“Indifference” – Thinking Through Cold

 

Prologue to Cold

Time has been spent lately thinking about Schelling’s Idealist appropriations and improvements on Spinoza’s notion of Substance and self, the way that he bent Nature’s history forward towards a development involving a supposedly higher unity, or at least self-conscious, expression, through an attempt to (re)unify the subject and the object. Unfortunately, because he held quite strong Idealist strains which conceived of the subject and the object under a fundamental binary involving the freedom of the self, itself representationalist and based upon a metaphor of a mirror’s reflection, I believe he missed one of the most radical notions contain in Spinoza’s thesis: that freedom consists not in binaries, but in infinities, and that what is “cold” provides in any case, the moment of eruption.

Spinoza’s project might be considered as a contructivist, immanent search for the leverage of Absolute Zero.

For those that don’t know, Absolute Zero, like the much more acclaimed speed of light, stands at a physical limit of the Universe, a temperature state no thing can be put into. So cold that all movement between related parts stops, so frozen that one has only pure structure, or we might say information, with no loss of entropy. Scientists have been attempting to cool things to the lowest point since the mid 19th century, then concentrating on trying to liquefying the eternal gases like oxygen and hydrogen. Now they have gotten within a few hundred billionths of a degree and produced the fantastic Einstein-Bose Condensate, bringing matter into such curious states that the wave functions of quantum particles begin to overlap and quantum effects start to manifest themselves on the macroscopic scale. At the very least the human quest for Absolute Zero, and the remarkable counter-intuitive behaviors of matter there make of the stuff of striking scientific analogy and fact.

I want to draw on the concept of Absolute Zero, −459.67° F or 0 Kelvin, to expose the raw potentiality involved in Spinoza’s criticism of most concepts of the world and our place in it, and in doing so show how Spinoza’s metaphysics signficantly involves prescriptions and diagnoses for how to go about finding real points in a lived life, in real situations, for radical, radix, change (liberation). When I say that I want to draw on the concept, there is a fine line being walked here, for generally I resist loose philosophical appropriations of scientific principles meant to describe very specific physical phenomena (so much messiness with what is done with Quantum Mechanics). There is ever a danger that what is being described in science becomes the event for only a merely fantastical imagination only stimulated by the idea found in a discipline. And perhaps this is the case here. The coldest of the cold has remarkable consonances with the conceptual (and even psychological) armature of Spinoza’s prescription, and in many senses there risks a vast and even confused conflation. But there is more than this to the transfer of Scientific Cold to Spinoza’s Metaphysical Cold, and this is found in translated attempts to connect Spinoza’s thinking on the concept of Idea to a universal notion of Information as a constituent element of the Universe (discussed some here: Information, Spinoza’s “Idea” and The Structure of the Universe ), joining matter and energy. If indeed there is a productive collaboration between Spinozist Idea and Stonier’s notion of Information, the real states of non-entropy, absolute cold, the zero-point edge of all reality, provide a real nexus between what is being described and our prescriptions. In a certain literal sense, Absolute Zero would be a place or state of pure Idea (or at least its approach). I want to investigate then, what it means for us to pursue states of Absolute Zero within our very temperate realm of the human, as a kind of liberating attractor, in the richness of an imaginary and prospective unveiling of the powers of Spinozist metaphysics, without losing the possible literal correspondence between Spinoza’s thinking and the informational properties of the Universe.

From Magnetism to Cold

In the 18th century there was another philosophical appropriation from science, which at least in my view gave birth to one of the more confused ideologies of philosophical thinking…the “dialectic”. Schelling invented the modern dialectic which Hegel perfected into pure abstractions, in part through the influence of Brugmans’ research into magnetism. Schelling, in his quest to reconsile the subject and the object as they are problematically posed in Kant’s and then Ficte’s Idealism, and in result synthesize ethics and subjectivity to objective natural philosophy, found inspiration in the points of “indifference” that Brugmans discovered in magetized metal. Between the metal’s polarities of +/- there were to be found points which were seemingly a kind of null-source of the polarity itself, or rather more technically, there were spatial threshold limits in a metal piece set to be magnetized by another which when fallen short of or transgressed in the process of being stroked produced the said polarity, and when ended upon, did not.

“I shall therefore take the opportunity of calling them the points of indifference. This seems to me to be a not entirely unsuitable, for the ends of the rod which has been stroked up to these points have an indifferent effect upon the poles of the magnetic needle” (Brugmans, Magnitismus seu de affinitatibus magneticis observationes academicae 1778)

These points of “indifference”  inspired in Schelling the notion that there are to be found points or a state of indifference (or really nondifference) to which the Idealist opposites of subject and object are immanent. Ultimately this state of Indifference, apart from Schelling’s early theories on magnetism and the construction of the Universe, would come to be interpreted as the Dark God, Ungrund, or blind Nature within God that gives birth to the otherwise oppositional Identity and difference and other oppositions.

What I want to think on is the Idealist notion of opposition itself, the idea of Absolute Opposition, which drives Schellings entire system (or systems). I would like to take on the very notion of opposed things, and redefine the power of Schelling’s original appeal to magnetism and Indifference to unlock just how Spinoza’s treatment of Idea and Object (and inside and outside) radically dispels all the hierarchies that Idealism attempts to set up to resolve what is for me a false problem, an cast image on which Man is set as precipice.

The difficulty follows from the host of philosophies of Representation and of Reflection that flow from Kant, and Schelling is certainly not immune, despite his Spinozist vertex (in a triangle of Idealism, Spinozism and Romanticism). It will be upon Spinoza’s non-representationalist conception of knowledge, his minimalization of the importance of self-reflection and thus human centricity, that I will try to rebuild the notion of Indifference with an intended radical effect. To see how Schelling conceives of necessary, conceptual opposition, and its Ur-source in optical metaphor one need only look at his comparisons of oppositions found in Bruno, where we find that a mirror image is irreconcilable to its object, unlike combinative chemicals. We are to read all “necessary” oppositions in just this sort of spectral way:

Bruno: I say that things are relatively opposed if they can cease being opposites and can be united in some third thing. Such an identification is unthinkable for absolute opposites, though. You will have an example of relative opposition if you think of two chemical substances with opposite properties, for they can be combined and so produce a third substance. You will have an example of the other sort of opposition if you think of an object and the mirror image of that object. For you can conceive of any third thing that would allow mirror image to pass over into object or permit the object to be transformed into an image? Aren’t they precisely so related that one is object, and the other image, absolutely, necessarily, and eternally distinct from one another?

Bruno, or, On the natural and the divine principle of things

Buried in the heart of Schelling’s attempt to reconcile these supposed opposites is the plague-born philosophy of reflection rich in its imaginary confabulations, leveraged upon the metaphysical consequences that must be earned due to the essentiality of human beings in the hierarchy of creatures. A philosophy of object, reflection and judgment encrusts itself with concerns for the ontological priority of human freedom (necessary for Christian theology and soul-orientation), knotting at its core this representationalist dream: the idea is a reflection of some sort. What is needed is a radix reformulation of what distinguishes idea from object, and a deepened sense of what the Indifference of imagined opposites can provide, in particular when “reflection” is not seen as an occasion of ontological apex.

Instead of thinking how God could ever reflect upon himself and create some sort of unity (as an idealized projection of what human beings optimally do), instead Spinoza provides a kind of maximalization of thought such that human actions (including thoughts) occupy no more priority in the Universe than anything else: human thoughts are about as similar to God’s as the barking dog is to a heavenly constellation, Spinoza tells us. Because ideas are not reflections of their objects (nor objects of their ideas), but rather are parallel expressions of extended things, there is a kind of “indifference” that is already found at the level of any idea (or thing) at all. Each and everything idea/thing is co-incident of Substance, expressively.  The indifference of the distinction between idea and thing resides in their singular essence. 

While Schelling will find the ultimate Indifference between opposites to be posited in a Dark, Unconscious God Ungrund which out of pure yearning give birth to the subsuming Ground of God as a collective of Identity into which all of difference is joined, as due to the quite reflective preoccupation of his philosophy, in Spinoza the Indifference (if we can borrow the term) falls to Substance itself which contains all things as a Unity come out of its unbound nature, a pure affirmation without lack; thus for him the differentiation of essences expressed in an infinite number of Attributes flows from its sheerly immanent, determined and infinite nature. The supposedly necessary “opposites” such as those that occur in fantasmic mirrors do not seem to find anywhere to take hold. Instead, idea and thing are already made mutual and co-incident, born of their essence in a dependent net of horizontal causes. As such in a certain fashion, each and every essence as it expresses itself as an idea and a thing, it itself an Indifference wherein ideas ARE things (despite Spinoza’s restriction against ideas and things cross-causing events in one or the other). Our causal explanations indeed trace out their chains in one or the other, but these two infinities are locked in a singular core of each essence, an essence which makes of any thing-idea existence a bright and gravitious star. Substance is already Indifferent as is each essence, which is its indifferent expression.

There is a sort of rhetorical game going on in my argument because Spinoza does not solve the problem that Schelling attempts to solve with the notion of Indifference because his formulations prevent it in the first place. So when I say that for Spinoza Substance is Indifferent or an essence is indifferent, there is a near non-homology. I say only near non-homology though because I would like to keep to the original science borrowing that inspired Schelling in the first place: there are points within a metal extension that are null to the process of being magnetized into poles. Because the split between thing and idea does not occur, the “point” between them is simply their immanent origin (and not a mirror’s tain), and not a null ground or subsumption of any sort. If indeed poles of magnetism are taken to indicate an imaginary split between idea and thing, image and object, subject and object, as such things are in Spinoza’s vision, the null point of their mutuality actual falls to the conditions of their expression, and within that, to what I would say is their Cold Point.

The Issue of Cold

Upon this framework for a general notion of non-representationalist, non-reflexive Indifference I want to open the path forward from the other end, that of a prescriptive diagnosis for radical change and freedom of action, within history and the condition of human thought. Under the onus of such a path Spinoza’s answer is: look for the Cold, pursue Absolute Zero, find Indifference. 

To be continued…The Cold of the Body Without Organs

Throwing A-causal Stones From Theoretical Glass Houses

I don’t read Harman’s blog, but directed there by Steve Shaviro I noted this rather odd criticism given toward Shaviro’s theoretical embrace of becoming, apparently only the mere illusion of change in lieu of a real explanation:

GH: “Shaviro claims that his position explains change, but all it really gives us is the illusion of change: like those card decks with stationary cartoons which, when flipped through in rapid succession, give the illusory impression of a dynamic event.”

This of course should be contrasted with Graham’s own theory of “vicarious causation” which not only possesses almost no explanatory value of what causation might be, but actually invents in perhaps a non-Occamian profusion, a host of objects imagined to interact in ways that are yet revealed by their author. The objects are posited, but they are still waiting for their theory. Indeed Graham’s thinking ALLOWS cars to be crushed and ice cream to be eaten, as he proudly proclaims, but his theory of cause and effect seems to fall even below the threshold of “illusion” when it comes to change itself. Instead vacuous objects retreat into ghost worlds connected through subterranean mojo mixed with the mysteries of intention, becoming all the more inapplicable at the level of bowling-ball type objects that the theory is supposed to rescue.

Adventures in Incoherence

Graham recoiled from Steven’s description of his (general) theory as incoherent, and Steven apologized for the word choice, and in fact praises to a strong degree the effect the criticism he has received. But at least in this aspect of Harman’s thinking – his explanation of cause - to this reader, the Harman account is incoherent. Which is not to say that I disagree with it, but rather, it lacks applicable coherence: the theoretical parts match up (Harman’s importation of Husserlian Idealist objects exotically fused to a Heideggerian matrix), to be sure, but they do so in an utterly non-productive way, leaving one to feel that one is just making categories up in some kind of meta-love of the Husserl-Heidegger tradition. There doesn’t seem to be anything to actually disagree with other than that the notion of “allure” (unexplained and largely undifferentiated) explains what causation is, especially given its anthropomorphic projection of human experience onto largely inanimate objects that are supposed to make up our orientation.

There is a thin line between “incoherent” and “the supposed coherence between concepts does not do the explanatory job”. “The hand of Zeus makes it rain” is both coherent (at least I understand what the sentence means), and also incoherent as an explanation. All the explanatory connectives are missing. As far as Whitehead’s causation as becoming I feel we are at least closer to having concepts that when understood contain a kind of explanatory value that is more satisfying. I find it very odd though that Graham would chose causation as the house from which to through his stone.

In the comments section to the linked Shaviro post I offered a sketch of how Spinoza’s metaphysics might address the breach between these two camps, for what it is worth.

Swimming Without Pause: Production Sans Subject:Toscano on Schelling and Spinoza

Breathing Matter

In this wonderfully conceived essay on Schelling and Spinoza “Fanaticism and Production: On Schelling’s Philosophy of Indifference” Albert Toscano works from a perspective of production, taking as a general question of philosophy the object seen as product. As he traces out Schelling’s struggle with Kantian concerns with the object, Toscano describes well the absolute limit at which Spinoza has placed himself, the radical of radicals (at least for the late 18th and 19th century mind). What the “subject” does, and I had never considered this in just this way, is provide a break in production, a gap, a respite, a hollowed out moment when all production stops. The machine that churns, relentlessly, holds its gears, if only locally. To have removed the importance of the subject, which Spinoza’s absolute philosophy ever threatens to do, is to remove the breath taken in the swim (leading to all sorts of transcendental leveragings). The appeal to the subject was not initially this, one suspects, but rather simply the way in which the subject seemed to explain how one escaped from the actual, what was happening in the moment (in the way that a dead, inanimate object seemingly cannot). But rather, subjectivity became more, a question of salvation, how to breath in a world of pure matter.

A significant passage:

Its two definitions, as eternal becoming and producing without limit, testify to Schelling’s monumental effort, even while still in Fichte’s wake, to think production beyond its Greek matrix: beyond transcendence construed either as the primacy of an effect or product or as the exteriority of form to matter. Philosophy as a suspension-in-production is thus geared towards resisting the tyranny of the actual, as that which covers over the activity which gave rise to it and leads to  these effects or illusions of transcendence which are engendered by the separation of subject and object. We are now ready to understand the retroactive significance of those passages in Schelling’s late lectures which refer to Spinoza’s substance as a “being (das Seyende) without potentiality”, “powerless being”, and his system as one of “complete quiescence”. The clue to this matter will come from one of Deleuze’s seminars, in the form of what may be an implicit avowal of an insufficiency of Spinoza which bears some interesting resemblances to Schelling’s own. Deleuze makes the following remark:

The necessity in Nature is that there will not be any relationships which are not effectuated [effectués]. The entirety of the possible is necessary, which means that all relationships have been or will be effectuated. [...] Nature is the totality of effectuations of all possible, and therefore necessary, relationships. This is identity in Spinoza, the absolute identity of the possible and the necessary.(13.01.1981)

Now, if we turn to the Munich lectures, we can understand what is meant when Schelling, to support his critique, states that Spinoza’s is a system in which “the cause has completely merged into the effect”. For Schelling, in Spinoza’s system of necessity a suspension in production, even an artificial one, is unthinkable. There is simply nothing which would allow one to abstract production from product, which would allow an unlimited activity as pure cause to hold itself suspended before its effects. The reasons further adduced by Schelling in this 1833 text to support his claims against Spinozism, show him instead retreating to the positions held before that momentous threshold in German Idealist appropriations of Spinoza, the Supplement to the Ideen referred to above. “The God of Spinoza”, writes Schelling, “is still lost in substantiality and thereby immobility. For mobility (or possibility) is only in the subject. The subject of Spinoza is just object”. It is evident that, at this point, Schelling could no longer stand behind that fraught and tenuous, but nevertheless singular project of bringing together, through the indifferentiation of transcendental and natural-philosophy, the concepts of indifference and production into a philosophical endeavour truly beyond the legacy of Kantianism. To a certain degree the Schellingian project foundered precisely because of its radical character. In trying to think past the dichotomy of subject and object, Schelling found himself in a conceptual vacuum of sorts, unable to give due consistency to an inquiry which sought to break with the damning alternative between the articulation of subject and object on the one hand and the “night when all cows are black” on the other, as Hegel famously sniped at his former collaborator (16-17)

While I enjoyed Toscano’s take on Schelling and production I think that something is missed here, not in his description, but in the very notion of a “suspension before effects” as it is related to the notion of a Deleuzian avowal of a Spinozist “insufficiency”. Indeed it would seem that Spinoza does not let you breathe, insofar as you consider the material (object) environment alien (unbreathable). And if one cannot breathe, how can that which suffocates you breathe? Spinoza makes the world unbreathable, under the conditions to which a subject is put to use – and Toscano does an excellent job of discussing the apogee of Schelling’s flight towards Spinoza, away from Kant and Fichte. But in that holding of the breath, in Spinoza, as he submerges you, you then are forced eventually to gasp. One may find that beneath those oxygenated waters already there was breath, waiting. All the binaries of Idealism, many of which Schelling rapidly played, are organized against this possibility, that in matter, right there in the actual, you can and already breathe. No extrication was needed. Key to this is the suspension that is imagined to have happened through the subject, the gap in which “production” is supposed to have stopped and ground its gears, is an illusion. Production has continued, in the same way that the desert sun shines for the ostrich. All that one has done is secluded one’s knowledge. This is not accomplished through a “negation” or the imposition of the human powers of nothingness. It is done through a tempoing of the human half-directed, to a line of production, a river of it that it cannot follow, through the “picture” of an affirmation. Spinoza’s radical, powerless nihilism is a constructive one, one might suggest. It is one that, mid-stream, finds any action to come on the fly, amid production. There is no “time out” in history.

What is most interesting when following the Pantheism Controversy and all the ways in which people reacted to and corrected Spinoza is to key your eye upon what each was trying to preserve from Spinozist annihilation. You can’t think that, or we’ll lose “x”. Nearly everything that was an “x” for late 18th century German philosophy had strong political and ideological roots, that from this distance show themselves more clearly (in Schelling one of those “x”s was “freedom”). The terrible limit at which philosophy placed Spinoza during the controversy and its aftermath exposes as well the radical possible for both ourselves as a people and as subjects. To think without “x”. It would be a path of participation and cybernetic change through integration, aesthetic thresholds of fray and fixity, instead of instrumentally induced “breaks” in the order of being, timeouts wherein we get to play at God.

Art: The Watch that Ticks Fast?

Found posted over at antagonist, this recounting of something Kafka said in passing on Picasso:

Recalling a visit with Kafka to an exhibition of French painting, Janousch reports that, in answer to a comment he made on on Picasso’s “rose coloured women with gigantic feet” which was to effect that Picasso was a “wilfull distortionist” Kafka replied: “I do not think so… He only registers the deformities which have not yet penetrated our consciousness. Art is a mirror, which goes ‘fast’, like a watch – sometimes”.

(from The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head by Louis Begley)

Its odd that when you work to uncover an idea such as that which I excavated from Spinoza’s Letter 17, here: Spinoza’s Scheme of the Prophetic Imagination and here Omens of the Future: Intellection and Imagination, one stumbles upon it an even more extraordinary form. Here in the image of the fast clicking watch we have a romantic condensation of just that thought that governed Spinoza’s reasoning on affects of the future. And more, it was my unstated desire to suggest that indeed such a logic could underwrite some of the powers of art and political visioning. (It should be noted that Kafka has at least a tentative connection to Spinoza through the Jewish Prague circle with included Einstein: The Prague Esprit de Spinoza and Einstein’s Inception of General Relativity.)

But Kafka’s diagnosis of Picasso’s powers of depiction are eruptive. It is not merely the future that comes through the fast-ticking lens of the artist, but deformities which have not yet penetrated our consciousness. Amazing. Like long delayed stars’ light the great contortions of what we cannot imagine present themselves, and possibly those beauties. What seems conferred by art is a possibility from the potential of affects which totalize the soul, selected out through a logical intimacy with the times. What we CAN feel draw from the yet imagined possible of what we WILL feel.

Omens of the Future: Intellection and Imagination

[click on photo for larger image]

More on the Balling Letter

This is a follow up on the train of thought I began two days ago on the subject of Spinoza’s letter to Peter Balling where Spinoza brings up the curious notion of sharing in the essence of another person, and even the result that one could have phenomenological experiences of future events: Spinoza’s Scheme of the Prophetic Imagination. I wanted to really explore just how Spinoza is using or conceiving of the imagination as a wayward point between events of the body, and events of the mind, as it seems that this is most important to determining the value of Spinoza’s comments, in particular how they might reveal just how he conceived of the importance of the “imitation of the affects” and also our general capacity to know (and/or participate in) the essences of external things.

Spinoza displays some inconsistency in how he treats the imagination (and even the concept of order, discussed here: Spinoza’s Two Concepts of Order), throughout his work. And the problem of the standing of the “imagination” in 17th century thought is not something unique to Spinoza. By and large though I think we can assume that what Spinoza means by the imagination is what we commonly mean by phenomena, that is our experiences of things either being present to us, or our ability to conjure them up apart from their presence. Largely these are just what we would call our “experiences” in general. So when Spinoza and Peter Balling are talking about either a waking dream of a diseased slave or the sounds of an ailing child groan, these are hallucinatory effects which are not different in mechanism than the effects we experience when we perceive the world.

Spinoza early on takes these experiences of the imagination to be best seen as products of the body, and as sources of confusion. We do not understand their causes, and they kinda of erupt out of our ignorance, seemingly at random. They are the products of external bodies interacting with and stimulating our own body. Most importantly, it is this tendency towards randomness (in terms of their meaningfulness) that Spinoza is most concerned with, the way in which our phenomenal experiences occlude and confuse, something which Spinoza attributes to their bodily source. You can see this in his Emendation where he claims that the effects of the imagination are only caused by bodies, but it is interesting that when it comes down to it Spinoza himself seems a bit confused on how to classify them by their source in the body. Instead it is merely their tendency towards (apparent) randomness and also our passivity towards them and the world which distinguishes them from products of the Intellect. In this sense explanations of our experiences which turn to our body alone, due to our ignorance of causes, tend to create passive states to be contrasted with the workings of the Intellect which are activities of our being:

Thus we have distinguished between the true idea and other perceptions, and we have established that the fictitious, the false, and other ideas have their origin in the imagination, that is, in certain sensations that are (so to speak) fortuitous and unconnected, arising not from the power of the mind but from external causes, in accordance as the body, dreaming or waking, receives various motions. Or if you wish, you may here understand by imagination whatever you please, as long as it is something different from the intellect, and the soul has a passive relationship to it. It matters not how you understand it, now that we know that it is something random, and that the soul is passive to it, while we know how we may be delivered from it with the aid of the intellect [84].

Emendation of the Intellect

In this way our experiences are seen as simply the receiving of motions from external bodies, and our bodies become something of a “picture making machine” (citing the end of Willa Cather’s story “Paul’s Case“). But by the time of Spinoza’s writing of his letter to Balling in 1664, perhaps some six years after the Emendation (if we are to believe Mignini), Spinoza adopts a dual possible source for effects of the imagination and our experiences. They can come either from the states of our body, or from the Intellect. In fact, Spinoza regards a whole class of imaginary effects as near automatic traces of the ideas we form in the Intellect:

The effects of the imagination arise from the constitution either of body or of mind. To avoid all prolixity, for the present I shall prove this simply from what we experience. We find by experience that fevers and other corporeal changes are the cause of delirium, and that those whose blood is thick imagine nothing but quarrels, troubles, murders and things of that sort. We also see that the imagination can be determined simply by the constitution of the soul, since, as we find, it follows in the wake of the intellect in all things, linking together and interconnecting its images and words just as the intellect does its demonstrations, so that there is almost nothing we can understand without the imagination instantly forming an image.

Letter 17, To Peter Balling, July 20th 1664

Apart from the take in the Emendation, here the imagination actually “follows in the wake of the Intellect” and distinct from the opinion that it tends towards randomness in meaning, its images and words (!) are interconnected just as (one presumes, in a way similar to) the intellect’s linking of its proofs. It should be noted that Spinoza is reasoning from “experience” itself here, and not making a deductive determination, but it is clear that he has at the very least shifted his stance away from the significantly passive and randomesque sources of the imagination some years back. And even more evocative, the very concept of linked and interconnected images and words strongly calls to mind the linchpin proposition 13 of part II of the Ethics, wherein the order and connection of ideas and (extended) things is said to be the same. There is nearly a third “order and connection” going on here.

How Can The Imagination Have Two Sources?

This aspect of the letter actually has troubled me quite a bit. In fact any place Spinoza argued that there is either a bodily source or a mental source for an event I felt a deep objection arise in me that Spinoza’s parallel postulate strictly forbids any such ultimate distinction. As you can see from the diagram posted above, the order and connections of the bodily state expressions of an essence run necessarily parallel to their ideational expression; and Spinoza precludes the idea that one side of the parallel can have causal effect on the other. So any bodily state, when taken as the causal source of an event, must also have its parallel ideational state which additionally the causal source of the same event (read as an ideational expression). What determines whether one uses the bodily state as the causal source or not is whether the event is read as either a physical expression, or as an ideational one. But all events are necessarily both. So when Spinoza says in the Emendation that the imagination (those events) are bodily in nature, this can only mean that he is already speaking of them as physical (putting some strain on the future of the parallel postulate). By the time of writing of letter 17, the effects of the Imagination are dichotomized, but at first blush this is not at the level of description. Instead it seems rather for Spinoza there are kinds or classes of effects of the Imagination. Delirums and dispositional judgments spring from bodily constitutions, and in this case, prophetic imaginary experiences which spring from the mind or the constitution of the soul.

What are we to make of this supposedly confusion of the parallel postulate wherein some experiential events are predisposed to be explained through a physical causal chain, and others through an ideational one? And what are we to make of the causal difficulties involved in the notion of the imagination “following in the wake” of the Intellect, or even that such wake-following possesses its own order of expression? I think the answer lies within the kinds of relevant causes that get swept up in either chain of explanatory force. That is to say, while we may presume that the parallel postulate holds and that there is a causal chain of each kind flowing backwards for any one event, which chain we chose depends on both our access to information about that chain, but also what each explanation would reveal. And in the case of our experiences of our interactions with things external to us, indeed each chain gives us a different method of self-analysis and world orientation which is in some sense linked to the ontological lean each event has towards the world itself. Spinoza wants to say something of the effect, there could be two seemingly similar imaginative effects, waking dreams, but understanding one might tell us more about ourselves (if we take it to be the product of the physical states of our body), and the other might tell us something more about the world, something external to us, (if we take it to be the product of our ideational state and our relational juxtaposition to other things in the world). You can see this in the way that Spinoza justifies that Peter Balling’s hallucination would indeed be prophetic, born out of the love and literal union of the father to the son:

[continuing from the passage just cited] This being so, I say that none of the effects of the imagination which are due to corporeal causes can ever be omens of things to come, because their causes do not involve future things. But the effects of the imagination, or images, which have their origin in the constitution of the mind can be omens of some future event because the mind can have confused awareness beforehand of something that is to come. So it can imagine it has firmly and vividly as if such a thing were present to it…

The Logic of the Future

What I propose is that the dichotomy Spinoza uses is one quite natural to us. In lieu of the medical common place at the time, thickness of blood, we moderns need only replace “low dopamine levels” or “damage to the cerebral cortex” to see that physical causal explanations of our experiences and judgments gain their traction from the way in which those experiences fail to shed light upon the world. The meaningfulness of those mental events, in that they fail to reveal the world (for others or ourselves), drains away, and is recouped through a physical explanation. In Spinoza’s letter, a fever explains a hallucination when the vision does not seem to derive from events in the world. Physical dispositions explain those that are too morbidly or aggressively predisposed, when those mental events seem out of joint with what is going on. To take another example, “its the drink speaking” is a regular dismissal of the “truths” spoken by a drunk person. The recapture of explanatory force at the level of the physical is accomplished by understanding better the way in which physical causes are operating. One might cure a fever to ride oneself of delirium, or abstain from alcohol to avoid overly emotional outbursts (or take lithium to avoid depressions). Key though to Spinoza’s dual cause interpretation is that given that mental events lack traction in the real world (seemingly), such imaginary effects will simply seem to the person experiencing them to verge towards “random”. A cloak of ignorance covers much of the causal chain, leading to confusions.

There is another path to explanation, the path to order and sense-making, and it is to this that Spinoza sets up his alternate explanation of a waking dream. Imaginary effects, in that they follow in the wake of the Intellect actually can reveal the world itself – and in this case even indicate something of its future. Spinoza predicates this upon what he calls “participating” in the essence of another person (or perhaps more correctly, in the affections and ideas of another person), something he calls a union and a becoming as if one and the same, via love. For clarity sake I diagram out the two causal explanations of waking dreams below:

[click on photo for large image]

I think that there is more than our ability to interpret waking dreams at stake in these descriptions. In fact I think we have clue to the very picture of the world Spinoza holds as it underwrites all of his epistemic arguments for how we do and do not know things in the world. But first I would like take up the very notion that we might have premonitory imaginary experiences. This is something that strikes us as sheer superstition, and it is hard for us to accept that the quite sober Spinoza would indulge in such a fancy. But I think I can appeal to some very real, in fact everyday experiences which may clear up just what future-vision may be for Spinoza, or perhaps why he holds the claim that he does: that things of the Intellect involve things of the future. The first of these is obvious, the sciences indeed are, based on acts of intellection, quite predictive. But it is more than this, for Spinoza is talking about an outright hallucination of a future event, so much so it is as if the event is happening right in front of you. Do we have any instances of this sort we can draw on? The most instructive one I believe is the example shared by Spinoza and Wittgenstein, discussed here: Understanding in a Flash and the Mastery of Technique. This is when a mathematical series is being expressed and that there is a rule that is being followed in the succession of numbers. It don’t think it is too much of a stretch to refer to what Wittgenstein called “characteristic accompaniments” as effects of the imagination which are not understanding itself, but rather seem to come in the wake of understanding. If I say aloud “2, 4, 6, 8…” it is not out of the question that you might have an auditory hallucination of the sound “1o” in anticipation of the next number. This in fact would be an albeit confused but still imaginary premonition of a future event, even if I happen to stop at the number 8. In fact we get a glimpse at what Spinoza means by the “wake of the Intellect”. In some sense this power of anticipation through imaginary phenomena expresses our grasp of a situation is what Spinoza is appealing to when trying to explain how Balling’s vision differs from his own. And most importantly, the foundation of this difference is the participatory relationship the father has with his son’s essence, the literal union of the two.

How Adequate Are Our Ideas of External Things?

Much has been debated about the way Spinoza conceives the adequacy of our ideas of external things, and in this questions about just how adequate the ideas of Science are. Spinoza is restrictive to the value of abstractions (of which much of Sciences seems to be composed), and mathematics (which he calls both a product of, and an aid to, the imagination in letter 12). Spinoza’s theory of Common Notions introduced in the Ethics simply is too bare to do the weight of carrying  the whole load of how we gain knowledge about states of the world. Indeed I side with others such as Michael Della Rocca and Eric Schliesser who, for different reasons, renounce that completely adequate ideas could be held about things external to us, insofar as they are taken as separate things. And I think core to the issue of adequate knowledges is Spinoza’s Letter 17 notion of participating in the essence of another person to strong ideational effect. There seems to be an undercurrent of participation in essences between Spinoza’s intuitions about how we hold ideas of other things i the first place.

Most readings that seek to resolve the difficulties of how adequate our knowledge of external thing is turn to either our necessarily adequate knowledge of “common notions” (supposedly ideas that are common to both ourselves and external things) or to the infinite modes like “motion and rest”, which in turn are taken to be common to all things. And Spinoza towards the end of his unfinished treatise on the Emendation gives us a good hint at how we should think about these very “real” things, things we must train our Intellect to:

As to the ordering of all our perceptions and their proper arrangement and unification, it is required that, as soon as possible and reason demands, we should ask whether there is a being – and also what kind of being – which is the cause of all things so that its essence objectified is the cause of all our ideas [ut  class="hiddenSpellError" pre="ut ">eius essentia obiectiva sit etiam causa omnium nostrarum idearum]. Then our mind, as we have said, will reproduce [referet] Nature as closely as possible, for it will possess the in the form of thought the essence, order and unity of Nature. Hence we can see that it is above all necessary for us always to deduce our ideas from physical things, i.e., from real beings, advancing, as far as we can, in accordance with the chain of causes from one real being to another real being, neither inferring something real from them nor inferring them from something real. For in either case the true progress of the intellect is interrupted.

But it should be noted that by the series of causes and real beings I do not here mean the series of mutable particular things, but only the series of fixed and eternal things. It would be impossible for human limitation to grasp the series of mutable particular things, not only because they are innumerable but also because of the infinite number of factors affecting one and the same thing, each of which can be the cause of the existence or nonexistence of the thing. For the existence of mutable particular things has no connection with their essence; that is (as we have said), their existence is not an eternal truth.

But neither is there any need for us to understand their series. For the essences of particular mutable things are not to be elicited from their series or order of existing, which would furnish us with nothing but their extrinsic characteristics, their relations, or, at most, their circumstances. All these are far from the inmost essence of things. This essence is to be sought only from the fixed eternal things, and at the same time from the laws in these things as well as in their true codes [veris codicibus] so inscribed, which govern the coming into existence and the ordering of all particular things [99-101]

The Emendation of the Intellect

In such a passage our modern scientific gaze turns to these “true codes” and “laws” which govern particular things, and we ask ourselves just how Spinoza conceives that we can know these laws within his framework of knowledges. And how are we to conceive of the passing from one real thing to another, without falling into abstraction? What does it mean for us to identify what kind of being is the cause of all our ideas so that we hold the essence of something in our mind, as the source of our own ideas of a particular thing? What I suggest is that Spinoza’s letter 17 notion of “participation” in an essence is precisely the relation that Spinoza is thinking of here. There is for Spinoza a genuine transformation of the self, through the power of its ideas, when it comes to perceive and think about particular things external to it. And I would suggest that this transformation involves the literal becoming other than itself, or rather, forming a mutuality with the object known such that the inter-relationship expresses a new essence: 

 

[click on photo for larger image]

In letter 17 the father is said to necessarily have an idea of the affections of the body of his son due to the degree of their union so as to have become one and the same. They have achieved a kind of identity which at the ideational level anchors the adequacy (or at least the greatly increased adequacy) of his idea of his son’s affections, so much so that the future of the son’s illness leaves a trace in the imagination of the present. That indeed a new essence is achieved through the father’s love could be argued in two ways, following two of the definitions of what makes any composition of physical parts an “individual”. The first is that any fixed ratio of a communication of parts achieves individuality, and there is no reason at all why one would not admit any cognitive inter-relationship between a knower and a known as just such a communication of parts (however mediated). The second is that Spinoza defines as an individual anything combination of causes which produces a singular effect. In the case of the father’s premonition, at least as Spinoza qualifies it, it is the union of the two, closely related to the level of essences, that produces this imaginary event, establishing this union itself as an individual. But I suggest further, participation in the essences of other things external to us is the FUNDAMENTAL mode of our knowing anything about anything in the world, and this is due to the fact that any particular modal expression shares its status as an expression of Substance with any other modal expression. If there are laws (and codes) which govern the expression of any two modal forms, these two modes are necessarily participating in the essences of each, at the very least through their sharing of the governance which brings them into being and order.

The Participatory Ontology of Knowing

But something more is meant by “participation” by Spinoza in this letter, in particular how it is due to the deep love of the father for his son. In the Ethics “love” is relegated to the order of the passions, a complimentary psychological part to hate, each echoing back into the other. Here in the letter to Balling instead love is seen as the source of a deep ideational union between two persons, and a kind of prophetic power of epistemological imagination: a father that can foreseen his son’s death, however confusedly. In the Ethics Love is defined as the increase of perfection accompanied by the idea of an external cause, and in this sense the father loves his son because he regards the son as the source and cause of his own increases in perfection and joy. I have always taken this phrase “accompanied by the idea of an external cause” to be a reprovement for the human tendency to select out only ONE cause for the complexity of relations which compose our mental and physical events. Indeed the beloved is “a” cause of our increase in joy and active perfection, but what makes this a passive relation is the exclusion of all other causes, the entire matrix of intimate connections which for Spinoza go all the way up to God-Substance, and all the way into our own individual states, which have brought about this change. What distinguishes Spinoza’s participatory love from just this sort of passion, at least so far as how he exemplifies it (and notice he speaks of an ideal relation, and not necessarily the Balling experience), is that it creates a participation in essence which connects one’s own ideas with the affections of the other person. And implicitly, I would propose, such a love-paricipation must involve all the common notions, the mutuality of human nature and the infinite modes as determining and shared expressions. One has, at least potentially, ideas of all these mediating things in just the same way that one has ideas of the affections of the son.

If this line of thinking is to be embraced as underwriting knowledge for Spinoza, that is, degrees of participation qualified by the degree of adequacy of one’s ideas, the degree of one’s being, and even the strength of intellectual love, then Spinoza’s principle of the “imitation of the affects” has to be reconsidered or at least put into juxtaposition with the participation in essences, due to love:

 E3, Proposition 27: If we imagine a thing like us, toward which we have had no affect, to be affected with some affect, we are thereby affected with a like affect…

Such a proposition puts the imagination front and center in the processes which allow us to achieve social bonds, not only with other humans but with almost all things in the world; (I argue this at some length here: The Trick of Dogs: Etiologic, Affection and Triangulation, Part I of IV) The question always is, How can mere processes of projective imagination gain any ground on which such imagining and experiencing the world through others actually proves efficacious and informative. When Spinoza says “If we imagine a thing like us” is there a concrete, or real “like us” which makes this process gain traction and ultimately real? If we take up Spinoza’s Letter 17 musings on the prophetic, and if we grant that essence participation is fundamental to the access of at least some of our intellectual activity and awarenesses, it would seem that the imitation of the affects is an imaginary expression “in the wake of” real intellectual, ideational unions, unions which vary by degrees of adequacy and being. The question is not whether we can have adequate ideas of external, particular things, but rather how adequate ideas express themselves in varying degrees of our occasions of cybernetic union with things in the world. It is for this that Spinoza wants us to concentrate on “real beings” which constitute our very combinative participation with those things we know, use and ultimately love.

Revelation in the Wake of Intellect

Lastly, this would suggest, that if our world being - quite in contrast with Heidegger is not a “thrown-into-ness” of alienation - is one of a necessarily participation and overlapping, boundary-defying mutuality of expression, in which our knowing of things is to some degree our being them (Campanella), then our imaginations may very well be capable of producing phenomenal presentations of our futures, however confusedly, in much the same fashion that Peter Balling foresaw his son via participation. Additionally, it is my suspicion that Spinoza’s dream of the Scabrous Brazilian slave was no mere random eruption of the physical states of his body, as he would have it, but likely an expression, however mitigated, of the actual relations of Spinoza to the Jewish community back in Amsterdam, and the slave trade discussed some here: Spinoza and the Caliban Question.

Spinoza’s Scheme of the Prophetic Imagination

[click on photo for larger image]

The above is the scheme of Spinoza’s implicit theory of a prophetic imagination, come from his letter to Peter Balling (17), where a father writes about his premonition of his son’s death. The pertinent description from which this is drawn I quote:

To take an example like yours, a father loves his son that he and his beloved are as though one and the same. According to what I have demonstrated on another occasion, there must be in thought an idea of the affections of the son’s essence, and what follows; and the father, through the union he has with his son, is a part of the said son, because necessarily the father’s soul from the son’s ideal essence, and with the affections of the same, through this, to what follows he must participate (as I have demonstrated elsewhere at greater length). Next, since the father’s soul participates ideally in this – in the things which follow from the son’s essence – he (as I have said) can sometimes imagine something of what follows from his [the son's, implied] essence as vividly as if he had it before his eyes…

nempe, pater (ut tui simile adducam exemplum) adeo filium suum amat, ut is et delictus filius quasi unus idemque sint. Et quoniam (juxta id, quod alia occasione demonstravi) filii essentae affectionum, et quae inde sequuntur, necessario in Cogitatione dari debet idea, et pater, ob unionem, quam cum filio suo habet, pars memorati filii est, etiam necessario patris anima de essentia ideali essentiam filii, et ejusdem affectionibus, et iis, quae inde sequuntur, participare debet, ut alibi prolixius demonstravi. Porro, quoniam patris anima idealiter de iis, quae essentiam filii consequuntur, participat, ille (ut dixi) potest interdum aliquid ex iis, quae ejus essentiam consequuntur, tam vivide imaginari, ac si id coram se haberet…

 

I’ve discussed this letter before [How Long was Peter Balling’s Son Dead? and Spinoza and the Caliban Question to name two posts], quite frankly, if fascinates me, and it seems its ideas are often neglected in serious discussion of questions of the role of the imagination and the knowledge of the essences of external things. I was listening to Daniel Selcer’s “Singular Things and Spanish Poets: Spinoza on Corporeal Individuation” today, which I recommend for anyone interested in a slightly Deleuzian and highly literary appreciation of Spinoza’s notion of what constitutes an individual. Selcer’s treatment of ”individual” as anything produced as a singular effect by a multitude (something to be appreciated by ne0-objectologists), set off another foray into the ideas of this curious letter, which I read in support of some of his thinking. (The lecture, as well as many other wonderful Spinoza papers just given on Spinoza and bodies, is found here). 

 

I thought it best to scheme it out, if only for later reference – and perhaps in posting it others will find it interesting, or may even be able to correct it with a better understanding. Sometimes I have a weakness for diagrams and schemes, as they anchor points in the mind so that it can do related, more inventive work along the way. Hopefully some will enjoy the map.

 

What is most troubling or difficult about the prophetic imagination is that it is far from clear just how to read the becoming “one and the same” of the father and the son (quasi). In many respects this simply falls into the imitation of the affects which foregrounds socialization itself, as found in the Ethics [treated quite thoroughly by Balibar, Balibar’s Spinoza and Politics: The Braids of Reason and Passion]. It is a purely imaginary projection, the seed of conflict and excessive binding, needing to be leavened by power of rational unity. To be sure, Spinoza is covering something of the same grounds here (the beloved to the Father seems a passionate connection).  But this is no mere fantasy, but rather the real (though imaginary) prophetic experience of a future affective state. (It should be noted that Peter Balling externalized the affections of his son, heard his son’s future groans and did not feel pains or difficulty of breathing himself.) This imaginary relationship has epistemic traction. Spinoza is at pains to propose a dichotomy in which the ideational source of this imaginary event provides a real knowledge (if confused) of the future. Thus, just what the traction is it seems, must be found with the real participation of the father in the essence of the son, an implied merging of the two, or at least assemblage or mutuality (something I am tempted to read as cybernetic).

 

Under the question of the knowledge of other essences (or their affections that follow) it is significant that this portend comes from the ideational side of one’s own expression. That is, it does not come from the affections of one’s own body (which Spinoza’s dream of the Scabrous Brazilian is supposed to represent). It comes instead from the idea of the affections of another person’s body, casting into doubt just where one’s own “body” ends, and other’s begins. To a point of near contradiction, some idea follows from one’s own essence which, due to love and union, necessarily is of the affections that follow from another’s essence. This is something which one would presume could only occur if the two of you formed a single essence in some shape or form. Perhaps there is another answer to this, but this is all that I can see.

 

Another note worth talking about in brief is that I have been under the running theory that Spinoza contracted his tuberculosis from his own father (or step-mother), both of whom I hypothesize died from the disease [discussed recently here: Was Tuberculosis the Condition of Spinoza’s Emendation of the Intellect? and originally here: Spinoza and Tuberculosis: His Disease and Devotion]. If this is the case then the image of the “union” of the father and the son, and the idea that there are affections that might follow from the each of them certainly would grow more vivid. Indeed, Spinoza may have felt his very love for his father wove itself into the mutuality of their shared physical fates (as I most tentatively argued, Spinoza seemed to abstract into idea his own symptomatic, affection pathways in the first paragraphs of the Emendation).

 

The question is, does this letter (and my possible schematization of it) represent a confusion of Spinoza’s theories of body, idea and imagination, or does it possibly shed greater light on some of the more difficult passages in his thinking. I suspect the latter, especially in the sense that I have long held that Spinoza’s view is cybernetic, one in which knowing things intimately breaks down the boundaries between self, world and others, all the while retaining causal distinctions as concrete and distinct. In the letter to Balling Spinoza seems to, closer than at any other time, touch on the very mechanism of mutuality and its real, physical and mental effects. And that he does so in the context of arguing a prophetic imagination, this makes it all the more curious, and possibly engaging.

Understanding in a Flash and the Mastery of Technique

 

 

Eternity and Know-how

 

I’ve been reflecting on the concurrences between the excellent passage from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations below, and the Spinoza point made, which follows. Wittgenstein’s brilliant, economically, though quite gnomically put point has always been “there is no rule for how to follow a rule”. Simply so, when following a rule for action, the rule itself (nor the appeal to any other meta-rule) is not sufficient to justify the application of the rule, at least from any foundational conception of knowledge. In the passage below Wittgenstein picks up the simple mathematical example of rule-following, which he attempts to sculpt down to its most essential aspects. What is most telling is they way in which he rejects any temporal mental action/experience, what he calls a “mental process” as the source for what is called “understanding”. That is, anything that has what Spinoza named “duration” cannot be the origin of our ability to comprehend.

 

I’ve always looked at this passage with amazement, as we hear Wittgenstein’s mind ticking in self-conversation in his usual style, feeling a surgeon’s hands being placed right in the meat of what the much philosophically pursued “understanding” is. Never though had I connected the passage, either in influence or just in terms of content, to the similar analogy used by Spinoza to point out the difference between “rational” knowledge given by the appeal to reasons (the art of reasoning) and the preferred “intuitional” knowledge that comes out of a union with God, Substance, Nature.

 

Here is the respected passage from Wittgenstein. If you are not familiar with his method, keep track of the different Socratic voices:

145. Suppose the pupil now writes the series 0 to 9 to our satisfaction. – And this will only be the case when he is often successful, not if it does it right once in a hundred attempts. Now I continue the series and draw his attention to the recurrence of the first series in the units; and then to its recurrence in the tens. (Which only means that I use particular emphases, underline figures, write them one under another in such-and-such ways, and similar things.) – And now at some point he continues the series independently – or he does not.- But why do you say that? so much is obvious! – Of course; I only wish to say: the effect of any further explanation depends on reaction.

 

Now, however, let us suppose that after some efforts on the teacher’s part he continues the series correctly, that is, as we do it. So now we can say he has mastered the system. – But how far need he continue the series for us to have the right to say that? Clearly you cannot state a limit here.-

 

146. Suppose I now ask: “Has he understood the system when he continues the series to the hundredth place?” Or – if I should not speak of ‘understanding’ in connection with our primitive language-game: Has he got the system, if he continues the correctly so far? – Perhaps you will say here: to have got the system (or, again, to understand it) can’t consist in continuing the series up to this or that number: that is only applying one’s understanding. The understanding itself is a state which is the source of the correct use.

 

What is one really thinking of here? Isn’t one thinking of the derivation of a series from its algebraic formula? Or at least of something analogous? – But this is where we were before. The points is, we may think of more than one/ application of an algebraic formula; and any type of application may in turn be formulated algebraically; but naturally this does not get us any further.- The application is still a criterion of understanding.

 

147. “But how can this be? When I say I understand the rule of a series, I am surely not saying so because I have found out/ that up to now I had applied the algebraic formula in such-and-such a way! In my own case at all events I surely know that I mean such-and-such a series; it doesn’t matter how far I have actually developed it.” -

 

Your idea, then, is that you know the application of the rule of the series quite apart from remembering actual applications to particular numbers.  And you will perhaps say: “Of course! For the series is infinite and the bit of it that I can have developed finite.”

148. But what does this knowledge consist in? Let me ask: When do you know the application? Always? day and night? or only when you are actually thinking of the rule? do you know it, that is, in the same way as you know the alphabet and the multiplication table? Or is what you call “knowledge” a state of consciousness or a process – say a thought of something, or the like?

 

149. If one says that knowing the ABC is a state of the mind, one is thinking of a state of a mental apparatus (perhaps of the brain) by means of which we explain the manifestations/ of that knowledge. Such a state is called a disposition. But there are objections to speaking of a state of the mind here, inasmuch as there ought to be two different criteria for such a state: a knowledge of a the construction of the apparatus, quite apart from what it does. (Nothing would be more confusing here that to use the words “conscious” and “unconscious” for the contrast between states of consciousness and dispositions. For this pair covers up a grammatical difference.)

 

150. The grammar of the word “knows”  is evidently closely related to that of “can”, “is able to”. But also closely related to that of “understands”. (‘Mastery’ of a technique.)

 

Footnote, bottom of page 50: a) “Understanding a word” : a state. But a mental/ state? – Depression, excitement, pain, are called mental states. Carry out a grammatical investigation as follows: we say

 

“He was depressed the whole day.”

“He was in great excitement the whole day.”

“He has been in continuous pain since yesterday”.-

 

We also say “Since yesterday I have understood this word”. “Continuously”, though? – To be sure, one can speak of an interruption of understanding. But in what cases? Compare: “When did your pains get less?” and “When did you stop understanding that word?”

 

b) Suppose it were asked: When do you know how to play chess? All the time? or just while you are making a move? And the whole of chess during each move?- How queer that knowing how to play chess should take such a short time, and a game so much longer!

 

151. But there is also this use of the word “to know”: we say “Now I know!” – and similarly “Now I can do it!” and “Now I understand!”

 

Let us imagine the following example: A writes series of numbers down; B watches him and tries to find a law for the sequences of numbers. If he succeeds he exclaims: “Now I can go on!” – So this capacity, this understanding, is something that makes its appearance in a moment. So let us try and see what it is that makes its appearance here. – A has written down the numbers 1, 5, 11, 19, 29; at this point B says he knows how to go on. What happened here? Various things may have happened; for example, while A was slowly putting one number after another, B was occupied with trying various algebraic formulae on the numbers when had been written down. After A had written the number 19 B tried the formula a (subscript) n = n² + n -1; and the next number confirmed his hypothesis.

 

Or again, B does not think of formulae. He watches A writing his numbers down with a feeling of tension, and all sorts of vague thoughts go through his head. Finally he asks himself: “What is the series of differences?” He finds the series 4, 6, 8, 10 and says: Now I can go on.

 

Or he watches and says “Yes, I know that series” – and continues it, just as he would have done if A had written down the series 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, – Or he says nothing at all and simply continues the series. Perhaps he had what may be called the sensation “that’s easy!” (Such a sensation is, for example, that of a light quick intake of breath, as when one is slightly startled.)

 

152. But are the processes which I describe here understanding? “B understands the principle of the series” surely doesn’t mean simply: the formula “an =…” occurs to B. For it is perfectly imaginable that the formula should occur to him and that he should nevertheless not understand. “He understands” must have more in than: the formula occurs to him. And equally, more than any of those more or less characteristic accompaniments/ or manifestations of understanding.

 

153. We are trying to get a hold of the mental processes of understanding which seems to be hidden behind those coarser and therefore more readily visible accompaniments. But we do not succeed; or, rather, it does not get as far as a real attempt. For even supposing I had found something that happened in all those cases of understanding, – why should it be the understanding? And how can the process of understanding have been hidden, when I said “Now I understand” because I understood?! And if I say it is hidden – then how do I know what I have to look for? I am in a muddle.

 

154. But wait – if “Now I understand the principle” does not mean the same as “The formula…occurs to me” (or “I say the formula”, “I write it down”, etc.) – does it follow from this that I employ the sentence “Now I understand…” or “Now I can go on” as a description of a process occurring behind or side by side with that of saying the formula?

 

155. If there has to be anything ‘behind the utterance of the formula’ it is particular circumstances, which justify me in saying I can go on – when the formula occurs to me.

 

Try not to think of understanding as a ‘mental process’ at all. For that is the expression which confuses you. But ask yourself: in what sort of case, in what kind of circumstances, do we say, “Now I know how to go on,” when, that is, the formula has occurred to me? -

 

In the sense in which there are processes (including mental processes) which are characteristic of understanding, understanding is not a mental process.

 

(A pain growing more or less; the hearing of a tune or a sentence: these are mental processes.)

 

156. Thus what I wanted to say was: when he suddenly knew how to go one, when he understood the principle, then possibly he had a special experience – and if he is asked: What was it? What took place when you suddenly grasped the principle?” perhaps he will describe it much as we described it above – but for us it is the circumstances/ under which he had such an experience that justified him in saying in such a case that he understands, that he knows how to go on.

 

Philosophical Investigations

There are several aspects of comparison between Wittgenstein and Spinoza, but most signficantly are Wittgenstein’s “nothing is hidden” assertion, as well as the notion that the learning of a rule is very much like the “mastery of a technique”. Evocatively he places “know” to be very close to the use of “can” or “is able to”, moving us very close Spinoza’s metaphysical point that knowing isn’t a representational state, but is an action.

Here are the related example from Spinoza’s Short Treatise, followed by the same example from two other works, concerning the ability to follow a rule:

Part II, Chapter I

Someone has merely heard someone else say that if, in the rule of three, you multiply the second and third numbers, and divide the product by the first, you then find the fourth number, which has the same proportion to the third as the second has to the first. And in spite of the fact that the one who told him this could be lying, he still governed his actions according to this rule, without having had any more knowledge of the rule of three than a blind man has of color. So whatever he may have been able to say about it, he repeated it, as a parrot repeats what it has been taught.

 

A second person, of quicker perception [more active intelligence, Shirley], is not content in this way with report, but tests it with some particular calculations, and finding that these agree with it, give his belief to it. But we have rightly said that this one too is subject to error. For how can he be sure that the experience of some particular [cases] can be a rule for him for all.

 

A third, being satisfied with neither with report, because it can deceive, nor with the experience of some particular [cases], because it cannot be a rule, consults true reason, which has never, when properly used, been deceptive. Reason tells him that because of the property of proportionality in these numbers, this is so, and coud not have been, or happened otherwise.

 

But a fourth, who has the clearest knowledge of all, has no need either of report, or of experience, or of the art of reasoning, because through his penetration he immediately sees the proportionality in all the calculations….

 

Chapter II

 

We call the first opinion because it is subject to error, and has no place in anything of which we are certain, but only where guessing and speculating are spoken of.

 

We call the second belief (opinion), because the things we grasp only through reason, we do not see, but know only through a conviction in the intellect that it must be so and not otherwise.

 

But we call that clear knowledge that comes not from being convinced by reasons, but from being aware of and enjoying the thing itself. This goes far beyond the others…

 

 the Short Treatise

 

…Suppose there are three numbers. Someone is seeking a fourth, which is to the third as the second is to the first. Here merchants will usually say that they know what to do to find the fourth number, because they have not yet forgotten that procedure which they heard from their teachers, without any demonstration.

 

Others will construct a universal axiom from an experience with simple numbers, where the fourth number is evident through itself – as in the numbers 2, 4, 3, and 6. Here they find by trial that if the second is multiplied by the third, and the product is divided by the first, the result is 6. Since they see that this produces the same number which they knew to be the proportional number withou this procedure, they infer that the procedure is always a good way to find the fourth number in the proportion.

 

But mathematicians know, by the force of the demonstration of Proposition 19 in Book VII of Euclid, which numbers are proportional to one another, from the nature of proportion, and its property, viz. that the product of the second and the third. Nevertheless, they do not see the adequate proportionality of the given numbers. And if they do, they see it not by the force of the Proposition, but intuitively, or without going through any procedure.

 

Emendation of the Intellect (23)

 

…Given the numbers 1, 2 and 3, no one fails to see that the fourth proportional number is 6 – and we see this much more clearly because we infer the fourth number from the ratio which, in one glance, we see the first number to have the second.

 

Ethics, IIp40s2iv

Tool Use and Eternity

After all this quotation I want to create the picture that for both Spinoza and Wittgenstein the rules of reason were to be seen as tools (and not knowledge in their own right), techniques of action. What both thinkers shared was a engineer’s sensitivity towards the way that parts fit together. Spinoza of course was a master lens-craftsman and Wittgenstein an amateur architect and mechanical engineer (I believe he designed his own aircraft engine, if I recall correctly). What is most germane, as both thinkers reflect back upon each other, is I think the way in which Wittgenstein’s “circumstances” which act as the criteria for our justification of the rule-following of others, opens out the historical immanence for Spinoza’s view towards eternity. This is to say, or argumentation about the truths of actions find their criteria in the real, historical milieu to which they are immanent. I think that this is very much in keeping with Spinoza’s articulation (as long as we remain under the question of “justification”). In this sense, reason has a historically contingent, natura naturata manifestation and horizon. But as well, Spinoza’s window unto eternity, aside from the question of justification, makes more clear Wittgenstein’s own attachment to a denial of durative processes as the source of understanding. Instead, while historically contingent criteria, all immanent to their circumstances, may lead us to the intuitive grasp of wholes, these are mere tools in a certain, transpiercing of history through intuitive grasp (in which the issue of justification falls away). Ultimately these are human and abiotic bindings, constitutive of their mutuality, in the end causal relations of perception. In all perceptions, including those of animals and inanimate objects, nothing is hidden, nothing lies beyond.

I think that this goes onto explain Spinoza’s own reticence towards the technological innovations of Christiaan Huygens in the area of lens grinding. Huygens and his brother were brilliant experimenters with the art of lens grinding, an area of craft which Spinoza specialized in. What is of note is that Spinoza did not find the Huygens’ shiny devices of much interest, just the sorts of machines that were arriving on the scene which seemed to manifest cleanly the powers of mathematical knowledge itself. Mechanical instruments seemed to express abstract truths without the stain of human hand. But Spinoza found this the least bit interesting:

The said Huygens has been a totally occupied man, and so he is, with polishing glass dioptrics; to that end a workshop he has outfitted, and in it he is able to “turn” pans – as is said, it’s certainly polished – what tho’ thusly he will have accomplished I don’t know, nor, to admit a truth, strongly do I desire to know. For me, as is said, experience has taught that with spherical pans, being polished by a free hand is safer and better than any machine. 

Spinoza’s Comments on Huygens’s Progress; To Understand Spinoza’s Letter 32 to Oldenburg

Spinoza in his letter to Oldenburg refers actually to the supposedly lowest level of knowledge in his trinity, experience, as the reproof of the importance of the semi-automated machine that he saw. I don’t believe that this is a small dispositional point. Rather, just as Wittgenstein refuses any grounding of “understanding” in rules (which are tools), and as Spinoza puts “intuitional knowledge” above the truths found in the Art of Reasoning, I believe that Spinoza found the appeal of instruments themselves as abstract devices and powers (be they rules, theorems, machines) to be utterly secondary to the intuitional revelation of God and Nature itself, through those tools. His preference for the “free hand” over the automated gear turn, expressed above, is not simply a pragmatic issue (most of Huygens devices did not seem to produce usable lenses), but also a question of just what the human/technological interface involved, and the powers of its action. Instrumentality, like that would mark much of scientific pursuit, was a fetish. Maths and Science were tools used for the transformational intuition of truth, a strong de-centering of the subject, and were not truths about the world themselves.

On Spinoza on tools: Checking Heidegger’s Hammer: The Pleasure and Direction of the Whirr; The Hole at the “Center of Vision”

Was Tuberculosis the Condition of Spinoza’s Emendation of the Intellect?

I have argued before that Spinoza’s life was likely one that involved carrying the burden of the disease tuberculosis, and that indeed it may have been the disease that influenced some of his most important decisions including his young adult break from the community and devotion to philosophy, as well as the decisions to live away from Amsterdam in states of relative isolation, and perhaps even his break from writing the Ethics and the turn to the Theological-Political Treatise: Spinoza and Tuberculosis: His Disease and Devotion. This is not to say that this is definitely the case in any of these events, but only that as far as I have read his disease is almost never considered by biographers or interpreters as a causal influence upon his life’s trajectory.

The article was called to my attention again and as it happens I was also looking back over Spinoza’s first philosophical work (following Mignini), the Emendation of the Intellect for other reasons last night. I was struck by more than one reference to death, disease and health in its first pages. I went back and inserted a reference in the original post, but it seems good to put them altogether here, for it strikes me that at the very least Spinoza does have disease and death on his mind as he makes his definitive break from the “uncertain” to the “certain”, leaving behind both the community he grew up in and the pursuit of wealth (his family buisness).

Four Citations of Health, Malady and Death

Keep in mind this is a prospective view, meant only to cast a different light on much-looked-at texts, and not a full-blown thesis. And thus the four citations I give are not definitive in any sense, but only supportive of general understanding that is missing in the common interpretations of Spinoza’s life and work.

The first of these is the opening paragraph of the Emendation. Here Spinoza cites “experience” that has taught him of the uncertain. As mentioned in the first article, the deaths of his step mother Esther and then of his father (1654-55) seven months apart, if from tuberculosis, approximately 3-4 years previous, not to mention that the possible onset of the disease in himself could have formed a definite part of this “experience”.

After experience has taught me that all the things which regularly occur in ordinary life are empty and futile, and I saw that all the things which were the cause or object of my fear had nothing of good or bad in themselves, except insofar as [my] mind was moved by them, I resolved at last to try to find out whether there was anything which would be the true good, capable of communicating itself, and which alone would affect the mind, all others being rejected – whether there was something which, once found and acquired, would continuously give me the greatest joy, to eternity [1]

If my hypothesis is correct, Spinoza has been suffering from some symptomatic tuberculosis, just as others of his family had, and that these bouts of coughing and possible blood were in some sense a wake up call to a devotion to the Infinite form him. I read something of this as expressed in his talk of the intervals of peace that increased with his determined change of mentality, possibly understood as a certain conflation of his disease with mental inordination itself (the worries and pursuits of the family business in trade). Could it be that it was intervals of real health, in the cyclic nature of TB, that coincided with Spinoza’s own attempts to straighten out his thinking?:

I saw this, however; that so long as the mind was turned toward these thoughts, it was turned away from those things [greed, desire, love of esteem], and was thinking seriously about the new goal. That was a great comfort to me. For I saw that those evils would not refuse to yield to remedies. And although in the beginning these intervals were rare, and lasted a very short time, nevertheless, after the true good became more and more known to me, the intervals became more frequent and longer – especially after I saw that the acquisition of money, sensual pleasure, and esteem are only obstacles so long as they are sought for their own sakes, and not the means to other things [11]

Then there is a small note on the importance of health, and the understanding of disease which he places between moral philosophy and mechanics, as important in the pursuit of human perfection. Though this could be a mere inclusive coincidence, but it also places the issue of “health” in chronological order between Spinoza’s own moral education at the hands of rabbis, and the discovery of Cartesian mechanics, likely at the Van den Enden school:

Third, attention must be paid to Moral Philosophy and to Instruction concerning the Education of children. Because Health is not small means to achieving this end, fourthly, the whole of Medicine must be worked out [15]

And lastly of the four opening references we have Spinoza speaking of the inadequate knowledge he has of his own condition, the mere report and inference if his own birth and death. Out of context of course these would be common ways of talking about how we “know” we are going to die, but note the specificity here. Spinoza says that he knows that he is going to die because “others like me” have died if from different illnesses. This strikes me as a philosophical abstraction from a real condition, the likelihood that both his step-mother and father had died of the same illness, and that indeed Spinoza was symptomatic of it was well. He “knew” he was going to die in a very real and specific way, and not just the common way that we all know, I suggest.

I know only from report the date of my birth, and who my parents were, and similar things, which I never have doubted. By random experience I know that I shall die, for I affirm this because I have seen others like me die, even though they had not all lived the same length of time and did not all die of the same illness [20]

Surely none of this is conclusive, but if correct it would shed more like both on the radical break Spinoza made towards a philosophy of the eternal, and away from the community that would excommunicate him. Further, it qualifies to a much greater degree Spinoza’s concern with the body and its limitations, and his attempts at mental perfection. It puts further emphasis upon his notion of the contingency of the body and the ignorance we have of its causes, and would show the way in which he envisioned mental clarity as the one self-determining path out of confused bondage. He was not so much escaping death, as embracing its brute fact and appreciating it, thinking in death’s shadow, I would propose, in a time where death was to become quite prevalent and all the more seemingly contingent.

Infinitely Narrow: How Spinoza Corrects Descartes’ Lenses

Corry Shores has another nice post up in his series on my study of Spinoza’s optical theories and practices. He is the only person, as far as I know, who has made an attempt to read through the whole of my study and it is with great appreciation to find my thoughts reflected there. Here, 6: Seeing Differences between Descartes and Spinoza. Some Observations on Spinoza’s Sight. [The Kvond Spinoza’s Foci Summary Series], he points out a power conceptual, and pictorial difference between Descartes and Spinoza. In my understanding it is hard to over estimate just how pervasive Descartes’ optical metaphor for consciousness and methodology for clarity became, in particular when it was grafted onto by Idealist notions of fundamental intentionality, self-hood, and subject/object duality. Spinoza’s correction to the hyperbolic lens, the lens that Descartes felt would unlock all the powers of clear, nearly unlimited vision to man, stands at a fundamental cross-roads in the history of philosophy, noting the turn-out where modernity could not branched off from the Idealism it followed.

This contrast between the narrowly clear and self-evident, and the broad spectrum, comprehensive intuition of a whole makes an interesting contact point to a discussion Carl Dyke and I have been having over at his blog, on the Infinity Standard (something he regards as an unhealthy societal influence), Existential infinity. Descartes envisioned an infinity as well, an infinite power developed upon the tunnel vision of narrow band precision of clarity, ultimately founded upon the notion of the “self” as indubitable. While Spinoza wanted to say of lenses, of eyes, and ultimately of consciousness, whenever we are perceiving something clearly it is always because we are already perceiving the vista of what lies beyond it. There is no narrow clarity that supersedes and establishes the role of the margin. In fact, as is the case in criticisms of philosophies of Presence, it is always the margin, the ground, that allows the narrow, bright center to have importance, or even substance at all. As I have mentioned before, recent concerns about objects and their centrality are grown out of the image of clear centrality itself, something that comes out of Descartes’ optics, and as I tried to show, Kepler before him.

We do not realize how much our folk and philosophical conception of consciousness and the world is governed by a metaphor of tunnel vision.

A related post: The Hole at the “Center of Vision”

US versus Stevens: The Affects of Law and Protection

The Market and Production of Affects: Ruling over Non-Communicative Expression

In 1999 Congress passed a statute aimed at stamping out an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 videos of perverse sexual interest, and distinct animal cruelty. It was conceptually organized with the child pornography Supreme Court case New York vs. Ferber (1982), which was decided such that States had the right to criminalized the distribution of even non-obscene depictions of children in sexual conduct partly upon the reasoning that prosecution of distribution of material in a “market” can be justified by virtue of its chilling, deterrent effect upon the crime of child abuse itself. The majority decision had several prongs to its reasoning (among them that the act of photographing a child in sexual conduct itself formed its own measure of abuse), but distinct was the thinking that government could restrict First Amendment restrictions in through the logic of attacking markets without having to invoke the standard of obscenity.

The Congress aimed its statute at the production and distribution of so-named “crush videos”. In these videos dominatrix-like women in high heels or bare feet cruelly crushed to death small animals (chicks, kittens have been named). This statute makes it a crime to create, sell, or possess “any visual or auditory depiction” of “animal cruelty” if the act of cruelty is illegal under federal law or the law of the state in which the depiction occurred. What is excluded from this criminalization is any simulation of such an act of cruelty, which is not restricted under this statute.

The statute passed with very little relevance for nearly a decade without a single case of “crush video” prosecution, and an attested “drying up” of the market it was directed towards. This until a man was arrested for making and distributing dog fight videos under the logic of the statute, his conviction brought before the Supreme Court now, US vs. Stevens. In oral arguments before the court the Deputy Solicitor General, Mr. Katyal, argues in fact that the exclusion of simulated acts shows that the statute is not concerned with limiting the content of expression, but rather only its mode of production. As he claims,

MR. KATYAL: In one sentence, if — if – if Congress sees a compelling interest in regulating the means of production and does not target the underlying content, they can — they can regulate a depiction, so long as it leaves alternative mechanisms for that expression in place.

This is a compelling case filled with complex questions of Freedom of Speech and the morality of policed value, in fact reading the oral arguments was intriguing (I was surprised how incogent many of the Justice questions seemed to be), but mostly I would like to focus on the original intent of the statute and not on the question merely if the statute is overbroad. As a few of the Justices wished to know from the Respondent Attorney Patricia Millett, would Congress even be able to write a constitutional statute limiting “crush videos” if they tailored their language more distinctly – which is to say, more abstractly, can or should the production and distribution of images or sounds be limitable under a logic of controlling markets of otherwise illegal activity?

Critical Animal was the one who brought to my attention this case: Moral schizophrenia and the power of affect in US v Stevens. I went back and read the oral arguments and a few summaries (the Slate article is absurdly written). And then I went back and read the majority decisions in the Ferber case, the Miller obscenity case, and a few others mentioned in the case. And it was Critical Animal who drew to my eye the question of “affect” control which seems to lie within the question of First Amendment restrictions. Ultimately, what people (and animals) feel is the paramount concern, even though pressures of the law are directed upon other structural aspects of behaviors: in this case upon markets and production. It is upon that I really would like to place my imaginary glass. 

What is a Simulated Message?

As mentioned, part of the reasoning behind allowing simulated material of a pornographic, and otherwise criminal nature is that supposedly it distinguishes that the government is not going after the “content” of a message, but rather in the case of child pornography and then again in “crush videos” after the very modes of production which is itself criminal. The crime is in the making, not the saying. This is essential to the Ferber decision which recognized that photography itself is abuse, and also claimed as important that the perpetuation of the shame of the child through distribution perpetuated this abuse. Each of these points don’t readily apply to the subject of “crush videos”. Rather the logic is much more simple. Animals have to be cruelly killed in order to produce these real images. And the thought is that if you simply faked the cruel killing, the message would be preserved without the criminal production. This move towards simulated allowance forms one subtle part of the logic of Ferber on which the Congressional statute was built. That is to say, even though in New York vs. Ferber non-obscene material was restricted, it was the very braiding of “content” and “production” as criminal which established the government’s right.

But the stronger strain of Ferber logic that is aimed at “crush videos” (and then eventually dog fighting videos) is the notion that if indeed the photographic (or auditory) reproduction of criminal activity serves to strengthen a “market” for such material, and thus the renewed criminal acts for the production of further commercial products, the advertisement and sale itself can be targeted with the aim of drying up the market itself. (In the case of Ferber it was the sale of images of a 15 year old boy masturbating that was seen as part of an entire child pornography network of crimes.) The 1982 Ferber logic of restraint against future criminal processes itself was checked in Ashcroft vs. Free Speech Coalition (2002) which decided that simulated digital images of child pornography could not be criminalized under the logic that they could be and had been used to seduce children into sexual behavior. This is to say that, if simulated images might be used instrumentally to forward the process of a crime, in the context of a “market” of child pornography, this “speech” cannot be Constitutionally constrained (Ashcroft), but if the sale of simulated non-obscene depictions operate as part of a market of criminal act depictions this “speech” can be Constitutionally restricted (Ferber, somewhat under the Brandenburg Test). The statute against “crush videos” negotiates these two aspects, allowing simulated images (despite that such images might foment a market), under the strong notion that the government is after an illegal mode of production. In a sense, the argument against simulated material/market connection is sacrificed to bolster the “mode of production” logic of the law.

This distinction between content and production is a philosophically interesting one, for it presupposes that there is a distinct content of these crush videos (and then dog fight videos) that is left protected by the Constitution. You can go ahead and “say” whatever a crush video says, as long as you don’t commit a crime in making it. And what is the “message” that is protected under such a distinction? Or oral arguments it is summarized by Justice Alito, repeating the reasoning of Justice Scalia:

JUSTICE ALITO: What about crush videos, which apparently were the focus of Congress’s attention when it drafted these? Now, I suppose by an analogy to what Justice Scalia just said about the message of dog fighting videos, the people who produce crush videos think they have a message, and the message is that this is — this is sexually exciting or it’s exciting in some way to see a woman in high heeled shoes crushing a little animal to death.

We are given to think that this message is stateable in a great number of ways. The high heeled woman could step on a stuffed kitten, or the camera could cut away at the right moment, or the event could be drawn  or animated, or, conceivably it could be stated just as Justice Alito has stated it. But really, is this the “speech” (what I would like to think of as the “expression”) of a crush video? It seems like an odd thing to say. Indeed as the idea that a painting could be criminalized and replaced by with a word expression of its depicted without loss of its message would tell you, something is missing.

Justice Breyer actually puts his finger right on it, there is a sense that crush videos actually communicate “nothing” which is to say, they gravitate towards a pole which lacks distinct verbal (one wants to say “rational”) content. He places this idea under the question of whether there is any possible construction by which Congress could restrict the speech of crush videos (aside from the statute under review). As Beyer sees it, there might be a class of things which devoid of content rather appeal to “instincts”:

…JUSTICE BREYER: But the point — the point I guess is when you say yes to this, what you are thinking is that, just as real obscenity when depicted does nothing communicative but rather appeals to the instinct of lust, so Congress could find a category of things that do not communicate, but appeal to the instinct of sadism; and that is true when other creatures are killed for the pleasure of the people who want to see them killed. Now, that’s what you are saying. Now – and I think maybe that’s true (32)

And Beyer continues the line of thinking, rebutting the argument offered by the Respondent (and by the earlier Scalia/Alito description) that crush videos possess content:

JUSTICE BREYER: I think what — I think what’s going on is — is not — your conflating two things. One is you are trying to produce education about something that has no communicative value. In so far as you are trying to make an argument or educate, of course, it is protected, but the government, here, is saying I think the statute is intended to forbid a different thing entirely, and it’s hard to draw a line.

Maybe it’s impossible; but promoting a thing which communicates nothing, but appeals to people’s worst instinct, that is not to advocate it or not to advocate it.

It is to try to make money out of it, and that’s what they think, I believe, the statute is aimed at (49)

Aside from the value judgment offered as to which instincts are the worse ones, or even if one can make a contentless appeal to an instinct of some kind, Justice Breyer it seems has really touched on something. There is the sense that at bottom, content appeals operate in context to contentless appeals to instinctual aspects of human beings, and people make money out of this through markets. Could it be that Breyer exposes the nerve pulse of Capitalism itself: to production and exchange of goods through markets given to contentless appeals? Critical Animal, as I mentioned above, supplies the right word, “affects”. Breyer opens up the question whether the Constitution protects affects at all, that is, our capacity to feel and even to organized our feelings (or have them organized for us). Perhaps this will become more clear in the next section.

What Good is the Non-Simulated Depiction?

Here I invoke a critique I made of some thoughts forwarded by Latour and a co-author on the nature of Copies and their Original: The Copiousness of Copies. Some of the ideas forwarded there should put into bolder relief some of what is truly at stake in the arguments about speech and content in the Congressional (likely overbroad) statute against crush videos. There I argue that what distinguishes a “good copy” from a “bad copy”, each made from an “original” are three factors that are weighed against each other:

1. The copy’s loyalty to germane causes – this means that when we appreciate an original as the source of a great many copies, this is done in the context of the preservation of traces of causes we read as germane to the importance of the original in the first place, and good copies preserve these traces. A photocopied dollar bill has effaced important traces of the causes that produced the original. Yet Warhol’s soup cans preserve important causes that produced the depicted soup can.
2. Richness of causes to be discovered – here, a good copy is one which maintains a deep record of possibly discovered causes that produced the original, traces which may lead to causes of the original later to be found germane. A detailed digital photograph of a painting may preserve brushstroke pattern thought unimportant, later to be a valued.
3. Fecundity of interrelations which promote its own replication – these are unto the very nature of the copy itself, and speak of the capacity of that copy to find itself replicatable, producing other copies of itself. In this sense a photograph of a painting is a good copy if it leads to further photographic duplications (put into artbooks, on post cards).

In this way a copy is good if it retains valued aspects of the original (which are themselves traces of causes), holds the capacity for the discovery of other yet to be valued aspects of the original, and itself due to its nature becomes the source for further copies. This stands in amendment of Latour’s idea that sheerly it is the copiousness of copies that establishes their good.

So where am I going on this? I want to explore the exact nature of the communication of the legislated against crush videos, just what it is that they are doing, how they are doing it, and how the notion of simulated replacement might not preserve the “speech” expression of their production.

Primary of difficulty is the Petitioner’s claim that a simiulated act in film, for instance, could retain the exact same message as a non-simulated act. The reason why this is of extreme difficulty – as I hoped to expose through my brief journey into a theory of the copy, is that one could never delimit exactly what causes are the germane ones to be captured by any one expression. This is to say, the point in watching a film of the “crush” variety is not simply to expose oneself to the “idea” of crushing, or even to the idea that such an act is good, exciting or preferred, but actually to submit oneself to the extreme details of such an act. And its given realness, the great variety of detail captured (whether it be a quality of smile of such a woman, the tempo of a hesitation, the color or grade of light on a surface, the pitch of an animal protest and the accorded response or lack thereof, all of these plastic effects), communicate themselves to the viewer with an aim to affective transformation, just as they do in a painting when compared to a prose summary. When one exposes oneself to the rich capture of the criminal act (it being criminal being secondary to it being real), provides a certain amplitude of a power of communication which defies any content definition. To say that one could simply “simulate” this process of communication by either changing the “content” of what is shown, or registers (media) is to simply lose track of what communication and ultimately expression is. The veridical nature of the expression is precisely that which contains the power of transformation that drives the expression in the first place. 

And while surely there exist simulations which could fool a prospective viewer into thinking that they are watching the Real, what drives the transaction is the actual promotion of a direct (or as near as direct) contact with a said person (the dominatrix of a kind), and that event. In the end “content” in terms of restateable “ideas” simply does not exist, any more than the notion that the content of the “Mona Lisa” is that “Women are inscrutable”. In fact the reason why we see the “original” that is hanging in the Louvre is so as to be transformed, at whatever level of awareness, by the hand that painted it, centuries ago.

This is not to say of course that crush videos should be legalized, or must be protected by the Constitution, but only that the particular argument by the government is highly flawed. More interesting perhaps is the other aspect of the Ferber decision that in fact inspired the case against Stevens, and in particular that uncovered by Justice Breyer: what the statute is aimed at is not “content” but at markets that trade on pure affects (leaving aside the notion that there is an appeal to an “instinct”  which is base or not). Indeed, this is right to the core of Capitalist endeavors, one might argue, the marketed trade of “experiences” which never can be reduced down to either a logic of “content” or “use value”. What is wrong with crush videos, at least in Justice Breyer’s view, is that they trade in just experiences meant to transform the viewer, and the problem the government faces is how to police these experiences (or that market), especially when their production involves criminal cruelty. There is a sense in which the consumer’s experiences, her or his affects, drive the market for produced experiences of another, criminal kind. The very circularity exposes perhaps the very affect-driven nature of markets themselves, all markets. In this case the affects of a cruelly killed small animal (and the imagined affects of a dominatrix) are transformed into a nexus for the affects of a perverse viewer.

What remains to be thought is Justice Breyer’s important qualification that it is not just contentless affects that mark out this case (at least in terms of the crush videos the statue was written for, but perhaps also in terms of dog fighting). It is that these products appeal to what is worst in humans, an instinct of “lust” or “sadism”. To this Justice Scalia offers the suitable defense to Ms. Millett:

JUSTICE SCALIA: I would have thought that your response to Justice Breyer’s comment about catering to people’s worst instincts in the area of the First Amendment, at least, would have been that it’s not up to the government to decide what are people’s worst instincts.

If — if the First Amendment means anything, that’s what it means.

If this is so, indeed the government has no first amendment leverage upon which to stand against markets of affects in terms of a primary value of the “instinct” they appeal to.

It cannot be over looked that this social contest I believe really does touch on the very engine of Captialist relations, and the need social justice has for restraining the kinds of affects people can purchase in trade (both in the production of products – i.e. the restriction of child labor for instance, but not animal torture in meat industries – and in the enjoyment of products). I think part of this is due to the very way that we read and interpret the behaviors and lives of others. We do this primarily through affective imagination, and the threat that there may be markets that have established themselves under the trade of certain affects – and little is as entrenched as a thriving market will be – invades the very boundaries of our interpretive bodies. If we want to understand “those perverts” to some degree, insofar as we do think we understand them, if only to reject them, we must enter into the affective states that they pursue. It is for this reason that the logic of the Ferber case makes the most social sense, lacking though perhaps the necessary argumentative, constitutional anti-market logic to extend it far beyond the exceptional case of child pornography (as the “child” stands as one of the ground work anchors of American sensibilities).

The concept of “worst instinct” really is a proxy term for the very threat that such traded affects present to the logic of markets themselves. And as Justic Scalia points out the First Amendment is poised as a leverage point between that hidden threat of Capitalist relations (that non-communicative, traded affects will transform subjects), and the necessary freedoms of expression that mark out just what constitutes a freely expressing subject or citizen. I must be free to express myself, yet the market place of expressive affects (accelerated as it has been by media technologies) risks intensity points that may subvert the very order of markets in the first place. To this degree, really, the affects involved in product production often must be masked or ideologically recoded, as best as possible. Animals who suffer for the meat industry are hidden behind happier chicken labels, while videos that expose viewers to real animal cruelty invoke traction for government action against markets. What the US vs. Stevens statute tries to do is incise the very mode of production of a market, in the logic of a child pornography in which reproduction constitutes a crime in itself, and as such under a proviso of simulated content freedoms attempts to side step the problem of freedom of expression. As the rationality of simulated replacement breaks down the true aim of the law is exposed as directed towards the markets of affects themselves, which is perhaps where all true social friction resides: the transmission and capitalization of experience.

In a certain sense crush videos hyperstate the very conditions of production, the powers of transformation of living material via its affective capacity and its representation, in trade.

Related blog post and another, and another posting around the web