Iain Hamilton Grant’s Schelling in Opposition to Fichte. Note Quote.

The stated villain of Philosophies of Nature is not Hegelianism but rather ‘neo-Fichteanism’. It is Grant’s ‘Philosophies of Nature After Schelling‘, which takes up the issue of graduating Schelling to escape the accoutrements of Kantian and Fichtean narrow transcendentalism. Grant frees Schelling from the grips of narrow minded inertness and mechanicality in nature that Kant and Fichte had presented nature with. This idea is the Deleuzean influence on Grant. Manuel De Landa makes a vociferous case in this regard. According to De Landa, the inertness of matter was rubbished by Deleuze in the way that Deleuze sought for a morphogenesis of form thereby launching a new kind of materialism. This is the anti-essentialist position of Deleuze. Essentialism says that matter and energy are inert, they do not have any morphogenetic capabilities. They cannot give rise to new forms on their own. Disciplines like complexity theory, non-linear dynamics do give matter its autonomy over inertness, its capabilities in terms of charge. But its account of the relationship between Fichte and Schelling actually obscures the rich meaning of speculation in Hegel and after. Grant quite accurately recalls that Schelling confronted Fichte’s identification of the ‘not I’ with passive nature – the consequence of identifying all free activity with the ‘I’ alone. For Grant, that which Jacobi termed ‘speculative egotism’ becomes the nightmare of modern philosophy and of technological modernity at large. The ecological concern is never quite made explicit in Philosophies of Nature. Yet Grant’s introduction to Schelling’s On the World Soul helps to contextualise the meaning of his ‘geology of morals’.

What we miss from Grant’s critique of Fichte is the manner by which the corrective, positive characterisation of nature proceeds from Schelling’s confirmation of Fichte’s rendering of the fact of consciousness (Tatsache) into the act of consciousness (Tathandlung). Schelling, as a consequence, becomes singularly critical of contemplative speculation, since activity now implies working on nature and thereby changing it – along with it, we might say – rather than either simply observing it or even experimenting upon it.

In fact, Grant reads Schelling only in opposition to Fichte, with drastic consequences for his speculative realism: the post-Fichtean element of Schelling’s naturephilosophy allows for the new sense of speculation he will share with Hegel – even though they will indeed turn this against Kant and Fichte. Without this account, we are left with the older, contemplative understanding of metaphysical speculation, which leads to a certain methodologism in Grant’s study. Hence, ‘the principle method of naturephilosophy consists in “unconditioning” the phenomena’. Relatedly, Meillassoux defines the ‘speculative’ as ‘every type of thinking’ – not acting, – ‘that claims to be able to access some form of absolute’.

In direct contrast to this approach, the collective ‘system programme’ of Hegel, Schelling and Hölderlin was not a programme for thinking alone. Their revolutionised sense of speculation, from contemplation of the stars to reform of the worldly, is overlooked by today’s speculative realism – a philosophy that, ‘refuses to interrogate reality through human (linguistic, cultural or political) mediations of it’. We recall that Kant similarly could not extend his Critique to speculative reason precisely on account of his contemplative determination of pure reason (in terms of the hierarchical gap between reason and the understanding). Grant’s ‘geology of morals’ does not oppose ‘Kanto-Fichtean philosophy’, as he has it, but rather remains structurally within the sphere of Kant’s pre-political metaphysics.

Capitalism Without Being…

There is only one way to escape the alienation of present-day society: to retreat ahead of it. – Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

This powerful statement by Barthes, even, unintentionally, is thetic of ‘accelerationism‘, the position that deliberates on the generation of forces of dissolution as an inherent property of capitalism calling forth to be radically challenged. How could this be achieved without falling into the trap of drawing endlessly vicious circles of positioning the subject of revolt as always peripheral to capital? One contingent solution lies in rehabilitating this subject of revolt in relation to capital, such that, the immense circuit of capitalist exchanges makes room for the possibility of coming-into-existence of all modalities of jouissance, with none of them suffering the fate of getting ostracized (marginalized). This very well echoes Lyotard’s position as stated in his Libidinal Economy.

My interest lay in connecting this rehabilitation with speculative realist stance, which would lock away the correlationist (thinking and being as tightly coupled) side, and appreciate the elevation of thinking capitalism as it would be in-itself. If, one perceives capitalism as a gigantic productive machine, without any relation to the human, one is successful in jettisoning the possessiveness involved therein, as in, capitalism-for-humans, as either putative or pejorative. Capitalism then, as a colossal producing machine, becomes inorganic, and calls for a traction along non-anthropocentric lines. Such a reading creates ruptures within the Marxian discourse, where, speculating on capitalism in-itself is either not permissible due to the tenets of his labour theory of value, or, if at all undertaken, epitomizes levels of insanity. Whereas, capitalism as inorganic, construes speculation to be of highest value. Supplementing this theme, is the DeleuzoGuattarian notion of capitalism-as-proces, where a switch from concrete-ness to processuality invests the onus of housing a true nature of capitalism as shifting  from basic building blocks, such as, forms of alienation to telos (destination) of the process.

The prescription is a call to embrace capitalism, in order to be liberated from the polarities of agonizingly devaluing post-modernism, and increasing bankruptcy of the ideologies of liberal democracy. Such a liberation might create frameworks of naivete, which would subsequently be liquidated with the emergence of inhuman subjectivation in the face of relentlessly indefatigable capitalism. For such emergence to be brought about, the embracing of capitalism would obligate the dissolution of animated ideologies that drive corporate assemblages on the one hand, and mass-based power structures (states, civil societies etc.) on the other. Such a dissolution, in the words of Alex Williams would usher in an absolutization of an adequation of post-human subjectivity to capital, and in turn would also carry a caveat akin to revolution eating its own children. One way to safeguard from this caveat is to go back to Deleuzian notion of metabolic rate within capitalism through the vestiges of Foucauldian ‘man’ that derives its dependency on the analytic of finitude while attempting to face up to the relentless brutal force of capitalism. This not only negotiates the falling back into the already experienced conservative subjectivation, but also formulates a novel theorizing accounting for the expansive nature of capitalism, homeostatically arresting the realization of pernicious potentials of capitalism.

Nothing would obviously prevent from thinking about such a form of realized capitalism as fantasy. Williams invokes the Badiouian fiction with its potency to bring about a completed truth, and in turn actualize its own reality. This invocation is required to undertake a radical new reading of the friction generated in balancing the deterritorializing/reterritorializing axiomatic within capitalism, a position that is not adversative to the real praxis built upon the system. The re-reading departs from Nick Land’s, where any deterritorialization sends an immediate reterritorialization into oblivion. Importantly, what is required is a firm belief in the negativity harbored in capitalism, through an accelerationist reading to safeguard the critique of the left on one hand, and the praxis of the right on another. This would not only maintain Deleuzean becoming sans affirmation, but equally legitimize capitalism’s colossal machinic status in tune with Lyotard’s observation (above), thereby expounding what is truly adequate to capitalism-in-itself.

How would an accelerationist reading differ from another communist revolution-in-the-making? The idea propounded by Williams is most suitable, for, accelerationism, in a weak sense, would be opposed to ameliorative leftism by acting to foreground the structural privations of the capitalist system, and accelerationism in its strong sense would mutate the system itself rather than getting engulfed in the euphoria of capitalism’s downfall. It is precisely in the strong sense of the word, accelerationism would talk about capitalism as inorganic, or as nullifying the subjectivity, or even for that matter, resemble as effectuating inhumanism. This inhumanism, or inhuman becoming poses the  problematic of grounding politics. In other words, with speculative realism as a tool, an un-correlated philosophical system at place would find its grounding on to the correlated domains of political system quite misfitting.

To circumvent this problematic, either through taking recourse to Deleuzean notion of capitalism as a system of deterritorializing/reterritorializing flows, or some sort of dialectical movement, with the haunting of de-subjectivation, if at all attainable, this could only be made so through the trace of what praxis seeks to eliminate….

But, then this is only a dream now with no academic ambitions to pursue. Fictionalised.