CORRELATIONISM: An Open Letter of Apology

[Layman Pascal]

Let us address this self-parodying question, “Does Correlationism exist -- or do I just think it does?”

First off... I must apologize.  

I am, alas, one of those hideously depraved & pitiable souls who is so poorly “made” that I find myself drawn irresistibly (& shall we say it? ambivalently) into the greedy semantic clutches of every new, half-assed form of philosophical jingoism.  This endlessly mutating jargon usually consists of trans-European conceptual novelties.  But let us be clear:  it is no badge of honor to want to bandy about some suggestive new fragment of neo-intellectuality such as “correlationism”.  

Correlationism?  As I write these words there is not yet even a proper Wikipedia entry about this term but still it is compulsively flung about in avant-garde cliques of high-minded pseudophilosophers.  So, for all these reasons also, I cannot claim to be an expert on this topic.  It is barely a topic!  Please accept another of my sincere apologies!

The word Correlationism enters our culture through Meillassoux’s text, “After Finitude”.  In this book he complains a lot.  One of his major grievances is that human thinking is dumb.. especially dumb when it tries to think about the significance of its thinkingness.  And truly, we have not been terribly clever (or else we have been too clever by half) in talking about the relationship between “ideas” and “things”.

What the hell does that mean?

Ok -- ordinarily I might think of a parrot.  I often do this for a quick laugh.  I'm not proud of it.  Then, being a clever fellow, I would say to myself, “Wait a minute Myself -- THAT is no bird!  It is only your thought of a bird!  It merely represents the Real Parrot!”

So I am a realist.  

But upon closer inspection it turns out that “the Real Parrot” is also a thought.  It is Another Thought.  Amazing!  Both “the parrot” & “the Real Parrot” are both my ideas -- and I cannot access a reality beyond my own thoughts.  Reality is just an idea.

So I am an idealist.

All this is nonsense, both these options, these are what Meillassoux complains about.  He calls it “correlationism”.  This means the attitude that a real thing is just my thought about a real thing -- reality is the “correlation” between my idea & my idea-of-not-just-an-idea.  

Seems like philosophy has come a long way.. but has it?  

I remember that most English-speaking children are introduced to philosophy through the following playground query, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it... does it make a sound?”  This arch-simple problem demonstrates the tricky relationship between Mind and World.  Surely the “tree” does fall -- but does this register anywhere?  Is it detected by someone?  Does it “count”?  

Here the philosopher’s instincts make themselves into the bureaucratic adjudicators of Official Reality.  Does it count?  Does reality count???  This question means I am either fearful and dissociated... or else power-mad & judicial.  Even the dullest philosopher -- especially the dullest! -- finds this situation flattering.

But the Ordinary Schmuck, the yokel, the everyman, understands all this speculation to be sheer nonsense.  His tree simply falls in the forest and anyone could approach to hear it.  He is too busy with life to bother himself about such timid or bureaucratic worries about reality.  And the Scientist is only the ultra-version of this yokel.  The scientist works on a realm that is complex but obvious, real, external.  Otherwise what is he working “on”?

Such yokels are pre-correlationist. If you were to tell that that a handful of the world’s sharpest intellectuals were beginning to risk the radical, tentative hypothesis that... OBJECTS EXIST???  They would scoff derisively!  And rightly so!  They could think of no more meagre & redundant usage of the human investigative consciousness.  

But between the pre-correlationist yokel & the post-correlationist (what they call a “speculative realist”) looms this dubious situation of reality.  The Real strikes the correlationist as dubious, unproven, enslaved to one’s inner conceptual, social & perceptual machinery.

Their tree does NOT make a sound.  

For who can say what goes on without us?  Nothing we can know about.  Nothing at all!  In order for reality to “count” it must get its official stamp.  And if it cannot get this stamp it must be considered to something between a dream & conversation -- but nothing more.  Nothing “on its own”.  So all these philosopher become semi-solipsists.  No one can prove to them that their experience is an experience OF some real thing.  This “of” languishes & dies.  Instead of relating to an external Real World we become withdrawn and slightly curved inward, fixated upon the status of the relationship rather than upon WHAT we are related with.  

These people love their marriages but are ambivalent about their wives.  Correlation takes precedence over substance.  I must again apologize... to the wives!

But how exciting these correlationist ideas can be!  To a certain species of thinker... When you partake of this food you start to feel wonderful, intoxicated.  You feel that humility is on the rise!  Dogma is waning!  We have grown bold enough for deep suspicion -- or even for Truth!  Unlike our depraved ancestors we comprehend the vagaries of relativity & context.  And, perhaps, these really are virtues... but these thinkers are also withdrawn, disengaged from the absoluteness of the Real, insulting the Other by neglecting its sheer otherness.  --  “She only lives while she dances with ME!”

There is an enthusiastic but juvenile pettiness in all of this -- a disparaging reticence in the face of “real things”, a delicate recoil which valorizes itself as the courage to be isolated within the bubble of interactive finitude.

Today -- Gods be praised! -- this correlationist nightmare is being challenged.  Or at least complained about.  Perhaps more trusting husbands are arising?  A less “official” reality is emerging and it may be more classically deserving of a yokel’s respect.  While the correlationists have withdrawn into arcane towers of socio-linguistic & phenomenological intricacy -- cramped, cloud-cloaked -- the laypeople of the emerging super-commercial, hyper-electronic, planetizing “humanity” have languished into naive atheism, regressive religiosity & wanton values-based attacks on civility and factuality.  These towers are too high!  They vanish into atmospheric fog and thereby fail to command truth in the world, fail to prevent the plagues of crude thought.  

So what good are they?

The post-correlationist does not withdraw but, rather, permits the secret Otherness of the Other to withdraw.  To withdraw means that some possibilities remain hidden to for other interactions.  We post-correlationists are coming to rebaptize (rejustify, take-command-of) Science & Math.  Whomsoever provides the foundations shall be master of the structure.  We must admit Science & Math to the secret club of Philosophers, Poets & Neuro-Linguistic Anthropologists.  For several centuries philosophy had been on the run from wild scientific achievements, challenged, reactive, recoiling -- but no longer.  We must be the legimaters of the human enterprise.  We must be confident in the instincts we share with all of the planet -- instincts which can think the absolute (or at least the optimal!) and deploy this absolute to validate the reality of Things... despite our interpretive and cognitive involvement in the perception of their qualities.  

[Balder]

I am curious, Layman, why you say at the beginning of this post that the term is being compulsively flung about by high-minded pseudo-philosophers.  Who are you thinking of here -- Meillassoux, or others?  Why do you call them "pseudo-philosophers"?  Also, 'fess up.  Didn't you just learn the term yourself and then do some quick cramming to write this?  How much of the literature or folks involved have you read -- or are you following Wilber's steps in making sweeping and hyperbolic "orienting generalizations" about things glimpsed from afar off, just for fun and effect?

.... Oh oh oh, I think I get the reference.  The "avant-garde cliques of high-minded pseudophilosophers" must be the very denizens of IPS, since this is where you probably learned about correlationism, possibly starting with the old Meillassoux thread here...?  Well, that much is true.  I am a pseudo-philosopher at best.  Also a pseudo-poet, pseudo-musician, pseudo-meditator, and pseudo-human.  Really.

[Layman Pascal]

I guess I should say, "Um, duh!"  But perhaps that's just the whiskey talking...

To address your curiosity:

This article hardly makes any sense unless I am considered to be one of the pseudophilosophers who has just learned this term -- flinging it about in a high-minded sense.  I am certainly not the only one but I am definitely one.  It must be personal and possibly-not-only-personal if it is to have any worth.  It would have no particular use to me if it merely singled out "some fake philosophers" from "other real philosophers" etc.  Broad self-referential inclusivity should be taken as a given.

Since the subject of the article is to wrangle & promulgate a newly emerging conceptual term/angle which operates at one of the most rare levels of human discourse it is my moral obligation to set the tone as one which half-heartedly damns the users of this term and therefore necessarily myself (hence some of the apologizing!).  

The writing is partly communication, partly summary, partly my digestive process, partly an affirmation, partly a mingling, partly praise, partly insult, etc.  That is to say -- for me -- worth it.

[Balder]

I heard the rib-poking mockery but couldn't tell if you were poking your own ribs in the act; it felt like it might be a joke largely at the expense of your new hosts here, and I felt a little defensive about that.  I probably could use some whiskey myself.

Regarding my question about how much you've read about it, I think it matters, not terribly, but (a) because the term is newly forming and still malleable, still slippery, still finding itself, so a fuller reading would help you get a better sense of its early evolution; and (b) because it has been getting traction and is being used in a number of places (books, blogs, articles), even if Wikipedia is still a bit slow to catch on to this new conceptual critter in our midst.

[Layman Pascal]

Well, I hope I was poking my own ribs -- otherwise they might be sore for a more serious reason!  Obviously you are a prominent bandy-er of the term and thus have my gratitude!  On this topic I've mostly read Bryant and Meillassoux with a few scattered comments by Badiou.  Doubtless I will absorb a few more but I also want to strategically keep my distance so that my input doesn't exceed by too much my own personalized formulations of the heart of the issue.  

Of course when too many people are into... it I'll probably have to abandon for the next newest and most obscure item.  I'm so fickle and trendy!  

Hopefully in the meantime I will crystallize my own sense of the way forward relative to the thought/world pairing.  

[Balder]

(I'm bandying the term, I must confess, because I'm in the midst of a recently commissioned writing project which will take this term as one of its focal points -- so it's "in the air" for me at the moment.  But it's obviously also something we've been engaged with here over the past year or more, as we each suss out our own hopefully fruitful ways forward relative to postmeta, correlationist, and other thought/world pairings...)

[Layman Pascal]

Since you are writin' a brave new bandy, here's a few of my thoughts on the discussing of this topic:

Correlationism is a sexy word but also a little misleading.  Part of what I folded into my article was this sense that the average person can probably understand the distinction that's being made... but it's not always clear what is getting "correlated" to what.  Since every alternative on every side involves some kind of thought/world pairing.  

The question of how "relating to THINGS" differs from "RELATING to things" and "relating TO things" is where I think more clarity (or teasing apart) is needed for a lot of folks. 

And secondly, as I dance through in the article, one of the primary issues about this post-correlationist move is how it might affect the mood of contemporary philosophy and the possibilities of its productive relationship with the non-philosophical majority of humanity. 

Philosophical validity/potency of concepts rests in four broad areas:

1. Integrity & complexity of reasoning (within the historical discourse of philosophy)

2. Aesthetic allure

3. Partial (the gist) comprehension by non-philosophers & anti-philosophers

4. The empowerment of philosophy and philosophers as a benevolent cultural force.

So these are the notes I try to hit.  As usual I think the "academic danger" is to overweight the first factor and treat the others as auxiliary.  

[Balder]

As discussed a couple weeks ago on the OOO thread, a notable thing about a number of the OOO/speculative realist philosophers is that they are active bloggers, interacting openly and regularly with readers (blurring the boundaries between the academy and the "world of yokels," as you put it), and they often release free, open-access copies of their books to the public rather than selling them at high (academic-market) prices (although copies can also be purchased). 

As for aesthetic allure, philosophy isn't for everyone, but there is definitely a quirky and compelling aesthetic in many of these works that could have a minor or even significant cultural impact in the long run:  in these congregating but not univocal works, the universe becomes, in animistic or literary fashion, a teeming, populated ecosystem of mysterious beings, sometimes evoking the "mood" of a David Abram, sometimes of H.P. Lovecraft, sometimes of Bjork or Kevin Kelly or steampunk (machines and artifacts becoming charged things of power, with stories and love lives of their own)...

[Layman Pascal]

Agree. & "like".

The balance must be just right.  Zizek observes in Parallax Effect that philosophy arises in the spaces between communities.  Nietzsche, of course, observes that the philosopher must be untimely, able to absorb and oppose the tendencies of his own epoch.  Together these points give me an impression of a need to simultaneously open to the forms and engagements of the emerging world (mixing with yokels) and also maintain a contemplative distance which is at once loft, commanding and protecting itself from what every says are the exciting new themes and media of our age.  The balance must be just right.

[Balder]

Here being one place, perhaps, where philosophy and the contemplative life overlap: I'm thinking of Thomas Merton's writings on the need for "marginal men," for those who (for a time, or for a life) withdraw to the margins of society, in part to better and more lucidly engage with it (in other part, of course, to better achieve a fruitful contemplative distance).

[Edward theurj Berge]

Fuck balance. I've lived on the margins since conception and as my Goddess sings, I was born this way. True I've sacrificed a normal life but never much cared for that anyway so no sacrifice, really. Good thing that my writing is clear and concise so that most folks with some semblance of intelligence understand the often difficult philosophical topics I investigate. But given my marginal social aptitude it's not as though I'm trying to be kind to yokels, just a good writer for the sake of exemplifying excellence. One (many) might argue that I'm obsessed with excellence in certain domains (dance being another example) at the expense of being 'un-balanced' in other areas. But again, fuck that.

[Balder]

I was going to bring up Sloterdijk's work to you, and in searching for an essay by him I'd read previously, I came across this blog* entry, which discusses Sloterdijk, correlationism, and OOO/speculative realism in the same piece -- reflecting on the political and ecological dimensions of correlationism and the turn from correlationism.  Elsewhere Sloterdijk also considers the (post-metaphysical) spiritual dimensions of such a turn (such as in You Must Change Your Life, or Spheres). 

 

 

*I kind of like that the blog is named after a Nepalese knife, which we also have displayed on one of our selves at home.  But I also kind of dislike it, since I expect the author may have affinities with the Maoists in Nepal, who have made life quite difficult for my wife's (democrat) family.

[Layman Pascal]

Dear Margin-dweller-with-terrible-taste-in-music,

Couldn't have said it better myself.

The particular area/value where integralists & 2tierists & meditative thinkers tend to hung up is on the performative over-estimation of the utility of balance.  And when this is pointed out they quickly agree -- as if you could balance balance with imbalance.  Is this a cul-de-sac or a triumph???

But the alternative to "mere imbalance", "mere balance" & "balancing balance with imbalance" is...

On the other hand, I'm currently listening to amateur online electronica remixes of quotes from the film "Big Trouble in Little China".  

Not sure what THAT proves.