Ray Brassier: Noise and Capitalism

Four parts of Ray Brassier's interview to Braham Leven. 


1/ "we can attain an objective perspective on our own subjectivity"


2/ "Integrated global capitalism is constitutively dysfunctional: it works by breaking down. It is fueled by random undecidabilities, excessive inconsistencies, aleatory interruptions, which it continuously reappropriates, axiomatizing empirical contingency. It turns catastrophe into a resource, ruin into an opportunity, harnessing the uncomputible."


3/ "The interesting [part] about noise is its dis-organizing potency: the incompressibility of a signal interfering with the redundancy in the structure of the receiver. Not transduction but schizduction: noise scrambles the capacity for self-organization."


4/ "there can be no ‘aesthetics of noise’, because noise as I understand it would be the destitution of the aesthetic, specifically in its post-Kantian, transcendental register. Noise exacerbates the rift between knowing and feeling by splitting experience, forcing conception against sensation."

Isomorphism

"There is, however, no analytic resemblance, correspondence or conformity between the two planes. But their independence does not preclude isomorphism..." (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.108) We need however to be rather careful at this point cause the use of isomorphism in the Deleuzoguattarian sense is referred to the two planes of content and expression in a direct reference to Hjelmslev's linguistic model. It is the decontextualization of the isomorphism that Delanda sets off to contextualise later at the field of theoretical and experimental physics. He will argue "In this old and tired view (realist), the relation between the plane of reality and that of physics would be one of similarity." (Delanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, p.170-171)   Therefore, he recalls Deleuze in order to break the resemblance without denying the isomorphism and he adds "...the physics laboratory [or the computer simulation as he is arguing to his latest book] may be viewed as a site where heterogeneous assemblages form, assemblages which are isomorphic with real intensive individuation processes" (Delanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, p.170-171)

OOO // Object Oriented Ontology II

"The issue I have is not with either Levi's onticology or Graham's OOO as it is with the general perception (a perception I don't think I've gotten from either of them, but from others) that "object-oriented" philosophy, as a kind of generic term, is a new and important development within Continental philosophy. Used in this broader sense, especially with the "-oriented" attached to the "object," one can't help but to think this means "object" in the everyday English sense of the word. And when I get asked (as I have been) why I'm interested in this trend, it's difficult for me to answer that, because the term sounds too much like "objectivity," "objectivism," and all the other things the word "object" has been philosophically associated with.

The general answer others might give, I imagine, goes something like this: it's a move away from X (subjectivity, perception, phenomenology, correlationism, Kantianism, relationism, or whatever else) and back to the actual real THINGS that make up the world. (That of course sounds, unintentionally I'm sure, a lot like Husserl's "Back to the things themselves!" The difference is that here it's the actual things, not our perceptions of those things. But I'm not willing to concede that we can purify the world of our perceptions.) While I can't pinpoint where I've heard this, it's still made to sound too much like a swing of the pendulum from one side (subjectivity, relationality) to the other (objects). And I dislike that both because I'm tired of swings of the pendulum, when what we need is more integrated accounts of how all these things (objectivity and subjectivity, etc.) work together, and because I think it will have a hard time doing much work outside the limited circles of (mostly) young Continental philosophers who use the term now. So my issue is really a strategic one."

extracted from a blog-post let a thousand objects bloom

OOO // Object Oriented Ontology

Ontology is the philosophical study of existence. Object-oriented ontology ("OOO" for short) puts things at the center of this study. Its proponents contend that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally—plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players, and sandstone, for example. In contemporary thought, things are usually taken either as the aggregation of ever smaller bits (scientific naturalism) or as constructions of human behavior and society (social relativism). OOO steers a path between the two, drawing attention to things at all scales (from atoms to alpacas, bits to blinis), and pondering their nature and relations with one another as much with ourselves.

Bringing some of its foundational figures together for the first time, this inaugural Object-Oriented Ontology Symposium marks an effort to brew a new flavor of post-continental philosophy for the twenty-first century.

The one-day event is free and open to the public.