Pre-History of An Encounter
What does it mean to live in the space between worlds? To feel paradigms melting away? It means, in a sense, to be in the void.
The void is outside of meaning and history. This is something we can feel - whether it is Fukuyama’s end of history, or the post-modern rejection of grand narratives and essence, and even in the contemporary rejection of Fukuyama and post-modernism that is incapable of producing real alternatives. We’re falling - flailing around for anything solid that won’t melt into air.
Louis Althusser called this void the philosophical void - modelled after the void of Lucretius’ poetry from which all things were born. The void isn’t empty, just as we occupy our void, the void of Lucretius is filled with falling atoms. So long as they fall in parallel, they give up nothing, no information or meaning. It’s only when one atom swerves, and collides with another, that the whole constellation of our meaningful reality comes into being in the ensuing chaos. The ingredients for meaning are all around us, awaiting the collision.
Why is this allegory important for Althusser? It was, firstly, an implicit broadside against his post-modern and post-structuralist critics, as well as the ghost of secular teleology which has haunted Marxism almost from the beginning. History does have meaning - and narratives do appear, emerging from these atomic encounters - creating their own internal logics, driving their own contradictions. But before the moment of encounter, this vast wealth of meaning did not exist. Not only was its creation a contingent act - its meaningfulness is a result of the necessity of this contingency. An encounter could just as easily not take hold.
There is no historical continuity between what came before and what came after, the internal logic is completely different. And there is no overarching, mechanistic teleology that can tell us what happens next.
To illustrate this point, Althusser asks us to consider why capitalism took hold in Britain and not Italy. After all, the crucial ingredients were all there - accumulated wealth, highly developed commercial relations, manufacturing, and manpower - in 13th and 14th century Italy. Yet capitalism didn’t take hold. These factors, after all, do not exist in history to create capitalism - though this meaning to them can be endowed retroactively, and though they hold within them a number of potentialities. These meanings, and potentialities, are therefore of a stochastic, random, nature.
And just like wealth, manpower and technology were not put on Earth to nurture capitalism, neither could we draw out capitalism and its consequences from these humble beginnings. We could not make a straight line, as Herbert Marcuse did, between the enlightenment and the rationalization of Fordist America and the Soviet Union. Nor did Isaac Newton’s laws of motions demand the dropping of the Atomic bombs on two cities in Japan. Nor was some primordial step of human evolution, imparting us with instincts for domination and violence, ultimately responsible for the Vietnam war. There are many things that are functionally necessary for an event in history, but the objective of historical analysis is to cut through these pre-conditions, and find the driving logic of that specific, contingent, encounter.
But this blog isn’t about historical analysis - it’s about pre-historical analysis. This is the analysis of identifying potentialities, possible encounters, which cause a break in the logic of the world. This is a game of identifying the tendencies which currently exist, how they interact - and what kind of situations might come about from their logical conclusion.
To identify these potential encounters is equally art as science - weaving economic history, philosophy, and speculative imagination together. Beginning with this post, I hope to engage in research and analysis to that end - to identify the living pre-history of encounters - the break-down and creation of states, new regulatory, ideological, theological frameworks, methods and modes of production.
My next post will be on simulating the rate of profit. With any luck, many more will follow - that’s one new year’s resolution of mine.