Notes on "Minor Rationalism"

This was originally written for a planned catalogue for a group show called "Minor Rationalism" by Eric Schmid, which was about the idea of synthesizing a notion of rationalism inspired by Deleuze's concept of the "minor" based on the notion of constructing universals from piecewise local components. His official curatorial statement from the show can be found here.

A forest. You careen down a turbulent dirt road surrounded on all sides by thick opaque foliage, turning one way and then another, utilizing ritual and spontaneity alike to decide path to follow whenever you encounter a junction of any kind, unable to find any actionable advice beyond Yogi Berra's eternal arborescent wisdom: "when you hit a fork in the road, take it." There might not even be a road, you may have to just cut through the vegetation and hope it leads you somewhere, anywhere, maybe not even with a proper knife.

Eventually you might just come back to where you started from, and you might do it enough times that it becomes familiar, and from there you can draw some kind of a map. You have no idea where you are in relation to the World, that hazy notion of some thing-in-itself your ideas ultimately refer to, the container of all your endeavors; but you have a piece of paper and that's enough to keep a record of the things that don't change: that when you make this set of choices while walking, you'll be back where you started, and from this invariance you can begin to put down some makeshift coordinate system to explain where other pathways, whether pre-existing or ones of your own making, stand in relation to it.

From there, you continue to build your own world, one defined not by the blooming and buzzing confusion of the sights and sounds that swarm you from every angle, but by the pathways you've carved out that allow you to get from one place to another and in doing so relate those places in a way that allows you to give them definitions (this road leads to a lake, this road is the hub for all roads that go west, and so on…) It's not an entirely private world so much as a game you're playing with your neighborhood that you slowly turn to your advantage by further developing the rules, but it's of no concern to those hidden on the other side of the forest who have yet to make any connections; until they do.

This is the dance of Rationalism: the relentless, if not downright ruthless, terraforming at the borderlands between the possible, defined by legible notions of probability and value (or more technically, of measure), and the contingent, where things can happen that don't even belong to the set of all things that could happen. Such autopoesis is all well and good, is it not? Every organism, every system, every expression of what we call life constructs its own umwelt, a subjectivity made not merely of the structure of its senses and thoughts, but of the ways in which such structures are inseparable from the ways it acts on and transforms its habitat in order to create a niche. You have the reflex to flush the toilet after you shit because your ancestors invented toilets and you spent your whole life getting your fiber from the fruits of their mad anal-retentive scheming; your idea of putting your keys in your pockets will always be shaped by the place you chose to put them every day, and if you put them anywhere else, your morning will be shrouded in confusion and strife because you disobeyed the geometry you spent so many years developing and he is a jealous god.

And yet we know from the second we're born that other people, other forms of life, exist. You keep hacking away at that forest, paving newer smoother roads, your labor reflected in the shiny legibility of your updated maps, until one day you hit another one. You were never alone; you did not begin in a virgin forest of cartesian solipsism: your actions, your senses, your very ideas about it all, were always enfleshed in the ceaseless curation of trillions of other minds, each of them themselves constituted not of a pristine atomic cogito walled off from countless prying noumena but of the infinite variety of roads between regions great and small, microscopic and cosmic, that both enable and define the very relationships by which concepts and subjects alike are defined.

And at every step this was evident by the way that you have to work with the world and not against it: cutting a tree one way yields a cleaner and more usable result than doing it another, the sun rises in one place and sets in another, and trees might obstruct your movements or your views but they also provide shade and cover from the rain, which in turn both gets you wet but keeps you from dying of dehydration; but it's easy to take all this for granted and believe yourself the master of your domain until you directly confront a strange path that intersects with one of your own making. Life becomes more complicated, difficult, but it also provides the opportunity to develop a map that offers an even more global sense of space, one that not only covers more area but tracks what can be accomplished by exchange and collaboration between yourself and another; commitment to another as a sacrifice, yes, but one that brings a new kind of autonomy that goes beyond the atomistic language of utilitarianism and negative liberty. You give up some part of yourself, as everything has a price, and yet the capacity for individuation has only increased insofar that the very idea of what you, and others, could be is qualitatively augmented.

And I've been keeping it all a bit humorous for the sake of style and clarity alike, but I'm entirely serious about the underlying ideas and I need to stress for a moment that there's something at stake about which there's nothing funny at all: with the dualism of the "enlightenment" came the undeniable benefits of the scientific and industrial revolutions, but with it also came the glib dismissal of all other epistemologies, all other ways of life, as something purely "wild" that was considered neither civilization nor thought; the "virgin forests" chanced upon by European settlers were not simple unfettered biomass, they were part of a deep co-evolutionary system of stewardship by inhabitants who had lived there for tens of thousands of years, and their fundamental incomprehension of this history was both a cause of and caused by their dehumanization of those who didn't fit the mold of their own civilizational cosmology.

Did I bring this up to arbitrarily inject politics into an otherwise innocent theoretical exercise? As you might imagine from my asking such a rhetorical question, I didn't; this was unavoidable the minute I spoke of the wilderness, which was unavoidably the metaphor that has to be used in light of the cybernetic fixation on forestry found in everything from computer science (binary search trees) to linguistics (generative grammar) to biology (the phylogenetic tree) to geometry (fractals) to the far reaches of postmodern philosophy (the rhizome, on which so much of this essay is based). From that point on, it was only a matter of time before I got to the heart of the matter, about what's at stake when you encounter the Other in the forest and how you handle it, and for me to continue with an innocent fairy tale and ignore the very real times this happened not all that long ago would be infinitely more offensive than any controversy I might stir by directly talking about that difficult subject.

But it also highlights exactly where the project of rationalism has many a time gone wrong: to take one's cues from Plato and see "first principles" as fixed eternal forms uncovered by breaking down fossilized walls of statistical noise, as things that exist at the top of some hierarchy from which everything else derives, is to reduce the local knowledge inherent in the ongoing usage of countless varieties of practices, concepts, tools, traditions, postulates and cosmologies alike to mere protrusions to be shaved off until the ideas in question are nothing more than frictionless bricks to be seamlessly fit into a monoculture that perversely claims to be in some way "universal."

In doing this, the rationalist project betrays its very goals by denying the process of bricolage by which its greatest achievements formed: Newton was not a bureaucrat filing and stamping papers according to a rigid set of rules, he was throughout his life an alchemist, a relentless tinkerer that at some point stumbled on a set of universals that, rather than limiting what one could say, expanded our capacity for thought and action by providing an entirely new vocabulary for talking about the motion of bodies. That his laws were eventually supplanted by Einstein's relativistic framework only serves to prove this point further: he did not uncover something fixed and universal, he created something powerful, so powerful that even though it turned out to only hold under certain special conditions within the more global map provided by Einstein's own concepts of space and time (i.e. when things move slow enough that time dilation doesn't mess with calculations), it not only served as a dialectical stepping stone to Einstein's ideas but also remains a foundation of modern engineering in its own right.

If we choose therefore to treat such "universals" not as rules that dictate the semantic makeup of reality but rather as constructed interfaces through which one can choose to step into this or that enlarged cosmology, we find ourselves left with a kind of ideal that provides additional agency to an endless array of minority epistemologies rather than coercing them into an increasingly restrictive type system. There is as always a cost, no different from the way one must make their ego at least somewhat permeable when they encounter another subject, and this comes in the form of a kind of training: one must learn to move differently, to perfect new techniques by removing their redundant gesticulations, in order to deflate the excess semantic baggage that obstructs one's view of a new concept: one must, for example, learn to do without the classic Euclidean idea of distance to talk about more generalized metrics for defining space (e.g. Einstein's geometry of space-time), and one must abandon an idea of distance altogether to become fluent in other ideas of proximity defined by non-metric topology. But the reward is a positively defined freedom, an ability to reconstruct many of one's own ideas from this new global standpoint that's part and parcel of developing new affordances by situating one's ideas in a richer system of relations.

But in order to prevent the hubris of vulgar reductionism from creeping into this ongoing construction of the global, one must always first and foremost engage the minority: not by searching for some imagined underdog within an existing order of identity or adopting some edgy-sounding label that simply doubles down on the combinatorial logic consumerism, but by proactively drawing connections between disparate ways of thinking that cut across and tunnel under the delimiters constructed by the majority to render subjects more legible (and by extension, more controllable) and creating a fundamentally unstable but contemporaneously productive schema by which a transient minority effortlessly elides existing barriers by simply adding provisional dimensions; dimensions which after repeated use may yet come together as the basis for an entirely new discursive space. There is nothing irrationalist or relativist about it: such lightning coalescings use every tool at their disposal ("anything goes", as Feyerabend loves to say) with the utmost rigor in order to make a tight turn inside the majority's OODA loop, being "formless" only in the eyes of their ubiquitous adversary by virtue of developing a more nuanced one that can't be effectively destructured by the insufficient resolution of the cameras tracking them. Only the minority, the weirdos, the outsiders, the (actual) geeks, those that were called "irrational" every step of the way, know what real rationalism is well enough to wield it against the rabble of self-serving idolaters who merely pay lip service to it; only the minority can be truly rational.

Such is the modus operandi of a rationalism that, rather than presuming a view from nowhere by which all ontological furrows exist a-priori as an eternal and fixed playing field rather than anything actively cultivated through an ongoing process of exploration and construction, accepts the fundamental contingency and variegation of our ideas and actions; sees them as a necessary component of Reason which, far from being a naive mechanical process of computing on extant propositions, is nothing less than the irreducible labor of constructing invariants that reconcile these otherwise disparate modalities of Becoming into a prism through which a single kernel of truth effortlessly diffracts into these fundamentally multiple haecceities; not in order to reduce such multiplicities to simple homogenous mechanisms, but to further empower the multiple to adapt and invent in entirely unforeseen ways by leveraging newfound universalities.

By means of this harmonizing of the universal and the particular, by which each in its groove greatly augments the other, the conflict between the oft-maligned order of generality versus that of repetition^[1] is mediated and transformed into an explosive blossoming in which a manifold of heterogeneous practices and the concepts that bridge them becomes the fuel by which the turbine of Reason continues to repeat the Nietzchean eternal return of its relentless revolutions.

But in order for this to happen, in order to outflank the very ossification that not only stifles the creativity necessary to adapt to our ever changing world but also outright crushes the spirit long before, one cannot take comfort in any kind of prestige or familiarity or seek refuge in the Maginot Line of any fixed pretense of identity that obviates invention and further atrophies the possible ways we can strive to relate to one another. Individuals far and wide, as well as subjectivities of scales both larger and smaller than such individuals, must be brought together on their own terms, on the basis of their own cartographic works in progress, in order to establish a new gestalt cultivated from novel relations through which an ever-new minority may opt to declare itself.

But like everything else this is easier said than done: there are no shortcuts around the uphill battle of deliberate practice and intellection, of hard-earned reason, of respecting the very real constraints that come with reaching for a new synthesis with no guarantee of what it may be or even of there being anything on the other side at all. But the alternative, a descent into reactionary irrationalism, is a surrender to bondage, a cry for empty validation that signals to grifters and rentiers that you're willing to make a deal with the devil. The choice between these two poles is every bit as simple as the task is indefinite and nebulous, but every day you wake up you'll be asked to make it once again, to once more renew the forest with the sweat of your brow even if nobody ever thanks you for it. Your move.

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