Becoming Better (Dialectical) Materialists (Part 1)
Further Reflections on O.G. Rose's Belonging Again: An Address
Today at The Portal we will be hosting Daniel L. Garner and
of for a Book Club focused on Belonging Again: An Address. You can either join by becoming a member of The Portal, or by signing up as a one-time event: Book Club.O.G. Rose will also be hosting a course at
starting July 7th. To learn more or to sign up, see: Belonging Again: An Address. of is also offering discounts on writing consultations this summer for members and students of Philosophy Portal. If you are interested in working on your writing projects, contact him here to find out more.In this next series of reflections on O.G. Rose’s latest book Belonging Again: An Address we will focus in on the way in which, implicitly or explicitly, Rose offers us a few keys for becoming “good” (dialectical) materialists. In the first part of this series, we will focus on the dialectic between rhetoric and discourse, or to simplify to the extreme, the dialectic between persuasive speech and authoritative speech.
However, first, we must situate this series in a point emphasised by philosopher Samuel Loncar, and reflected in Rose’s text, that we need to become better materialists:1
“Dr. Loncar suggests we need to be “better materialists” who don’t lose sight of the reality […] that “the Human is the Event not yet tried,” an “always unfolding Apocalypse”[.]”
Thus, this series of reflections aims to take us from our initial reflections on the “Hard Road” and the “Scale Problem”, towards the “Human Event” as both “Hard” (as an unfolding apocalypse no one wants to try) and difficult to “Scale” (to go from particularist organising towards universalist effects).
Why would the dialectic between rhetoric and discourse be a place to start in order to become “good” materialists? First and foremost, rhetoric and discourse as modes of speech, must be surely conceived of as idealist, as the products of thought and mind, and not material, as in the external world out there. This would be the first mistake of contemporary idealists and materialists, that is, philosophers who have not managed to tarry with the Freudo-Lacanian moment of psychoanalysis proper. In the Freudo-Lacanian tradition, or should I say discourse, what is emphasised is the signifier not as ideal but as material, having real material effects and consequences. Here is Lacan from the opening of the Écrits:2
“First of all [it is] the materiality of the signifier that I have emphasised[.]”
This form of materialism is not the materialism of the “sun, moon and stars,” it is not the materialism of spacetime; it is the materialism of the word, and it is the materialism within which, we cannot realise mind in the way empty rhetoric about the mind and idealism is on display in contemporary pseudo-philosophy, because it does not really tarry with the real free speech of the subject as a material phenomenon. Here Lacan emphasises perfectly that the stakes of being a good dialectical materialist have nothing to do with the sun, moon and stars, but rather the realisation of the mind:3
“I also get concerned when I come across the assertion that “according to materialism, the mind is an epiphenomenon,” recalling as I do that form of materialism in which the mind immanent in matter is realised by the latter’s very movement.”
Thus, the mistake most idealists make, is putting the proverbial “cart before the horse”. In Hegelian terms, they (narcissistically) place too much emphasis on the immediacy of their intention or idea, and fail to engage the hard work (required to be a good materialist), of carrying it through towards a result, and seeing in this result, the real truth of the intention. The reason why one would avoid this hard work, is that when one carries through an intention towards a result, one will always find one’s intention “infected” by strange and unforeseen consequences that may be alien and foreign, extremely negative even, as it relates to the initial intention.
Best not to tarry with that!
In order to be capable of it, we will have to work through the dialectic between rhetoric and discourse. For Rose, there is certainly a heavy emphasis on confronting the heavy burden and responsibility of rhetoric, that is persuasive speech. There is also a call to our attention of the dangers of discourse, that is authoritative speech. Rose warns us against a discourse that becomes “autonomous” (which seems to be similar or even synonymous with his warnings of “autonomous rationality”). The problem for a discourse that becomes “autonomous” is that obfuscates the power of “high order” rhetoric. From Rose:4
“Rhetoric is particularly in jeopardy, precisely because “high order Rhetoric” is so unnatural to consider compared to “low order Discourse”[.] Eventually, “autonomous rationality” (without “menti-divergence”, “non-rationality”) can no longer advance so descends into Discourse from Rhetoric).”
We might even take some liberties here, and say that an autonomous discourse is a form of rationality which obfuscates the truth of freedom (of speech). And yet there are some complex dialectical pathways we should pay attention to here. In order to “ironman” this preference for rhetoric over discourse, we must also “iron man” discourse, since I would argue there are high and low forms, natural and unnatural forms, of both discourse and rhetoric.
In order to find this proper dialectical relation we may be aided with the help of
of who reminds us of the crucial distinction between weak and strong rhetoric:5The “Weak Defense” of rhetoric posits that rhetoric is a neutral tool that can be used to accomplish good or evil. Furthermore, anyone who hasn’t mastered rhetoric is at the mercy of anyone who has. This is the argument Gorgias tries (and fails) to defend.
The “Strong Defense” of rhetoric posits that the truth always emerges in a social context. It’s discovered, negotiated, and shaped at the level of discourse. It needs to be successfully communicated to have any effect. This means rhetoric is generative and creative; it’s essential to establishing the truth.
From this distinction we may conclude that if we do not understand the proper dialectical relation between rhetoric and discourse, we not only risk falling into an autonomous rationality that obfuscates the truth of free speech, as well as the creativity that may dwell within, but we also risk falling into a form of empty rhetoric that does not help us forward our combat with the truth. I dare say we risk become “false creators”.
Thus, in the same way that “autonomous rationality” in the form of a reified discourse can threaten “high order Rhetoric” where we find new ideas and creativity; we could saw that a “low form of rhetoric” can be used to obfuscate a “high form of discourse”. What is essential is that the “high form of discourse” is not only a discourse that has been won through the arduous labour or work of the concept, but also related to “unnaturally” in the sense that it is related to as oriented towards freedom, and thus not so much identified with as exhausted.
Moreover, discourse, as authoritative speech, is sorely needed today, considering that we have huge issues with legitimacy and credibility, which breakdown intergenerational transmission of knowledge, and thus truthful mediation. In this context we could even say that what is at stake when low form rhetoric obfuscates high form discourse, is the total loss of the truth as a process of mediation.6
This will all be woven into a thesis that any emphasis on rhetoric, comes with a huge burden and responsibility, with concrete examples from world historical processes.
However, first, I can demonstrate the importance of this dialectic with the historicity of Philosophy Portal itself as a material history of signifiers. Philosophy Portal emerged precisely in response to the problem of “low order discourse” as a result of most universities either not teaching the fundamental texts properly, or just teaching philosophy in a deconstructive mode. It also emerged in the context of spending a lot of time on “intellectual” mailing lists which were perfect examples of “low order rhetoric” (which as stated is extremely poisonous vis-a-vis truthful mediation). In order to play my part in resolving the issue of “low order discourse”, I started teaching long-form courses on some of the greatest foundational texts in the modern world. I not only taught these texts as a totality, but also opened up the possibility for students to develop their own relation to these texts in the form of conferences and anthology processes, which is a further dimension of the materiality of the signifier, necessary for the immanence of new subjective mind.
In fact, the explicit branding for the first two years of Philosophy Portal was related to being a place where one could learn the foundational discourses of the modern world.
The reason why this legitimately filled a gap in the philosophical market place was because actually learning the foundation discourses of the modern world is hard, and as mentioned, most philosophy departments that currently exist at scale, have replaced this hard road with teaching post-modern deconstruction of modern discourse. The problem here is that if you do not know the foundational discourses of the modern world, learning the tools of deconstruction actually leads to the problem that you do not even know what you are deconstruction. In this way, in what can only be seen as an ironic historical repetition, post-modernity opens up the trap of low order theoretic that
from is right concerned about. Here Žižek notes that what we find post-modernism is already a dimension that Plato encountered when he was trying to secure truth:7““Postmodern relativism” […] only [reaches] a deadlock that Plato was already struggling with in his repeated attempts to distinguish true philosophical knowledge from sophistic trickery[.]
When we fall into low order rhetoric we fall into the simplistic immediacy of the child that does not yet have the capacity to mediate truth, as opposed to striving towards the immediacy of the child that is the result of mediation (which is arguably possible in the proper dialectical unity between high order rhetoric and discourse). Such a goal is obviously central in Rose’s work.
After making Philosophy Portal’s foundation for learning the modern discourses, I also recognised the problem of a discourse becoming “autonomous”, and disconnected from high order rhetoric. The problem was immanent to the materialist movement of the signifier itself, presenting itself as a strange surprise in the result of my initial intentions. And that is really a dimension where the course foundation needed to be supplemented with The Portal, a live event space that aims to bring philosophy to life, or make philosophy actual. In The Portal rhetoric can flourish, but only in the context and the conditionality that it is being expressed in a community that is also committed to learning the foundational discourses. Rhetoric without foundational discourses has a tendency to spin in circles and never end up in a real mediation, that is, there is the problem of authority, and the problem of rhetorical manipulation.
But as Rose notes, when discourse becomes separated from rhetoric, we have a whole different problem: the problem of self-enclosure. Rose suggests that rhetoric supplements discourse because rhetoric is a form of free speech that works against closed social mediation:8
““Free speech” works against “closed social mediation,” which is to say works to help society and mediation from becoming “autonomous” and self-enclosing "(A/A).”
As a good dialectician, Rose also notes that we cannot just remain completely open, and that being open is not inherently better than closed; again, there is a dialectical relation, where being too open leads to empty deception of low-form rhetoric, and being too closed leads to empty authority of low-form discourse. To stay in the dialectic of openness to rhetoric and closure of discourse, as a fundamental unity, is to engage a real process of mediation that is truly negentropic.9
To demonstrate the materialist stakes of this dialectic between rhetoric and discourse, we can not only rely on an example like the historicity of Philosophy Portal, but also must use world historical examples. Here Rose helps us better understand the relation between Protestants and Catholics. In this dialectic, Protestants would be viewed as more on the side of rhetoric, emphasising free speech and novel interpretation of the Bible, where new ideas and creative projects could emerge; and Catholics would be viewed as more on the side of discourse, emphasising standard or doctrinal interpretations of the Bible as absolutely authoritative.10
Here Rose points us towards the pros and cons of both:11
“Where there are books, there must be interpretation, and so not even completely true books entail no risk of falsity. Protestants cherish the spread and wide-reading of the Bible, but the Bible can be misinterpreted and used for falsity, as Christians can think of other Christians who follow a different demonisation.”
When we analyse this tension as a whole we find the importance of the dimension where our abyssal freedom and our total responsibility completely overlap in speech and interpretation. The Protestants, in differentiating against the Catholics, were so bold as to open the gates of free speech and interpretation in relation to the truth. However, what Protestants have had to wrestle with in the past half-millennium, is the terror of what comes with opening these gates in the necessity of total self-responsibility for the power of our free speech and the power of interpretations. The Catholics have not had to wrestle with this problem, but the Catholics also have the benefits of a higher unity and less fragmentation.
In fact, let’s continue that line of reasoning, as endless fragmentation of authoritative discourse may actually be Protestantisms’ great cultural strength opening up new and unexpected forms of freedom. Consider that this force which has opened the modern world, whether it is aware of it or not, and I tend to think it is not aware, is that it has transcended even the explicit need to identify as a Christian to be Christian. This possibility is so strange that it could be that the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s, often conceptualised as an anti-Christian force, was itself a second reformation in disguise.12 That is, a force often perceived to shake the Christian world’s own self-confidence to the ground on the level of both morality and ethics, may in retrospect be interpreted as the strength of Christianity itself to re-invent itself. This re-invention occurred by Western culture, undoubtedly grounded by Christianity at least in part, including within itself all of the marginalised identity categories produced by historical contingencies of patriarchal colonial expansion and globalisation. If this is true, all that is needed for Western culture to make significant progress in the culture war, is to simply recognise this via a perspective shift on the very tensions between traditional Christian culture and modern liberal culture, that from a certain point of view, appear to be intractable and ineradicable.
Moreover, this dimension directly opens for us the mysteries of unconscious belief and action that are a dominant feature of the contemporary culture war. Take for example people who directly identify as Christians who act as if they don't really believe in a transcendent higher reality but rather get twisted inside out by simple day to day pleasures; or take for example people who directly identify as atheists but can still act as if they are Christians in the sense of sacrificing themselves for a higher transcendent truth, justice, and so forth, in concrete political action.13
But none of this would have been possible without the dialectic of rhetoric and discourse which exploded discourse from within. What is now needed is for us to reconcile with the history of our discourse that is a consequence of this explosion. To be precise, contemporary liberal culture, in its antagonism with traditional Christian culture, can easily fall into a superficial form that loses any capacity to rise above the childish immediacy of pleasures for a true ontological commitment to the truth.14 And indeed, this is what has happened in the emergence of “woke” politically correct ideology. What we get in this ideology is a childish form of rhetoric qua persuasion, an ideology that has no real authoritative discourse tested by the historical weight of philosophy, but just a pluralist multiplicity that has yet to think itself or raise itself to conceptuality. And so, recognising the discourses that made this rhetoric possible, Christianity, as well as modern philosophy, we may lift this rhetoric to a new truth, dialectically.15
We must sublate liberal democracy towards a higher truth in such a way as that we can include within it the whole historical foundations of our history, inclusive of Christianity and its fragmentation via Protestantism into contemporary modern capitalist culture, as well as the counter-cultural “second reformation”, which includes within itself the totality of multiplicity of differences. This is why
forces us to differentiate from democratic materialism towards dialectical materialism via a “Deleuzian” repetition of Plato and Hegel:16“So why a return to Plato? Why do we need a repetition of Plato’s founding gesture? […] Badiou provides a succinct definition of “democratic materialism” and its opposite, “materialist dialectics”: the axiom which condenses the first is “There is nothing but bodies and languages…,” to which materialist dialectics adds “…with the exception of truths.” […] Badiou here makes the paradoxical philosophical gesture of defending, as a materialist, the autonomy of the “immaterial” order of Truth. […] Badiou focuses on the idealist topos par excellence: how can a human animal forsake its animality and put its life in the service of a transcendent Truth? How can the “transubstantiation” from the pleasure-oriented life of an individual to the life of a subject dedicated to a Cause occur? In other words, how is a free act possible? How can one break (out of) the network of the causal connections of positive reality and conceive an act that begins by and in itself?”17
Back to Rose.
As we covered in our first overview of Belonging Again: An Address, this Deleuzian repetition of Plato is very much active in his work. Here we encountered the potential utility of a Hegelianised-Nietzsche, as opening us to the question of spreading childhood, as well as the problem of scale, where we ended with a dramatic ambiguity about what to do.
Or in the words of Lenin: “What is to be done?”
This series of how to be a good (dialectical) materialist is trying to answer that question in a counter-intuitive way. “What is to be done?” is an eternal question that can never be finally reified in a set of un-dialectical idealist propositions, but at the same time allows one to mediate one’s desire for the good to the drive as good. Thus, the question “What is to be done?” is eternal in the sense that we must tarry with it in both the exhaustion of an authoritative discourse, as well as the freedom of our rhetoric for truth. We might say that Protestant ethics, and the ethics of modern philosophy, both at their best, achieve this, or at least open its condition of possibility. We need only recognise it to see that traditional Christian culture (as an authoritative discourse) and modern liberal culture (as a free rhetoric), are not as opposed as they may seem.
Hopefully the first lesson we have learned in this series is that the dimension of discourse and rhetoric, as authoritative and persuasive speech, have to be held in a unity. However, as a dialectical unity, these dimensions are not peacefully balanced in a harmonious whole, but rather constantly at war with themselves (as we see between traditional Christian culture and modern liberal culture). Discourse risks becoming autonomous, as Rose warns us against well, preventing us from actually seeing the real historical struggle for freedom being waged by subjectivity; but rhetoric risks becoming deceptive and false, twisting the truth of a pleasurable immediacy which may bring new power, but also obfuscates the total responsibility that must come with that power. If we can treat discourse as exhaustively oriented towards freedom (and not existing in-and-for-itself), we can avoid the problems and pitfalls of discourse. If we can treat rhetoric as the total responsibility to defend and fight for truth, we can avoid the problems and pitfalls of rhetoric.
We “ironman” both, we transcend the culture war, and that is certainly part of what it means to be a good (dialectical) materialist.
And in whatever is to be done beyond this war, we will need both, because we are dealing with the “Human Event”, as both “Hard” (as an unfolding apocalypse no one wants to try) and difficult to “Scale” (to go from particularist organising towards universalist effects). In the next reflection, we may take a closer look, both dialectically and materially, at precisely what this historical moment calls forth from us beyond the culture war.
Today at The Portal we will be hosting Daniel L. Garner and
of for a Book Club focused on Belonging Again: An Address. You can either join by becoming a member of The Portal, or by signing up as a one-time event: Book Club.O.G. Rose will also be hosting a course at Parallax starting July 7th. To learn more or to sign up, see: Belonging Again: An Address.
Andy of
is also offering discounts on writing consultations this summer for members and students of Philosophy Portal. If you are interested in working on your writing projects, contact him here to find out more.Rose, O.G. 2024. Chapter VI: The (End) of True History. In: Belonging Again: An Address. O.G. Rose. p. 569.
Lacan, J. 2005. Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”. In: Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English. W.W. Norton & Company. p. 16.
Lacan, J. 2005. Presentation on Psychical Causality. In: Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English. W.W. Norton & Company. p. 129.
Rose, O.G. 2024. Chapter IV: Rhetoric and Discourse. In: Belonging Again: An Address. O.G. Rose. p. 240.
In fact, I would argue that as Substack has become more popular, the principle threat is the emergence of low form rhetoricians who use the platform as grifters for money-making scams.
Žižek, S. 2011. Chapter 1: Vacillating the Semblances. In: Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 76.
Rose, O.G. 2024. Chapter IV: Rhetoric and Discourse. In: Belonging Again: An Address. O.G. Rose. p. 246.
In Systems and Subjects I suggest we may think about the Absolute as a “pulsating” openness and closure, see: Last, C. 2023. 4.4.1(a) — Pulsating Absolute: Openness and Closure. In: Systems and Subjects: Thinking the Foundation of Science and Philosophy. Philosophy Portal Books.
Rose, O.G. 2024. Chapter IV: Rhetoric and Discourse. In: Belonging Again: An Address. O.G. Rose. p. 224.
Ibid. p. 233.
We will be exploring this possibility in part with Owen Cox of
next month at The Edge. You can find out more about the event here: The Portal. You can also access the event as a single ticket, here: The Edge.A point well-made by Jordan B. Peterson, see: Peterson, J.B. 2002. Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. Routledge. p. 7.
A point well-made by Slavoj Žižek, see: Žižek, S. 2024. Christian Atheism: How to be a Real Materialist. Bloomsbury. p. 201.
Indeed, I think Philosophy Portal has played its role in pointing in this direction.
Žižek, S. 2011. Chapter 1: Vacillating the Semblances. In: Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 41.
Such questions are also at stake in the recent conversation between
and I on the Deleuzian-Žižekian Bridge, see: Deleuzian-Žižekian Bridge Concepts.