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Text of the page (random words):
all too obvious camp is a word which miéville uses often in this context sexualization both in shape and in actions see the famous scene of the alien s tail creeping up lambert s leg conversely the weird indexes that which is utterly alien unsettingly resistant to conceptualization impossible for thought to metabolize as miéville notes however this concept proof constructions used as literary devices impose an interesting disjunction very noticeable in lovecraft on the one hand their complete transcendence while on the other the literary necessity and the human desire to get to describe them so we are told how utterly impossible the shapes seen by the terrorized witness were and yet these latter are still able to go on describing them in all their grotesque details this tension is even more evident miéville observes when lovecraftian creatures are tamed in order to be located in the economy of spin offs rpgs so how many hps does a shoggoth have i don t fully share miéville s passion for tentacled creatures which i still find too easily sexualized so i think that in this respect cthulhu is the least successful of lovecraft s deities all too representable reason for its iconic popularity indeed miéville laments the capitalist mercification of cthulhu in plush form shame on me for having bought one as compared to other more thoroughly cosmic old ones even in fiction then abysmal incomprehensibility must give something in to representation just as an incredulous or terrified for that matters stare is not an argument a blank page is not a story the weird attempts to describe things so violently in themselves to shatter any attribution of meaning and scale down human self perception in this regard i was extremely pleased with miéville s claim that william hope hodgson was perhaps a worse writer but a more interesting one than lovecraft was since well i always thought that to be the case you want cosmic weirdness and ancestral isolation the breathtaking second half of the house on the borderland a book that is now over a century old still leaves me speechless at every re read if you got a kindle you can find a free copy in the kindle store do get it the weird is not the horror of the unheimlich re cognition but that of getting a glimpse of the unknown and realizing that it is operating according to meaningless rules rules which have been in place far before we appeared in the universe and will go on undisturbed after we ll depart it i am deeply enamored with thomas ligotti s short story in the story the astronomic blur part of sideshow and other stories in teatro grottesco a two pages long tale of a mysterious yet anonymous bland little store with a strange flickering light it s hard to convey the mood which ligotti builds up in just a few paragraphs but the last masterfully constructed one is a marvelous example of the getting a glimpse on the meaningless trope of weird fiction perhaps i had seen too deeply into the nature of the little store and it was simply warning me to look no further on the other hand perhaps i had been an accidental witness to something else altogether some plan or process whose ultimate stage is impossible to foresee although there still comes to me on certain nights the dream or mental image of a dark sky in which the stars themselves burn low with a dim flickering light that illuminates an indefinite swirling blur wherein it is not possible to observe any definite shapes or signs leave the unknowable alone or it shall annihilate your ambitions with the hazy banality of its meaninglessness having reached this point it is all too easy to leap from weird fiction to meillassouxian realism of contingency and related philosophical ideas for what is hyperchaos if not a name for those strange aeons during which even death may die this is a most delicate point since we are starting to walk the thin line between the careful comparison of certain kinds of sensibility of affine orientations of thought and the wholesale meaningless in the vulgar sense and often pretentious unregulated exchange of concepts between dark literature and philosophy when asked about style miéville concedes some ground to the critics that accuse lovecraft of over writing of employing a baroque faux 18th century and heavily adjectival style yet he defends the necessity of such a convoluted style for weird fiction to achieve its affective results i wasn t surprised since miéville quite obviously adores to use powerful and often cryptic words if you ask me occasionally indulging in this impressionistic practice too much see the quantity of things which ooze in perdido street station which don t get me wrong is a staggering novel in content and in style winds aerostats blood spit skin houses rivers flying creatures however in fiction a story has to be told and i wouldn t want miéville to change his trademark style where the vocabulary is skillfully employed to construct metaphors which buttress the weird on the other hand in philosophy which is not pace rorty just a kind of writing and in science there are good and bad metaphors i e those that facilitate an increase of knowledge and those that remain pure metaphors resisting any possible conceptual clarification philosophy needs the former breaking down metaphors those that die when brought up to the light of day meaningless metaphors are not the right material for philosophy even when such a philosophy is trying to track the consequences of the meaninglessness of the universe as a rule of thumb over writing is a mistake in philosophy i wouldn t go as far as williamson in arguing that pedantry is a fault on the right side because i believe it is perfectly possible to be good engaging and yet precise writers bachelard writes about science but insofar as philosophy and science aim at being modes of rational inquiry the point stands for both the danger of immediate metaphors in the formation of the scientific spirit is that they are not always passing images they push toward and autonomous kind of thought they tend to completion and fulfillment in the domain of the image the miévillian broken metaphors literary powerful don t do philosophical work but remain lost in a fuzzy world of affective ideality the central trope which weird fiction and philosophical speculation share that of the meaninglessness of the in itself is expressible without having to recur to wild metaphorizing incidentally it has always been my understanding that what meillassoux wants to do with mathematics is precisely this the in itself is only mathematically expressible and mathematics is the language of contingency a formalism of symbols devoid of meaning again an interesting parallel could be drawn here between meillassouxian mathematics and lovecraft s employment of mathematics to convey the utterly alien and the non linguistically conceptualizable the fact that both weird fiction writers and speculative realists are interested in the way in which the in itself is fiercely human concept proof does not imply that philosophers should buy into the affective style which writers employ in order to produce a sense of awe in the reader the architecture oozes out of its bounds is a powerful highly impressionistic literary metaphor which produces definite effects on the reader hence with a specific literary value on the other hand in a philosophical context a sentence like the noumena ooze back into the phenomenal world means nothing i e does no philosophical work in terms of clarification of concepts whatsoever having said that what i find most interesting is a certain cultural resonance between weird fiction and new realism specifically when it comes to the dialectic between the intelligible and the unknown unknowable and to the meaninglessness of the natural world i take it to be a central axiom of any realism that certain things or states of affairs in the universe are unknown and perhaps unknowable to make such a claim is not to be an anti realist but a consistent realist stathis psillos spells this out very clearly when he writes that despite their many differences with the early empiricists modern anti realists do share with them the view that existential claims should be tied to some possibility or other of verification a thesis which scientific realists deny since it is typical of scientific realists to argue that the content of the world can in principle exceed what human beings even ideal observers can access epistemically none of these modern anti realists is a scientific realist scientific realism xx and recently michael brooks wrote it in a recent featured story on the new scientist pdf there are some things we can never know for sure because of the fundamental constraints of the physical world then there are the problems that we will probably never solve because of the way our brains work to accept that in principle parts of the universe can exceed our epistemic and conceptual grasp does not turn one into a vulgar kantian for to assert epistemic inaccessibility does not imply lack of reference and ontological antirealism unless you are van fraaseen it is a realist move to claim there are things we do not know and yet exist and even there are things mathematical propositions we cannot know to be true and yet are true what i take to be the most important contribution that a certain continental orientation can bring to the table of the scientific realist is the elaboration of strategies for identifying and transcending the horizon of knowledge meant as badiouian technical term as i see them an attempt to break the constraints of warranted assertability is the minimum common denominator that unites the philosophy of deleuze derrida and badiou a trend which in fact goes back to the french tradition of épistémologie of bachelard and canguilhem we must trace the historical evolution of our scientific concepts in order to be committed to an open ended project of enlargement of knowledge and of creation of new concepts and truths uphold the virtual possibility of the previously impossible it seems to me that a balance must be reached an excessive emphasis on the weirdness inaccessibility and incomprehensibility of reality in itself re produces a secular form of a vacuous mysticism of darkness which is more self congratulatory than philosophically fertile and undermines naturalism by re imbuing nature of supernatural traits on the other hand we should be cautious with hyper rationalisms relying on the sheer power of pure thought to comprehend everything for that is just the flipside of the old theological coin on the one hand negative theology which is always about meaninglessness for us on the other confidence in the lumen naturalis of reason which ultimately banishes meaninglessness in itself the limits of our epistemic grasp cannot be overcome via either poetic talk nor via a mysteriously efficacious intellectual intuition they can only be probed and pushed by rational inquiry epistemic optimism is not an all or nothing package since there are clear limits to the knowable imposed upon us by our very best scientific knowledge the hubble horizon the sub plank scale but also the mathematical work of goedel and turing similarly we need to push thought to its rational limits circulating to borrow graham priest s terminology between transcendence and closure even someone like me with neo pythagorean mathematical structuralist sympathies must acknowledge that there are limits to our scientific mathematical knowledge because i believe that probably due to my other de totalizing post structuralist sympathie the uni multi verse itself is not the kind of complete and consistent whole which we would like it to be it is dappled chaotic and imperfect and the rather gifted yet limited creatures called humans are the product of this chaotic purposeless and meaningless universe so no thought is not omnipotent but yes there is something like objective scientific progress and like the discovery of new truths no there s no need to quiver in awe of fanged noumena but yes there are things out there which will always elude any conceptualization due to the limits of our biological brains and attribution of meaning due to the intrinsic meaninglessness of reality i join meillassoux here in stressing that the answers to big questions don t have to induce in us any sort of fear and trembling but can be just be prosaically rationally given ultimately i like to be disturbed and unsettled by weird literature and to be stimulated and provoked by speculative philosophy and these are pleasures best enjoyed separately posted in philosophy uncategorized tags china mieville darkness h p lovecraft metaphors philosophy weirdness speculations ii finally out may 5 2011 3 comments we are pleased to announce that the second volume of speculations is now available for download on the website i am posting this from my phone so i don t have time to make lengthy comments but once again my thanks to my fellow editors especially thomas for his usual epic pagination editing layout work thanks to his work you can download speculations as a pdf in ipad format or kindle format you can buy a print on demand paper copy or you can even print and bind your very own handmade copy complete instructions will soon appear on the website and of course you can read it online you ve got pretty much no excuse for not reading it posted in uncategorized resurrecting the corpse of philosophy april 24 2011 3 comments image credit alessandro bavari n arratives of philosophical progress crumble when scrutinized by the eye of the blackened theorist the degradation of ontology must aim towards a chaotic reterritorialization of the concept of being its hallucinatory positivity buried deep under an unlimited plateau of immanence covered with the scattered remains of decaying noumena a metaphysical blashyrkh a desert that no mind can ponder o pening windows onto the freezing vista of the cosmic thanatosphere thought will sharpen its edge blunted by centuries of human centered navel gazing and cut open the corpse of anthropocentrism the slime of the absolute will ooze out coagulating into unforeseeable shapes a new form of heretical spinozism will deploy its perverse weaponry against itself in a degenerate form of post socratic suicide revealing to its own blind eyes the organic scree of biological contingency leaving behind a corpse without organs n egatively charged with a filthy desire for death the subject coerced to follow the cruel vector of bataillean materialism will reach a veritable aphotic zone of thought delivered from the warming comfort of life the ego will realize that it is its own pathology impotent when contemplating the baleful axiomatic of death speechlessly facing the blade of a macbethian dagger covered in the black blood of the earth free from the parsimonious administration of rule bound metaphysical dilemmas thought will be perpetually inebriated by the fumes r...
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