Levi Bryant’s August 2010 post about “Experimental Metaphysics” was brought to my attention the other day via an NYC yoga instructor’s stumbling across the entry and adding a comment that a few days ago automatically fed into my email.
Mistaking the post and its subsequent discussion as recent, I added my own thoughts on what an experimental metaphysics might entail.
Bryant basically asks how activities seemingly tangential to the task of doing metaphysics come to inform the latter. For example, how does the smell of damp soil and the observation of sunlight’s path across a patch of tilled earth find its way into one’s thoughts about the stuff of being? The post is mostly suggestive and ultimately quite modest in its proposals.
While I think there’s definite merit to what Bryant asks, and an obvious implication that circumstances are an ineliminable part of the way a broader reality is taken up by an individual and related to others, the idea of the experimental here is rather conservative in its aims. Specifically, I think the way that Bryant frames the experimental is assuming in its orientation towards a real whose existence matters as fact. That is, what’s being assumed by the experimental activity here is a reality whose status as “real” is determined in advance. The experiment here is more an act of discovery than one of invention, and in a sense, it’s an act the outcome of which is something to know.
My comment (reproduced below) suggests that the “experimental” be considered less as a method for pondering “the resistance of the real” and more a way of being concerned with the creation of realities.
Response to Levi Bryant’s “Experimental Metaphysics?” (posted 11 August 2010).
(February 27, 2013 at 4:53 am)
I’d love to see “experimental” considered here in a sense that is closer to the way the term is used in the arts. I’m thinking specifically of the way John Cage defined the experimental “not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success and failure, but simply as of an act the outcome of which is unknown.” If we take “experimental metaphysics” in this sense, then aesthetics truly becomes first philosophy. The practice of philosophy, and the elaboration of a metaphysics, could be understood, then, as an event-driven act, an event/act whose duration may span a lifetime, and, as Fabio puts it, whose aim resides in the “development through time of the [philosophizing] itself.” This is to say that an experimental metaphysics would see itself chiefly as an aesthetic project whose article of creation—its “ontology”—is no less fabricated than, for example, experimental music’s “compositions,” or experimental fiction’s “novels.” What’s important to an experimental metaphysics of this kind is making sense, which is to say, making particular activities function in a way that lures attention into the ambit of an effective difference—namely, the difference that an argument, along with its concomitant rhetoric and style, makes. Like any artwork, the sense a metaphysics makes needn’t be true or even, in the extreme, coherent. A(n experimental) metaphysics just needs to be persuasive, or more importantly, it needs to be interesting in its invention of a conceptual domain. I’d suggest a metaphysics is also experimental not only when the practices that inform the collection of ideas are spotlighted or emphasized, as they would be—discomfitingly perhaps—at a conference that asks its participants to cook, fold paper, etc., but when an effort to create concepts and to forge new ways of thinking is done without knowing what sense their being done will make. This, however, would be incredibly difficult to image because it risks undermining the cogency that makes philosophy a robust form of knowledge and not mere prattle. (Perhaps this is what Guattari was up to. Levi suggests in another post that he finds G. thinks “too quickly.” It’s possible that Guattari was not thinking too quickly so much as he was doing exactly the kind of experimental thinking that I’m relating here.)
– Priest