Causality and Explanation

In my first course with Dr. Ulmer, we were trying to invent an ontology of the accident as opposed to substance. One of the instructions and ideas that I will never forget is that we aren't in the business of explaining the accident, but rather that the accident EXPLAINS US (not just as individuals, but as a collective society). This is with the logic of psychoanalysis -- the externalization of a string of signifiers shows us to which signifiers we are subjected to (how our unconscious is structured/organized). So, in this case, we were not thinking about explaining history, nature, or anything external in terms of causality or tendency.

In the history section, Julien claims that Westerners too had an intuition of shi: "Montesqui, has an intuition of shi, as what he calls a 'general cause' or a 'trend'" (214). Going along with what Jake Greene said in the band presentation, we don't want a "general" cause and we are not looking for a concept or myth that would explain events. Instead, I would argue in contrast we have to look at the external world to understand ourselves and, particularly, to understand our own agency.

Greg said something very suggestive last night: We are all our own prime movers.

This directs me to Julien's more explicit philosophical claims on causality. Because we in the West were concerned with being, we posited a substance which meant that we had to explain change: hence, agency. The challenge for China is that they have to explain being or, relative stability. According to Julien, the Chinese explain that through positing nature, history (remember, although the Chinese are not speculative, they tend to be systematic) as a closed, auto-regulative system that functions through alternation.

We are looking for what Michel Serres calls a "quasi-cause," a catalyst, a parasite. A 'cause' in the sense of object cause of our desire (we will get into this more with Lacan).

Instruction: We are not trying to explain Chinese metaphysics or Western Metaphysics or Electrate Metaphysics, because to explain them would be to locate causality in either abstract concepts, agents, and causes or internal processes of auto-regulative systems. We have to look at Electrate Metaphysics as emerging from the co-agency (quasi-agency/quasi-cause) of human beings sending their desires out into the world and getting them back in return. 

The world intimates. 

I think this instruction is close to a Chinese poetics, but instead of trying to capture the internal "spirit" or "breath of life," we want to capture the relation between the senses, desire, and the world. I recognize I might be jumping the gun or important other attempts at electrate rhetoric/metaphysics from other seminars, but I think that this is in some ways the only alternative to these literate systems of explanation. Not to eliminate cause, but to think about cause differently. Lacan will help a lot with this task.