CFP: Inscriptions

Inscriptions, a journal of contemporary thinking on philosophy, psychoanalysis and art, invites contributions to our upcoming issue Outsourced! Mediatisation and rivalry. We are looking for well-crafted and skilfully written scholarly essays, interviews, reviews, short interventions, and opinion pieces that engage the theme of this issue and/or our mandate.

To raise oneself above the fray, to situate oneself at distance, to let someone else act in our stead – these are ways that enable us to take up an analytical, reflective position. When the mind is released from the immediacy of the biological drive, we can enter into a mediate relation to our world, and it is this indirect, contemplative relation that lays the ground for reflection and insight.

The psychoanalyst and philosopher Slavoj Žižek has used the term “outsourcing” to explain this effect: when we allow others to act and react in our place, we let them be active for us. This kind of interpassivity – some agent is active so that we can be passive – allows the observer to take up a mediate relation to his or her world by letting the interpassive relationship articulate the immediacy of the drive. Indeed, in the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan we observe a necessary movement of mediatisation as we become beings of desire: it is through the intervention of language that we can rise above the immediacy of the drive and begin to articulate what it is that we want. Language, in this view, is a vehicle to mediatise desire.

In the philosophy of Wolfgang Schirmacher the active agent of interpassivity takes the shape of a mediated figure, the Homo generator. This is an inaugurator of human reality in the media, and as such it is a stand-in for the observer and consumer. It is in this sense that the mediate figure serves as a clone of our inner desires: in the media we can see generations of new life, and we can begin to determine our biological and spirital future. The interpassive encounter in Schirmacher is decidedly more artful, more social, than Žižek's psychoanalytic approach. The key distinction lies in the medium where our desires are transposed: is it restricted to a psychic and linguistic realm, or does mediatisation take place in a social, and potentially empirical domain?

It was as an amalgamation of these two senses of mediatisation that Rene Girard's theory of mimetic rivalry emerged as a profound and comprehensive explanation of violence half a century ago. The figure of a mediator – or model – of desire enabled Girard to study how it is that what we believe is most intimately ours, our desire, continues to be shaped by our mediators, which, in turn, become our rivals in our quest to satisfy our desires. To Girard it was characteristic of desire itself
that it was shaped by mimesis, governed by attempts to upend our rivals, and culminating in mass-mediated spectacles that stage the elimination of the mediator and model.

Our forthcoming issue of Inscriptions (vol. 3, no. 1) seeks to investigate questions of desire, mediatisation, and rivalry in ways that encompass both psychic and social approaches, and that engage several senses of terms such as medium, model, and rivalry. Key questions include:

• In what sense is our desire mediated in traditional and contemporary media, and to what effect?
• What is the relation between media consumption and reflection, and how can philosophy intervene in the debate over social media?
• How does the process of mediatisation generate social effects such as scapegoating, and in what sense should we take a normative stand on such effects?

Submission instructions

Academic essays should be 3,000 to 4,500 words. We also seek scholarship in the form of interviews, reviews, short interventions, opinion pieces, etc., and in these cases we also seek shorter texts. Inscriptions adheres to the Chicago Manual of Style (footnotes and bibliography). For other instructions, please see our website. We encourage potential authors to submit proposals for review prior to their writing/submitting entire full-length manuscripts. Include title, proposal (150 words),
short biography, and institutional affiliation in your preliminary submission. All academic essays undergo double-blind peer review.

Submit proposals, essays and literary fiction on or before September 15 through our online platform at https://inscriptions.tankebanen.no/

Yours sincerely,

Torgeir Fjeld

Editor-in-Chief, Inscriptions

http://inscriptions.tankebanen.no/

Part the Fourth. Mirror Images: Philosophy, Feuerbach, and the Dialectics of Consciousness

by Simon Smith

What Things May Come: the Future of a Dialectic 

Well I did say, approximately three parts.

The deconstruction of speculative philosophy and theology marks the end of Feuerbach’s journey, or at least our version of it. It does not, of course, mark the end of his radical critique. Oh no, indeed it does not. We still have one more step we can take and beyond that, who knows? 

Faced with the choice between theology’s fever-dream of Being-just-being-itself-in-plenitude-and-necessity and the ever-more narrow horizons of radical and contingent subjectivity, philosophy chose the latter course. So much is clear from philosophy’s transformation into the modern sciences.

Consciousness strives. Anyone for String Theory?

Step 3: Science

The abstraction of being-concepts from all relation and experience continues unabated. For the dialogue that births the dialectic of religious consciousness, there is no room at the philosophical inn.

Stumbling to a halt on the threshold of pure reason, philosophy finds its conceptual pockets empty. Empiricism and its younger, smarter brother, Logical Positivism, open the door only to bar the way to metaphysical myth and speculative fantasy. Lacking any experiential content, the absolutes and ultimates of onto-theology make no experiencable difference to human knowledge or human action. For “that which has no predicates or qualities has no effect upon me; that which has no effect upon me has no existence for me. To deny all the qualities of a being is equivalent to denying the being himself.”[1] Having no effect, absolute being, sheer noesis, are dismissed as empty abstractions. All that remains is the product of rigorous empirical, i.e. scientific, investigation. Reality as it really is: causally determinate, objective, scrubbed clean of every vestige of subjectivity, stripped of every trace of human consciousness and personality, a universe so utterly unlike us that it is, at base, not even made of stuff or substance, but of rhythmic patterns of energy.

With the detailed mapping of the physical universe well underway, and neither hide nor hair of humanity to be found, one might suppose that the dialectic of consciousness must now finally grind to a halt.

Indeed one might, but one would be wrong. Oh yes indeed.

For Feuerbach, the self-same projects are quite as busily at work in these new modes of thought as ever they were in the old. In some cases, the anthropic content is as poorly disguised as it was in the original religious projection; the moral of Neo-Darwinist dog-eat-dog dogma, for example, is particularly hard to miss. It may well be that “selfish” genes shape the evolution of our species; to Feuerbachian eyes, however, they also represent, metaphorically or mythologically, the development of consciousness and culture in the modern era.

A depressing enough conception of consciousness as a function of biological forces; it is not the only idea or ideal embodied by the modern sciences, however. Even by the 19^th Century, when Feuerbach was writing, the physical sciences had made their bid for infinity and omniscience. Through telescope and microscope, he observed, scientists had begun to count “the stars in the sky, the ova in the spawn of fish and butterflies, and the colour spots on the wings of insects.” And while one scientist may fix his gaze upon Venus or Mars, someone somewhere is bound to be looking at Uranus.[2]

And that, dear friends, is the best joke in philosophy.

These “objective” conceptions reflect that other, more primal, more personal one we have already encountered: that participation in the other, which constitutes my own self-construction. In plain Feuerbachian speech, limitation lies in isolation; collectively, as members of a community of knowledge, for example, we may strive for the infinite.

More interesting still, a new kind of speculative cosmology has emerged during the last hundred years or so, one that reflects an older and far healthier image than did its theological ancestor. In scientific cosmology, we find a universe in which human beings play an integral part. Our universe is the universe it is, only because it is the concatenation of interpenetrating forces, which actually does constitute it. That must, in some way, include the very consciousness that explores and explains it; unless we plan to retreat into an untenable Cartesianism, that is. In the words of the great Carl Sagan, “[t]he cosmos is… within us,” in every sense; “we are made of star-stuff.” If religion gives us the social self writ large, scientific cosmology has redone it in a big glittery pen with lots of heavy underlining. How else should the Evolutionary Biologist, Julian Huxley, conclude that “[a]s a result of a thousand million years of evolution the universe is becoming conscious of itself?” Why else might Einstein endow astrophysics with an anthropo-theological flourish by remarking that “the one issue of true religion” is that “optical delusion of… consciousness,” the strange but persistent belief that “our thoughts and feelings are somehow separate from all the rest [of the universe].”

Conclusion: Don’t Panic, There is a Happy Ending

Refined and rarefied it may be, but the social self, our species being, remains at the heart of these cosmic conceptions, transforming the cosmos into a mirror for developing self-consciousness. No “merely theoretical or inert conception,” no literal projection, that is. Presenting the primal connections in which we become, these anthropic images continue to “call us to action, to imitation.” Projections of “perfectibility” reflect actual aspirations: modes of relation worthy of replication: they reflect both what we were and what we yet might be: consciousness engaged in its own cosmological extensions.

No longer a personification of the cosmos; this is a cosmologising of consciousness. And in it we may begin to see the psychodynamic possibilities such evocative constructs hold for human development and for the universe of which it is a part. Images of cosmic consciousness reveal the universe as it is known and the mind that knows it. Echoing Huxley, Sagan reminds us of the real import of Delphi’s Oracle: “[w]e are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”

So we come to the crux of Feuerbach’s radical critique, his negation of philosophy. The point here is not, of course, to reduce the sciences to anthropomorphic projection. It is to reveal the dialectic that is and always has been at work within all our explorations and explanations, so initiate the anthropological reconstruction of our cosmological projects. That is the ‘anthropotheistic’ drive of consciousness which philosophy embodies. In other words, it reminds us of the role these conceptual constructs, these maps of reality, play in our own self construction, in the development of consciousness. And in reminding us, Feuerbach’s radical critique awakens us to the transformative potential of these ideas and ideals, allowing us to re-enter them and participate consciously, self-consciously, in our own becoming.

And this is where the story really starts!

---

[1] Essence of Christianity, 14.

[2] Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, 17.

Part the Third. Mirror Images: Philosophy, Feuerbach, and the Dialectics of Consciousness

by Simon Smith

Feuerbach’s Radical Critique: Unpacking the Dialectic

Thus far, we have seen the development of consciousness as religious consciousness: a dialectic reflecting on the co-constitution of itself, its own essential sociality. We have also seen how that reflection reveals a fundamental disharmony between the self and the other inside, a disunion between who I am and who I ought to be. This is the creative insecurity, Kierkegaard’s five thousand fathoms of doubt, which drives the dialectic of religious consciousness onward and upward, transforming religion into onto-theology, speculative philosophy, before delivering consciousness into the hands of modern materialism and all its abstract metaphysical constructs.

Atheism, ho!

Step 2: Theology & Philosophy

Theology sees religious consciousness cast out of the Garden of Eden. The self no longer recognises itself as a participant, still less a constituent, of the primal dialogue, I and Thou. The dialogue is still the ground of my Being, but it’s no longer who I am. It is only who ought to be and consequently who I am not. By objectifying the dialogue, theology alienates the self from its natural context, transforming it into a separate, subjective, limited, and contingent being: the object of a real, which is to say, necessary, Being.[1]

Re-framing the divine Other as Objective Subject, forces religious consciousness to acknowledge the anthropic implications of its projection: the personal predicates at work in our thought and talk about God no longer represent objective truths about personal being. If they did, they would belong to the self, necessarily; but a self that ought to possess such qualities obviously can’t possess them necessarily. The personal God, therefore, appears as an anthropomorphism; its qualities: expressions of subjectivity, nothing but reflections of finitude and contingency.

The predicates will have to go. 

So begins an act of intellectual purification: in Feuerbach’s words, the “abstraction from all that is sensuous and material”[2] about the believer’s conception of God, the purging of all religion’s “subjective” content, the better to isolate the “true” or “objective” grounds of conscious existence.

It seems possible, if not probable, that the classical doctrine Contemptus Mundi is at work in all this. Exorcising the temptations and contaminations of finitude, in the words of the Book of Common Prayer: “the World, the Flesh, and the Devil.”

Theologically, that may be so; Feuerbach, however, walks a more strictly philosophical path. By purging the project of anthropomorphism, he sees religious consciousness as striving to meet the realist conditions of its own objectification. The move is a tentative one at first: the divine predicates are not rejected absolutely but merely distinguished from the divine subject. In this way, the consciousness that negates itself may still reclaim itself as a reflection of Necessary Being, relocate its own contingent being within the charter of an Objective Subject. That way, theology resists the fullest implications of its necessitarian demands. Apparently, theology wants to have its ontological cake and eat it.

Under the austere gaze of speculative philosophy, however, theology will find that there is no cake.

Mere distinction is not enough: the personal predicates from which God-talk is arises must be stripped away completely.  No vestige of subjectivity must remain if we are to encounter the Real Being of God.

This acid rejection of personal predicates – and cake – forces consciousness into an ontological crisis. Apart from some predicable possibility, Being remains logically underdetermined. Entity is a presupposition of recognisable, describable identity. Sans identity, the presupposition is cast adrift without the logical anchor of that which it’s supposed to presuppose. In abstraction from any recognisable mode of existence, being-just-being-itself – the ground of being – lacks particular instantiation: it – whatever it is – is not this, that, or any other thing. Necessary Being is nothing but an empty construct.

Logically dubious and descriptively threadbare, the Objective Subject is pragmatically disastrous. Since it offers no distinguishable existence, there can be no real relation. Being isolated from particular effect means Necessary Being is isolated from the particular “effect” that is the finite self. But a God who’s isolated from us, “who does not trouble himself about us, who does not hear our prayers, who does not see us and love us, is no God.”[3]

In the end, Necessary Being has neither moral nor psychological purchase to offer. Breaking the ontological tension here leaves consciousness with a deceptively simple dichotomy. Take refuge in the illusions of Necessary Being; or confine itself to the narrowing limits of self-separating, contingent “being,” the isolation of consciousness: being as a limited, finite individual.

And this is where the story really starts!

---

[1] See Essence of Christianity, 29-30.

[2] Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, 13.

[3] Essence of Christianity, 213.

Part the Second. Mirror Images: Philosophy, Feuerbach, and the Dialectics of Consciousness

by Simon Smith

Feuerbach’s Radical Critique: Unpacking the Dialectic

In the previous instalment, we set out to consider the point and purpose of philosophy. In truth, this is a question that has troubled me for some time. I have come to suspect that there isn’t one – at least as far as academic philosophy is concerned. What, one might fairly wonder, do (academic) philosophers actually do, apart from talk a load of old toot to other academic philosophers?

From this, of course, it does not follow that philosophy, per se, has neither point nor purpose, although that is also a distinct possibility. However, the unexamined life, as Socrates reminds us, is hardly worth the candle. Likewise, Feuerbach saw, in philosophy the most truly and profoundly human of all human acts. No, not eating seventy-five hotdogs in a minute. And it’s not taking pictures of other humans sans vests either. No, what Feuerbach saw in philosophy was an act of self-discovery, of self-transformation, of becoming human. Indeed, it’s not only philosophy but every attempt to understand ourselves and our universe that embodies, better, manifests the dialectic of consciousness.

Let’s take this one step at a time.

Step 1: Religion

The dialectic works like this: in the first stage, we see the “objectification,” the projecting outwards, of our true nature; what Feuerbach’s calls our “species being”.

“Species being” represents the primal determination of the self, the essence of our humanity. And that determination or essence marks the self as a social reality; consciousness, to borrow Austin Farrer’s phrase, is a “social product.”[1]

The roots of who and what we are, of all the various modalities in which personal identity is embodied, lie in the arms of those who cradled us and cared for us and taught us how to be conscious human beings in the first place. We’re made to be cared for, as John Macmurray rightly said – the psychological evidence is undeniable; the biological evidence, irrefutable (though probably a lot more fun). Simply put, selfhood does not spontaneously burst forth, like a pluke on the end of one’s nose. It is invested in us.

In particular, we’re taught to think, or more precisely to speak. Talked into talking, we learn, as Farrer put it, to “talk silently to the images of the absent, or… pretend to be our own twin, and talk to ourself.” And so we learn to think, for “[t]hought is the interiorisation of dialogue.”

From which it follows, of course, that people who do not talk to others cannot think for themselves.

In teaching us to think, those who have and hold us stake their claim to the structure of those primal transactions: they too are internalised, instilling the self with what Feuerbach called “the inner life of man.” The developing self, its needs, activities, and perspectives are refracted by, passed through, the image of the other. Being “filtered”, the self learns to evaluate and re-evaluate itself, to construct and re-construct itself, in relation to others. And so, in other words, I learn to double myself, to put myself in the place of others and re-enact that otherness. To become I, that is, the self must learn to be Thou unto others.

That, in sum, is what Feuerbach sees at the heart of religious mythology: the anthropomorphic personification of “species being,” the “inner life of man” writ large in illuminated text and reflected in the life of faith: “[t]he image of God [he said] is…the ‘mirror of man’.”[2] In that mirror, consciousness reflects back upon itself, not directly, but refracted through the idealised image of itself, the essential sociality of its nature. This image, however, destabilises the self; for, as Feuerbach put it, it “proclaims to me what I ought to be, it also tells me to my face, without any flattery, what I am not.”[3]

And who wouldn’t love that?

Thus am I thrown “into strife, into disunion with myself;” thus am I compelled to confront and indeed participate in the dialectics of my own self-construction.

Philosophically speaking, consciousness conceives, i.e. enacts, itself in relation to a transcending archetype, an idealised otherness.

To the religious believer, of course, that means putting oneself in the way of God’s will, of enacting that will in the world.

Nota bene, the reduction here, insofar as there is one, is epistemological, not ontological. Contrary to popular opinion, Feuerbach’s claim is not “What God is to me, is all God is,” but simply, “[w]hat God is to me is to me all he is.”[4]  The repetition is crucial.  God can only be (for me) what God is (to me).  That means no ontological reduction, but instead a demand for psychological purchase, a recognisable predication-principle. The point of application (of truth) is the point of appropriation of the self. That is to say, in order to instantiate human being, consciousness appeals for “a being with attributes analogous to the human.” Analogous because cosmological instantiation cannot be literally predicated of God.  In short, although ostensibly “about” God, the analogate of the analogy is for us.

And this is where the story really starts!

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[1] This is from Faith and Speculation, although I can't find the exact page just at the moment. If anyone is interested, drop me a line and I’ll dig it out.

[2] Volume VI, 78, Feuerbach’s Collected Works; quoted Wartofsky, 292.

[3] Essence of Christianity, 47. Cf. Iris Murdoch, Sartre, Romantic Rationalist (London: Fontana, 1967), 65-66: ‘A sense of value then is as sense of lack, the lack of a certain completeness; and the reflective consciousness which reveals to us this lack (under the eye of which what we are shrivels, as it were, to nothing) is properly called a moral consciousness.’

[4] Essence of Christianity, 16; my emphasis.