New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies

The Birth of the Subject = The Death of the Subject

(Part of) Foucault’s project has been to understand the coming into being of the sciences of man (Foucault [1966/1970] 1994). Immanuel Kant, that is, the anthropological turn in philosophy that started with Kant, is being rewritten in Foucault’s work. For Foucault, the birth of the subject equals the death of the subject, or in a Nietzschean mode, the death of God equals the death of man. Foucault states in his Introduction that an unfinished and unpublished correspondence with Kant’s (former) student Jakob Sigismund Beck in conjunction with the published version of the former’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View from 1798 makes clear that Kant managed

Foucault notes that the Preface to the Anthropology states that Kant’s object was “what man makes of himself—or can and should make of himself—as a free-acting being” (Foucault 2008, 44) thus making anthropology pragmatic. Anthropology deals with the balancing act in which “man is considered to be a “citizen of the world,” as belonging, that is, to the realm of the concrete universal, in which the legal subject is determined by and submits to certain laws, but is at the same time a human being who, in his or her freedom, acts according to a universal moral code” (ibid., 42). And it shows “how a juridical relationship of the order of a possession, which is to say a jus rerum, manages to preserve the moral kernel of a person construed as a free subject” (ibid.). Pragmatics then deals not with human nature or essence, but with “a movement where nature and freedom are bound up in the Gebrauch—one of the meanings of which is given in the word ‘usage’” (ibid., 51). To be more precise, “in Anthropology, man is neither a homo natura, nor a purely free subject; he is caught by the syntheses already operated by his relationship to the world” (ibid., 54–5). Studying a different set of concepts (Gemüt and Geist) allows Foucault to claim that in the Anthropology no space is given, however, to “being tied to the passivity of phenomenal determinations” (ibid., 63) since

On this basis, Foucault comes to claim that the “I”/Subject of the Kritik is wholly inverted in the Anthropology, in a way that is more complex than an exchange of cause and effect. Namely “it appears in the density of a becoming where its sudden emergence infallibly assumes the retrospectively constituted meaning of the already there” (ibid., 67).

In the introduction to the Logik, published in 1800 (nearly twenty years after his first Kritik) Kant famously summarizes his critical project in not three, but four questions. He summarized his three critiques by asking himself “what can I know?,” “what should I do?,” and “what may I hope for?.” He then added a fourth question to the list, namely: “what is man?” Only in his later notes (Notes and Fragments (2005)) he realizes that this sentence in fact captured his main contribution to thought. For whereas in those days it was still common to start thinking first and foremost from a thorough conceptualization of God, from which thoughts on nature and on the human being subsequently arose, Kant started his philosophy with the human being—or even better, with human thought and its relation to nature. In other words, Kant turned (theological) metaphysics into transcendental anthropology. Kant’s second Copernican revolution, as it revolves around concepts like the Subject, Geist and Gemüt, was by all means a humanist revolution, since it turned the relations between the three poles mentioned around. This is clearly noted by Foucault (2008, 78):

Foucault claims that it is with Kant that man has not only turned into the origin of thought, but that both God and the world (nature) subsequently arise. Yet as “[…] man immediately defines himself as a citizen of the world, as ‘Weltbewohner’: ‘Der Mensch gehört zwar mit zur Welt.’ And completing the circle, all reflection on man involves reflection on the world” (ibid., 78–9), Foucault makes clear that this does not involve a naturalism (“where a science of man implies a knowledge of nature,” ibid. 79) nor a determinism “on the level of the phenomena” (ibid.) but rather “it is the development of self-awareness and of the ‘I am’: the subject self-affecting by the movement in which he becomes aware of himself as an object” (ibid.). This affirmative rewriting of Kant, contrary to how Meillassoux reads Kant (as we will see later) boils down to what we could call, with Barad, an intra-action between (social) world and Subject. Foucault even states that “the world, as a whole (Ganz)” seems to be excluded from language, yet has structure or meaning (ibid., 80). The way in which he then explains the world comes close to DeLanda’s immanent morphogenetic changes of the real, where the world is source, domain, and limit (ibid., 80–1). That is to say, the metaphysics according to which Foucault re-writes Kant is wholly monist: “the whole of existence defines what belongs to it necessarily and originarily” (ibid., 84). The death of the Subject is encapsulated in its Kantian birth.

Anthropocentrism (Un)Solved, or: Critiquing Critique

In After Finitude, Meillassoux takes on a similar project as Foucault, which we might summarize as a rewriting of Kantian paradigms that concern the human being (the Subject) and the object. Yet he does so by asking a different opening question. Foucault is interested in Kant from what we might call a post-Nietzschean perspective. For although a historian, Foucault’s call for the End of Man is about a resistance against the Absolute powers from the pre-critical period, as they keep haunting man and the way in which man conceptualizes his newfound rationality. Foucault sets himself to a discovering of empirical reason, what Foucault earlier referred to as a pragmatics, and it is thus that he wants to push Kant’s dualist thinking to the limit. Foucault already notices this emphasis on the empirical in Kant himself when Foucault (2008, 63) summarizes Kant’s final steps: “The movement which, in the Critique, gave rise to the transcendental mirage is extended and prolonged in the Anthropology in the form of the empirical, concrete life of the Gemüt.”

In the preface to After Finitude, Alain Badiou claims that Meillassoux’s approach to the three questions that summarize Kant’s Critiques, rather than re-reading their dynamics in the empirical, pushes them to the point of a “critique of Critique” (Badiou in Meillassoux [2006] 2008, vii) which is to say that Kantian anthropocentrism has not at all been “solved” by Foucault or his followers. For whereas the first and foremost Kantian question (“what can I know?”) has been attacked primarily (by Foucault for instance) for its use of the “I am,” or, the construction of Subjectivity (the “I think”) which it entails, Meillassoux’s critique of Critique focuses on the necessity of “knowledge” and the way Kant’s notion of knowledge is built on an odd kind of dualism. Foucault (2008, 78) already noticed clearly that “it is from the starting point of man that the absolute can be thought” and it is this idea in particular that Meillassoux considers corrupt. Thus, without doing away with the subject and the object (he actually affirms it rigorously), the latter sets himself to a rethinking of how this opposition relates to one another in terms of knowledge.

In Kant, Meillassoux sees a metaphysics being developed which he refers to as “correlationism.” He defines it as such: “Correlationism consists in disqualifying the claim that it is possible to consider the realms of subjectivity and objectivity independently of one another” (Meillassoux [2006] 2008, 5). Meillassoux does not negate correlationism as such; later in his work it is in fact through “weak correlationism” that he sets up the necessity of his speculative materialism. But the way in which Kant introduced correlationism in his Kritik der reinen Vernunft in 1781 was, as Meillassoux ([2006] 2008, 124) calls it, a “catastrophe” for philosophy.

Crucial for Kant’s correlationism is the idea that the objects in the world consist in themselves, independent of any observation, and at the same time have subjective qualities that allow them to reveal themselves in an observation (ibid., 31). For a human being, then, the things in themselves are not knowable but we can think them; whereas we can get rational knowledge (about a thing) only in the observation, in how the object allows itself to be represented. It is thus that the world as a whole (das Ganze) subjectively comes into being, from the perspective of the “I am.” Meillassoux’s critique of this Kantian relation between subject and object is twofold. First, he questions the limits that Kant puts to rational knowledge. Why can’t the object itself be known? How can thought ever be given “limited access” to the object (which thus in the presentation allows itself to be thought but not to be known)? Secondly, he asks himself why Kant demands the object to be presented in order for it to be thought. This notion of givenness (the object has to be confronted with the subject in order to become part of the world) also sounds questionable because it is deeply anthropocentric.

In order to clarify his reservations, Meillassoux gives us the example of what he calls the “arche-fossil” (a life that has ceased to be before the human being and its thinking came into existence) or the question of the ancestral. He wonders whether it could be possible, as Kantian thinking seems to presuppose, that “Science can think a world wherein spatio-temporal givenness itself came into being within a time and a space which preceded every variety of givenness” (ibid., 22). Or, how is correlationism liable to interpret ancestral statements? The answer of course is that it (philosophically) cannot, which is a serious critique of Kant and of the anthropocentrism that he proposes. The paleobiologist confronted with the arche-fossil has a problem thinking ancestral space-time that never “appeared” to him and to which he thus has no access (since it does not take place). Meillassoux’s critique of Critical (correlationist) thinking is a critique not of the being but of the knowing Subject. His alternative is a speculative metaphysics, which is not subjective, but rather demands that philosophy turn to objectivity again. The critique of Critique is thus a critique of epistemology as we know it.

Doing this he also comes back to God and the tripartite taxonomy of thought discussed earlier. Contrary to Foucault, whom we have called a post-Nietzschean, Meillassoux is by all means an anti-Nietzschean. For whereas Nietzsche, at the close of the nineteenth century claimed that the Age of Reason (introduced to us by Kant among others) has caused us to murder God, Meillassoux claims exactly the opposite. He states that Kantian thinking, in which the absolute has been closed off from thought for good, expelled from the metaphysical, has caused the remarkable return of religious fundamentalism today as it allowed for the absolute to be removed from knowing and thus to be revived in the form of believing (ibid., 45).

Both Foucault’s and Nietzsche’s comments are of course not correlationist, in Meillassoux’s opinion. Rethinking the Kantian “I am” empirically, they push the whole subject-object opposition to the extreme, introducing us to a new kind of thinking that has been able to firmly rewrite correlationism. Meillassoux calls this thinking a “subjective metaphysics,” which is all about absolutizing the correlate itself:

Meillassoux goes on defining this subjective metaphysics, in a mode that resembles the oppositional logic that we have discussed in chapter 6 of this book, and which also characterizes Barad’s reading of hauntology as affirmed through Bohr’s complementarity (Barad 2010, 253):

The concepts created by subjective metaphysics, as they are nowadays increasingly popular within cultural theory, create a metaphysics that we could also call a metaphysics of the event (referring to Whitehead). It has no eye for individual objects, or at least these individual objects do not exist in their entirety but only insofar as they are actualized in the event. And it is this actualization which in the end, as Leibniz put it, is the only possible world. Foucault can be accused in a sense of forgetting the object, but we will get back to this later.

It is important to understand that this twofold definition of subjective metaphysics makes any materialism impossible, as Meillassoux claims. Just before he confronts us with this definition of subjective metaphysics, which (as stated) cannot think the Epicurean atom, he says that Epicureanism is in fact the paradigm of all materialisms. In Epicureanism

The speculative materialism that Meillassoux proposes seems very different from the materialisms discussed so far, as indeed it does not seem to underpin the Spinozist monism which we have been developing up till now.

When stating that absolute reality consists of entities without thought, or even of entities that necessarily precede thought (we now see why he started his argument with the arche-fossil, which indeed turns into the perfect example of an event preceding human thought), he radically does away with Spinoza’s pantheism. According to Meillassoux, Spinoza’s claim that God equals nature (since both are unlimited, they must be one) is a subjective metaphysical definition of God as it creates a larger whole which equals the absolute. Considering God as equivalent to nature also means that nature is rational (which, of course, paleobiologists also believe when they consider their readings of nature “real,” as in, the same as the objective materiality) and this too is an impossible anthropocentrism to Meillassoux. For him nature is contingent, especially because it precedes thought, or even better, because it precedes any system of logic that we could come up with (see his argument on “spatio-temporal givenness,” ibid., 22). Again in contrast with Spinozism, Meillassoux claims there is no such thing as the Principle of Sufficient Reason; every cause can have an endless amount of consequences and these consequences are in no way “given” in thought. In the end he therefore feels much closer to David Hume than to Kant’s correlationism in which knowledge of any synthethic proposition can never be a priori. This manifest stability of chaos, Meillassoux argues, “[…] would allow us to penetrate much deeper into the nature of a temporality delivered from real necessity” (ibid., 101).

Pushing Kant’s weak correlationism to the extreme, Meillassoux composes a speculative materialism that is quite different from Foucauldian and post-Nietzschean thought, but which is nevertheless of the greatest importance for the new materialist project. For although his fiercely argumentative rewriting of the history of philosophy comes up with quite a different cartography compared to the sketches we have produced in the previous chapters—his appreciation of Descartes is especially hard to combine with what has been said above—his moves away from anthropocentrism contribute a great deal to the project announced by Foucault.

Let us therefore take a closer look at the closing of his first chapter (and the start of the second) in which he discusses ancestrality. Here Meillassoux introduces us to the two grand speculative materialist themes. First, there is a radical break between objects (matter) and the thoughts that follow. With this claim, however, he does not accept linear space-time (which the word “follow” might suggest); he does away with linear space-time by stating: “to inscribe these conditions in time is to turn them into objects and hence to anthropologize them” (ibid., 23). The claim thus emphasizes the contingency of matter (nature, the object) and is interested in how thought is capable of accessing the uncorrelated, the world not-given. Second, though it is not elaborated upon in After Finitude but employed as a recurring referent to speculative materialist futures, Meillassoux keeps stressing “mathematics’ ability to discourse about the great outdoors; to discourse about a past where both humanity and life are absent” (ibid., 26).

The two “propositions” refer us once more to Spinoza and actually reveal a more similar approach. For although the first part of the Ethics elaborates on the existence of only One substance (which is necessarily both the absolute infinite God and Nature), it is immediately added that it holds in it the attributes (for instance a human being), and is organized in different modes (for instance thought and extension). Concerning the human being, mind and body are “the same thing” since they are the essence of the individual (and make up one attribute of God). This is sometimes referred to as Spinoza’s parallelism (although the term comes from Leibniz), yet this term is probably a bit too “equivocal,” as it seems to suggest a sort of similarity that cannot be observed. An important argument for its univocity is that although Spinoza claims that all that is action in the body is also action in the mind, an idea (an action of the mind) is a consequence of its body. This does not mean that the body can determine the mind to think (as the mind also cannot determine the body to move) ([1677] 2001, E3P2), it does mean that the body (res extensa) is what Brian Massumi (2002, 8) would call ontologically prior to the mind, since bodies “[…] have ontological privilege in the sense that they constitute the field of the emergence.” Much as with Meillassoux, this is not a temporal distinction, and thus it refuses anthropocentrism.

This now requires a formal expressionism that, as Brian Rotman envisions, should push us “outside the domain of the sign.” Whereas Meillassoux claims that it is through mathematics that his philosophy is able to understand the object in itself (the absolute), the subtitle of Spinoza’s Ethics (Ordine Geometrico Demonstrate) shows that the latter makes use of geometry in order to achieve an understanding of the Absolute. Let us map the trajectories sketched.

Mathematics, Geometry, Topology

The relation between mathematics (which includes geometry and topology) and the body is now at stake. Of course Spinoza and Meillassoux are not reductive, nor do they practice a linguisticism. Yet “what mathematics can do” needs more thought.

Contrary to both Spinoza and Meillassoux, there are scholars who do not see how mathematics or a geometrical order would be able to make universal claims. George Lakoff and Rafael E. Núñez (2000, xvi) for instance claim that “[h]uman mathematics, the only kind of mathematics that human beings know, cannot be a subspecies of an abstract transcendental mathematics. Instead, it appears that mathematics as we know it arises from the nature of our brains and our embodied experience.” Their book entitled Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being intends to show that all thought, thus including mathematics, follows from our bodily motor existence (which they then presumably consider to be uniquely human). Their arguments are in line with Ricardo Nemirovsky and Francesca Ferrara who claim that “[t]hinking is not a process that takes place ‘behind’ or ‘underneath’ bodily activity, but is bodily activity itself” (in Rotman 2008, 33). Claims like these, since they seem to limit mathematics to a bodily interior, are obviously anthropocentric, since all forms of calculus, all formulas and geometrical figures (straight lines, curves, etc.) are then believed to be consequences of our bodily being. By suggesting that mathematical figures necessarily spring from a (human) body, it seems that the figures found outside of us are merely projections of our inside, which then indicates what Meillassoux would call a strong correlationism as it supports “the thesis of the essential inseparability of the act of thinking from its content. All we ever engage with is what is given-to-thought, never an entity subsisting by itself” (Meillassoux [2006] 2008, 36).

Read with Brian Rotman, however, this relation between mathematics and the human body seems to be less confined by the boundary of our skins. In Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being from 2008 Rotman introduces the concept of “gesture” in order to show how mathematics and the body are one non-linguistic materialist morphogenetic process, countering the general yet largely unacknowledged agreement that in mathematics “Platonism is the contemporary orthodoxy” (Rotman 1997, 18 in Kirby 2003, 422):

In line with Barad, DeLanda, Massumi, Lloyd, and Meillassoux as well, Rotman calls for mathematics as a key to the ontologically prior. And in contrast with the mathematical anthropocentrism suggested earlier, Rotman does not lock the argument into the body. A gesture always already suggests a kind of rhythm as it necessarily moves with the outside object (to come), and with the multiplicity in which it happens. Rotman thus proposes that what is at stake concerning a mathematical abstraction is “what it functions with” (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987, 5) thus instead of opposing an abstraction’s (or a book’s) subject and object, the question is how “[i]t forms a rhizome with the world” (ibid., 11). [29]

Would this necessarily take us “beyond” language? In fact, Kirby in “Enumerating Language: ‘The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics’” from 2003, has a strong argument for approaching mathematics as a language. This does not automatically lead Kirby to a linguisticism and away from the ontological prior. Defining mathematics as a “system of relational configurations that refers to itself,” Kirby (2003, 418) alludes to her attempt at rewriting the deflated, representationalist concept of “language” as it features in much of cultural theory, while rewriting “mathematics [as] the language of Nature […] divine[ly] author[ed]” (ibid., 419) along the way. Kirby thus also critiques Rotman in a manner similar to her and other new materialists’ critique of Butler (see Chapter 5 of the present book). Nevertheless, it is possible not to go along with Kirby’s negative reading of Rotman’s anthropocentrism, based on a simple reversal of a mathematics reated by Nature/God (ibid., 426–427).

It is possible not to go along with Kirby’s negative reading of Rotman’s anthropocentrism, based on a simple reversal of a mathematics created by Nature/God (ibid., 426–7). That is, we can read the ontological prior into both Kirby and Rotman.

Famously, and counterintuitively via a Derridean detour, Kirby (2006, 84) states that “[f]or if ‘there is no outside of text,’ as Derrida suggests, then it is in ‘the nature of Nature’ to write, to read and to model.” “[M]atter” thus “appears within the horizon of our inquiry as a much more curious subject. And importantly, its appearance need not be veiled in substitute form as a cultural artefact” (ibid., 85; original emphasis). Echoing her rewriting of Ferdinand de Saussure in Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (1997), Kirby states that Derrida’s “there is no outside of text” should be rewritten into “there is no outside of Nature” (Kirby 2008b, 229). Thus, in turn echoing Spinoza, Kirby proclaims a univocity (Colebrook 2004). [30] In this way Rotman’s gestural, ontologically prior stance is to be found in Kirby’s work when she, via Derrida, states that

We have encountered such theorizations many times in this book, starting with DeLanda’s work in the interview with him and in Chapter 5. According to Rotman’s “gesture,” “the exuberant bodily connectivities” are “mathematical practice” (ibid., 428). Kirby’s project of showing how “it is […] in the nature of corporeality to mathematize, represent, or intelligently take measure of itself” (ibid., 434), of “think[ing] of biology as a “unified field” of operational differentiations, a mathesis naturalis” (ibid., 438) does exactly the same thing. In both cases, the bodily force is what is ontologically prior.

Then in keeping with how Kirby rewrites the notion of language warding off linguisticism, we should (with Rotman and Deleuze and Guattari, among others) rewrite mathematics warding off a “mathematicism.” A necessary breakdown of any mathematical anthropocentrism in favor of any sort of materialism would probably mean, first of all, a move away from set theory, so dominant in mathematics these days (as Fernando Zalamea [forthcoming] also suggests). At least, this is a common move by those scholars interested in what we term a new materialism. Stengers (2000, 157) proposes two routes:

The first option Stengers proposes is interesting, because of its call to develop a “new materialist” mathematics, focusing on differing (see Chapter 7 of this book), as a worthy alternative to set theory. The second is interesting, because this route is actually the most commonly followed, including by Rotman, DeLanda, and Massumi. Following Mandelbrot’s non-Euclidean geometry, it is especially topology that is considered as a fruitful ground for a materialist mathematical metaphysics. Topology might even be considered the very opposite of set theory, practicing a radical “difference in degree” as opposed to set-theory’s “difference in kind.” Bearing this in mind, DeLanda (2002, 24; original emphasis) defines topology as: “[…] the least differentiated geometry, the one with the least number of distinct equivalence classes, the one in which many discontinuous forms have blended into one continuous one.” Massumi, in his 2002 Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation explains very well how topology should be seen as the smoothest of the sciences, or as Elie Ayache (2010, 147) beautifully puts it: “Mathematics is a thought (and not just a calculus), and it is thought that asserts existence through the orientation of its discourse.” Massumi (2002, 135), recalling Kirby, adds to this:

Although Meillassoux, in After Finitude, seems to be most interested in physics, and sometimes seems to be seduced by set theoretical problems (following the way his teacher Badiou has always been keen on such mathematical models) such as Cantor’s theorem, his speculative materialism seems to be in need of a mathematics that actually comes very close to the speculative pragmatism that Massumi has been working on in past years, and notably to the role topology plays in this type of thinking. And vice versa, Meillassoux’s interest in the absolute, in searching for the transfinite, or the “unclosed pluralization of the infinite qualities” (Meillassoux [2006] 2008, 142) might be just what Massumi needs when exploring what topology can do. The notion of the virtual (as Massumi takes this from Bergson and Deleuze) especially seems to him of the greatest importance, as affirmed in Meillassoux’s “Potentiality and Virtuality” (2011). As Massumi (2002, 135) puts it:

The smoothness of topology is nowadays mostly developed (in maths) in so-called “pointless topology,” continuing the traits of Peter T. Johnstone (1977), and mereotopology as it follows Whitehead ([1929/1978] 1985). Here we see most convincingly why Deleuze and Guattari considered mathematics (together with music) capable of producing the smoothest of smooth spaces, and thus as most suitable for a rewriting of the dualisms that haunt us. Johnstone’s concept of the “locales” for instance, as he opposes them to “frames,” allow us to rethink morphology in terms of “continuous maps” (Johnstone 1982, 39) as he calls them. No longer related to objects, “locales” allow us to do pure morphology that always already includes a multiplicity of bodies equaling physical nature. Mathematics (pointless topology) is then our route (among many unforeseen routes) that allows us to get rid of our vectorial (homomorphic) status “in favor of a spreading out on the surface,” as Cache (1995, 75) puts it. Our upright position, as the latter continues, would then only be a consequence of the morphologies at work on the continuous abstract map (or plane) that is realized.

To close with an example, we could think of how Massumi (2002, 75) re-reads Michel Serres’ analysis of a soccer game, which concludes as follows: “The player’s subjectivity is disconnected as he enters the field of potential in and as its sensation. For the play, the player is that sensation. The sensation is a channeling of field potential into local action, from which it is again transduced into a global reconfiguration of the field of potential. Sensation is the mode in which potential is present in the perceiving body.” The manner in which Massumi does not take man as the starting point of analysis—or even of bodies—but rather the forces and surfaces that are being realized throughout the material practice, opens the way for a pointless topology similar to how Johnstone and contemporary Whiteheadians would have it. Massumi’s case proves Johnstone right in introducing a concept like “continuous mapping” when emphasizing the morphogeneses taking place with the creation of surfaces. Freeing us from the point, the line and even from movement (which in the end makes up a correlationist argument, as Meillassoux would put it), the virtual absolute is actualized. Pointless topology is then one of the “infinity mechanisms” in which Henri Michaux ([1972] 2002, 70) finds himself: the one infinite mechanism that is all. It liberates a new materialism.