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.  

[Edward theurj Berge]

I actually think Big Trouble is a classic and have seen it numerous times. And as for the Lady, thems fighten' words buster! (See my exegesis here.)

[Layman Pascal]

Okay, in the interest of civility I will leave aside all plain remarks indicating the musical insufficiency, mediocre transhumanism & cultural redundancy of that illegitimate offspring of a one-night stand between Madonna and Salvador Dali -- and move on to propose a diplomatic solution.  What is my proposal?  A radical new direction for this forum...

INTEGRAL POST-METAPHYSICAL BIG TROUBLE IN THE LITTLE CHINA

[Balder]

I like it, but it needs to be a mash-up.  Add in a good dose of Tremors, and I'm in.

[Layman Pascal]

Well, Tremors is an excellent depiction of how the subterranean one/many irrupts from the failure-of-relationship to terrorize (and justify) the lurking paranoia of anti-urban conservatives... okay -- it's in!

INTEGRAL POST-METAPHYSICAL BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA (FEAT. "TREMORS") 

[Edward theurj Berge]

Actually she is the offspring of Hermes and Aphrodite, from my rhetaphorical standpoint. Perhaps Big Tremors in Little China?

[Layman Pascal]

Now, who deals well with this question -- so seldom touched upon in popular discourse -- of the two opposed ways in which the anthropocentric critique is deployed?  

Meaning

(a) it is anthropocentric for human beings to think that they KNOW about a real world beyond their human thoughts

(b) it is anthropocentric for human beings to hoard reality and presume that only human thoughts are knowable.  

I am constantly looking at one every time I hear the other and in this parallax we are close in on Correlationism's flank (though, as I understand it, Sloterdijk considers "ad hominem" to be the true flank attack...)

[Balder]

Hmmm, is it anthropocentric to think that our nature is only our nature?

Or to think that our nature must be equally others' nature...?

:-D

[Balder]

I was thinking Bruno Latour might be one who deals well with the dimensions of the anthropocentrism critique, and came across this blog entry (featuring brief quotes from Latour and Tom Tyler).

 

Latour, like many in the OOO crowd (see Morton's Ecology Without Nature), challenges the modern/Romantic polarity of "Man" and "Nature" -- which arguably is the foundation of most charges of anthropomorphism.

 

Here's a fuller quote, to flesh out the blog snippet above:

 

Must we solemnly announce the death of man and dissolve him in the play of language, an evanescent reflection of inhuman structures that would escape all understanding?  No, since we are no more in Discourse than we are in Nature.  In any event, nothing is sufficiently inhuman to dissolve human beings in it and announce their death.  Their will, their actions, their words are too abundant.  Will we have to avoid the question by making the human something transcendental that would distance us for ever from mere nature?  This would amount to falling back on just one of the poles of the modern Constitution.  Will we have to use force to extend some provisional and particular definition inscribed in the rights of man or the preambles of constitutions?  This would amount to tracing out once again the two Great Divides, and believing in modernization.

If the human does not possess a stable form, it is not formless for all that.  If, instead of attaching it to one constitutional pole or the other, we move it closer to the middle, it becomes the mediator and even the intersection of the two.  The human is not a constitutional pole to be opposed to that of the nonhuman. The two expressions 'humans' and 'nonhumans' are belated results that no longer suffice to designate the other dimension.  The scale of value consists not in shifting the definition of the human along the horizontal line that connects the Object pole to the Subject pole, but in sliding it along the vertical dimension that defines the nonmodern world.  Reveal its workof mediation, and it will take on human form.  Conceal it again, and we shall have to talk about inhumanity, even if it is draping itself in the Bill of Rights.  The expression 'anthropomorphic' considerably underestimates our humanity.  We should be talking about morphism.  Morphism is the place where technomorphisms, zoomorphisms, phusimorphisms, ideomorphisms, theomorphisms, sociomorphisms, psychomorphisms, all come together.  Their alliances and their exchanges, taken together, are what define the anthropos.  A weaver of morphisms -- isn't that enough of a definition?  The closer the anthropos comes to this distribution, the more human it is.  The farther away it moves, the more it takes on multiple forms in which its humanity quickly becomes indiscernible, even if its figures are those of the person, the individual or the self.  By seeking to isolate its form from those it churns together, one does not defend humanism, one loses it. (Latour, We Have Never Been Modern)