Radical philosophy, conservative philosophy

There are certain distinctions that have a greater payoff on the methodological level than on the theoretical or philosophical level, but which nevertheless belong to theory and philosophy. In literary studies, especially in the early New Critical times, we used to have plenty of them, but they have been replaced slowly by all-encompassing concepts like "text." Right now, we need more distinctions. We need to be able to assert something about a work that becomes only more clear insofar as a very fine, isolated contrast is entertained. This distinction can be applied elsewhere--it isn't small or powerless. And the assertion one makes isn't entirely beholden to its correctness. The thing simply works, and thereby allows us to work better. Multiply tools, create contrasts. Avoid efforts that require one vague, homogenizing concept to make things clear, and stand or fall with the coherence of this concept--like "affect," as it is used by Sianne Ngai, which, however internally complex, ends up working just like that big behemoth "text." Let me just add that Marxist literary criticism (along with the related fields splintering off of a massive, conflicted cultural studies) seems to me to be the place where this criticism full of helpful distinctions is most prevalent right now.

However, there are other places where this sort of concept is in play. In the last chapter of Prince of Networks, Graham Harman makes one of these distinctions--and I find it to be one of the most useful things around for my thinking lately. This is between "radical philosophy" and "conservative philosophy." Harman takes up the sense in which we might at first read these terms and inflects it dexterously. One thing I should note is that the distinction ultimately reaches to philosophy as a whole, but its concern is first and foremost the treatment of objects. While the move from the latter to the former is wholly legitimate, one would have to recall many of Harman's arguments about objects in order for it to be fully appreciated (that is, why philosophy should be object-oriented). I won't do all that now (I just want to explain the way it appears) so I'll reconstruct only the immediate context (though it does gives you enough of a sense of the connection already). For the full story, read the excellent Tool-Being and Prince of Networks.

Harman begins to talk of what objects are, or rather what we really need to affirm about objects in order to have any real sense of them:

Whatever sense of the word "object" we might consider, it always refers to something with a certain unity and autonomy. An object must be one, and it must also have a sort of independence from whatever it is not. An object stands apart—not just from its manifestation to humans, but possibly even from its own accidents, relations, qualities, moments, or pieces. Furthermore, insofar as an object is more than its relations it must stand apart from any supposed monism of the world-as-a-whole, since a homogeneous universe of this kind merely gives us the most radical form of relationism—with everything dissolving into everything else in a vast holistic stew.
-Prince of Networks, 152

Simple enough. But philosophy has proceeded in a peculiar way when faced with such requirements:

Now, any distinction between objects and the other terms mentioned above can also be rejected, provided good reasons are given. Indeed, most cutting-edge philosophies are distinguished precisely by their denial of one or more of the differences just mentioned.
-Prince of Networks, 152

You see the level at which Harman is working: he's showing us that various philosophies have gained their coherence by eliminating something that we might really think twice about. But he's not doing this to fault anybody on small points. He's doing it because he's showing how the process of forming concepts involves many tacit compromises on issues--points at which we'll just leave the thing as it is because we've made good progress in another direction. This is why the reasons given here are "good reasons," even though they have to do away with some of the requirements. I was talking to Paul Ennis, and he rightly said that you rarely encounter such frankness--at least in print--about the way philosophy works. Regardless, my point is that the level at which Harman is looking at all of this allows him to say the following:

Let’s use the phrase "radical philosophy" to describe any claim that the object is nothing over and above one or more of the terms to which it might be opposed.
-Prince of Networks, 152

That is, Harman finds a logic behind a particular way that the various denials of the differences proceed. He then shows us many instances of this logic: Spinoza's divine substance, for example, denies that objects are separate and autonomous in the world, or isn't anything more than its relations, and so is a bubble in the holistic, monistic stew. He rightly says that this particular sort of hyper-relationism characterizes much French philosophy (153). A more commonplace denial of this difference is the commonplace move of science: deny that the object can remain anything other than its parts or accidents, such that the object just is, somehow, its atoms, etc (154). But the point, remember, isn't the classification, but the logic, which is radical. And at this point he really says what this involves:

These approaches can all be called "radical" for reasons of etymology. While not all are radical in the sense of being new and unforeseen, all are trying to identify the single radix, the root of reality as a whole. By taking one side of any opposition as primary and the other as derivative, they resolve an apparent paradox by collapsing everything into one of two opposed terms.
-Prince of Networks, 154

I find this fascinating and so useful because it cuts across so much--we can see that so many philosophies are out there to get at the reality, even if this involves weird postmodern de-ontologizing maneuvers of all sorts. One understands it as a maneuver, and also something that is more than a maneuver. For then, we get the reaction to it:

By contrast with such radical gestures let’s use the phrase "conservative philosophy" to refer to those doctrines that leave initial oppositions in place rather than radically reducing them to one term, but with the major drawback of not giving adequate explanation of how the two terms interrelate.
-Prince of Networks, 154

So of course you have mind-body distinctions, but also things like the phenomenal/noumenal, which weirdly stay in place: "all of these theories try to conserve two sides of the story, if at the cost of failing to link them effectively" (155).

Now, Harman goes on to say that we usually will adopt a general take on things that is either radical or conservative, but then have elements that end up a bit of a mix of both ("Most treatments of most philosophical problems adopt either a radical or a conservative strategy and most thinkers are radical on some points and conservative on others," 155). Regardless, because this mixing happens doesn't mean that the distinction is useless--one can see plainly how much it already pays off. In fact, it makes possible a third way between the two, which Harman says OOP takes. But it also shows us what we're doing constantly--and for me that is almost enough in itself:

Stated differently, radical philosophy holds that there is no problem of communication between opposites in the universe, because everything is ultimately of the same nature. [...] Meanwhile, conservative philosophy holds that there are absolute gaps or dualities that must be respected, and which are generally only described or else solved by fiat.
-Prince of Networks, 155

For at this level of generalization (we have now reached the point where we are implicating philosophy as a whole in terms of its orientation--or lack thereof--towards objects) I feel we're getting at something that remains hidden under so many of our basic ways of working, and which only seem to come out in the philosophy classroom (if at all). (Physicalism, I think, would be neat to view through this lens, even as it deals, however, not with objects per se [everything would need to be shifted around here regarding consciousness if we are to try and take the OOP point about it correctly]. It starts out conservative in this loose sense but then ends up in all sorts of radical claims. Non-reductive physicalism itself announces in its very name that it will have this trajectory, and that this trajectory will lead to a lot of strain: many headaches are involved in trying to conserve hard and fast distinctions and at the same time point out how the nature of consciousness, rightly thought beyond these distinctions, will solve everything.) I would caution that we shouldn't overgeneralize the distinction.

In conclusion, though, I would like to say something about how its more general aspects bear, not on philosophy, but on literary study. In literature, we're way too excited by radical philosophies. When philosophers (among others) complain that literary studies just colonizes other discourses, this is what they are getting at. When people also complain that literary studies just looks for what's new and fashionable and then applies it to various texts, this is what they are talking about. People are out there and trying to say that, because someone has said that everything is of the same nature--in whatever way--we can say x or y about a particular literary text. This isn't such bad reading--though it may be that--as it is attraction to the wrong type of philosophy. Or rather, attraction to only one type of philosophy--that is, I think, the important point. It isn't that radical philosophy is wrong: it is that there is no other tradition, no sort of other tendency within literary studies (and why would there be? we're not philosophers!) that deepens the divisions, that respects the differences. This is to say that I think we can really begin to understand this criticism people levy at literary studies by using Harman's distinction: for no longer are we "colonizing," or really trying to ultimately be philosophers (indeed what's clear from this is that we aren't in the first place!), but that we are weirdly only attracted to one sort of tendency within philosophy. And indeed, this would be the primary reason that when we do philosophy, we're really horrible philosophers--not because we're lacking some sort of counterbalance all the time, but because even if we tried to be conservative we would end up pushing it all towards a radical end. Too quickly, the conservative solutions become for us "historical" views. And in the meantime, the "radical" views aren't really historicized enough--which is, I think, the one thing we can bring to philosophy (a certain sense of how the philosophical argumentation relates to other linguistic maneuvers in history). But I'm becoming too speculative--I'll stop here.