Ontology

“Being free is not of the order of relation between bodies and

languages, but, directly, of incorporation (to a truth).”

Alain Badiou.

“I would imply that I am totally awakened while dreaming,

and I have no illusion about that.”

Jacques Derrida

“What if the true task of thought is to think the self-division

of the One, to think the One itself as split within itself,

as involving an inherent gap? ”

Slavoj Zizek

Reality as such is phantasmagoric: the last bulwark of meaning in a world devoid of sense. The decontructivist common sense goes something like this: there are cinders, but no fire; or to put it in Wittgenstenian terms, “to reveal the relationship between language and the world: what can be said about it, and what can only be shown.” On the other hand, the (scientific) doxa almost overlap with deconstruction: of course that electrons (or whatever concept one wants to put here) are an approximation to what happens in reality, and science can only make better and better models to describe it, but nevertheless it always remains a step too far away from our grasp. A truism, practically. However, if we look a bit closer into this worldview, we find out that this reality that we presuppose out there is impossible to define without reference to the subject who talks about it. There are cinders and we posit the fire as that which language can never grasp. Nevertheless, the naming and the named thing are correlative; if we follow Žižek, when I say “this is an elephant” I thereby confer upon an object its symbolic identity; “I add to the bundle of real properties a symbolic unifying feature that changes this bundle into One, a self-identical object.” The trap to be avoided here is to think that the bundle was there before I said the word; there is no bundle of properties prior to the naming of this bundle. It is in naming that we create the bundle to name. However, the problem of this naming is that the bundle is infinite, it has no definite boundary and the properties I bundle together are dense in the mathematical sense of the term. One could use as an example the aforementioned elephant, France or myself: none of them has any unity whatsoever; yet the case of, say, an electron, is more illustrative since we are aiming to corrode the scientific doxa. As anyone barely read in quantum electrodynamics knows, when an electron moves through space, it actually “is” everywhere with a certain probability; as if this would not be enough, the electron also interacts with itself in the past and the future, so the electron “is” also in all the time. And the same goes with France, whose physical boundary, language, history, culture, good cuisine and nicely dressed women, are precisely not France; France is the je ne sais quoi that let me talk about any of the properties in the bundle as part of what France is.

(This pervasive reality, this something that is there but that we cannot ever comprehend, understand - a positive entity that lasts all the time and occupies all the space - is non other than good old God, the same who was supposed to be dead centuries ago.)

It should be clear by now that this “self-identical” object whose symbolic identity I confer upon the moment I name it is far from being self-identical and rather appears as a void of pure negativity, or to put it in Buddhist terms, it appears as that over which I cannot put my finger - the Buddhist name for the I. (It is not casual at all that the object and the I are related, but to develop its full weight we need first to understand how is that the I in its most basic level - that of the cell - appears in the world.)

So, to recapitulate, in naming we give symbolic identity to a bunch of features whose identity - as a bunch of positives features whose bunchness is also created in the act of naming - is inseparable from my act of naming it, and, at the same time, we alienate the bunch of features from the identity that we just created; that is, after named, each and every one of the positives features that we encircled with the name are precisely not that, not what we named.

(What do we do when we name? What do we do when we live in a world? These two questions are in fact two sides of the same coin.)

Why is this split consubstantial to the action of naming? In uttering the word, the subject repeats the gesture, the foundational gesture - the original always-already effaced gesture - of self-positing: for a cell knows nothing but herself, and nevertheless she lives in a world. Structurally, positive entities in a cell’s world can occupy but the place that the cell has for herself, and to this points - in the final analysis - operational closure: to know is always to know about oneself, and the remainder that resists this gesture - objet petit a, in Lacanian - is precisely what gives consistency to the bundle of positives features that define an object. In definitive, there is only I and a, and this remainder, this non identity of the cell with itself, is the original displacement that permits, that gives the space - the operational gesture that occupies the place of the signifier of pure difference on structuralism - to posit a world different from my self in myself; without it, without the obscene remainder of symbolization, reality and myself lose all consistency, for there is no way to properly delimit - to properly separate - the I from the world.

Events, despite the fact of been true only for the ones engaged on them, create a world of significance that pervades reality as a virus, immediately, transforming the world ipso facto and for everyone, not only for the subjects engaged on the event. (As the attentive reader should have noticed, we mean here precisely that the event transform reality as such, the very fabric of it, making it what always-already was.) As an example, enough is to think of la Commune de Paris, the political event by antonomasia: the world as such changed in those magical two months. Despite that the domain of human affairs gives us an almost unlimited set of examples, we will focus on two domains where the evental nature is not straightforwardly recognized: the emergence of life and the emergence of language.

To prove the evental nature of life one must resort to Hans Jonas and his “only life can know life”. What does this mean? The path towards an answer passes through the thought of Francisco Varela, whose life’s question was:

Why do emergent selves, virtual identities, pop up all over the place creating worlds, whether at the mind/body level, the cellular level, or the transorganism level? This phenomenon is something so productive that it doesn't cease creating entirely new realms: life, mind, and societies. Yet these emergent selves are based on processes so shifty, so ungrounded, that we have an apparent paradox between the solidity of what appears to show up and its groundlessness.

The apparent paradox is easily resolved when the solidity of the world is melted into air, when we realize that reality as such is phantasmagoric. To understand properly what we mean here by a phantasmagoric reality, we first need to realize that the order of beings is, from the very beginning, the order of living beings. It is here where Varela’s idea of autopoiesis is useful, since it is a precise - and almost Hegelian - definition of life, of the basic form of life - a cell - only in terms of a process:

There is a circular or network process that engenders a paradox: a self-organizing network of biochemical reactions produces molecules, which do something specific and unique: they create a [spatial] boundary, a membrane, which constrains the network that has produced the constituents of the membrane. This is a logical bootstrap, a loop: a network produces entities that create a boundary, which constrains the network that produced the boundary. This bootstrap is precisely what's unique about cells. A self-distinguishing entity exists when the bootstrap is completed. This entity has produced its own boundary. It doesn't require an external agent to notice it, or to say, "I'm here." It is, by itself, a self-distinction. It bootstraps itself out of a soup of chemistry and physics.

This boundary, which spatially defines an inside and an outside on the spatial domain, on the temporal domain remains open, expecting, unfinished; in a certain way, the bootstrap is never completed - on topological terms, it is an open interval on the time axis. A cell’s identity is never completely reached, and this is the reason for life: try to fill - infructuously - the gap that separates a cell from its complete fulfilment.

Nevertheless, Varela is still too metaphysic here: our point - and also his, at least in the final years of his life - is that there is a logical, rather than historical (if we are to keep on with the linear conception of time that we are assuming) precedence of the living organisms to the physical ground of it. (To put it in simple Derridarean terms: there is no outside-text.) This implies, in the first place, that we cannot afford to extrapolate what a posteriori appears, and certainly is, the cause of a given phenomenon into the reality of a world independent of the object whose cause we are considering; an uncompromising materialism obliges us to posit the cause as a consequence of the effect. When the effect appears - when the new appears - the material causes of it are posited retroactively in such a way that what it is now becomes always a necessary outcome of the conditions of the world previous to the existence of the effect. The point is, of course, that without the effect the conditions would have never been so.

What Varela was not able to fully develop is the Hegelian component of identity that is never equal to itself; the indivisible remainder of symbolic identification, the object petit a that appears with the cell while saying “I am here, and I am not-all. There is something there, a stain, a non-object that prevents my self-identification and keeps me moving, living, something which urges me to live, to grasp this thing that looks like a world, feels like a world, and behaves like a world but that nevertheless is nothing but me - in spite of the fact that I cannot realize about that, and therefore I treat it as a world.”

This object that never allows the cell to be complete has, of course, no positive existence whatsoever; it is nothing but the frailness of the cell, the forever present need for something else to be itself - in the most literal sense of the term - the cell always needs material components to reproduce the boundary of processes that defines it as a unity. Life as such is always incomplete: it strives for survival and it is always - in the best Heideggerian tradition - a being-toward-death. The universe of meaning of a cell - its world - is only constituted as that which threatens or promotes its existence: a cell on a gradient of glucose “sees” on one side death and on the other side life. Without this gap on itself, the cell would live unattached to the factual state of the world, and therefore, it would perish immediately. It is in this precise sense that object petit a is necessary for the construction of both: the being and the world. Or to put it even more pointedly, a is the very gap that gaps - and gives existence with it to - the cell and the world. The basic definition of life, then, concerns precisely this constitutive lack (on a network of processes) rather than the logical bootstrap of a process which produces the components that define the boundary of this process: one could easily imagine a process that needs nothing, that it is complete in itself. This would be precisely not life.

So, is not already clear that if there ever was an event on the world, this was the creation of life? Out of a soup of dead molecules and water, something emerges whose existence can only be asserted as such from the engaged point of view of those who are alive. Is not precisely this the major characteristic of an Event for Badiou? Is not this to what “only life can know life” aims? Life as a meaningful distinction in a world devoid of meaning, in “the cold and dead universe of physics” - to use Varela’s words - is something impossible to recover a posteriori; the signifying unity of life must be posited as the first thing, despite of being historically posterior to the physical ground - historically posterior in a conception of time that belongs always-already to living beings. The only point of view from where life appears as a meaningful phenomenon - as a self-relating totality, as an identity in the most basic sense of the term - is from the point of view of a living being.

To grasp this in more human terms an analogy with psychoanalysis is useful:

Two opposing passages characterize the analytic process: the one from possibility to necessity, and the one from impossibility to contingency. At the level of transference [which is the domain of love], the analyst operates as the “subject supposed to know,” this is the illusory Other place at which everything is always-already written, at which the (unconscious) meaning of all symptoms is always-already fixed. This figure of the analyst stands for the Unconscious in the atemporal dimension, for the Unconscious which, as Freud put it, knows of no time.... This is the passage from possibility to necessity: what first looks as a mere possibility, an accidental occurrence which also may not have happened, is retroactively transformed into something that was predestined to happen from all eternity.... (This position, of course, is based on a retroactive illusion, on misrecognizing its own performative dimension: the “eternal” meaning discovered by the patient is constructed in the very process of its discovery.) This aspect of the figure of the analyst, however, has to be supplemented by its opposite: the analyst’s interpretive intervention also stand for the element of surprise, of the intrusion of the Real; the passage here is from impossibility to contingency, that is, what appeared impossible, what did not belong to the domain of possibilities, all of the sudden — contingently — takes place, and thus transforms the coordinates of the entire field.

Is not this, precisely, to what we are trying to point at with our ontology of the living beings? (I am tempted to paraphrase here: “At the level of” science, the scientist “operates as the ’subject supposed to know,’ this is the illusory” Reality on “which everything is always-already written, at which the” (unknown) “meaning of all” phenomena “is always-already fixed.” ) The retroactive illusion, in our case, consist on reality as such: once we discover photons, they have been there since all the eternity, or to put it even more concretely, once life occurs it becomes a necessary outcome of the universe as it is. This could look like a nuance - what does change pragmatically if we assume this? The world, unfortunately, is real (as Borges would have said) - but it completely relates to the second aspect of the figure of the analyst: “the passage from impossibility to contingency, that is, what appeared impossible” to happen in the world, “what did not belong to the domain of possibilities, all of the sudden takes place, and thus transforms the coordinates of the entire field.” One does not need to be Badiou to recognize here the occurrence of an Event. If we call this two passages a and b, we could formulate our critic to the current doxa as: a worldview where a is not the fundamental nature of reality aims to erase any possibility of b; its aim is to maintain the status quo; it aims to a world without events.

Therefore, the assumption of a reality that is independent of our way to name it - in definitive: independent of our very being - appears as an unnecessary extrapolation, as a jump into a solid ground that is not there but that we dream of. Why do we indulge in such an error? The answer must pass by capitalism: the Kantian access to the Ding an Sich is the best definition of capitalist realism; we touch what it is, there is no way to imagine that things can be different - things are like that - and we must answer the deranged demands that reality imposes upon us (the house, the car, the one or more life style partners, the happy life and worrying about global warming) without questions or second thoughts. (Marx was again wrong; almost everything that is solid melts into air; capitalism needs - in order to support its constant revolutionizing of the world - reality to remain solid as the final ground of its existence.)

In this way, the question of why do we need the phantasmatic support to reality completely misses the point: it is not that we need a fantasy support for a solid reality but rather that reality as such is always-already phantasmagoric, the constitutive illusion of a self that is never identical to itself. Since we are too coward to acknowledged this fact - in the final analysis, this means that there is no meaning at all, tout court - we posit, in the same movement, reality as our hard ground - the final support of our lives, something that it is there independent of whatever I do, so I cannot hold responsibility for the state of reality; “things are like that” - together with its phantasmagoric support - the idea of the matrix, for example, that we are beings slaved to a machine, etc., works as the mechanism of disavowal: “if only I would be free, I could change things, do things differently...”. (To put it in psychoanalytical terms, the phantasmagoric support of reality is a symptom of the repressed inconsistency of reality as such.) Our very conception of reality bears witness of a social deadlock (just one of the (infinite) possible examples):

A study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research at United Nations University reports that the richest 1% of adults alone owned 40% of global assets in the year 2000, and that the richest 10% of adults accounted for 85% of the world total.”

This, again, is not the world in which I want to live. In a world where the very notion of owning has a meaning, where it makes sense and appears as an ethically neutral category, appearing on an encyclopedia written by the “people” - concealing the violence of what attempts to look natural - and, since trying to imagine the end of private property is impossible today, we want to dismantle (our conception of) reality as the first step.

Our stance, then, is that the very notion of reality is where capitalism holds us from the balls, and to free ourselves we need - not only, of course, but also - to reapropiate reality in a different - a communist, dialectical materialist - way. We insist that this appraisal of reality as a consequence (rather than as a cause) of life, of language, of society - this is what we understand from Lacan’s “the real is nothing but a deadlock of symbolic formalization” - is the proper way to do it. So, of course reality is such and such as a bunch of positive entities that exist independent of us as particular subjects - we praise ourselves of not being total solipsistic idiots: our point is rather that the further one goes with a materialistic naive description of the world, the more one needs to relies on the cognoscent subject to define individual objects and not only one big wave function of all the universe (where no identity is saved neither any distinction can be made) - but to say something about reality, one first must be in the position of being able to say something - namely, one needs to be part of the conversation - and it is only then that one can say “reality has always-already been such and such”. And here lays the trap: what one is tempted to do is to extrapolate - disregarding our position of enunciation - and say that reality it was always like that, but it is only now that we realize about it. In doing so, we posit the existence of a ground that gives us existential support, and at the same time bereaves us from any responsibility regarding the actual state of reality: things are, and I can do nothing about it - besides know them. On the other hand, if we consider reality as a consequence of our very being, we can dream with a different world that once realized will appear as always been a potential outcome of reality. This means, then, that there are still possibilities in the world.

In front of the question of what is reality, we must answer with the old Leninist motto: reality for whom? To do what with it? Reality as such today is capitalist; and the problem, then, resides in the fact that when positing reality as the hard ground that grounds our existence, we miss the opportunity to take responsibility for it, responsibility for the (not-all) whole of reality. Or, to put it in Badiou’s terms, there is only one world, and it is the one that we make. And here is where the Communist Manifesto confronts us with a truth that we are unable to accept today: “In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” Today, this seems as impossible and imaginable - unreal, in one word - as the abolition of slavery two hundred years ago, the abolition of monarchy, or the universal vote; private property appears as a constitutive component of reality - what always have been and what always will be - in a word, ideology at its purest. However, if there is one thing that history teaches us, is that we have never got anything for free; since reality is not independent of our being, of our essence - and we are beings that rather difficulty one could not designate as symbolic - the abolition of private property passes necessarily by the transformation of the symbolic order; in the final analysis, capitalism’s only support is our believe on the believe of the others, our believe that the others will take for serious money and will act accordingly, despite our knowledge of the unreality of it.

(Here a parenthesis is due regarding our opening quote by Derrida. If there is something to be learnt from Bolaño’s Savage Detectives is that the dream - the nightmare - is not going to end. Furthermore, that the only way to live a life that is worth living - something that in Latin America, due to its social conditions and scant symbolic support is strictly unimaginable - is continue to dream while the storm sets up and invades everything. The storm, for Bolaño, is poetry: the horror of a woman - Cesarea, the name for an assisted birth in Spanish - poet whose life is the dream of two sleepwalkers that can keep the eyes open through the night while the rest of the world wakes up, buy a house and finds a job. Against a reality whose phantasmagoric, or rather nightmarish, character we only barely discern - in the crimes, in the thousands of crimes against women that flourish in the desert of Mexico, like fake flowers blooming the first day of spring; the oasis of Horror that Baudelaire speaks about - but nevertheless know certain, as real as our own selves (equivalent to our own selves) - against all this - there is poetry. We have the dream. We have no illusion about it, but we dream. We know the storm will take us sooner or later, and it is always too late, when it already took all the others and we stay alone in front of it, holding the ship towards the new, with stone hands holding, trying to avoid the old. The new that we cannot bring, that we only can hope to arrive out of grace, and for which the greatest fights are fought, for which the most subtle intelligence is needed. Or, to put it in the words of Derrida, “But one does not make the other come, one lets it come by preparing for its coming. The coming of the other or its coming back is the only possible arrival, but it is not invented even if the most genial inventiveness is needed to prepare to welcome it.” Nevertheless, we must go beyond Derrida (in a word, we must go beyond post-modernism): I am pretty sure I am dreaming, tells us the savage detective, but I have my eyes opens through the night. It is a dream - a nightmare - and so what. Il faut être absolument moderne.)

So, going to the bottom line of our argument against the scientific doxa (that today completely overlaps with capitalist ideology): as communists, we need to “grasp communism [...], in terms of the creation of a new way of seeing, a new hearing, a new thinking, a new loving - in short, the production of a new humanity.” In definitive, the lack of a solid reality where to put one’s feet, where to ground the meaning of - not even our life as a whole but - all our acts, from the coffee we make in the morning to the first time we hold hands with a person whom maybe a few days later will be our life’s partner, are completely meaningless, senseless, without any warranty and most certainly condemned to fail, miserably. Here the christian legacy comes handy: God in the cross, abandoned by himself - fully responsible for the world where he is to be crucified - is the perfect metaphor to understand subjectivity in a world devoid of ground.

We must think of everything, nothing can be left out of our struggle. From reality to love, art, meaning, politics and science: our task is the creation of a new humanity. Our bet is that it is only through the symbolic destitution of the subject - and the completely anti-ideological world view implied by this - that the creation of a new humanity is possible; a new humanity whose creation is correlative with the abolition of private property. This new community - there is a new community, of course - has no origin, myth or anything that is common; rather, the community is hold together - and hold is too strong a verb here - on the common struggle, which at the end is the struggle for meaning.

Our task is not to make sense of the world, but rather - to put it in quite pathetic Hegelian terms, that nevertheless appear to us as the best possible formulation - it is about how to tarry with the lack of meaning and bring it into being.

Drawing by Aurora Mediavilla Marcos.

p.s.: This is an abridged version of the manuscript.