On Meillassoux’s Critique of Vitalist Subjectalism - TripleAmpersand Journal (&&&)
Romulo Moraes
Within Quentin Meillassoux’s sweeping critique of the entire history of Western philosophy, a special place seems to be granted to the thought of Gilles Deleuze. Meillassoux sees Deleuze as one of the few philosophers who tried to break out of the ‘linguistic turn’ of the 20th century and, more broadly, of what he calls the… Read More »
TripleAmpersand Journal (&&&)
Within Quentin Meillassoux’s sweeping critique of the entire history of Western philosophy, a special place seems to be granted to the thought of Gilles Deleuze. Meillassoux sees Deleuze as one of the few philosophers who tried to break out of the ‘linguistic turn’ of the 20th century and, more broadly, of what he calls the ‘era of the Correlation’: an era inaugurated by Berkley and characterized by philosophy’s repeated denial of the possibility of “acceding, through thought, to a being independent of thought.” (Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition 118)

Notwithstanding Deleuze’s merit in trying to break the correlation in order to think the vicissitudes of matter and of a being understood as difference-in-itself, Meillassoux sees this attempt as riddled with problems. In his opinion, Deleuze’s philosophy is nothing but another instantiation of the periodical recoil against correlationism which attempts to surpass the latter’s deabsolutory impulse—the deflating of the possibility of thinking an absolute being independent of thought—by absolutizing some aspects of the correlation itself; by attributing being itself with certain aspects of human subjectivity. In doing so, Meillassoux throws Deleuze in the same bag as Fichte or Hegel, arguing that the only significant difference between these philosophers consists in the specific traits of human subjectivity each of them opts to absolutize: whereas German idealism openly imbues being and the real with rationality, Deleuze, even after proclaiming a staunch critique of idealism, of rational subjectivity and of the representational image of thought (Difference and Repetition 131-161), nonetheless ends up smuggling certain sensible traits of human subjectivity through the backdoor, elevating them as properties of being itself. In other words, between these otherwise radically different philosophies, Meillassoux identifies a common denominator which he calls ‘subjectalism’. Thus, the difference according to him is merely between two strands of subjectalism: one idealist and the other vitalist.

Meillassoux’s portrayal of Deleuze as a subjectalist is a highly critical one in several respects, ultimately seeing the latter’s philosophy as somewhat of a failed project: Deleuze’s attempt to create a philosophical materialism ends up betraying the materialist endeavour itself; it is “no longer a materialism at all, since it identifies all reality with a sensible mode of subjectivity in all things.” (“Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition” 124) According to Meillassoux, Deleuze’s ‘flat’ or immanent ontology is nothing but a ‘dissolving’ of human traits and dynamics—such as habit, sensation, creation, the phenomenological contraction of time, etc.—everywhere into reality; a paradoxical ‘deanthropocentric’ attempt of dismantling the primacy of the representational subject which ends up hyposthazising the pre-subjective or ‘infraconscious’ aspects of subjectivity as properties of being itself, from organic life all the way down to inorganic matter. Deleuze’s world is one in which univocal being’s attributes are modelled on the human and are expressed along a continuum of beings (between which there are no differences in nature but only differences in degree) understood as ever smaller ‘larval subjectivities.’ According to Meillassoux, the ‘deanthropocentric’ and anti-idealist impulse of Deleuze (and of vitalism more generally) ends up, paradoxically, as a sort of molecular anthropomorphism:

“This refusal of anthropocentrism in fact led only to a most startling anthropomorphism that consisted, following the most classic illusion, of seeing in every reality (even inorganic reality) subjective traits whose origin is in truth all human . . . If there was ever a way of placing oneself at the summit of all things, it was surely to place oneself in all things in a most diluted state.” (ibid.126)

Meillassoux’s critique can be seen as a stepping stone towards his own formulation of a ‘authentically’ materialist speculative philosophy: one which is capable of thinking a purely a-subjective matter, an anonymous ‘matter=x’ (ibid. 131) completely devoid of subjective traits; a dead matter separated by an irreducible fissure from humanity, and one which—Meillassoux claims—can only be thought or apprehended via the ‘signs devoid of meaning’ provided by mathematics. Assessing the pertinence and precision of this critique would require a more in-depth analysis of Deleuze’s work of the kind that surpasses the modest aims of these brief pages. However, we believe that by merely questioning some of the inconsistencies or presuppositions of Meillassoux’s own project some light can be shed on this particular issue. How can a critique of these presuppositions modify Meillassoux’s assessment of Deleuze? Could this in turn lead to a modification of Meillassoux’s own speculative materialist project?

I

Firstly, we can cast doubt on the supposition that a non-correlational being must forcibly be a passive or ‘dead’ being. Meillassoux’s definition of ‘correlation’ in the first pages of After Finitude is the following: “By ‘correlation’ we mean the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from each other.” (5) Although his formulation may seem symmetrical or reversible at a first glance, it soon becomes evident that it is far from being so. Meillassoux portrays the non-correlational absolute as one which is entirely indifferent to thought, a passive absolute which does not depend upon its givenness to thought: “absolute reality is an entity without thought.” (ibid. 36) As Steven Shaviro rightly points out, this amounts to an arbitrary construal of the correlational dynamic as unidirectional: “When thought and being are correlated, thought is always the active and relational term: the one that actually performs the correlation . . . thought always refers to being, but being in itself remains indifferent to thought.” (112) Thus, in order for thought to escape the shackles of the correlation, it must find a way to think this passive being, a being that just is; one must find the way to “[point] the arrow of thought toward the very heart of all that is dead” (Meillassoux, “Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition” 134). Therefore, as Shaviro argues, “in place of the correlation of thought and being . . . Meillassoux presents us with the stark dualism of an absolute thought without being and a being entirely devoid of thought.” (113-114)

This separation of a passive being from subjective intentionality is closely linked to Meillassoux’s revival of the Lockean distinction between ‘secondary qualities’ (color, smell, etc.) and ‘primary qualities’ (measurements of physical properties), as well as the concomitant privilege he grants to the mathematized (‘Galilean’) physical sciences as a way in which thought can legitimately apprehend the latter, understood as noncorrelational —deuteroabsolutory—properties of the actual world: properties which are ontologically primary due to the fact that they do not presuppose a human perceptual apparatus. However, one is inclined to agree with Shaviro when he ultimately denies the ontological privilege of the latter arguing against such a sharp distinction between the way in which we access primary and secondary qualities: “Whether I am dealing with quantifiable properties like volume, mass and wavelength or with ‘qualitative’ ones like color, I am still stuck within the correlationist circle. Epistemologically speaking, I can never eliminate my reliance on the mediating practices of measurement and perception.” (116)[1]

What does this unidirectional construal of the correlational dynamic tell us about Meillassoux’s conception of thought, and how does this relate to his portrayal of Deleuze as a subjectalist? As it has been said, a noncorrelational thinking is, for Meillassoux, a thinking of a passive being entirely devoid of meaning: in other words, it entails an arbitrary postulating of a fissure between a passive or ‘dead’ being and the intentionality of thought. It is by starting from this arbitrary fissuring (one akin to what Whitehead called the ‘bifurcation of nature’) that Meillassoux will interpret any trace of subjective traits in being as entirely illegitimate or illusory. Most certainly, one is right in exerting caution when approaching philosophical constructions which attempt to cover dogmatist animist metaphysics under a thick layer of skillful rhetorical devices and metaphorizations; crafty metaphysical constructions oblivious of the epistemological constraints dismissed by their absolutory statements. However, we would also like to argue that, beneath Meillassoux’s assertions lies the assumption that thought is unique to humans and, therefore, inherently correlational or intentional (except, of course, the kind of thought he himself is trying to articulate). Thus, besides deciding to ignore the evolutionary links between animal sentience and human sapience, these assumptions render Meillassoux incapable of conceiving the possibility of a non-human (artificial, animal, machinic?) thought which—by virtue of not being the product of an intentional human consciousness in the first place—could arguably also escape the correlationist framework. He does not conceive the possibility of “a sort of thought—or consciousness, or sentience, or feeling, or phenomenal experience—that is nonphenomenological insofar as it goes on without establishing relations of intentionality to anything beyond itself and even without establishing any sort of reflective relation to itself.” (Shaviro 126) For Meillassoux, thought is the hallmark of human exceptionality, of the irreducible “rupture without continuity” separating humanity from the rest of nature. (“Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition” 128)

Thus, we can identify the presence of an ultimately unjustified human exceptionalism in the thought of Meillassoux: one that informs his critique of what he calls vitalist subjectalism and, more specifically, of Deleuze. Meillassoux’s irreducible rupture between human subjectivity and nature underlies the assumption that attributing ‘subjective traits’ to other entities amounts to an illegitimate leap between different orders of being—to the misleading absolutizing gesture that characterizes the so called subjectalists. However, if one considers this rupture or bifurcation as an arbitrary decision, if one reconsiders the pertinence of the idea of a continuum of differences of degree within a univocal being, then one would perhaps also be inclined to loosen the rationalist epistemological constraints demanded from the vitalist gesture. As Shaviro points out, “in his attack on ‘subjectalist’ claims in modern philosophy, Meillassoux never accounts for his own assumption that these traits are ‘in fact entirely human’—and exclusively so—in the first place.” (126) With this in mind, should we reconsider the dismissal of Deleuze’s ‘larval subjects’ and ‘desiring machines’ as hypostatized anthropomorphic metaphors, as misrepresentations of being?[2]

II

Meillassoux affirms that his speculative materialist project is not primarily concerned with giving an account—as non-correlational and mathematized as it may be—of the actual world: that, he argues, is the exclusive task of the physical sciences—a task in which metaphysical constructs (such as Deleuze’s) have no part to play except, perhaps, if they are humble enough to accept the role of a ‘heuristic’ or imaginative ‘cryptophysics’.[3] What speculative materialism aims at is not merely a non-correlational account of this world, but a non-correlational account of any possible world whatsoever. It does not aim at the deuteroabsolutory properties of the world as mathematized by the physical sciences, but at the primoabsolutory mathematizable invariants of any possible world, even if it was to exist in a reality in which the laws of nature are entirely different from ours:

“we will not derive. . . the conclusion that our world is in fact mathematizable, but rather that any possible world whatsoever, any regime of the real, can necessarily be seized through mathematicity.” (“Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition” 149).

It goes without saying that these stated goals are underpinned, in Meillassoux’s philosophy, by the derivation of what he calls the ‘principle of factiality’: the principle by means of which he is able to assert the absolute necessity of contingency, or, what amounts to the same thing, the regime or law of ‘Hyperchaos’. It is not our purpose here to assess the validity of the dazzling—albeit dubious—argumentative chain that leads Meillassoux to assert the existence of such thing as a Hyperchaos.[4] We would rather limit ourselves to a brief comment on the ontologically privileged role that is assigned to mathematics in Meillassoux’s thought, as well as the relationship (or lack thereof) this maintains with his critique of Deleuze.

As we mentioned above, Meillassoux’s ontological privileging of mathematics as the means available for thought to think reality in a non-correlational manner (or to ‘touch upon the Real’ as Lacan would have it) is closely linked with his bifurcation of nature, in other words, with his radical separation of the intentionality of human thought from a passive and indifferent being. We also mentioned that his aim is not only to legitimize the non-correlational deuteroabsolutory truthfulness of the mathematization of this world, but the primoabsolutory capacities of mathematics themselves. However, one might ask: what specific kind of mathematics is Meillassoux elevating to this absolutory status? Additionally, another question comes to mind: what about Deleuze’s own complex engagement with mathematics and geometry in Difference and Repetition? Being mathematics so important for Meillassoux, why is this never mentioned in his critique of Deleuze? Is differential calculus and Riemannian manifolds devoid of any kind of absolutory capacities?

We can entertain the hypothesis that answers for both of these questions could be traced back to Badiou’s overall influence on Meillaseux’s thought. The characterization of Deleuze as a vitalist is most certainly not an uncommon one. However, said characterization, along with Meillassoux’s concern with mathematics and his concomitant neglect of Deleuze’s own engagement with them, all seem, to a certain extent, to be mirrored in Badiou’s work. However, Badiou’s own attitude towards Deleuze’s engagement with mathematics is not one of neglect, but of downright dismissal: in the very first page of Deleuze: The Clamour of Being, when narrating his differences with Deleuze, Badiou mentions that “when it came to mathematics—which, I recognized, keenly interested him— Deleuze’s preferences were for differential calculus and Riemannian manifolds, from which he drew powerful metaphors (and yes, I do mean metaphors). I preferred algebra and sets.” (1) A few pages later—when recognizing his fellow frenchman as his principal adversary in the philosophical task of thinking an ontology of pure multiplicity—Badiou affirms that, while he himself opts for a mathematical (set theoretical) thinking of multiplicity, Deleuze’s thought of multiplicity is drawn entirely from a (Bergsonian) ‘vital’ or ‘animal’ paradigm—terms through which Badiou is inconspicuously pointing to what he sees as a lack of rigour (3-4). It seems clear, then, that Badiou does not consider mathematics as an integral part of Deleuze’s philosophy, but merely a source of accessorial metaphors used to spice up an otherwise full-fledged vitalist philosophy. Daniel W. Smith, for his part, wholeheartedly disagrees with this accessorial status granted to Deleuze’s engagement with mathematics: he claims that, “in fact, Deleuze’s theory of multiplicities is drawn exclusively from mathematics—but from its problematic pole.” (“Deleuze and Badiou” 86) Which is this ‘problematic pole’ of mathematics Smith mentions, and why is it dismissed by Badiou in favour of a mathematics of ‘algebra and sets’?

As it is well known, Badiou’s mature project (from Being and Event onwards) revolves around the idea of a particular ontological status of set theory in its axiomatized (Zermelo-Fraenkel) version; more specifically, around the widely disputed thesis that set theory is the proper mode of ontological discourse. Meillassoux’s own philosophical project is not based on Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory per se. However, he does mention it as a paradigmatic example of the tendency, initiated by Hilbert, towards modern logical mathematical formalism. According to him, this tendency is characterized by an attempt to develop a formalized axiomatics: an axiomatic in which, contrary to the Euclidean version, axioms themselves are not established by means of definitions but by relations between undefined terms. Meillassoux argues that the power of mathematics—as a means to break out of the correlation, both in a deuteroabsolutory as well as a primoabsolutory manner—resides precisely in these formalizing capacities: on the capacities of mathematics to operate within a formal semiotic realm in which it “makes systematic use of signs that ate effectively devoid of signification” (“Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition” 163). Thus, differences notwithstanding[5], we can argue that what Badiou and Meillassoux have in common is that they both take for granted the superiority of modern formalized mathematics; of what Smith calls the ‘axiomatic pole’ of mathematics (as opposed to the aforementioned ‘problematic pole’ that concerned Deleuze).

According to Smith, the tension between these two poles is one that has been present throughout the entire history of mathematical thought[6]: one that arised internally in Greek geometry (the tension between ‘problematics’ and ‘theorematics’), shifting to “a more general tension between geometry itself, on the one hand, and algebra and arithmetic on the other” by the seventeenth century, and continued to unfold as the ‘clarification’ of differential calculus (which was itself imbued with geometrical ideas and processes) via the set theoretical foundations (themselves later axiomatized, as we have mentioned) developed in the 20th century. Smith, utilizing Deleuze’s own terminology, sees this as the tension between a ‘major’ or ‘royal mathematics—guided by the principles of discretization and axiomatization, as well as the search for rigour and foundations—and a ‘minor’ mathematics—concerned with variations and transformations, and guided by the principle of continuity or the geometrical ideas of smoothness of morphological variation.[7]

Additionally, Smith points out that one of the main difference between these two poles of mathematics is their different modes of deduction: “in axiomatics, a deduction moves from axioms to the theorems that are derived from it, whereas in problematics a deduction moves from the problem to the ideal accidents and events that condition the problem and form the cases that resolve it” (“Axiomatics and Problematics” 145). In general terms, the task of major mathematics has been the reduction or ‘rectification’ of problematics by means of its translation into arithmetics, a gesture which, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, could be described as the “uprooting [of] variables from their state of continuous variation in order to extract from them fixed points and constant relations.” (408)

In its various iterations throughout history, minor mathematics’ concern with notions of dynamism and transformation (such as heterogeneity, flows, continuous variation, thresholds, infinitesimals, etc.) has been regarded by major mathematics as still too embedded in geometrical intuition and, more broadly, in the empirical; as lacking in rigour, one which should be obtained through rational formalization, discretization and axiomatization.[8] As is was briefly touched upon above, when writing about the formalizing capacities of mathematics—and its power as a means to break out of the correlation— Meillassoux seems to conflate the tendency towards axiomatization and discretization (the ‘major’ tradition) with mathematical formalization tout court. At the same time, he, following Badiou, seems to oppose this formalized discourse to the otherwise ‘unformalized’ vitalist rhetoric of Deleuze’s subjectalist metaphysics. However, according to Smith, behind the theory of Ideas developed by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition lies an attempt to develop a philosophical formalization of the minor or problematic pole of mathematics[9]; an attempt which “parallels the movement toward ‘rigour’ that was made in axiomatics: it presents a formalization of the theory of problems, freed from the conditions of geometric intuition and solvability, and existing only in pure thought.” (“Axiomatics and Problematics” 163)

Most certainly, a much more nuanced treatment of Deleuze’s engagement with mathematics would be needed in order to continue developing the ideas that, at this point, have merely been broadly outlined.[10] However, from what has been said one can catch a glimpse of the questions that are raised and the directions a further interrogation could take. Assuming that Smith is right when claiming that Deleuze’s ontology is drawn entirely from mathematics, can Meillassoux’s characterization of the latter as a vitalist subjectalist still hold its ground? Does mathematical thinking necessarily have to be formalized along the following the line of axiomatics in order to present itself as a kind of thought potentially capable of breaking out of the correlationist shackles? How could speculative materialism be transformed if we were to think the absolute with the mathematical tools of a formalized problematics? Could Meillassoux’s attempt to think primo-absolutory Figures[11] be reformulated along these lines—less like statical invariants and more like something akin to a topological model? In other words, could we in some way conceive of something like a ‘primoabsolutory minor mathematics’?

[1] Meillassoux himself would surely disagree with this argument due to the fact that he does not consider the act of mathematical measurement as just another form of mediated human access. Rather, following the footsteps of Badiou, he grants mathematics with a privileged ontological import. We will briefly touch upon this subject later. It is worth mentioning, though, that Shaviro’s critique points towards a more general disagreement (perhaps one of the most significant ones) between the different strands speculative realism: that of the purportedly absolutory capacities of science and mathematics.

[2] In one of the endnotes of “Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition”, Meillassoux himself (in a somewhat disconcerting manner and without offering further explanation) goes against his own delegitimation of the vitalist project: “The variants of vitalism nevertheless differ from the variants of reductionism in that they are not immediately absurd . . . To insert the living into all things, however, remains a coherent philosophical project, of which we will even maintain, going against our representation above, that it is legitimate, however difficult.” (194 n28)

[3] “I call ‘cryptophysics’ a metaphysics that has become postulatory and is no longer dogmatic […] a discourse which, even though its rendering of the world proceeds beyond constituted knowledges, in particular scientific knowledges, does not claim to seat its description of the real upon a necessary foundation, limiting itself to a revisable postulate that it tries to verify by applying it to the reality of its times . . . this regime of thought is a quasiclantestine physics—a second physics, but not one endorsed, like true physics, by physicists themselves: a ‘speculative physics’. ” (“Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition” 153)

[4] For Meillassoux’s detailed account of the derivation of the principle of factiality and the—supposedly concomitant—neccesity of contingency see chapter 3 of After Finitude.

[5] For example, Meillassoux claims that, while Badiou’s ontology of mathematics is one which tries to show the hidden ontological referent behind the signs devoid of meaning (sets), his own aim is to “constitute an ontology of the empty sign” itself (“Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition” 163).

[6] For Smith’s brief historical account of this tension, see “Deleuze and Badiou” 80-83, or “Axiomatics and Problematics” 158-155.

[7] For Deleuze and Guattari’s treatment of the broader conflict between ‘major’ or ‘royal’ science and ‘minor’ or ‘nomad’ science, see Deleuze and Guattari 361-374.

[8] For their part, Deleuze and Guattari deny the ontological reducibility of problematics to axiomatics, and instead argue in favor of a closer look of their interactions: “Minor science is continually enriching major science,communicating its intuitions to it, its way of proceeding, its itinerancy, its sense of and taste for matter, singularity, variation, intuitionist geometry and the numbering number . . . Major science has a perpetual need for the inspiration of the minor; but the minor would be nothing if it did not confront and conform to the highest scientific requirements.” (485-486)

[9] An attempt to formalize problematics which has its precursors (Galois, Riemann, Poincaré), otherwise neglected, by the official history of mathematics, in favour of the trajectory of axiomatic formalization (Hilbert, Zermelo, Frankel, Gödel, etc.) (Smith, “Axiomatics and Problematics” 159).

[10] Simon B. Duffy, among others, has written extensively on this topic. See Duffy, Simon B. Deleuze and the History of Mathematics: In Defense of the New. London and New York, Continuum , 2013; and also Duffy, Simon B., ed. Virtual Mathematics: The Logic of Difference, Manchester, Clinamen Press, 2006.

[11]Meillassoux describes Figures as the “nonarbitrary and necessary properties”, the “absolute invariants” of any world whatsoever that could be created by the necessary contingency of all things (Hyperchaos) (“Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition” 138).

Sources

Badiou, Alain. Deleuze: The Clamour of Being. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton, New York, Columbia University Press, 1994.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Translated by Ray Brassier, London and New York, Continuum, 1994.

— — —. “Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition: A Speculative Analysis of the Sign Devoid of Meaning.” Genealogies of Speculation: Materialism and Subjectivity Since Structuralism, edited by Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik, London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016, pp.117-197.

Shaviro, Steven. The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Smith, Daniel W. “Badiou and Deleuze on the Ontology of Mathematics.” Think Again: Alain Badiou and The Future of Philosophy, edited by Peter Hallward, London, Continuum, 2004, pp.77-93.

— — —. “Axiomatics and Problematics as Two Modes of Formalisation: Deleuze´s Epistemology of Mathematics.” Virtual Mathematics: The Logic of Difference, edited by Simon B. Duffy, Manchester, Clinamen Press, 2006