Towards Philosophical Research
François Laruelle
In Introduction aux sciences génériques (Paris: Pétra, 2008), p.19-37
From the research-world to thought-science
This first chapter is preparatory and furthermore dedicated to a new position of the most general relations of sciences and philosophy rather than towards an elucidation of the notion “generic science.” The point is to examine these relations no longer under the traditional epistemological aspect of scientific procedures but under the angle of “research” alone. And, in accordance with this, most contemporary, interest of Reason, to propose an inversion, and undoubtedly more than an inversion, of their epistemological relations.
Rather than always deciphering practice of science from philosophy, a philosophy that is often sclerotic and classical, and to form an epistemology, let us make the inverse hypothesis, reading philosophy from effective scientific research for a moment in view of elaborating what we may call a “philosophical research,” something like a “mixed,” scientifico-philosophical method or a practice of thought and research, destined to succeed doctrinal systems and which would not be an abstraction of present metaphysical and speculative “grand narratives” still within the “philosophy of sciences.” Of course, the point is not to trace it from the scientific. If there is a new type of scientific research which is set up and what we call the research-world, a mondialisation of research, it will be for us just a symptom that serves to elaborate a certain type of “thought” entirely concentrated within an activity of research, namely the struggle for the emancipation of this research. The point is to kick philosophy out of research but to also emancipate this research from philosophical sufficiency, the condition, perhaps, of an emancipation of scientific research itself. However, “research” seems to be an eminently philosophical concept since Platonic questioning and metaphysics as “sought science” (Aristotle). But we must distinguish between indefinite, traditional questioning research and a solutioning research, if we may say, one that is finite and infinite but not indefinite, one that is even more close to scientific research and would be possible to use as a guiding thread for a new type of philosophical activity (if not for a new philosophical doctrine?). Let’s begin by naming this unknown. We will call it a “thought-science.”
The classical figure of research, exactly like science (which is its field of exercise), could be also called “fundamental” and/or “applied.” This image was and is still partially guided and dominated, formatted according to the dualist model of strong and narrow theories and experimentation. It is described in accordance with this scientific practice as much as science is practiced in accordance with a certain metaphysical figure of philosophy. A Platonism of vectors of the rational and the real, sometimes ascendent, sometimes descendent, an apriorism of essences then faculties, a duality of the sources of knowledge, a conductive function of theories, the individuality of the researcher and their own object (even a personal object), a distinction of paradigms and normal science – these dualities were as much philosophical as a way to produce empirical knowledge. They give rise to a “philosophy of knowledge” and an epistemology whose fundamental research was the dominant paradigm. In classical philosophy, along with the distinction of the fundamental and the applied, corresponded a great distinction between two possible descriptions: the speculative description of everything, and the description of objects and empirical diversity. The ontological fundamental maintained narrow relations with fundamental research, and the philosophers’ regional maintained narrow relations with the distribution of the theoretical domains of objects. A philosopher like Badiou relies on Set Theory rather than on the fact that there are thousands of theorems produced yearly. Must we then rely uniquely on the interesting, the remarkable, and the singular (Deleuze) rather than on the fundamental or the founding? Philosophy assumes that there is a topology of sciences, a cartography of disciplines and continents, an archeology of knowledges: it’s an immense effort to lay the sciences on the Procrustes’ bed of philosophy and in the coffin of history, to reduce knowledges to very distinct disciplines that they nevertheless exceed. We formerly imagined that the sciences were cargo phenomena along the coasts of experience or traveling on the high seas in the ocean of theories. Now, we navigate like corsairs to capture, indeed pirate, knowledges in transport, making contraband and participating in the international trade of knowledges. If this phenomenon was inevitable, we aren’t sure that it would be more fertile or creative than the former. Above all, it would be vain to reflect on these new mores in geopolitics of research which would not offer itself as a transformed epistemology in a “generic” sense and capable of another pertinence than philosophy, something like a “non-epistemology.” This would always be the classical gesture of Platonism or anti-Platonism such that is prolonged in contemporary philosophers. The structure called the “intersections between” philosophy/others of philosophy (sciences, art, psychoanalysis, politics, literature) begins to undo these dualities but to replace them with another one, a duality of the “deconstruction” style in which we say that without being entirely negligible, it is not the most effective possible use of means (duality and alterity) that it would be better to dedicate to the generic. A more archivist posture (Foucault) on the gray literature of researchers and the mess of research is obviously imaginable. However, how would what is but a renewal of the history of the sciences not be still commanded by the presuppositions which (to be presuppositions of “diagonality,” “transversality,” or “epistemic plinths”) make the heterogenous but reversible, indeed reciprocal duality of visibilities and statements one of the rejuvenated images of the old duality-unity of the fundamental and the derived, assigned in a balanced way sometimes to the visible and sometimes to the sayable? The philosophers, having become too often but inevitably historians of the sciences (when this is not their own discipline), isolate interesting results after their philosophical criterion in the middle of an ocean of “results” that viciously secrete their own mode of evaluation. They precisely make a philosophy of knowledge by selecting within science and philosophy. However, we can say as well that they are induced by the old practice both of philosophy and scientific research as well. Rigorously, even if we refuse any unilateral or linear causality between epistemological research and scientific research, there is a certain analogy between these two activities. On this basis, we can now make the hypothesis of a certain dissolution of the philosophy of knowledge undermined by the new “scientific research.” For our part, indeed privileging research and the process of production of knowledge about ready-made or completed science which would either lead to Idealism or to Materialism, we can seek within some modifications of contemporary research a new guiding thread to elaborate not the contents of a new epistemological doctrine but to modify the philosophical form and producing what we call sometimes a thought-science, sometimes a non-epistemology, or even a generic epistemology.
Some theses on the research-world
A new figure of research as a social and practical activity of the laboratory, a new type of scientific research founded on communication and the globalization of information, in a dominant capitalist and liberal context, sets up the forced operation of acts, forms and objectives, but which one can begin to suspect that represents its mondialisation but also a new harassment of the researcher, even if they can arouse a new type if epistemology. How we orientate ourselves in thought is always a problem of actuality. One of its forms is how do we orientate ourselves in the research-world? How could research into non-epistemology emancipate itself? To clarify, we pose the following theses. They are obviously not exact description but tendential and are established through symptoms. They are therefore simplifying, especially since they describe phenomena of philosophical essence that function “in Everything” [au Tout], if we may say, and are approximations of the Whole [du Tout]. They pose some primacies (in the philosophical sense) which are also priorities and force us to think. They are first epistemological preparations towards the entirely different point of view, the point of view of generic science or again a “thought-science” and its own research. Then, what is this becoming philosophical par excellence that we call a mondialisation or again, like Marx, a “becoming-world of philosophy” and a “becoming-philosophy of the world”? The most general philosophical structure, the structure of philosophical systems and in particular epistemological ones, is a variable combination of unity and duality, One and Two. There is a becoming-world when the heterogenous terms of duality fuse in immanence but where one of them despite everything acquires a primacy over the ensemble and assumes this immanence, detaches and adds itself as the third transcendental term. In their turn, immanence and primacy, far from excluding each other, reciprocally presuppose each other: this is the super-Whole [sur-Tout], the essence, existence, and telos of philosophy. This extremely simple schema is provisionally enough for us.
1) The becoming-immanence of research to science and the becoming-immanent of science to research signifies a final primacy of scientific research over science. Research has stopped being an activity in the service of science to become an autonomous and dominant activity.
2) The becoming-immanent of its theoretical paradigms and its other conditions for “normal” research is resolved by the final primacy of a supernormalization of research over its normality which would still suppose the entre-deux of paradigms.
3) The research-world prevails over its geopolitics, the topology of relations between researchers and the topology of sources, the faculties of knowledge, research centres, and over the cartography of knowledges.
4) The research-world is inseparable from the multiple constraints that it interiorizes: regional/national, national/international, public/private, technical/scientific, but it is resolved by the primacy of the auto-evaluation of research as production of a surplus-value of knowledge.
5) The research-world is the formation for research but by research itself. It is its auto-legitimation as surplus-value of research.
6) The multiple finalization of research has the primacy over its classical ends, like incentive techniques (orientations, gifts, sponsorships, contracts, calls for offer) destined to activate the national and international market of researchers. It has the primacy over the efficient causality of the mind, reason, and interest of agents.
7) The research-world becomes effectively globalizing through the constitution of new disciplinary, molar, molecular and reticular materialities over the paradigmatic model of enterprise and susceptible to local mobility and delocalization. These new disciplinary entities, these enterprises specialized in research, assemble multiplicities of knowledge, technical, human and financial means in accordance with leveraged objectives. It’s as if an invisible and divine understanding, one of the capitalism-world, works secretly to organize its internal growth as the capital of knowledges. For a long time, research has begotten its own theology and mysticism, and now its “economy.”
8) The research-world requires the generalization of modeling and assures a primacy of it not only over “theory” but also “experiment” [expérience]. Modeling’s rise in power signifies the inclusion of knowledges in the dimension of the world. The loss of authority, but not the loss of the functional necessity, of theory is judged by its pragmatic requisition in accordance with the needs of research. However, modeling still remains a divided enterprise or of a double philosophical and amphibological essence with its two vectors, rational/real and their double orientation (concrete interpretation of formalisms, and the formalist interpretation of experiment).
9) Another symptom of the mondialisation of research is the emergence of the theme “generic sciences” and interdisciplinarity that give an effective, other than verbal, content to “hybridization” [métissage] (a biologico-colonialist concept issued from the Human Sciences). However, this new figure emerges on the edges of epistemology. It is a way to actualize the market of knowledges under the philosophical law of the Whole by distributing itself following transversal or diagonal lines. It is consummated in the elevation of research to the state not only of a productive force but of “true” wealth or capital of nations in their struggle for development.
10) In the machine park of the research-world, the computer[1] has primacy as a material-and-intellectual productive force, and computer sciences [informatique[ has primacy within the relations of production. The computer [ordinateur] is the source of a new duality, as a productive force and as the social relations of production of agents. The computer has primacy over the old dualities like theoretician/experimenter that it has not annulled but displaced. This new duality, that crosses over the previous ones, is the duality of calculability and publications, the duality of calculable writings and grey literatures. The computer is a kind of theoretical panopticon that promotes always displaceable transparency and secrecy. However, far from being a duality irreducible to a system of the philosophical type, it emerges from the organizational power of computer sciences which is an economic purveyor [facteur] and a new logos to it alone. The computer has displaced philosophical functions which are not immediately recognizable, endowed with a power of synthesis, connection and communication, interface and exchange – which are strictly philosophical or worldizing. Hegel is dead, but he is raised by the calculator.
11) Rather than distributing itself into paradigms and “normal science,” the research-world follows two lines of flight: seeking without finding, finding without seeking. However, these two diverging lines converge ad infinitum. Research is for research. It infinitizes itself. But this “durable” research just has “interesting results,” without a decisive or “crucial” value, immediately re-invested in the relaunch of another research. However, there is another line punctuated by “findings,” or true inventions, thresholds and constants that apparently spontaneously emerge that have an otherwise paradigmatic intrinsic value, phenomena of crystallization or “stop-on research” by which it seems that a moment “succeeds” and is able to be finished, as if there was then a specific problem of theoretico-technological decision (Entscheidung) of research. The programmes of classical scientists, the programmes of the modern research of the State, and finally the programmes of private contemporary research, represent different combinations of these two styles of more or less heterogenous temporality: research terminable and interminable. It took Foucault’s methods to distinguish the continuum and the epistemological plinth. This objective appearance of two paths brought to their greatest heterogeneity is specified by the computer in its own way.
12) Research no longer obeys a logic of development scientifically controlled by the distinction normal science/paradigms. This is another distribution. The research-world is the normal state of research, no longer having paradigms, but islands of research called fundamental but all the more surveilled and managed by the States. At this level, nothing seems to be able to anymore justify a new epistemology, save to reformulate it into the classical frameworks of philosophy as an activity of labeling (the “philosophies of knowledge”) which precisely take normal or normalized science as an object.
13) The becoming-immanent of researchers to research prevails over the dependency of research on researchers. The researcher is determined by the research that interiorizes them, and no longer is the research determined by the researcher, their person and “interests.” Research has always been a combination of sources, faculties, knowledges of varying origins under disciplinary identities but it left the researcher as the meta-agent of research. One of the tendencies is the becoming-immanent of meta-agents or the “rational researcher” of yesteryear like “technicians of research.” Psychology, sociology, politics, ecology, ethics, and the human sciences: this is the whole meta-text of research that has been interiorized, creating a confusion of orders, a fusion of instances as “objective.” This becoming-immanent of meta-language to the object of disciplines maintains an indiscernibility that has the greatest affinity with an ideological meaning or “taste,” a form of Logos that invades research under multiple and unexpected forms. Eventually, it calls on the reconstitution of a meta-agent of a superior degree, the State, and indeed planetary capitalism.
14) As an average, “ordinary” or “generic” intellectual in the vulgar sense of this word, having lost their privileges as a “scientist,” existing through metastable collectives, assemblies, colloquia, aggregates or nametags, devoted to the self-defence of research through a contractualized functioning, grounded on statist-industrial demand on the one hand, philosophico-sociological on the other hand, and professionalization prevailing over vocation, the researcher enjoys a mode of existence and normality that is still philosophical in a broad though non-classical sense. The researcher lives in a world where meaning and values are philosophical, that is, research fulfills the essential of their life, the quasi-totality of their existence and defines their humanity as rather average or ordinary. The researcher is accompanied by a lack of culture in general and the inevitable ignorance of immediately neighboring domains, an ignorance that is perhaps necessary for the infinite finitude of research. The researcher is disindividuated or fragmented like the object of their research, and just individuated by the difficulties of their local object. The researcher knows a new elementary and mobile solitude as a superior technician of the laboratory dedicated to the small grey dramas of everyday competition, close-range combat with the mess of knowledges and observations. For the rest, the researcher resorts to the cliches of the oldest philosophical tradition stricken with inefficiency but destined to insert them, as a subject, into the order of collective values.
15) The research-world is not only a means of war. It is itself an eminently competitive and “mimetic” activity that tends to local and global war. If a “hard research” is possible, we must image it on this basis as a metastable durability.
16) The research-world is a mode of control of populations of researchers as “subjects” subjugated by research at the same time as a liberal-capitalism control of science. Hence, this faceless figure of researchers, a selected population hooked on and bewitched by the mythology inherent to the research-commodity, contractualized, hired, and thrown at will to needs, and finally harassed by their objective.
Epistemological surplus-value and generic sciences
It is possible to imagine a specific “philosophical research,” distinct from philosophical doctrines or narratives, on a double basis. On the one hand, on the model of the scientific research-world as now being our material or our symptoms, only indicating some traits of the research-world to have a material to process. And, on the other hand, on the basis of a generic science, our point of view, which has need of these symptoms to transform them itself. The furthest goal is to establish a notion of generic research with a double, scientific and philosophical aspect capable of intervening in the accumulation of scientific capital without destroying it. How? Through a certain sterilization or neutralization effect of epistemological sufficiency. Let us remain provisionally on this enigmatic and a little concerning notion: not as the negation of thought by science, but the generic sterilization of the surplus-value attached to scientific knowledge by capitalism and philosophy together. Our objective will be to form the concept of generic sciences such that they can no longer exclusively serve, producing on the model of others of epistemological surplus-value, a surplus of philosophical power, but to make the capital and surplus-value appear as what they are: it is to struggle against the mondialisation and exclusive capitalization of knowledges as a way of harassing subjects.
We must obviously pose an axiom concerning our conception of philosophy, a conception of a proximity, indeed a similitude, of structure and functioning, all objects otherwise differing, between capitalism and philosophy. Hence, the notion of philosophical surplus-value. It is a new interpretation of the Marxian theory of commodity fetishism, which is undoubtedly here overinterpreted and radicalized since we can no longer, like Marx, contemplate philosophy within itself as he still did. Precisely, the notion of the generic must allow us to find a point of view that is immanent and heteronomous to philosophy and facilitate its rapprochement with capitalism. Philosophical surplus-value is less an always growing and hegemonic production of philosophy, even if the two phenomena go together as the conjuncture shows, than it is an expansion of the sentiment and practice of philosophical power that is manifested under the form of an ontological “sufficiency.” The becoming-philosophy of the world follows its becoming-capitalism with a certain distance of good ideological taste, but it follows it.
For philosophical power or philosophical sufficiency is the same thing if it just the first (power) returned to the lived experience of the philosopher and the second (sufficiency) to its claims over the “Real.” The Principle of Sufficient Philosophy is the motor of philosophizing, and this motor functions with the expansion of power. When they are associated, positive sciences and spontaneous philosophies produce a phenomenon of sufficiency, an epistemological but more fundamentally philosophical surplus-value, which is added to brute, industrial and political capitalist exploitation of sciences and research. On this basis, generic sciences will be defined as those which renounce this epistemological surplus-value, sterilizing or neutralizing it, and therefore not destroying it either. They produce a useful knowledge, one deprived of this sufficiency and harassment of subjects, a knowledge that is investible in the positive sciences, but does not risk augmenting their claim or power over subjects (in particular, but not only, researchers).
We have noted two principal phenomena as to epistemology that are consigned in these theses: the first is that its sphere tends towards a certain internal but multiple unification, an immanence beyond its general and regional forms, a Whole and even a super-Whole. It must be interrogated not on the existence of this tendential identity of the “becoming-world” or the mondialisation, but on the possibility of thinking it, for it concerns the philosophical drive par excellence and often negated by the philosophers who argue their “difference” of objects and positions and practice the waltz of epistemological labeling. The second is that the dualities that strictly nearly all of these phenomena, since the great already stated classical dualities like theory/experiment, rational/real, classical scientist (academies and societies)/scientist-researcher, up to the dualities of computer science, calculabilities/grey literature, and passing through contemporary dualities of private/public, regional/national, national/international, subsist in their own way and are irreducible. If these dualities are globally interiorized within the research-world, if they are shuffled or overdetermine each other, they do not disappear however, but lay out and combine with each other otherwise.
Regardless of the adopted solution under the term “generic science,” it should reckon with this double style of unification and duality. The generic science that we outline on the basis of contemporary symptoms, one that is a sought science and in no way given, if it is precisely not through outlines and inclinations in the space of epistemology or on the map of knowledges, must be able – we cannot give for the moment more explanations of this ambition – identically, in the same gesture, explain and transform these symptoms. Far from being a commentary on the research-world, the point is to find an interpretation for it, to lead it back to its cause, and finally transform it in its reality and organization, in accordance with this sought science, and to consequently introduce this new dimension into a generic science. It would be contradictory with the spirit of what we call in general “non-philosophy” to claim to a priori give as all ready-made in some understanding the rules of this discipline to then apply them to epistemological data. Precisely, there is nothing identifiable on the epistemological surface but supports (statements, institutional phenomena from any dimension) for these symptoms wherein the meaning of symptoms depends on the use we make of it. Non-Philosophy is an immanent activity in-the-last-instance articulated on a generic constant. This is all that we can say for the moment. It is only a programme within these limits, and we therefore avoid also saying “this is not a programme!”
What name is possible for this type of activity? Let’s at least try for a moment the name “construction,” not that it has no aspects of a “deconstruction” of epistemology, but, on the one hand, it submits the critique and deconstruction to the primacy of a Generic Real which is certainly invisible, non-given or non-presented (but not the Judaic Other). The Generic Real is what we rather call Man-in-Person. And, on the other hand, towards the priority of a construction of the research-world and its epistemology through a generic a priori. If the point is that of a deconstruction, it would be a deconstruction of conceptual structures and not textual structures, the ultimate structures of meaning of philosophy rather than the ultimate signifying structures, which are secondary when it concerns philosophy and above all science. A deconstruction of epistemology is not our object, but rather a construction of epistemological appearances and the research-world that becomes our own, a construction of the most general presuppositions that render deconstruction itself possible. More generally, the point is to pose the scientific and philosophical conditions of a generic subject of science who would be in-struggle against the sufficiency of epistemology, disposing of an organon or means of a “non-politics of research,” the “non” preceding being understood in the habitual sense of non-philosophy, the universalizing “non” that transforms philosophical material into a generic mode.
The One/Two system characteristic of philosophy even in its ultimate becoming-world does not pose a primacy without this being reciprocally presupposed with immanence, the fusion or interiority of duality. We can give a first idea of the work carried out here, just a sketch, one that is enough for a first orientation, consisting in eliminating the reciprocal presupposition of terms or the reciprocity of presupposition. Rather, there will be a presupposition, but one that is unilateral or a presupposition of one term by the other: 1) The primacy of Identity, comprised as immanence or sterility of idempotency, is radical or no longer maintains continuity with the interiority of the duality that it no longer presupposes, therefore it is no longer absolute but radically autonomous; 2) Therefore, the duality can no longer fuse in interiority, it remains what it is, irreducible, but it most lose the reciprocal presupposition of its terms. One term of the duality now presupposes the other that does not presuppose it. This is what we call the “logic” of unilateral duality that illustrates generic science which will give it an effective content. Therefore, it is this generic effectivity of Unilaterality that we implement by simply beginning in what follows by raising symptoms of the generic present in philosophical, economic, and social doxa, and that must incite us to more rigorously establish as Unilateral Duality.
[1] In English in original. – Trans.
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