Belonging Again

A Reflection on O.G. Rose latest book

I discussed with Daniel Garner of O.G. Rose their latest book, Belonging Again: An Explanation.

I take the central point of O.G. Rose latest work, Belonging Again, to represent a crucial break in the contemporary discourse on both “crisis” and “meaning.” Although there is a great legitimacy in framing certain aspects of our contemporary situation as a crisis of meaning, there is also a way in which this framing can miss the foundation of the human world, which involves the problem of belonging. I, for one, happen to find the work I do incredibly meaningful (even if I never reflectively think about it, my action just always-already is meaningful). However, in actualising this “meaningful drive,” whether in the university system as a doctoral student, or as a post-academic in various liminal web spaces, what strikes me as a constant is the feeling of never-quite-fitting-anywhere, never quite belonging.

Surely I am not alone.

The problem of belonging is one that does indeed get overlooked. What immediately strikes me is a legendary trialogue between anti-guru Krishnamurti, physicist turned spiritualist David Bohm, and the speculative biologist Rupert Sheldrake, on the roots of psychological disorder.¹ What this trialogue points towards, is that, while meaning can be situated on the register of an adventurous drive, belonging must be situated more closely on the register of a security drive. We may even use the metaphor of a tree: while the sprawling branches of a tree (qua adventurous drive), can point in this or that direction at the same time, this whole motion is irrelevant and even impossible without the root-system (qua security drive), that establishes the foundation for the tree.

This is all very relevant to the contemporary discussions in intellectual online spaces about crises of meaning. It could be that what is really going on, is not a crisis of meaning, but rather an uprooting of our basic security drive/belonging systems that make the drive of meaning, meaningful. That would make a lot of sense. In the past two decades the world has been totally consumed/enveloped/destroyed-and-remade in the image of the global digital surface that threatens to pull us all away from our embodied existence (which must always submit to and contend with the chain of biosocial reproduction) into a hyper-reality metaverse.² This hyper-reality metaverse melts all normative human relations that constitute belonging within a generational and developmental framework.³

Now we are all just disembodied singularities on a virtual surface.

Consequently, whatever we found meaningful in the old system of values, like performing as a professor of science at a neoliberal institution, all of a sudden seems hollow, empty, superficial… meaningless.

What a crisis.

Well, its meaningless because there is no more belonging. No one belongs anymore, and no one wants to pay the price that is demanded for belonging. I suppose the only way I have been able to keep myself engaged with a “meaningful drive” is reconciling myself with the feeling of belonging in the universalisation of non-belonging.⁴

Enter O.G. Rose, a brilliant creative team and married couple, comprising the individuals Daniel and Michelle Opperman Garner (O.G.)⁵ and their latest philosophical work: Belonging Again.

Belonging Again “short-circuits” our current moment by bringing attention back to the roots.⁶ Daniel Garner emphasises that this bringing attention back to the roots, is something that has occupied, not only his mind, but also his body, since the writing of the book in December 2016. In the work of O.G. Rose, this team always, and uniquely, manages to balance both the adventurous drive into the unknown, in their podcast series, O.G. Rose Conversations, and the security drive grounding community, in his discussion space, The Net.⁷

This balance is also nicely struck at the very structural ground of the book, Belonging Again, which is inspired by American sociologist Philip Rieff's Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (1966). What Belonging Again tries to frame is what we might call “The Rieff Problem,” involving the loss of traditional “constraints,”⁸ and what Garner will call cultural “givens," which threatens institutional foundations and democratic processes.

In the technical literature, the importance of constraints has become the focus of an important topic: thinking through the evolutionary emergence of new phenomena, like for example, new forms of belonging.⁹ Paradoxically, without constraints limiting what is, we cannot meaningfully generate anything novel. The evolutionary scientist Terrence Deacon, in Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (2011), emphasised that thinking constraints entails thinking absence (or what he calls “absentials”). To think the emergence of something new, we must first think what is not there. In other words, we must think the negative.

No wonder Garner is inspired by Rieff, who, following Freud’s Civilisation and Its Discontents (1929), tries to make use of Freud’s discovery of the unconscious (not-conscious) for framing a tragic sociology.¹⁰ What is so tragic? The loss of traditional constraints/cultural givens and the inabiltiy to re-establish these traditional constraints/cultural givens by way of the older ways of thinking (whether fundamentalist religions or conventional morality). And the situation is not resolved by Rieff himself, who Garner emphasises, is not interested in defending traditional culture, but is rather simply pointing out that we are in deep trouble without social constraints.

This trouble is that without social constraints we lose a positive negativity, i.e. a background of thoughtlessness. Consequently, we gain a negative positivity: everything must be thought. Perhaps this is why I feel like the current moment can be conceived of as the “revenge of philosophy,” where basically everything must be thought again, from the ground qua root system, up. The temptation to recoil back into some fundamentalist givens will be/is a strong one. A world without a thoughtless background is extremely existentially demanding, anxiety provoking, because the subject cannot locate itself in its social matrix.

Moreover, even if this is the “revenge of philosophy,” not everyone wants to or can shoulder the burden of thinking in the style of a Socrates, or a Kierkegaard, or a Nietzsche. Consequently, you cannot build a civilisation out of Socrates, Kierkegaard, or Nietzsche. For that, you would perhaps need a Plato (who can certainly help think ancient grounds) or Hegel (who can certainly help think modern grounds) or Deleuze (who can, perhaps, help us think post-modern grounds).

What Garner wants to bring to our attention specifically, in the spirit of a great dialectician, is the relation between “givens” and “releases.” Our current society is a pure release from givens. What Belonging Again invites us to think, is what it would take to re-establish givens without recoiling back to traditional fundamentalisms. This is an important task and thinking path for young people today. That is precisely what we should be trying to think, if we want to consider ourselves worthy of the title “intellectual.”

But what would that entail? What would it mean to be a “Garnerian Knower” or a “Garnerian Overman”? What it entails and means is the courage and the commitment to thinking through new traditional definitions of daily life that are inspired by actually confronting the limit-zones of one’s own phenomenal experience within daily life. As Garner always emphasises in his work, one should beware of becoming too caught up in one’s own “bright ideas” that “overfit” to “phenomenal” experience in order to avoid the burden and pain of thought. Indeed, without the burden and pain of thought, which brings one to the contradiction of one’s identity, is one even thinking at all?

These new traditional definitions of daily life involve the way we relate to concepts like courtship, marriage, child-rearing, faith, and interpersonal exchange (inclusive of the sexual, economic and political). Let us consider the “meaning crisis” again: if as a society we have no common relationship to courtship, marriage, child-rearing, faith, and interpersonal exchange (inclusive of sexual, economic, and political relations), then we will have no belonging, and we will be cutting the very root system required to continue engaging a meaningful drive. Consequently, the risk of falling into isolationism (Garner will frequently warn us of the Deleuzian society par excellence: Japan), and collectivism (Garner will frequently warn us of the temptation to totalitarianism and authoritarianism that emerges due to lack of belonging).¹¹

Thus, if we are to re-engage a meaningful drive, as a society on the local, the national, and the global levels of complex spatiality, it must be situated within a framework for belonging, that can really hold or stabilise new relations to courtship, marriage, child-rearing, faith, and interpersonal exchange (inclusive of the sexual, economic and political). But the challenge seems impossible. How are we to think through belonging in a world of artificial intelligence, unregulated global capital, bioengineering, and cultural pluralism? Moreover, how are we to think through these dimensions when the large majority of individuals are not formally trained in the foundational philosophical thinkers, that may help us raise our minds to the intensities and complexities of the present moment?¹²

This is perhaps why Garner calls the subtitle of the second major section of his work Confusion’s Masterpiece. Can we see the dizzying complexity of our moment as something inherently masterful and beautiful? As opposed to the desire to become all-knowing masters as an unconscious response? For Garner, we must become absolute knowers (which is basically equal to knowing one’s limit or constraint vis-a-vis the given) and Nietzschean children (which is basically equal to an open indeterminacy capable of release and re-release into what is given), to confront this confusing masterpiece. Garner often refers to this move as the “Absolute Choice”¹³ that involves the “work and blood of our lives,” through which, we may belong again.

Note here, how Garner, far from emphasising a return to an abstract identitarian alignment with traditional culture (whether Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, etc.), emphasises “work” and “blood.” In other words, it is only through a “blood work,” that we may belong. Conversely, there is no belonging if we are not willing to “pay the price.” Garner’s belonging is not a naive utopianism or an absolute communitarianism. It is a belonging where we risk heart break, it is a belonging where we include radical (sexual) difference, and it is a belonging where we die to the future child. Belonging comes at such a price, and perhaps the global digital, with its screen totalitarianism, is something that many escape into, so that we can avoid paying that price. Ask yourself: have I really risked heart break? Have I included radical sexual difference into my life-path? Am I preparing to die to the future child?

If the answer to any of those questions is no, perhaps you need to rethink your meaning drive from the ground/roots up.

Some final thoughts: in my conversation with Garner about Belonging Again, he emphasises towards the end that we cannot truly belonging again unless we are willing to:

1. Deeply and repetitively question our motives (think absolute knower, Nietzschean child)

2. Be constantly willing to kill the thing we spent our life’s work on (i.e. if your meaning drive is not rooted, you have to go back to the square root of -1)

3. Become skeptical of thinking that makes you comfortable (comfort is not intrinsically bad, but it is if you are using comfort to avoid risking your heart)

4. To avoid the temptation to be seen as the person who finds the solution (i.e. to be THE Master Signifier that resolves “Confusion’s Masterpiece”)

Only with this quadruplicity will we become the people who belong, and in that belonging, perhaps, become the people capable of address.¹⁴

You can find the work of O.G. Rose here: link.

Reminder: I discussed with Daniel Garner of O.G. Rose, to discuss their latest book, Belonging Again: An Explanation.

1. Krishnamurti, J. 1982. Discussion with scientists 1 - Roots of psychological disorder. link.

2. See: Last, C. 2020. Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer. (see: link)

3. My first scientific intuition pointed towards this uprooting biosocial reproduction itself, see: Last, C. 2014. Human Evolution, Life History Theory, and the End of Biological Reproduction. Current Aging Science, 7(1), 1-8. DOI: 10.2174/1874609807666140521101610. (see: link)

4. One here is reminded of Dr. Todd McGowan’s attempt to think our current situation from the perspective of the universality of non-belonging, see: Universality and Identity Politics.

5. “Rose in the Cross of the Present.”

6. This short-circuiting to the roots captures a similar motion in my philosophical attention to Alenka Zupančič’s What Is Sex? (see: link).

7. ““In the spirit of eunoia” the second subtitle, is meant to honor an organization O.G. Rose was part of between 2008 and 2014 in Charlottesville Virginia, though “The Net” has no official affiliation with that organization now. “Eunoia” can be loosely translated as “beautiful thinking,” a phrase we have always loved, for it recalls the three infinites—the good, the true, and the beautiful. We included the second subtitle to honor that creative community which was so formative and meaningful to us.” (see: link)

8. See: Rieff, P. 1966. Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud.

9. Heylighen, F. 1995. (Meta) systems as constraints on variation—a classification and natural history of metasystem transitions. World Futures: Journal of General Evolution 45.1-4 (1995): 59-85. (see: link)

10. What is also interesting to note is that in my personal relation to Daniel Garner, we have been trying to think again modern philosophy, specifically the relations between Nietzsche, Deleuze and Heidegger, from the standpoint of Hegel’s dialectics of negativity.

11. Here Garner frequently references the way in which Orthodoxy leads to Duginism, for example.

12. This is indeed the whole point and meaning behind the establishment of Philosophy Portal.

13. Garner, D. 2022. The Absolute Choice. In: Enter the Alien: Thinking as 21st Century Hegel. Garner, D. & Last, C. (Eds.). Philosophy Portal Books. p. 250-283.

14. Part 2 of this same book, will focus on “The Address” to belonging.