the turn to Nyarlathotep—bringing the void to birth

In an entry to l’infini et le néant entitled “Inkblots and Infinity“, I presented two aphoristic vignettes developing intuitions that, when the journal entry was written in February, seemed to suggest an anti-realist position. Though “The Rorschach Test” admits that there is raw material being dealt with—the interplay of ink and paper, the “differance between colors and white”—it is the human mind that is “able to shape it into meaningful objects.” The human element is explicitly responsible for bounding beings, giving them shape—imposing differences upon an undifferentiated world. So, to paraphrase Nietzsche, it smells offensively anti-realist. I will attempt to save it—to eradicate the smell—by performing a surgery of sorts, if not a full-blown resurrection, with the aid of Levi Bryant’s Principles of Onticology.

What about it is anti-realist, though, if it (notice that I am unwilling to take responsibility for the post’s contents!) concedes a really-existing, though formless, world? In other words, is it really dead? The answer lies, I believe, in Levi’s Epistemic Fallacy. It states that the reduction of ontology to epistemology is fallacious. Assuming this to be true—and why shouldn’t it be?—we can see clearly that the “really-existing world” of “Inkblots and Infinity” undergoes a metamorphosis when it is given over to the perceiving human; the human, in other words, calls beings into being from the muddled nothingness of being-without-Man. This is the same as Sartre’s view in La Nausée (cf. Word Vomit), which sees the human subject as hammering the world, like a throbbing lump of aluminum, into shape. The world’s way of being is thus determined by the human intellect, rather than by the world itself. Furthermore, we might point out that it is suggested that world is incapable of determining itself, since it wallowed flabbily in a state of nothingness until Das Man whipped it into shape. What can be said of the being of such a world? It is truly nothing, as the term is defined in the post’s comments.

Our indictment is heavy. But, in spite of this, I believe there are ways of treating the corpse-post that will enable us to extract some useful organs for transplant. To do this, I will rely heavily on two more of Levi’s principles—the Ontic Principle and Latour’s Principle. I quote his definitions:

Ontic Principle – There is no difference that does not make a difference. This is to be understood in three ways: 1) Ob-ject-iles are compositions of difference (here “composition” should be understood as both having musical connotations and connotations of “material composition”), 2) Ob-ject-iles differ in themselves insofar as they are constantly changing through their adventure in time and “autopoiesis” or enlistment of other ob-ject-iles to produce themselves, and 3) ob-ject-iles make differences on other entities. Minimally, “to be” signifies to make a difference.

Latour’s Principle – There is no transportation without translation. Follows from the Ontic Principle. Insofar as there is no difference that does not make a difference, it follows that no assemblage or ob-ject-ile can transport or convey its difference to another assemblage or ob-jectile without a process of translation or weaving of differences in which singularities must contend with one another in the production of a state-change in one or both of the assemblages involved.

(For definitions of unfamiliar concepts mentioned above, such as “ob-ject-ile”, I highly recommend Levi’s original post “Principles of Onticology“.)

Again assuming Levi’s principles to be true, we must immediately excise any mention of a metaphysics of presence—the flab of presence- and absence-to-hand, the gauche appeal to differance. “Minimally, ‘to be’ signifies to make a difference.” If we are careful in our reading, it is clear that this does not imply presence or absence, but only the disseminating action of force, a causal relation that can be initiated from any point(s) in the continuums of being, space, or time. An important feature of this observation—this peeling away of the flab—is that it allows us to be distinctly realist. In order to be at all, beings must differ from each other, and so, for a human to be at all, let alone exert mental influence upon the world, beings must already populate that world.

This realism has a further advantage in that it accommodates certain of anti-realism’s most important insights without committing the Epistemic Fallacy—and becoming anti-realist. Of these, “Inkblots and Infinity” attempts to shore up the notion that the human exerts some kind of creative influence on the world, and that the quality of the human’s access to (and, thus, impact on) the world is determined by the underlying structures of the mind, though this latter point is made more explicitly in Word Vomit. Both insights are easily transported into our newfound realism by re-reading them in light of Latour’s Principle.

First, humans, like any other beings, have their being in virtue of making a difference. Their activity of differing pushes against other beings, which are in turn forced to “translate” these differences. As the differences are conveyed from the human to another being—and onward to other beings—the field of differences is upset into “the production of a state-change.” The second insight is accounted for if we note that the conveyance of differences is not unilateral, but bidirectional. Humans do not send forth their differences, thus creating a new world by some kind of apotheotic fiat, but they are mere beings-in-the-world that are also subjected to the differences of beings. The differential activity of beings is, thus, reciprocal.

We are finished with surgery, having successfully removed the necrotic tissue and dispelled the stink. Post-op care is nothing more than a bit of physical therapy for maintenance. There are, however, surgical scars that will guide some of my questioning from this point: articulating an Orthodox anti-humanism, as well as elaborating on differential ontology, beings as acts, etc. Despite these lacunae, I believe that this post puts the final nail in the coffin of my anti-realism, which had long been a point of great inner struggle for me. My home and my rest are for now taken with Speculative Realism.