The other night I linked this interview with Adrian Johnston as part of a beginning exploration of contemporary 'object-oriented philosophy'/speculative realism and the postmodern thinkers taken as foundational by these current philosophers. Following the link to the interview with Adrian Johnston below is an extract concerning his viewpoint on the so-called hard problem of consciousness. Beyond that you will find discussion related to how the term 'materialism' has become problematized by certain 'splits' in the thinking of some post-postmodernists.
Interview with Adrian Johnston on Transcendental Materialism | Society and space[/QUOTE]
“. . . Another sticking point for me, appropriately enough, has to do with what philosopher of mind David Chalmers famously dubbed “the hard problem.” To be more precise, I am unsure of whether I can or should (and, if so, exactly how) attempt to grapple specifically with so-called “qualia” (i.e., the phenomena of private, first-person sensory experiences) as they figure in mind-body debates amongst Analytic philosophers. I am tempted to continue hewing to the angle I have adopted to this thus far, sidestepping the issue while remaining cautiously optimistic that the perceptual components of experiences—in line with Kant, Hegel, and McDowell, among others, I consider experience always to involve a complex admixture of percepts and mediating concepts—sooner or later will receive satisfactory bio-physical explanations. Previously, I have justified this sidestepping by emphasizing that
the subject at stake in my theory of subjectivity is, to stick with the immediately preceding terms, inextricably intertwined with conceptual mediation (rather than being anchored in perceptual [supposed] immediacy). With reference to Lacan’s psychoanalytic distinction between ego (moi) and subject (sujet) and his distinctive conception of the latter, the perception-consciousness apparatus of the ego is not what preoccupies me, as it arguably does those heavily invested in the squabbles about qualia. Or, put in yet other words, I am more interested in the rapport of active conceptual sapience, instead of passive perceptual sentience, with bio-physical bodies. For me, there is another hard problem: the enigma of how material nature becomes self-sundering, auto-disruptively giving rise to denaturalized “spiritual” (à la Hegelian Geist both subjective and objective as well as both “I” and “We”) beings instantiating and individuating themselves in and through virtual webs of socio-symbolic (quasi-) materials. But, whether a solution to my hard problem depends on a prior solution to Chalmers’s is a question I wish to give additional thought. Again, I will need to reassess these issues after further reading and reflection.
PG: Of course, everyone claims to be a materialist these days. How do you differentiate your work from other dominant materialisms? For example, while it’s clear you think Badiou’s formalism is one dead end for materialism, you also steer away from the “new materialisms” of such people as Jane Bennett.
AJ: As your question already suggests, nowadays the word “materialism” has been rendered almost meaningless through absurd overuse. When formalist metaphysical realisms and spiritualist theologies can and do pass themselves off as militant “materialisms,” merely identifying oneself as a materialist becomes, by itself, an uninformative gesture at best. I maintain that any materialism worthy of the name must be, as the Lacan of the tenth seminar might phrase it, not without (
pas sans) its conditioning relationships with matter(s) as the spatio-temporal forces and factors encountered precisely through the
a posteriori observations and experiments of Baconian modern scientific method and its post-Baconian variants. The arguments supporting this multi-aspect stipulation, with its greater stresses on the sciences and naturalism, entail disqualifying as genuinely materialist many self-styled materialisms recent and contemporary, particularly those of more rationalist or religious bents.
As you note, I contend that Badiou’s
a priori mathematical formalism is fundamentally incompatible with his materialist commitments. This contention is spelled out in the fourth chapter (“What Matter(s) in Ontology: The Hebb-Event and Materialism Split from Within”) of
The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy. However, in response to your question, his now-familiar distinction, from the preface to
Logics of Worlds, between “democratic materialism” (with its particularist “there are only bodies and languages”) and the “materialist dialectic” (with its universalist addition “except that there are also truths”) is relevant and insightful at this juncture (transcendental materialism converges with key features of Badiou’s materialist dialectic as per his 2006 masterpiece). I agree with the basic gist of this Badiouian distinction, an agreement I clarify and qualify in
A Weak Nature Alone. Moreover, his broader point that
the ancient conflict throughout the history of philosophy between idealism and materialism (as per the traditional Marxist narrative of Engels, Lenin, and Althusser, among many others) recently has morphed into an intra-materialist antagonistic division is well illustrated by exactly what motivates your very question. That is to say, the ongoing battle for the title/term “materialism” is one of the overdetermined primary sites of “struggle in theory” today.
Your mentions of Jane Bennett and the various “new materialisms” are quite fitting and helpful in this context. The twelfth and final chapter of my forthcoming
Adventures in Transcendental Materialism is devoted to articulating criticisms of Bennett’s “vital materialism” (as per her 2010 book Vibrant Matter) and William Connolly’s closely related “immanent naturalism” (as per his 2002 book
Neuropolitics and 2011 book
A World of Becoming). Due to the initial appearance of uncanny proximity between immanent naturalism especially and transcendental materialism, spelling out the differences separating these two positions that make for a real difference between them as distinct stances proved to be an important and productive exercise at the end of
Adventures in Transcendental Materialism. And, the first three chapters of
Adventures in Transcendental Materialism set up these later criticisms by revisiting Hegel’s Spinoza critique with an eye to its still-enduring relevance. To be more specific, I view one of the main fault line of current intra-materialist tensions to be that dividing neo-Hegelian materialisms (such as those of myself and Žižek) from neo-Spinozist ones (such as those of Bennett, Connolly, and many other “new materialists”). Basically, reading the first of Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” as an extension of one of Hegel’s key complaints about Spinoza’s monism (and this whether Marx himself was aware of the connection or not), I portray Bennettian vital materialism and Connollian immanent naturalism as both being “contemplative” materialisms in the sense problematized already in 1845 in Thesis One. Overall, the ongoing debates concerning contemporary materialisms strike me as often echoing the conflicts of the German-speaking intellectual world of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries—more precisely, the disputes concerning the relations (or lack thereof) between consequently systematic philosophies and philosophies of radical autonomy initially stirred up by Jacobi’s use (and abuse) of Spinoza, with these disputes remaining thereafter central to the development of Kantian and post-Kantian German idealism.
In addition to a German philosophical background from Jacobi through Marx casting its long shadow over today’s clashes and divergences between neo-Spinozist and neo-Hegelian materialisms, a more recent French background far from unrelated to this older German one also inflects the intra-materialist factionalizations of the early twenty-first century. The neo-Spinozism of the majority of new materialists tends to be that of Deleuze. Of course, Žižek, Badiou, and I, by contrast, rely broadly and deeply on Lacan (for instance, Badiou appropriately depicts Lacan as foreshadowing his own efforts to overcome the opposition between asubjective “system”
à la Althusser [a self-confessed neo-Spinozist] and subjective “freedom”
à la Sartre [an inheritor of a Cartesian-Kantian-Hegelian line of thinking about subjectivity]). Obviously, the reality and place of “the subject” is the big bone of contention between a Spinoza-Deleuze axis and a Hegel-Lacan one.
Not only do I reject the Althusserian/Deleuzian insistence on the inseparability of anti-humanism and anti-subjectivism as based on an illegitimate equivocation between the concept-terms “human being” and “subject”—for a number of reasons, I simply do not think that the structures and phenomena characteristic of what is referred to as “subjectivity” validly can be replaced by monochromatic monisms of non-subjective entities and events all arrayed on a single, flat, uniform field of being. The causally efficacious real abstractions of the structures and dynamics of subjects resist being conjured away through quick and easy reductions, eliminations, fragmentations, dissolutions, dehierarchizations, or deconstructions. For me, the true ultimate test of any and every materialism is whether it can account in a strictly materialist (yet non-reductive) fashion for those phenomena seemingly most resistant to such an account. Merely dismissing these phenomena (first and foremost, those associated with subjectivity) as epiphenomenal relative to a sole ontological foundation (whether as Substance, Being, Otherness, Flesh, Structure, System, Virtuality, Difference, or whatever else) fails this test and creates many more problems than it supposedly solves. Such dismissals are as similarly unsatisfying in my eyes as the contemplative outlooks of Feuerbach and his eighteenth-century French materialist forerunners were in Marx’s.
PG: As you’ve noted one thing that you’re quite critical about in recent Continental philosophy is its anti-naturalism, in particular its seeming allergy to discussing the empirical findings of contemporary science. Why do you think that came about?
AJ: The hostility to naturalism and the natural sciences dominating twentieth-century Continental philosophy save for a handful of exceptions—this animus continues to skew the perspectives of most self-professed Continentalists and their allies in the theoretical humanities—unsurprisingly has a complex history behind it. As I see it, its roots trace back to the final years of the Holy Roman Empire. In that time and place, as the context giving rise to Continental philosophy itself as springing primarily from the twin fountainheads of Kant and Hegel, anti-Enlightenment Protestant Pietism becomes a powerful intellectual influence (partly thanks to Jacobi who, well before Heidegger and his disciples, makes the “nihilism” of rational disenchantment a central concern of European philosophers). In particular, German Romanticism and the more Romantic sides of German idealism (especially Hölderlin as well as Schelling at several of the many phases of his Protean philosophical evolution) embrace a Pietism-tinged spiritualist animosity to the Enlightenment’s secular rationality. Of course, these late-eighteenth-century developments are continuations of the antagonism between science and religion that immediately arises with the birth of the former early in the seventeenth century with Bacon, Galileo, and Descartes. Moreover, the Pietist-Romantic backlash against scientific-style Enlightenment reason (and the atheistic consequences it threatens) comes to color the subsequent two centuries of European philosophy; a line of scientific naturalism’s enemies forms from Jacobi on through Schelling (particularly in his later years), Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, and many others, including these figures’ legions of contemporary followers (to this anti-Enlightenment axis, I like to oppose the one I am allied to that includes Hegel, Marx, Engels, Lenin, the later Lukács, Freud, Lacan, Badiou, and Žižek). Not only is it no accident or coincidence that the recent so-called “post-secular turn” initially arose within phenomenological circles—this turn is not even really recent or original, with the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century origins (i.e., Protestant Pietism and German Romanticism) of phenomenology, existentialism, and their offshoots already having taken such a turn against the secularism of the Enlightenment. As even the most unperceptive observer of our current collective situation knows, we still are fighting on multiple fronts variants of the now four-centuries-old science-versus-religion conflict (however, in a larger historical perspective, four-hundred years is not that long a stretch of time).
Furthermore, the “critical theory” of twentieth-century Western Marxism partially dovetails with the not-so-secular neo-Romanticism of the existentialists and phenomenologists. On the European continent in the twentieth century, anti-naturalism/scientism makes for some very strange bedfellows, implicitly uniting such adversaries as Heidegger (with his warnings about the desacralizations of nihilistic techno-scientific “enframing”) and Adorno-Horkheimer (with their similar warnings about the dystopian nightmare of the “fully administered world” of “instrumental reason”). The 1923 publication of the early Lukács’s
History and Class Consciousness opens up a rift between Eastern (i.e., Soviet) and Western Marxisms, with Engels’s dialectical materialist engagements with the natural sciences being a main point of divergence. In line with the Lenin of 1908’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, the Soviets stick to the project of extending and enriching Engels’s “dialectics of nature,” whereas, starting with the young Lukács, Western Marxists tend to repudiate Engelsian
Naturdialektik, preferring a narrower version of historical (rather than dialectical) materialism whose social constructivist commitments justify an overriding preoccupation with cultural analysis and ideology critique. This anti-Engelsianism marks both the Frankfurt School and Athusserianism alike despite their many other differences. Hence, in twentieth-century European philosophy, hostility to naturalism and the natural sciences spans the full political spectrum from the far Right to the radical Left, cutting across otherwise opposed positions. In the second volume of
Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism,
A Weak Nature Alone, I both tell this story about Engels’s disputed legacy as well as seek to reactivate the abandoned Soviet option of interfacing historical and dialectical materialisms with the sciences of nature.
Of course, I would be the first to concede that, when parties as far apart as Heideggerians and Adornians end up tacitly agreeing with each other, there most likely is something really there to which they all are responding. In this context, there indeed are countless grave problems plaguing (post-) modern (post-)industrial societies as themselves thoroughly dependent upon scientific knowledge and technological know-how. Conservative neo-Romantics and revolutionary Marxists both are similarly registering and diagnosing intertwined sets of cultural, economic, political, psychical, and social symptoms (although, obviously, their prescribed remedies, if and when proffered, differ dramatically). My fidelity to an Enlightenment-rooted, science-informed atheistic materialism does not uncritically disregard these problems/symptoms despite its contention that the majority of twentieth-century Continental thinkers react to them with misdiagnoses and misprescriptions (I will address the more ideological dimensions of scientism in response to your next question below). . . .
