Death, Movement, Change and Transformation

https://schoolofmaterialistresearch.org/Death-Movement-Change-and-Transformation-The-Domain-of-Matter

Why has something as simple as movement posed such enormous difficulties for philosophers and scientists in the Western tradition when other traditions have not had the same trouble? Many of the greatest minds of Western history have dedicated their lives to the discovery of something genuinely immobile that could explain why things move,” is the question from which the three master classes offered by Thomas Nail depart. Nail’s series of classes is called Matter and Motion: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Movement. In the elaboration of his set of master classes offered as part of the summer school, titled “As Above, So Below: Correspondences, the Supernothing, and the Hyperbolic,” John John Ó Maoilearca says “Here, the ‘non-‘ will be seen to operate in full plenitude, though at another level/scope/temporality (rather than ex nihilo – from the inert void below), The ideas of destruction and negation are consequently re-rendered as substitution, confusion, or destructive interference between levels.” Achille Mbembe, who has initially confirmed his participation (we are expecting a reconfirmation of dates and topics) is invited to revisit his materialist radicalisation of the concept of necropolitics he explored as part of the SMR Intensive Study Courses in Fall 2021.

Syllabus 1: Thomas Nail Matter and Motion: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Movement: 3 Master Classes

This set of classes will introduce students to the philosophy of movement. Movement is all around us, yet perpetually seems to evade our attempts to grasp it. It runs like smoke through our fingers changing and curling in response to how we try to grasp it. What is matter? What is movement? And why have they occupied, along with death and negativity, the lowest run on the great chain of being throughout Western thought?

Why has something as simple as movement posed such enormous difficulties for philosophers and scientists in the Western tradition when other traditions have not had the same trouble? Many of the greatest minds of Western history have dedicated their lives to the discovery of something genuinely immobile that could explain why things move. The Greek philosopher Aristotle imagined an “unmoved mover” who first propelled and gave order to the cosmos. The ancient scientist Archimedes imagined that if he had a fixed fulcrum and a lever long enough, he could move the earth. Later, the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes reinterpreted Archimedes’s fulcrum as a point of “certain knowledge” from which the rest of moving reality could be objectively known. Most modern thinkers, such as Descartes and Isaac Newton, also shared a belief that God was like an unmoving clockmaker who set our mechanical universe into motion while he remained still. Even Albert Einstein’s incorrect theory that we live in a finite “block universe” was part of the centuries-long effort to explain motion by something immobile.

But what motivated these pursuits, and what are their consequences for us today? Alternately, what if we stayed with movement instead of trying to explain it by something else? Today, there are many books written on the philosophy of time, space, and even objects, but relatively little on movement. Why? These may sound like simple questions, but they have taken me a decade to answer. This class brings together all the key ideas of my research on the question of movement and materialism of the last ten years into a general introduction.

Lecture 1: “The Ontology of Movement.”

We will try and rethink what ontology would mean if we thought of everything as in motion, without defining motion as the movement between one point and another in space and time. We will look at the historical emergence of the word “matter” in the West and try to think about it not as a substance. We will try to think about matter and motion as indeterminate and relational processes by looking some early ancient works including pre-Greek Minoan artifacts, Homer, Hesiod, and Lucretius. Instead of assuming space, time, or substance are ontologically primary, we will consider an alternative process-oriented definition of negative materialism. Read: T. Nail, The Philosophy of Movement: An Introduction (University of Minnesota Press, 2024), introduction through chapter 5.

Lecture 2: “The History of Movement”

We will consider what this shift in definition means for how we think about the Western history of art, science, and politics. Much of Western knowledge production has been motivated by the metaphysical assumptions that movement is caused or formed by something else. But if there is no higher cause of motion, as we propose here, what is knowledge-making? In this class, we try to rethink the history of knowledge as a history of patterns of motion. Ultimately, in the bigger cosmic and terrestrial picture what is human knowledge doing? If there are no universal or static forms to found, what is knowledge’s relation to natural history? Read: T. Nail, Matter and Motion: A Brief History of Kinetic Materialism (Edinburgh University Press, 2023).

Lecture 3 “The Ethics of Movement”

We consider the ethical and political implications of placing matter and motion at the bottom of an ontological hierarchy of beings. We will think about how the present conditions of climate change, global migration, digital media, and quantum physics have spurred an increasingly fast-pasted world and yet a planet whose overall entropy and diversity is being reduced. What has the life-centric focus of Western humanity lost by denying death? And what tools does the philosophy movement offer us for living well in such a world? Read: T. Nail, The Philosophy of Movement: An Introduction, chapter 11, 12, and Conclusion.

Syllabus 2 : John Ó Maoilearca “As Above, So Below: Correspondences, the Supernothing, and the Hyperbolic”

This is an all-encompassing description of the sequence of lectures, divided in 2 to 3 sessions by prof. O Maoilearca, in his own words:

“My recent work has developed concepts of the ‘hyperbolic’ and the ‘supernormal’ as extrapolations or generalisations of François Laruelle’s ‘philosophical decision’ (the gesture that attempts to make one thought form depart the rest as their master and overseer) and ‘non-standardisation’ (recognising the philosophies indigenous to putatively non-philosophical spheres). These generalisations also attempt to render Laruellean concepts beyond their apparently infra-philosophical, abstract-cognitive, and anthropocentric domains towards more (immanently) metaphysical, panpsychist, and cosmological levels. This is a form of naturalisation without scientism. For example, the concept of the ‘supernormal’ is used as a means to exit any substantive duality between nature and its supposed opposites (from non-being and the unnatural to the supernatural and spiritual, mystical) by thinking in terms of a temporalised mereology – levels of nested temporalities à la Bergson – rather than of hypostatised objects or dialectically opposed substances. Here, a part-whole approach to thinking about reality and representation is forwarded, though it is one where the mereology is temporalized through covariance (moving parts) and heterogeneous continuities.

These lectures will explore various cases of such naturalism, at both macro- and micro- level (‘above’ and ‘below’). Firstly, as regards the micro-, we begin with the negative in dialectic. Here, the ‘non-‘ will be seen to operate in full plenitude, though at another level/scope/temporality (rather than ex nihilo – from the inert void, below), The ideas of destruction and negation are consequently re-rendered as substitution, confusion, or destructive interference between levels. For instance, the mystical concept of ‘supernothing’ (Angelus Silesius) can be likened to Bergson’s concept of nothingness as movement in the making, a supernormal concept that lets us re-view hyperbolic nihilism (Gorgias’ nihilistic approach to thinking and communication par example) as a ‘destructive’ interference between levels or parts. Gorgias’s four-part embargo on nothing – it exists, it cannot be known, cannot be communicated, cannot be understood – mutates such that nothingness, lack, the void, or emptiness, are seen as forms of movement; in particular, as the transmission and reception of images by the brain. Indeed, this is precisely Bergson’s own theory of the brain – as a receiver and transmitter of images, a mere communication of micro-movements. This seemingly ‘nihilistic’ approach to the brain (it does not store images, it has no positive content) is not some sub-Badiouian/Sartrean valorisation of the ego as void à la Thomas Metzinger, but the real, processual rethinking of what nothingness and nihilism might mean, with a full, moving ‘supernothing’ at its core. This ‘mystical’ account does not lead to any hyperbolic excess (the brain as supernatural agent, for instance), but rather a very ‘ordinary’ account: ‘supernormalisation’ as the extraction of the supernatural nothing by natural means – micro-movements. To reach above, to the macro or cosmic through the supernormal, the lectures then turn to the alternative cosmology and metaphysics found in the films of Jacques Tati. In Tati’s five major films there exists an indigenous non-standard metaphysics concerning space, memory, movement, and matter. They tackle physical objects such as motorcars and bicycles, material processes (flows, fallings, arrivals, departures), and sensuous memories (of the beach, of posture, of sound). Here, what counts as ‘metaphysics’ does not match the hyperbolic abstractions associated with ‘Platonism’ but rather a ‘Tatiphysics’, a radically immanent film-philosophy. This is a non-standard model of matter-memory hetero-continuity between small-scale materials and macro-level ‘abstractions’. Indeed, Tati’s notion of ‘mime’ (whereby each thing becomes a hyperbolic excess or imitation of itself to create both comedy and horror) can be seen as a model of covariance or interference between ‘above’ and ‘below’, microworlds and macro-worlds. As such, they raise the prospect of massively integrative matter-memory correspondences. The wave-like destructive interferences (hyperbolic annihilation) and constructive interferences (supernormal naturalization) discussed earlier can then be seen as allied through likenesses, covariances or correspondences operating between temporal levels, mimes, and qualia (qualities) that are neither subjective nor anthropocentric, but panpsychist and cosmic.”

Syllabus 3 : Joel White “On Transformative Finitude: From Helmholtz to Deleuze”

Herman von Helmholtz in his 1854 lecture “On the Interactions of Forces,” argues that the dogmatic question: “How can I make use of the known and unknown relations of natural forces so as to construct a perpetual motion?” was inverted by Sadi Carnot to the critical question: “If a perpetual motion be impossible, what are the relations which must subsist between natural forces?” Helmholtz argues that “Everything was gained by this inversion of the question.”

This talk will follow the line of philosophical inquiry into the science of energy transformations that runs from Helmholtz to Deleuze via Nietzsche and Bergson, asking to what extent has this critical position been upheld? Who among these philosophers of energy fell back into the dogmatism of perpetual motion and what resources do we have to escape what Nietzsche called the “longing to believe that somewhere or other, in some way or other, the world is the same as the old, beloved, infinite and limitlessly creative God after all.” That is, how can we think the actuality of transformative finitude or finite transformations.

Jonathan Fardy, title of the Lecture: The Matter of Theory: Althusser and Laruelle