Irony and Science

0. Empiricism lives and studies in the future anterior; thus order and number appear, as though already in their most sublime perfection, and involve themsleves in the experiment as though always fully formed from the outside. They are a key to the symbolic universe and thus a virtual island of hope -- but survival demands we must be harder than mere forms. Faith in number, the pure form of being, isn't even ironic; it's messianic, a hermits’ opium dream. For truth can be unveiled only on the basis of differences, and among these only those which make a difference; therefore sets already contain a measure of sublime violence. Any enterprise ironically founded upon the abyss cannot overcome its own implicit transcendence and lapses into reaction-- if it fails to rise forward towards any kind of 'bright future' other than one already fully formed. And in any case, science is never an end, but a means; and insofar as this remains true, it will function transcendentally, and even ironically, as a form of institutional violence.

1. For upon what does reason does stand, if not itself -- if not upon it's own virtuality, it's unconscious investments? Reason is like freedom because it speaks upon its own authority: it does not dominate, yet effortlessly counters every effort towards domination. Could we not identify it as a species of sublimely misplaced aggression, purged first of violence, and finally -- even of the sacred?

2. The experimenter is a creature of an obscure delight, whose most intimate and secret desire-- is to become invisible; in the wake of this daring closely follows the 'moral' scientist who wants nothing more than to be a “good” and “shameless” observer. In terms of bearing witness to the singular ‘truth’ of a process, our testimony is only as good as we have become equal to the process in question. The experimental subject thereby becomes the secret and esoteric origin of the scientific situation. Not that science is to be relegated to narration; on the contrary, it may be that the path of the shaman and that of the biologist in the future could converge...

3. The scientist dreams of a time when knowledge will spread and conquer fear. Collective reason abhors the abyss, and cannot authentically envision the emptiness of the void as constitutive; yet for all our higher reason, as science approaches the edge, it grounds more and more of itself upon its own shadow. Science must rather illuminate: the void is not the ground but a kind of sickness, and the paranoid certainty of a egoistic-rational framework already demands a recovery-- a transvaluation. On this point, our position ought to be that the global and the local are neither distinct nor indiscernible. Thus we can observe (and without paradox) that the universe is evolving in time, that it is both orderly and chaotic, that some parts are hidden and others are revealed, that the whole is both being and becoming, all this at once, and in very many different kinds of ways. Thus we also must understand, and henceforth without mysticism, that existence -- visible or invisible -- is only ever spoken about in one sense.

4. Of course, there may be unseen dimensions of being-- but this is a conceptual boundary. For even these belong upon the same material plane when we indicate ‘being’ in its pure verbal and infinitive sense: to be as an infinite multiplicity.



5. We can now easily understand how reason is a meta-strategy: it is the thinking behind thinking, a sort of combinatorical game. More precisely, meta-strategy is calculating odds on the duration that a certain method (of prediction, explanation, control) will (continue to) succeed in ‘approaching’ being. So even though scientists are attempting to find ‘universal’ answers, transcendence is rarely explicitly invoked in scientific discourse. Yet the subject of science is such that experimenters cannot escape that they are concerned, in a specifically human way, with illuminating a species of ‘timeless’ truths.

6. The ‘science’ of language makes this particular paradox clear: enunciation, is after all, only a bridging of two different ways of measuring time.

7. Let us introduce a new understanding of the term by saying that analysis begins with the mutual understanding that something in a situation is existentially intolerable. This is, as it were, the heart of the vortex -- an (or even ‘the’) object which will not ‘let us alone.’ Thus the fundamental operation of analysis is the inscription of a transversal line through the heart of the obscurity, it is a kind of torturing which could possibly heal. It could turn out to be the creation of a new science, but undeniably more often it is simply the scientific creation of a desired objective process (removal of the feared or dangerous object, etc.) In light of the preceding arguments, we can now present the thesis that analysis traces these transversal lines of flight towards new senses of being. The displacement of aggression into a process of healing is a particularly fascinating inversion to which we shall have to return.

8. At the time, it is enough to say: for too long has the scientific position been tainted by irony, been thought refuted even by its ‘refined’ position. Science certainly must play the role of the ‘ignorant,’ but of course it is already an elegant and Socratic ignorance-- laced with irony towards public opinion, and for ‘established but unfounded’ explanations. The ambiguity of the position of science does not account for its ironic origin. Latent hostility towards authority can indeed open spaces for dialogue, but is this really the production of the possibility of a experiment? So it will perhaps seem unusual to suggest that the ironic may in fact be the classical basis for all scientific knowledge, though even Descartes’ reformulation of the basis of knowledge in terms of doubt and Lacan’s in terms of paranoia seem to indicate a deep psychological connection between science and the position of irony -- of the "not so ignorant"!

Lying

Words signify man's refusal to accept the world as it is.
Walter Kaufmann

Sometimes you've just got to look reality in the face and deny it.

Isn't hope found finally in a (socially positive) sort of 'lying', a clear-eyed courage and a deep spiritual assurance? This natural social impulse could be literalized as something like: "even though you can't help but be false, still always tell the truth." I think this is actually the very beginning of speech, as a disappearance of the truth which opens a space for discourse.

But because religion in this way essentially denies what is most apparent, that this world is ALL that exists (all that we can percieve as such as existing,) when religion tells us to tell the truth, it seems to be saying: interpret the world justly. Without justice there can't be freedom and discourse and peace.

When we lie, we betray the event. So "not lying" means not framing things in bad faith. Telling the truth is a sort of faithfulness to an event, and because events as such are a-social and non-signifying, reality must be interpreted through culture, that is-- at a distance, as an image, the way we approach the future, is how we approach new thoughts and so this question of having faith, of telling the truth, is really about how we can ethically create new realities through language and technology.

The Peace of Belief

Freedom of belief is of central and obvious importance to a democratic community. Of course, beliefs are already quite problematic to the generation of a common public space. The twin "literal" issues surrounding the epistemological question, those of the expression and interpretation of beliefs, underscore the emergence of subjectivity in all political praxis, and in the broad sense, the critical self-questioning encountered in the everyday face-to-face encounter. As a brief example, what if the other's belief not only differs from my own, but ultimately proves threatening-- perhaps merely to my rationalization of reality, but also perhaps literally harmful or violent towards myself or my community. Do we require a dangerous other, to whom it is supposed we are "naturally" allergic, in order to achieve a community?

Let us examine the supposition that there are certain beliefs which could conceivably lead an otherwise peaceful society to violence. If there are such beliefs, they would certainly be powerless if they remained only as such; it seems to me that, by definition, beliefs only gain power when they are combined with a capacity and willingness to act on behalf of them. Even with harmful and dangerous beliefs, if they are only beliefs and influence action and speech in no perceptible way, we cannot say that they are harmful to others; indeed, we cannot properly speak of the content or value of beliefs which remain forever unexpressed. Now, in those beliefs which do transcend the immaterial realm of convictions, it can be fairly easily shown that beliefs whose content involves harm towards some other party are especially likely to be the source of actual violence or disagreement. In fact we can distinguish between two broad categories of belief: those that affirm some unifying principle of commonality, and those which affirm an antagonistic principle of division.

This distinction enables us to hazard an interpretation as to the nature of the transition which occurs from thought to action, from belief to principle of behavior. An idea has power inasmuch as it is believed; thus, belief is the power of an idea, though not the origin. Belief is faith in the possibility of revelation, in the future, but especially that aspect of reality to come which is completely unpredictable, and opens up onto a radical alterity whose horizons cannot be encompassed rationally. The infinite idea which is believed precedes the belief, if only minimally: an infinitesimal belief (which is an infinite skepticism) is required in order to approach an idea within the "reasonable" bounds of concepts. This is the essence of what it means to think rationally, "objectively"--which really stands in this case for, pretending we know nothing about the situation or ourselves, we act like we believe completely and only in the network of sensicality and in the testimony of our senses. Objectivity is actually a complex mediation of the subject-object relation which supports an illusion of perfect communicability, supposes an almost religious sort of fundamental sense-event which could guarantee the consistency and accuracy of our deductions and observations--"within reasonable limits," not comprehending the limits are just as arbitrary as the task for which the measurements are being taken.

Belief names the properly subject-ive moment in thought, indeed, it names the outermost limit of subject-thought. The process of belief transforms ideas into action. Belief powers the idea, demands faithfulness and responsibility, moves the subject to act, guides the action with deliberate concentration, with a joyful care. We can gather these strands together in order to enunciate the structure of belief; let's say that belief is the adequation of thought, and that this is accomplished by the repeated generation of (subjective) self-difference. Belief ex-cends this primordial separation between subject-object and Other, "completes" it in its total incoherency. The asynchrony between the same and the other is constantly generated by the unnatural and self-critical movement (belief, interpretation) which is brought about in the social encounter, and the subject is itself actualized in a responsibility to one's relationship to the community. Indeed, we might say the first question of any possible future democracy is at once and entirely a question of peace and political economy, and so the key question for politics at this moment would be-- to put it lightly-- who's the adult here? Could we compare society to the enactment of a scene from a dream, whose origins are lost in the depths of time and whose goals, limits and internal consistency are equally, terrifyingly uncertain?

All we own is an unfreedom we have been convinced to freely accept: where is the freedom we were taught to love? We should not be convinced of our own unworthiness or inadequacy. The non-adequation lies wholly within the total system which cannot integrate that which remains itself. Power is thought transforming into action; by escaping the reach of established power, we can lead both thought and action beyond the sick and paranoid systems which seek to completely ontologize reality, reduce everything vital and beautiful and free into a empty void full of violence and shadows and a wild, unsustainable desire... Just as there is no truth without dancing, there can be no ethics without a balance between the whole and the part, a balance which never reaches a perfect equilibrium but is always playing about the edges, deploying its forces to the limit, in an upheaval of the established institutions which is the inauguration of a new way of being. Such a transcendence is already the jouissance of a new manner of speaking... The belief in peace is salvation and slavery at once; democracy as a "peaceful" attitude towards beliefs ends up assuming an outright hostile, authoritarian attitude towards individuals. An ideal democracy is already a false one, and this hinge is why democracy functions so much better than other systems: reflexivity, evolution, and so on... But our freedoms erode as quickly as they are written into law, a writing which can never be adequate to the unfreedom which predominates...

Fantasy and Illumination

Have we been led into darkness by honeyed words of light and universal acceptance? Are we so entranced by this spectacle of violent love, so subdued by the pure flow of nothing, that when we are left trembling fear before the void--- we no longer know which way to turn? The truth ultimately is that unconsciously we know already we will eventually turn back, that at some point we always betray the unique truth of our discovery, by the very act of its dissemination.

We lose our faith at the very moment we gain the full force of it, in the very act of expressing it. This is the deep reason poets lie: like religion, love is a story, the prototype of the pure narrative, a total and complete fiction and yet, love owes its existence solely to the strictness of our belief.

Likewise, the religious fantasy is claimed to be formally real: whereas and therefore, the responsibility lies entirely upon us for the spontaneous generation of the radical movement of faith. As we are at once subjects of the truth we seek and subjected to this truth, we are absolutely irreplacable and we are thus made innocent of the slightest skepticism of our place in existence.

By allowing ourselves to be made incapable of maintaining even a minimal distance from the "unadulterated truth", to our ruin and to that of the truth itself, we have by now occupied a meta-position outside of self and universe in order to more completely vaingloriously identify with this universal, to become its excess, to exceed this universal in a particular trajectory. We have gone even beyond essence in our presumption that the universal could be given voice.

Indeed, this identification is already death to a separated freedom; the desire to reunite our essence with the universal is against life itself, is the very force of being-towards-death.

Even as we attempt to regain our balance, to recount and give voice to the pure truth, we are actors in a pure surrealistic fantasy of radical lack, speakers of a negativist discourse whose focus is death, non-existence, which thus becomes the rupture around which our "defective" mortal existence radiates-- and thus, in earning the right to speak it, we murder the truth itself!

The Cognition-Dissimulation Hypothesis

No one has proposed, so far as I know, a correlate in cognitive science to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle: let’s call it the cognition-dissimulation hypothesis. It would state something like "Though there exist a multiplicity of legitimate modes of analyzing cognition, there is an upper limit on how much we can understand about our processes of understanding." That multiple modes are possible is not incidental; this indicates a single explanatory appartus is insufficient to explain the "breakthough" which occurs in learning or self-awareness. Cognition functions only in the presence of uncertainty, when the solution is not obvious, when we have exhausted all available options. Thus there is a sort of “upper bound” to any explanatory schemata of the cognitive process, since cognition is multiple rather than singular.

A person’s behavior yield to many theoretical models, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Likewise, our thoughts can be analyzed in many ways and according to many paradigms, which leads us to an impasse: because we have no further empirical criteria to go on in terms of an algorithmic model for cognition, we are left with a purely interpretative question. Which is, to put it frankly, just not the sort of thing computer scientists are interested in--a formula, a model, a schematic, OK, but not an interpretative issue. Unless interpretation itself is the critical issue.

The point, basically, is that it would defeat the point to decide in advance what a true AI would be; it would have to be able to decide for itself. The fact that cognitive science is such an interdisciplinary effort is evidence that this interpretative crisis is already widely recognized, namely, that no single theoretical model can bring us there. Yet, we must be clear, the “holy grail” of artificial intelligence is self-interpretation, pure and simply. Thus the problem is reflection, that is, awareness and time. You can think about this self-reflexivity as it relates to time by thinking about the infinite number of cognitive acts which can occur in a finite time, or even simultaneously. For example, right now we’re already not just “thinking” but “thinking-about-thinking” and so on and so on.

Of course, the question of a model (whether a simulation or for a theory) immediately raises the question of structure. But if, as I’ve argued, cognition is non-linear (or, at least, not always or primordially linear,) how are we to understand a structure in thought at the pre-symbolic level (i.e., prior to logic, set theory) where cognition originates? Such a “structure” would have to be radically “de-structured,” in other words, a multiple-and-simultaneous, non-linear, self-reflexive collection of self-evolving processes. How can we understand this? Perhaps a topological analogy can clarify: thinking is situated between itself and what is undetermined. We aim to make complete something which is fundamentally lacking, thus thinking is structured around what is missing in the situation. Thus any hope of algorithmic description seems to suffer from an “infinite ladder” problem--we’d need to know what in particular is “missing” from a given situation before it arises.

Let’s summarize this with a second hypothesis: The structure of cognition is fractal. Thought is continuous but “asymptotic,” that is, always operating at its ultimate limit. The mind that thinks progresses, iteratively, evolving intelligent adaptations in response to pressure, as a “economic” or strategic function. For this same reason, any purely operational thematization of cognition is doomed to failure, for the process(es) are just as much self-deluding as self-critical. Thought is known to unify at least as much as it divides and improves only in order to more completely destroy--and then, of course, to fill the space thus opened up by thinking again. Thinking as the oscillation about the void point (of mystery, the structure of lack which defines a “problem” in the most general sense) and therefore, thought as the asymptotic coincide of subject and object--not emptiness as in a rupture, but positively-charged void. Conceived of in this manner, the process of cognition is pure operation (and is thus universal) and yet pure discourse (and thus subjective); this leads us to hypothesize that thinking is the pure investigation of the truth for yourself. Thus “truth shapes thought” is true only if “thinking is the creation of truth”; thus is thought without place yet also displacement itself. Self-symmetry is fundamental to the essence of cognition itself.

Badiou / Lacan / Descartes

In the last chapter of Being and Event, Alain Badiou investigates Lacan's relation to (what Badiou perceives as) his contiguity with the history of thought since Descartes. Badiou confronts Lacan with his overemphasis on the solidarity of the subject and her speech.

In order to show this, Badiou highlights Lacan's assertion of the subject's ex-centered dependency with regard to language. After all, isn't this already the Cartesian gesture embodied by the cogito? For example, when Lacan says it is our destiny to articulate a world--does he not aspire here to some transparency between thought and being, some (obviously imaginary) pure reflection between language and reality?

I understand Lacan to be saying that the world is not merely the background against which we pursue our destinies, but that our destiny is speech, is defined reciprocally by the social relation. Our response and responsibility is already to faithfully articulate (a/the) world.

Now, Badiou is making the case that, nevertheless, the intrusion of this third term (i.e., language) is "not sufficient to overturn this order which supposes that it is necessary from the standpoint of the subject to enter into the examination of truth as cause" (B&E 433) In other words, no knowledge, no matter how acquired, can be held to be certain without a (faithful) procedure of examining the truth of it oneself. A truth can only be a source of certainty, or veracity, once a subject "forces an undecidable,” that is, acts on the basis of a supposed future completion whose certainty is (ontologically) in a great deal of question.

Badiou is arguing that the position in which the subject finds himself is always the site of an event, that there are no subjects without events, that the subject is only a “finite local configuration” of a generic procedure aimed at discovering the truth of the being of the situation. The truths which a subject discovers/creates are found only through maintaining an active faithfulness to a investigatory procedure.

No amount of philosophical games will allow us "interpret" our way out of this crux: a truth is, in the end, neither decidable nor undecidable on the basis of its linguistic context--"truth only exists insofar as it is indifferent [to language] since it's procedure is generic inasmuch as it avoids the entire encyclopaedic grasp of judgments." Thus, truth follows the trajectory of a given subjects’ truth procedure, a “faithful” thought which overturns and escapes the structure of a situation.

Therefore the subject is rare, Badiou suggests, and we should not think (with Lacan) of the subject-effect as a void-set, since this makes it identifiable from within the “uniform networks of experience.” Lacan errs because his very "gesture" is overly soldered to language alone: even though Lacan moves towards a conception of truth which is "at last" completely disconnected from what Lacan calls "exactitude" or "adequation," Lacan is still attached to the Cartesian epoch of science--that is, by stressing the lack (and not the intervention) and thus structural permanence of the subject, we miss the event proper.

Lacan wants to “rescue” the truth but he ends up positing the subject in the absolute void of its own erasure. Unless we conceive of the genesis of the subject (argues Badiou) as its self-constitution by an active fidelity to an event or truth-procedure, we maintain the (weak) conception of the subject as maintained in the pure void of its subtraction--all this to save truth.

By contrast, Badiou defines a truth as multiple, the gathering together of all the terms which will have been positively investigating by a generic procedure of fidelity supposed complete (and thus infinite.) This supposition of completeness is critical to understand what Badiou means about nomination, but right now what we're interested in is the fact that Badiou identifies this "generic" truth-procedure as the very constitution of the subject even as (and because) the truth is constituted by a subject’s engagements and faithfulness to a generic procedure.

So, despite the fact that the void for Lacan is de-localized, and that its ineffability does not yield to any sort of pure reflection, in the end Lacan yields to what Badiou claims is the "empty and apodictic transparency of the cogito" by claiming the revelation of certainty about the subject (from the standpoint of the other) through psychoanalysis.

Badiou is attacking the possibility of a hermeneutics of truth (and so indirectly psychoanalysis, which claims it is a site where the truth of the subject emerges, transformed.) Psychoanalysis is shown to make a surprising presupposition: that "the truth of neurotic suffering is that of having the truth as cause." Badiou argues that it is not the truth which is the cause for subjective anxiety (which is actually a "false plenitude,") rather:

"The truth is that indiscernible multiple whose finite approximation is supported by a subject, such that its ideality to-come, nameless correlate of the naming of an event, is that on the basis of which one can legitimately designate as subject the aleatory figure which, without the indiscernible, would be no more than an incoherent sequence of encyclopaedic determinants."

What's going on here? There's a lot to unpack, but in essence: when we try to identify a "subject-cause," that is, some clear, distinct and certain conceptualization of the genesis of the subject, we tend to (incorrectly) think the subject in terms of a transparent, linguistic agency which unites being and thought through a gesture which maps the web of language onto the true.

The cogito gives language has a hidden capacity to poetically open up the world and verify it at the same time, revealing the subject through the very clarity and distinctness of truth itself (which is now revealed as the 'true cause' of the subject, and thereby the subject is identified completely with truth. Thus "truth" has been restricted to the whole of subjective existence.) Badiou says this is wrong; we cannot return to the truth, or to infinity, or simply to transcendence to find the cause of the subject. For that, we must return to the event (the truth, on the other hand, is just the "stuff" of the subject).

For Badiou, an event is composed of the elements of the site and the event itself; an event “interposes” itself between the void and itself. A part of a situation is said to be “indiscernible” if no statement of the language of the situation separates it or discerns it. This lack of separation is really an avoidance of falling into pre-existing determined categories that structure the situation. The truth IS that indiscernible multiple (or set) whose source is a generic procedure undertaken by a faithful subject.

A procedure of fidelity is generic by definition if, for any determinant in the "encyclopaedia" (a classification of the parts of a situation which can be discerned by a property,) it contains at least one enquiry, or line of investigation, which avoids that determinant. The four (and only four) types of generic procedure, and thus the only four sources of truth, are for Badiou: art, science, politics and love. (He has been criticized, rightly in my opinion, by Zizek and others for the brevity and oddness of this list of truth-investigatory procedures, most notably leaving religion out.)

So, a part is indiscernsible if it does not fall under any encyclopaedic determinants, i.e., parts of the situation composed of terms which have a property in common which can be formulated in the language of the situation. It would seem that, without the indiscernible, our language would be quite boring--just a series of judgments without a qualifying investigator procedures, language as pure performance.

As the subject would be as well; without the mysterious capacity of the event to be “more” than the situation (Badiou says it is “ultra-one” relative to the situation, since it stands in a relationship with itself,) our speech would amount to no more than incoherent sequences of judgments about common properties of terms in the situation. Actually, the subject-language unfolds "in the future anterior"; the subject is the trajectory of the enquiries of the truth procedure. So when Lacan writes: “Thought founds being solely by knotting itself within the speech in which every operation touches upon the essence of language,” Lacan in fact secures a position within his theory for the enunciation and veracity of the cogito. Indeed, he retains intact the Cartesian discourse of ontological foundation which Badiou is attempting to reinterrogate.

More broadly, Badiou claims that the categories of the event and the indiscernible have been at work, unnamed, throughout the entire history of philosophy. Regarding the doctrine of the subject and his apparent overall position on Lacan (near the end of the book):

"With respect to the doctrine of the subject, the individual examination of each of the generic procedures will open up to an aesthetics, to a theory of science, to a philosophy of politics, and, finally, to the arcana of love; to an intersection without fusion with psychoanalysis. All modern art, all the incertitudes of science, everything, finally, which the name of Lacan designates will be met with, reworked, and traversed by a philosophy restored to its time by clarified categories."