The Logos of the World and Its Anthropological and Non-Philosophical Critique
A hypothesis: the existing state of affairs, as one of capitalist globalization, poses the eminently logical question of the universal and particular, of classification and relation. Capitalism, perhaps like all social formations, and perhaps like all ideologies, gives itself as universal – its figures of humanness (“homo economicus”) and its paradigms of rationality, present themselves erroneously as timeless, and its norms appear as “common sense.” The critique of capitalism traditionally (and of other logics like patriarchy, heteronormativity, etc.) expose this universality as a particularity, while the sublation of such a critique is the dialectical affirmation of the universality of such a contradiction itself. The question of the capital-form and the question of the contemporary world-form are thus implicated as a question of the logos, dialectical or not, of particular and universal.
What exactly is the world’s “form”? In part: the abstractions of the commodity-form and money-form. Such abstractions effect a process of deterritorialization, annihilating traditional particularisms, stable identities, and personal images. They replace the qualitative logics and codings of pre-capitalist formations with decodings carried by a minimal and informatic code. At the same time, capitalism, according to its modality of social reproduction, reterritorializes, and today particularism is the prime technique of ideological reterritorialization, in the production of egoic and personal images.
The predominance of the type. The subject of Capital today is not merely a wage-laborer; it is a dehumanized ensemble of information-capital at every moment, beyond the limits of the work day, employed or unemployed. The ensemble of information-capital is what allows statistical algorithms to construct the average consumer-producer. We must all be identities, person-types, indexable as certain kinds of consumers and creators of categorizable information capital. The world-form as a logic of particular and universal is as much one of classification and identity (it is taxonomical). In all of this the phenomenal role of exposure and hyper-visibility in the constant availability of indexable personhood, the ideology of pure transparency, the “culmination” of the metaphysics of presence.
Globalization is capitalism in its most quasi-universalistic dimension, especially post-1989, where nothing explicitly poses as a veritable counter-force while Capital extends extensively and intensively (universal because everywhere, we still know it is but one social formation, quasi-universal). The homology between Capital and World as auto-positional form is in analogy with the homology between Logos and Society (realizing in another way the isomorphism between social classification and logical taxonomy, cf. Durkheim and Mauss On Primitive Classification). Abstractive deterritorialization and reterritorialization on one side, the logic of particular, universal, and type on the other: in truth, they form a complex. Yet the logos here is characteristically twisted for “the World” is the name of the auto-positional complex, and logos is already both its logic and its term: only a deeper form of what Non-Philosophy calls mixture and to be treated according to a scientific symptomatology.
Our theoretical solution is not an anti-logic but a “non-logic”: a unilateralization by generic humanity, by a Real foreclosed to Logic, although logic must be identical with it in the last instance. What can we do with “globalization” if not to push it forward towards a globality that would determined by this kind of humanity, a generic uni-versality prior to predication? Against the quasi-universalization of globalizing Capital, a materialistic uni-versality of generic humanness: globality-without-globalization. Finally, a genuine thinking from the human according to a scientific and empirical anthropology, this time freed from Western humanism, and also from the equally European obsession with the logos of identity.
It is to the credit of ontological anthropology to have paved the way to a truly matrixial and variational approach to human ontologies in their broadest dimension, and to a symmetrization that places “Greco-Judaic thought” as nothing but a human variant Such a relational matrix, however, poses the eminently logical problem, this time, of the status of relation: we are dealing with both the logic of class and the logic of relation (cf. Levi-Strauss The Elementary Structures of Kinship) even as we would free ourselves from the aporias of relativism: we now see “relativism” as itself a Western schema, we now see the relativity of “Culture” itself.
However, ontological anthropology fails when the matrix of relation is confused with an ontology of relation. The Relation is the Philosophical fantasy of synthesis and world-form, the logic of logic as logos, evidenced in the over-inflation of the concept of “relationality”": is this not the ideology and utopian ideal of connectivity? The usage of (world-)logic according to an immanent style of thinking starts, in contrast, from the non-logical and non-relational core of the human-in-human as a materialist theoretical praxis. Underdetermining according to an axiom of separation from the world-form, the matrix of relation is reduced to a tool of modelization.
Let us subvert the logos of the universal and particular and replace it with the complicity of the singular and the uni-versal (dialectical singularity is here a useful model): this is the paradigm of the generic. Indifferent to philosophical decision and to the arbitrariness of the World, we see the synthetic conjunction of the particular and the universal, as well as the (cor-)relations of relationality, as relative-absolute. Relative first and foremost as part of a relational matrix, a system of variants, and absolute as Philosophy and philosophical synthesis, we employ the latter as a modelization of the capacities of a human-in-human prior to predication. Separated and opposed to the capitalization of both identity and relation, but not without making use of its logics (are these not the transcendental masks of the human?), the non-philosophical subject emerges as a thinking in accordance with humanity.