Hey - I had a chance to glance quickly over your post and the Zak Stein article. There’s a lot going on and I’ve haven’t had a chance to read deeply, but there’s a couple of initial things that come to mind which I thought would be worth jotting down, even if they are slightly tangential to the content of your post.
The first concerns teleology. As I understand it, what Peirce did in effect was naturalise the philosophical method developed by the transcendental tradition. The promise of Kant’s transcendental method was that despite relinquishing any claim on the Absolute it could still deliver knowledge of invariants in the structure of subjectivity, by inferring from phenomena to their conditions of possibility. These results would be “invariants” in the sense that nothing we learn from e.g. cognitive science would force us to revise them. Naturalising this basically breaks the invariance clause—we can still do transcendental psychology, but it will not deliver a ring-fenced domain of necessary truth impervious to developments in empirical science. We can still do metaphysics (or something like it), but it is dethroned, and loses its claim to stand somehow above and outside other forms of natural enquiry. Suddenly it becomes possible to talk about the Absolute again, but only because our social-linguistic practice of “talking about the Absolute” has itself been empirically situated as a natural phenomenon. I’m all on board for that, but the thing is that while something like metaphysics does come out of this in tact, one thing that definitely does not survive is teleology, since this requires exactly the kind of invariance that a naturalised metaphysics cannot support. Which is why I find it extremely weird to see this placed alongside something like the omega point, which seems to me to jar horribly with the kind of thing Peirce had in mind with ‘scientific metaphysics’. Like, the absence of teleology is exactly the kind of thing that differentiates scientific metaphysics from old school metaphysics, surely? Perhaps I’ve missed something here.
The other concerns Eros—like, I came out of the Stein essay feeling it was somewhat unclear what a return to Eros was actually supposed to involve. I get the sense that Eros is being envisaged here in terms of something like affect or pulsion—sitting nicely with a kind of Nietzchean/Deleuzian vitalism which essentially calls for more flows and intensities in a world perceived as stifling them. This comes out in the critique of Nick Land, which was interesting in the fact that it wasn’t really a critique at all. I mean nowhere in that article does Stein tell us what is actually wrong with Landian accelerationism other than Eros good Thanatos bad, which is a bit like saying it’s just not to his taste. What I’d like to know is what exactly is the difference between Eros and machinic desire, and why is machinic desire being identified with the death drive here? What theory of desire is Stein proposing in its place?
I could perhaps make this more clear by contrasting it with Baudrillard’s view, which is that the contemporary problem is not an absence of Eros, but an excess of Eros caused by the exclusion of Thanatos from the cycle of symbolic exchange. What’s significant is the asymmetry—an excess of Thanatos and an excess of Eros amount to the same thing. Baudrillard would disagree with the identification of the erotic with something like eros qua affect (of love, sexual energy, creative pulsion, will to power, etc)—he would say that the erotic lies in the reciprocal exchange between Eros and Thanatos, a ritual form and nothing to do with desire (which is why a true romance must always end in death—Greek tragedy knew this, and so did Shakespeare!). So from the perspective I’m attributing to Baudrillard Stein’s position is indistinguishable from Land’s.
Anyway those are my disjointed thoughts! As I said I read it all quickly so may be missing stuff. I’m not sure to what extent my complaints align with yours, and I’d have to think a little harder about that!
Sam
