of science considerations that show that
there is better evidence for Cartwright’s dappled world, or for the
de-totalized real of Lacan and Badiou. There’s even better evidence just looking
at the state of the sciences and their historical achievements and lack of
achievements than there is for the old reductivist dogma.
BS: Isn’t this the reversal of
the standard interpretation of the consequences of Gödel’s incompleteness
theorems? The orthodox response has been to affirm consistency at the expense
of completeness, as opposed to affirming completeness at the expense of
consistency, due, mainly, to equating inconsistency with incoherence?
AJ: That’s right. A colleague
of mine here, Paul Livingston, who is a person who does very interesting cross
tradition work between the analytic and continental, has a book coming out
entitled The Politics of Logic. The two main figures he discusses are
Wittgenstein and Badiou. In addressing Badiou, Livingston goes back to how
Gödel condenses in a very clear way this fundamental set of alternatives
involving consistency: you have consistency but at the price of completeness.
The alternative that you point to he very clearly lays out. We’ve had
conversations about this, and he even noticed in some of my earlier work I run
the terms «inconsistency» and «incompleteness» together, and that’s something
I’m in the process of rethinking in the light of his work, because he did a lot
of work in mathematics and analytical philosophy and logic, and he’s now turned
his attention to Badiou. If you’re also already sensitive to these issues in
terms of these sets of alternatives that are forced upon us with a real
reckoning with Gödel, I think that this work by Livingston will be quite good.
Livingston quite rightly identified that I tend to go for exactly what you were
talking about there: a totality that is an inconsistent totality. That’s very
much what I’m after, and, of course, it’s what you have in Hegel and Žižek as well,
I think; you can see a definite chaining together of positions in terms of a
chain of equivalence that represents something fundamental to our approaches
despite whatever other differences you might isolate.
MB: We’re curious to ask where
you see philosophy going in the next few years, with particular reference to
how both European and Anglo-American philosophers are returning to Hegel and
idealism in general, as a general resource. What do you see as the crucial
philosophical questions for the current generation?
AJ: I’ve got to say I think
this is one of the most exciting times to be in philosophy, despite, of course,
the job market. You have the combination of absolutely brutal practical
circumstances of the most depressing sort, but simultaneously some of the most
promising work being done alongside this, in these circumstances. As critical
as I am, for instance, of certain aspects of speculative realism, or other
recent orientations, nonetheless I’m delighted to see these things happening.
There’s a greater awareness of serious problems that were eclipsed from view
due to certain dominant trends and obsessions in much of what counted for
continental philosophy, especially in the Anglo-American world, throughout a
good portion of the middle to late 20th century. In large part thanks to Badiou
and Žižek, there has been a really interesting break with the phenomenological
and post-phenomenological developments that held such sway, and were so
glaringly front and centre in terms of English-speaking work, in continental
philosophy. What’s followed holds out the promise for a number of different new
alliances between the kind of philosophical traditions we come out of and
fields such as the sciences, but also, of course, analytic philosophy. One of
the things that causes the analytic and continental traditions to separate from
each other and become opposed stances is the disputed status of Hegel’s
philosophy. In the beginning of the 20th century you have Russell and company
in reaction to the excesses of late 19th century British Hegelianism: they
reject Hegel completely, utterly break with him, in the same way that Descartes
did with the scholastics. For most analytic philosophers who are around even
today, their history of philosophy training involved going as far as P. F.
Strawson’s Kant and then leaping over everything for about a century and
landing with Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein at the start of the 20th century,
maybe a little Meinong before that, but that’s it. And, of course, Hegel was
cut out of that picture. For all my reservations about Pittsburgh-style
Neo-Hegelianism, I see it as one of the most promising developments in terms of
overcoming analytical/continental divides involving using Hegel as providing
a lingua franca in which we can begin having conversations with each
other that we haven’t been able to have up until this point, given that the
continental tradition is so deeply indebted to Hegel and to what he opens up in
a number of ways. I’m very interested in reaching out and engaging with figures
on the analytic side. One of the problems I have with a lot of speculative
realism is, again, the people interested in it have not had any exposure or any
serious sustained exposure to the analytic tradition, and therefore fail to
realize what resources are out there in terms of people who’ve been working on
the realism/anti-realism problem, issues having to do with scientific law and
the status of causality, etc. You have just this wealth of material that’s yet
to be fully tapped and that would allow for a lot of cross-fertilization.
One of the things I hope
that’s going to happen is that the younger generation of people working in
continental philosophy will be able to begin dissolving these long-standing
disciplinary divides, not just by simply continuing to present the material
they’ve been doing, but dipping into the wealth of material, the resources that
are there, for instance, in the analytic tradition. That idea of bringing the
strengths of both sides together is one thing I’m very hopeful for and that I’m
now beginning to try to do myself in a more sustained fashion.
MB: Thus far your own work and
your two most recent manuscripts have been focused on Zizek and Badiou, and I
think something that’s differentiated your work from other people writing on
Zizek and Badiou is that in both of these works a position seems to emerge
that’s neither Zizek or Badiou but rather your own position and your own sort
of constructive work. So where is your research and your project going, and
what can we expect to see in the future from Adrian Johnston?
AJ: At this point, I’m writing
the second volume of a two-volume materialism project. The first volume is
entitled Alain Badiou and the Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy:
From Lacan to Meillassoux, casting Badiou in the position of Feuerbach à
la Engels’ 1888 Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German
Philosophy. Volume one is a kind of ground-clearing operation. I hope I’ve
already settled my debts with Žižek, who, of course, I feel very close to in
certain ways. But there are other figures, who I consider to be intellectual
neighbours in relation to whom I feel very proximate and yet disagree
stringently with on certain key points; these others are Lacan, Badiou, and
Meillassoux. So, I settle my differences with them in the first volume as a way
to set up the second volume, which is where I delineate what I’m after in its
fullest form in terms of what I call transcendental materialism.
It will probably take me about
another year to complete the second volume. Another forthcoming project is this
book I co-authored with Catherine Malabou, which is now entitled Self and
Emotional Life: Merging Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neurobiology. My
portion of that involves looking at the vexing Freudian-Lacanian problem of
affects in relation to the unconscious and re-evaluating that in light of the
resources of contemporary affective neuroscience. Those are the things that are
on the chopping block.
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