Lines are not groovyWe should add another word to Harman's collection of adjectives used only to scare the skittish, such as folk and naive: linear.
Heaven knows why, but we are supposed to have an instant reaction against such a notion. Linear, why the very thought of it! Not me. No fear. I'm non-linear. Do I know what that means? Not sure. But I'm all for it. Non-linearity for all!
I've been to countless talks where this term is thrown around and everyone nods sagely as if to say: You wouldn't catch me within a million miles of that stoopid linearity!
Like a lot of things, the linear is really only aesthetic. It has to do with lines. We aren't told whether these lines are straight or curvy, but we suspect that they are straight. Wouldn't want to be caught looking straight, of all things. Curvy all the way.
Linear bundles an instant attitude of superiority and smugness. We're not one of those silly fools who believe in something as naive as lines. And if we do, why the lines we believe in, you probably couldn't even draw them, man. They're complicated!
I'm afraid Hägglund uses “linear” in precisely this way:
Succession should here not be conflated with the chronology of linear time (which is a recurrent misunderstanding of my argument). Rather, succession accounts for a constitutive delay and a deferral that is inherent in any temporal event.
But of course. Anything but that. Heaven forfend that we resemble lines!
11 comments:
Yet, Tim, were I to add "teleological" to this list of bad adjectives would you be so, well, scornful? Surely it's still as fashionable today to sneer at Marx's 'telos', say, the lack of any surprise in Marx's and so on, as it is to sneer at linearity generally? Isn't this where one place where the 'lines' of OOO and post-Marxist linguistic turn theory come together? Because I'd bet my lunch money all this fear of the linear is grounded in the post-Marxism of the linguistic turn. Linearity is a shorthand for the predestination of direction: so, with Hagglund, linear time is about the ECG of past, present, future. Strictly speaking, it isn't about lines but the fixation of line into lifeform: Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology is excellent on this.
I have the feeling you're on board with such criticism of a nonfalsifiable linearity - perhaps even on the grounds of its naivety and 19th-Century folklorishness! To lay my own cards down, I find the 'adjectival' argument to be fair in so far as it attacks a kind the rhetorical orthodoxy in certain radical paradigms of thought - but, in elevating its adjectives into a gallery, it rhetorically insulates OOO from any idea that it need renovate its own thinking in terms of radicality. It's found the anti-radicalism of radicality in the proponents of 'critique'. But what if there were not about radicality at all but about the passkeys of thought? Like, with naive realism, the point is that the adjective 'naive' tars all realism with naivety: the property becomes the object. The trickiness is not that a naive realism may or may not exist but that the description invites a conflation of existence and quality into a correlate with one another. There's nothing beyond the naive. What if, though, naivety was to become a matter of perplexity? What is to be naive? And isn't naivety - insofar as it implies greenness - what the concept of dark ecology marks itself against? My point being that the complex dark ecology so powerfully tackles is also characterologically a naivety it opposes. Does that thereby mean that, because it may not rely on the term 'naive', the beautiful soul doesn't (obviously) stand in its place? Yet, as your own Buddophobia seems poised to show, there may be nothing naive about the concept of 'soul'.
So is it then that you aren't authentically saying something of real merit in your development of dark ecology or is it that the criticisms we pin down to hold our tents aloft often depend on certain predicates that can themselves be elided into the dismissive adjectival form? Is this all about faux-radicalism or is it also about how philosophies age?
While I agree with you that it may well be time to rehabilitate the linear, it isn't just "adjectival": it's a predicate of particular philosophical work and, just as Latour insists it wrong to sociologize the content of an argument away, it's kind of a trick to take the adjective as the best expression of the position. Rather, the adjective reveals the flaw in the original background assumption: it's like a symptom, not a conceit. And this post - like a number of the other 'diagnostic' posts in the OOO quadrant - come over as scornful insofar as it accredits this to 'superiority and smugness'. Like: is there no other way to which the reliance on the stodginess of the linear can be deflated without ascribing it to academic groupthink - that old canard? As a fan of you and OOO, it's this kind of libertarian streak that irks me. It's as if it's more about cultivating a logic of Victim-concepts so as all the more easily turn whatever opponents are supposedly out there into Stalinist conceptual police squads. Like Zizek once said about anti-Semites, there are enough knee-jerk haters of OOO without any need to multiply their number by imagining non-existing ones. Oh, and I should also add that 'lines of flight' have been in academic parlance for some time now. Ditto situationism's drift lines. In that sense, the whole point is to re-evaluate the lineness of lines. Hence Hagglund's use of the term succession. The confusion here is not a phobia of lines but a concern that succession is a chronological restorationism. Line and time is the problem for Hagglund: not icky linearity but the lockbox of each moment in the span of forever. Though staged within deconstructionist tropes of deferral and delay, succession is a great outdoors concept.
Eezy peezy Slatted. I can tell you what "teleological" means. And not all who use it as a criticism are poop throwing Alpha male philosophers (Darwinists, for instance).
However, you can't tell me what "linear" means. You only mean an aesthetic construct I'm supposed to sneer at.
Tim, didn't I tell you what it means? At least for our purposes here: a shorthand for the predestination of direction. The fixation of line into lifeform. Time as entity, the big organic spaceship of everything. Which is what Hagglund, via Derrida, is taking aim at. And, given that aesthetics are no straw man for you as a first philosophy, I suppose the acidic word here is "construct". You may have something there in terms of a critique of Hagglund: that linearity is not the ontological fact of time would, then, presuppose that it is something like a construct, I suppose. Thus, the constructedness of linearity becomes a question about us in relation to the linear. But my point was that Hagglund doesn't argue that time isn't linear really: he argues that the chronology of linear time is always synchronic, as opposed to say to just chronic. Is such a position designed to make any 'linearist' out there a dunce? Is that its whole purpose for thinking as it does? Because it does seem like you're treating it that way. I'd say it's no more or less put out for the express intent of "superiority and smugness" than when OOO treats idea of constructionism as being reducible to a belief that all things are made out of paper-mache, with we the lucky machiers. I guess I just feel like it would be more interesting than assuming 'anti-linearity is contentless' to ask why is linearity a symptom in this philosophy? The problem with just presuming it's all about ego-enhancement is that it leaves you with the conviction that it's all cynicism, that a symptom isn't the blind spot of a set of sincere insights. It's a way of pulling the whole rug from beneath the feet of an argument by defining "rug" as a wig it's trying to pass for real hair.
PS. I'm sorry both my posts here so far have been critical. I should add I'm blissing on your stuff to do with sampling recently. And your 'Queer Ecology' essay was fabulous. Insofar as I'm talking about ascribing a shallowness of motives to "opponents" in the form of saying they're trying to ascribe shallow motives to you ("an aesthetic construct I'm supposed to sneer at"), this is more a follow-up to my previous comment, really.
"There should be some kind of punishment for people who try to stop other people from thinking." Also, uh, sorry if I'm reading in to things here, but if this tweet was referring to my comment, I'm truly mortified. If so, I apologise for making you feel like I was trolling or harassing you - it wasn't at all what I wanted - and absolutely won't comment again.
I can understand why you're cross, Slatted. You have never had to go outside of Zizekian configuration space before. It's cool.
I'm not cross. I just don't get this jealous guarding of sincerity as a value only OOO can own. And perceiving "superiority and smugness" everywhere else, as its corollary, even in the aesthetic use of a concept like 'linear'. And in response, I get told, essentially, my confusion is to be expected seeing as I've apparently never left Zizekian configuration space before. Because, like, I couldn't be asking this out of an immanent interest in OOO: no, that must be a ruse, it must be Zizek behind it all. And yes, I cited him, but I also cited Sara Ahmed. He's not god and I never said he was. I don't know. I obviously came over as picking at you and I'm genuinely sorry for that because all I was really hoping to discuss here was whether there might be a little more to a concept like linearity, whether it's treated in a way which is philosophically incoherent or not, than ego and a sneer-tactic aimed at being hipper-than-thou. Don't you feel reducing it to that is the same thing as Latour's point about critique sociologizing knowledge as a way to zone out the content? And that isn't a rhetorical question, I'm really asking.
"Anything you can do, I can do meta."
Yes, I know the post, Tim: that's why I made the reference to the rug. And one last time, in hope of an answer: "Their mere immediacy is always false. It's the deep structure, the numinous background, the possibility of the possibility of the horizon of the event of being, that is more real, or better, or just more rhetorically effective, than anything else." Exactly: Hagglund's mere immediacy in this instance must be false. The deep structure, the numinous background, the possibility of the horizon of the event of being is more real: thus, rather than linearity proposing a concept of time that advances an aesthetic claim with immediate content, it must be a kind of zoning out of the linear altogether - from the alignment of lines to just basic sneerage at the reductivity of any line whatsoever. The difference between naive and sophisticated succession, to use your words, though even that parsing will be kind of self-fulfilling from a 'going-meta' perspective, is not about the dumbness of the straight line or the lack of difference in moments but the argument that a straight line is attenuated within itself ('constitutive delay', 'deferral') that means that the trace it holds for the future is apprehended like tiny wormholes between past, present and future that don't just bring forward a piece of the past or back a piece of the future but, referred through the wormholes of the wormholes, a trace has to be held within a trace in each successive moment to persist, swiss-cheese time: which runs to Derrida's concept of autoimmunity. I don't see what there is about this that treats linearity as simple or stupid: what it does do is say that the chronology of linear time is not about synchronicity or the order of sequence. It's about interposition and eerie topology, prolongation and shortcut.
i don't always agree with lubos motl, but this old post might be of interest:
http://motls.blogspot.com/2009/04/against-religion-of-chaos.html
"Only I, the cynic, am allowed to be remotely amusing. Everyone else must be deadly serious, so I can mock them."
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