The second manifestation of hysteresis is iteration, to be understood as a property not of being, but of becoming. Consider, by way of example, a natural process such as the transmission of the genetic code; an artifactual process such as the splintering of a flint; and a cultural process such as the formation of a language or ritual. In each of these cases we are dealing with a succession of repeated acts (the copying of the code, the repeated percussion of the flint, the iteration of certain gestures or certain sounds). Little by little, each of these iterations gives rise to a being, both in the form of praxis, i.e. of action (for example, a ritual dance or a conversational exchange), and in that of poiesis, i.e. of production (the genesis of a life form, an arrowhead, a literary work or a legal code). The characteristic of acts, inasmuch as they are repeated, is therefore once again a variant of hysteresis, which in this case is the iteration of an act that is characterised by a competence not necessarily (indeed, only very rarely) accompanied by understanding. Both nature and technology as well as society operate by iteration much more than by understanding, which is why they are emerging structures and not the result of a divine or human construction that follows an intelligent design or some form of intentionality.

Becoming equals being iterated. What is iteration? Hegel wrote that meaning can only arise if something happens at least twice: ‘Einmal ist keinmal’, once is the same as never. For example, it could be a message sent by mistake, or containing an error, which is why when we subscribe to some service they ask us to confirm our email address. But, beyond this obvious practical function, iteration hides a metaphysical power that is not always taken into due account, and which acquires particular relevance at a time when technology, which is first of all iteration, has acquired unprecedented evidence, even though of course it has always been both in us and outside us, since we are intrinsically technological animals.

As we have seen, recording takes the place of causality. There could be causality without recording, but it would be nothing. If there is something, it is because there is recording, which from the logical, ontological and chronological point of view precedes causality, and moreover spares us the absurdity of the theories of some causa sui (‘cause of itself’). Recording is the ontological version of hysteresis, the principle of permanence of the substance as presence, resistance, existence. The realism I propose is not limited to believing in the existence of tables, chairs and anti-realist philosophers: as negative realism it recalls that reality resists thought; as positive realism it affirms that meaning comes from the world and its affordances; and as transcendental realism it affirms that the common root of resistance and affordance lies in recording. It is therefore necessary to start from here.

Being equals being recorded. If we follow the physical conjectures prevailing today – the Big Bang and its updated version, the Big Bounce – the origin of the universe presents itself as the weakening of an original recording. This original recording is the same currently found in black holes, which gave rise to space, time and spatial-temporal objects. These objects, after all, are characterised in ordinary experience as permanence and resistance, which find their condition of possibility in recording as the persistence of a state. From this point of view, being (i.e. the object of ontology) is the result of recording. Following an explosion, some very concentrated matter unfolded and became the world, which was a contingent fact. But in order for this contingency to emerge, transforming itself into the world, the explosion had to show not only the capacity to expand, but also the capacity to record, to keep track. At the beginning there was an explosion, at the end there will be thermal balance, and in the middle there is time, which tells the story of a growing tendency towards disorder and heat loss. But in each of these stages there is recording as the possibility of keeping track of the previous conditions, which, in the mesoscopic terms of our ordinary experience, defines the spatial-temporal characteristics of everyday objects (if the library behind me suddenly disappeared, I would have good reason to believe I was the victim of a hallucination, whether positive or negative).

To Paolo Bozzi

Ex te ipso excede: in exteriore homine habitat res

The structures of organisational power are the subject of this chapter. As a tributary empire, founded upon military conquest, the distinction between ‘conqueror’ and ‘conquered’ was among the most important forms of social differentiation. Membership of the former group implied an elevated social status, often physical separation from the conquered majority in garrisons or on the steppe, and a separate legal status, under the jurisdiction of the command hierarchy of the conquest polity – the Commander of the Faithful (amīr al-mu’minīn) and his sub-commanders (the amīrs). Moreover, the conquerors were the recipients of payments made to them by the conquered. Security and some degree of communal self-governance was the offer in return. The conquered populations retained their own local legal jurisdictions but were governed by the conquerors’ laws where the two groups interacted. Interactions on the empire's frontiers were more violent, unstable and predatory than those in the stable core provinces.

If ‘conqueror’ and ‘conquered’ was a fundamental social distinction, a fundamental social process was its complication over the course of the Umayyad century. In the decades leading up to the crisis of the ‘Abbasid Revolution’ of 747–50, the conquering elite had begun to diversify, with some remaining military specialists, paid from taxation and tribute, and others abandoning military activity for other occupations. The distinction between ‘soldier’ and ‘civilian’ was far from absolute, and individuals could move between activities or combine them. Likewise, from the outset some of the population of conquered lands had found places within the new imperial structures and could undergo processes of religious conversion and cultural or linguistic Arabisation, or both, as they joined, or attempted to join, the new elite. These processes accelerated in the latter part of the Umayyad period in the transition from a monotheist Arabian ‘conquest society’ to more fully articulated ‘Islamic empire’.

These processes had four main phases under Umayyad rule. The first is ‘Uthman's Medinan government of 644–56. ‘Uthman had inherited the structures of the ‘conquest society’. He presided over continued territorial expansion and the transfer of the leading commands and some valuable lands to ‘Abshami allies.

In 1920, two books came out that seemed to divide the field of knowledge in half. On the one side, this world, i.e. This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel. On the other side, the netherworld, whatever it may be, i.e. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, an essay written by a mature and almost elderly Freud. Despite his age, Freud was also making a debut in his own way: no longer as a doctor (albeit of souls) but as a speculative philosopher. I insist on the word ‘speculative’ because it is crucial and appears at the exact midway point of the book, in the first line of the fourth of seven chapters: ‘What follows is speculation.’ What does Freud mean by this? Something very similar to what Kant means when he says that there is a fate of reason, a kind of disastrous or beneficial destiny that pushes it to go beyond the boundaries it has set itself.

In a book published the following year – Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus, which like Freud's and Fitzgerald's works drew on material from the war (and in this case on imprisonment) – Wittgenstein concluded that on this theme of the limit one simply must remain silent. The philosopher thus inaugurated a sad and paradoxical era in which everyone, from physicists to bloggers, can speculate on the highest and most important systems (as they should) while philosophers have to be content with questions of detail that are mostly devoid of interest (and this is really unfair). This era is now coming to an end after a philosophical century that suffered greatly from this interdiction. Beyond the Pleasure Principle can serve as the viaticum for this new season of philosophy – let's not forget that some of the most remarkable philosophical expressions of the past century owe a great deal to Freud's little book. For example, Derrida dedicated a seminar to him which was published in 1980 under the (unsurprising) title ‘To Speculate on Freud.’

So what is speculation about? Death, of course, and a secondary effect of death that is particularly evident, pressing, needy, harassing – that is, life. For much of his reflection Freud was, despite himself, a monist and an optimist: drives are essentially linked to Eros, and therefore to life and its perpetuation. Pleasure is the way in which these drives express themselves, chasing us during the day and manifesting themselves in the night in our dreams.

The fundamental claim of new realism is not that what idealists take to be ideas are actually real things like trees and chairs. In fact, any new realist is perfectly aware of the merits of a coherent idealism and is far from indifferent to the charms of a new and reworked transcendentalism. The point is this: rather than an ontological commitment to the existence of given classes of beings (or as I prefer to say, of objects), new realism is the claim that such ontological commitment shouldn't leave the issue of reality to science, thereby limiting philosophy to a merely educational function. In this sense, the way in which new realism understands philosophy (that is, as a construction and a system, together with a clear ontological commitment) is much closer to nineteenth-century idealism than twentieth-century postmodernism.

I believe this is the right starting point for clarifying the function and scope of new realism in contemporary philosophy (to which I shall limit myself for lack of space, thereby leaving aside its scope in fields such as architecture, literature, pedagogy, art theory, political theory, social sciences, media studies and public discussion).

Nineteenth-century idealism. The twentieth century was a short century not only as far as history is concerned, but also philosophically speaking. At least until the First World War, there were fully coherent and widely accepted idealist systems in the philosophical community (this held true for the English-speaking world and Italy more than Germany, which had been the cradle of transcendental idealism at the beginning of the 1800s). It is against such systems that, as we know, twentieth-century thought went through the birth of what would later be called ‘analytic philosophy’. The raison d’être of the philosophy brought forward in England by Bertrand Russell and George Edward Moore was the critique of neo-idealist systems, and specifically that of John Ellis McTaggart (1866–1925). It was a call for common sense and the ‘robust sense of the real’ thanks to which, in response to McTaggart's claim that time doesn't exist, Moore could object ‘I’ve just had breakfast’.

The Middle East is a region where the some of the earliest empires began. The floodplains of the Nile, the Euphrates and the Tigris have sustained the production of food surpluses for millennia. Collected as taxation, at first in kind and later also in coin, these surpluses supported the armies upon which all empire ultimately depends, as well as the religious and political elites who create and maintain an empire's cultural and institutional identity. With the growth of long-distance trade – itself often stimulated by the dynamics of empire formation – revenues from control of trade routes and their entrepôts also became important. Ancient Middle Eastern societies became highly socially stratified: landowning and mercantile elites, and specialists in administrative, military and religious power, were dependent upon the great majority, the subsistence agriculturalists, who farmed the surrounding countryside. Military expansion, and the coercion of neighbouring groups into the provision of tribute and services or more complete incorporation into the empire's tax structure, was typical of these ‘tributary empires’. By the beginning of the first millennium ce, much of the Middle East was ruled by two long-standing such empires. The Parthian Empire (247 bce–c. 224 ce) was centred on the Iranian plateau, but also encompassed most of what is now Iraq, as well as modern Armenia and Azerbaijan. By the early first century ce, the neighbouring Roman Empire had encircled the Mediterranean, encompassing Gaul and Britain in the far north-west and Anatolia, Egypt and Syria in the east.

In the third century ce, both the Iranian and Roman empires weathered major crises. In Iran, the Parthians were replaced by the Sasanian dynasty (r. c. 224–c. 650), a powerful landholding family from the highland region of Fars, in the south-west. The Sasanian Empire competed with Rome with renewed vigour, notably under Shapur I (r. c. 240–c. 270). At the same time, the Sasanian elite negotiated a new relationship with the priests of the Zoroastrian religious tradition of Iran, transforming diverse traditional practices into a more centralised, imperial cult (though not an exclusive one – the Sasanian Empire was multi-confessional, with large communities of Jews, Buddhists, Christians, Manichaeans and others subordinate to the Sasanian aristocracy).

While there are many deep continuities in the economic and social life of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, some profound changes began or accelerated in the Umayyad era. A new military class, combining migrants from the Arabian Peninsula and pastoralists from the Syrian steppe reshaped both the landscape and the economy. New towns were founded, and the tax revenues of the urban hinterlands were redirected to new ends. The political unification of the Roman and Sasanian monetary zones and the emergence of Arabic as a lingua franca began to stimulate new commercial activity, just as the demands of the new imperial elites also provoked new patterns of trade or expanded older ones. Some of those same elites became wealthy landowners, and many acquired wealth in bullion, livestock and slaves, taken as loot and tribute on the frontiers. Both these spoils of war and attitudes to slavery, domestic life and inheritance among the new elite prompted high demand for enslaved women, shaping both the frontier economies and demographic patterns in the new cities.

This chapter begins with a brief overview of the physical geography of the lands ruled and contested by the Umayyads. This is followed by an assessment of some of the large-scale climate fluctuations that affected Africa and West Eurasia between the beginning of the sixth and the middle of the eighth century. These climatic effects impacted patterns of disease, agriculture and the economy and so are an important context for the Arabian conquests and subsequent social and economic change. These latter questions of human geography and economic change are the subject of the final parts of the chapter, which begins with the material resources of the empire, before turning to patterns of settlement and commerce.

The Physical Geography of the Umayyad Empire

At its greatest extent, in the 720s and 730s, the Umayyad Empire spanned much of the subtropical zone of North Africa and West Eurasia (see Map 10.1). The steppe regions of Arabia, North Africa, southern and eastern Iran were the main corridors of the first conquests, but the Arabian armies extended their control well beyond them, into the neighbouring highland and forest regions. Lowland zones irrigated by the major river systems of the Middle East were the wealthiest arable regions. Some highland and forest zones also supported significant settled agriculture, while in others pastoralism predominated, as it did in the steppes.

I remember one morning in 1979, in Milan, at the office of the journal Alfabeta. Gianni Sassi – not a voracious philosophical reader but a very intelligent man, who unfortunately left us too soon – was reprimanding an editor for cheekily inserting a review of his own book in the journal's next issue: ‘You cannot do that!’ shouted Sassi, ‘It's a question of ontology!’ – of course, he meant deontology. Those were the years when people started saying ‘epochal’ instead of ‘important’, and ‘ontology’ – a philosophical specialisation – was becoming an everyday term, in the wake of Heidegger's popularity.

Heidegger's idea was that the beings we encounter in the world hide a more fundamental Being that makes them possible, determining them through conceptual schemes (that is, concretely speaking, through the books we have read and the language we speak). He also thought that this encounter with Being – stratified in tales, traditions and libraries – constitutes a sort of duty, replacing those of religion and morality. In this sense, Sassi wasn't wrong, after all, in mistaking ontology for deontology. This duty, for Heidegger, concerns not only people, but also beings: if they really want to be what they are, they have to be confronted with the more fundamental Being.

This idea doesn't seem too far-fetched, either. The Aristotelian notion that experience comes before science, Leibniz's reference to the principle of a sufficient reason for everything, and – finally and mostly – Kant's transcendental argument that everything that can become science has to become science (just like every person must become moral), all point in the same direction. The fact that Being and Time was a piece of transcendental philosophy was fairly obvious to Löwith when he proofread the text for his professor.

For a long time I agreed with all of these views; then I developed some perplexities about them. On 28 September 1999 I was in Mexico City and had just begun work on this part of the book, which is a criticism of the abuse of conceptual schemes and transcendental arguments in ontology. Suddenly, the external world hit me: the room started shaking. At first I thought I was hallucinating – I had never experienced an earthquake before.

Movements advocating social or political action in the name of religion or ideology are often founded by charismatic individuals. Where the movement survives, and the founder's charisma is gradually appropriated by institutional structures (or ‘routinised’), claims about the memory of his or her example become crucial to the legitimation of those same institutions. The Qur’an and other seventh-century sources suggest that Muhammad's authority had depended above all upon his claim to direct access to God, that is, to ‘prophecy’ (nubuwwa) and to being a ‘messenger’ (rasūl). Such direct divine inspiration was always perceived as threatening by established religious authorities and so most (but not all) prophets in the late antique Roman and Sasanian world before Muhammad had come to be remembered merely as ‘false prophets’ or ‘heretics’. However, Muhammad's prophetic authority was perpetuated by members of the community of the Faithful who not only survived him but prospered. As a result, his legacy became the focus of intense political competition.

One consequence of Muhammad's prophetic authority was the importance of close association with him as the basis for a claim to lead the Faithful. Muhammad's first four successors are all said to have joined him in the 610s, before the emigration to Yathrib/Medina, and they were all related to him by marriage – the first two as fathers-in-law, and their successors as sons-in-law. However, there is no evidence for prophecy being attributed to any of them in the same way that it had been for Muhammad. This suggests that some aspects of the process of ‘routinising’ Muhammad's prophetic authority were widely accepted by the first leaders of the Faithful. God did not speak directly to leaders after Muhammad, but they did retain authority as military commanders, as judges of disputes and as moral exemplars. This ‘routinisation’ was probably bound up with the Meccans’ determination to retain control of Muhammad's movement after his death – prophecy is an inherently destabilising force.

Besides the legacy of the charismatic authority of Muhammad himself, three further features of the early political history of his movement stand out. The first is the dynamic of military and political expansion upon which the unity of the wider federation depended. The second and third points are noted above: the political power of the Meccan relatives of Muhammad – the Quraysh – was dominant from the outset and Muhammad's legacy was politically central.

Hegel wrote that ‘sense’ is a wonderful word, because it has two opposite meanings: On the one hand, it indicates the senses – sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste – and all that has to do with sensibility. On the other hand it indicates meaning, as in ‘it makes no sense’. This circumstance cannot be considered accidental. The sensible and the intelligible have a common root, as we have seen, and this root is found in the environment, in the interactions and inscriptions that take place within it, and in recording as a metaphysical condition of interactions and the environment: in reproductive imagination instead of productive imagination, in repetition instead of creation. If meaning can be grasped by the senses before the spirit, it is because it is outside before being inside.

How does spiritualisation happen? On the level of technology, Hegel observed that iteration is what ensures the transition from material to spiritual. The technology to which Hegel refers is the practice of embalming corpses in the Egyptian religion, which he interpreted as a first intuition of the immortality of the soul. And he noted that death, as suggested by embalming, occurs twice: first as the death of the natural; then, with embalming, as the birth of the spirit. Without recalling the long tradition that, from Plato to Hegel, sees the body as the material aspect of the sign, Hegel's thesis is that the simple preservation of matter, which makes it iterable, generates the process of alteration that ensures the passage from the material to the spiritual, from passivity to activity, from the pyramid to consciousness.

Perfect repetition is not the norm, but the exception. For example, for the organisms that reproduce asexually (which are evolutionarily older than those that reproduce sexually), mutations, i.e. alterations, take place as errors in the copying of DNA, i.e. in the principle of iteration. From these exceptions come good or bad things, at least if we take the point of view of humans, such as genetic mutations, whether they be useful for the evolution of the species or result in the death of the individual, as in the case of neoplasms. This is how, finally, we have alteration: the rank of soldiers comes together, or, outside the metaphor, perceptions (in the Aristotelian example) turn into meanings.

The Speculative Realism series at Edinburgh University Press would never have been complete without a book by Maurizio Ferraris, long-time Professor of Philosophy in Turin – the city where he was born in 1956. Amidst the ongoing resurgence of realism in continental philosophy, it is worth recalling that Ferraris has a good claim to be the first full-blown realist in the continental tradition since Nicolai Hartmann, a now-distant contemporary of Martin Heidegger. Given that the education of the young Ferraris was closely linked with the famed anti-realists Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, one would expect him to place the question of reality in sceptical quotation marks, or even ridicule it outright. Instead, Ferraris had sufficient courage to walk an initially lonely path towards the realist ontology he defends today. A stunningly prolific figure, Ferraris has authored somewhere on the order of seventy books, of which eleven are available in English translation at the time of this writing. Yet far from being a reclusive scholar, this book-writing machine of a man is also a socially dynamic organiser, a hero to Italian notaries due to his book Documentality, and someone who crosses the proverbial analytic–continental divide as easily as if he held a diplomatic passport. He is the driving force behind Labont (Turin's Centre for Ontology), and as affable a dinner companion as one could hope to meet. Along with the German philosopher Markus Gabriel of Bonn (whose own book Fields of Sense appeared previously in this series), Ferraris spearheads the New Realism movement in philosophy. No matter how grim the challenges still faced here and there by realist philosophy, Ferraris always appears to be in high spirits and never ceases working. Even a chance encounter with him at a conference often leads one to receive valuable news and to be drafted into two or three future projects.

As Ferraris tells us at the beginning of his book, its two main parts, ‘Observation’ and ‘Speculation’ (renumbered as Two and Three to make room for a fresh introductory passage), were written twenty-one years apart. This helps us understand at least two things about the book. First, it demonstrates the consistency of Ferraris's philosophy since the occurrence of his realist turn.

Unlike the steppes of Central Asia, from where federations of pastoralists have repeatedly irrupted into the settled lands to their south, the Arabian Peninsula has only ever generated one episode of trans-regional conquest – the so-called ‘Islamic conquests’ or ‘Arab conquests’ of the 630s and 640s and after. Hence, this unique event presents a problem. Whereas some patterns can be discerned in the interaction between the predominantly nomadic peoples of the grasslands of Central Asia and the settled agrarian lands of Europe and Asia, no such pattern is immediately apparent in the interaction between the Arabian Peninsula and the world to the north. Nonetheless, this exceptional event is explicable. A dual perspective, which takes in the long-term interactions between the settled world and the steppe, together with the short-term context of the geopolitical circumstances of the later sixth and early seventh centuries, provides the best framework for understanding it.

In the first overview chapter, events in the Middle East until the beginning of the sixth century are set out. From the fourth century ce, interactions between the empires to the north and the peoples of the Syrian Desert led to new political formations among the Arabic-speaking pastoralists there, often in the context of the adoption of local forms of Christianity, distinct from those promoted in the Roman Empire. Meanwhile, in the far south of the Peninsula, the kings of Himyar promoted Judaic monotheism and built alliances with pastoralists in southern and central Arabia. In the second chapter, the escalating conflict between Rome and Iran and the weakening of Himyarite power are the immediate contexts that explain the expansion of the influence of the West Arabian region of the Hijaz in the late sixth century and the success of the mission of the Prophet Muhammad in the early seventh.

The third chapter shows how Muhammad and his allies reshaped the religious and political landscape of Arabia and how his immediate successors extended their influence into the Roman and Sasanian lands of Syria, Egypt, Iraq and western Iran. Members of the Umayyad clan, most of whom are said to have opposed Muhammad until his victory became inevitable, were leading participants in the wars of the 630s and 640s.

Where do we come from? From an evolutionary history that is far longer than philosophers could imagine. Instead, philosophers devised a human being capable either of shaping the world through its ideas or created by God to shape the design of providence. In reality, we come from something that was there before us; which means that any hypothesis based on the anthropic principle is structurally inadequate. That is why we must take a leap of the imagination and try to think of the world without humans. If you will, it is a matter of taking God’s point of view: which is certainly not the much deprecated ‘view from nowhere’, since it is built precisely by following the thread of principles that go beyond human nature. We can see these same principles at work in the ongoing technological revolution, which is not only a revelation of human nature, but also at the same time an indication of what made human nature possible before any humans appeared on Earth. It is primarily in the present that the origin manifests itself.

0.1 In the Beginning Was the Web

The answer to the question ‘where do we come from?’ is a popular version of the fundamental ontological question, ‘what is there?’, but declined in the past tense: ‘what was there?’ Or more precisely: ‘what was there in the beginning?’ The answer is simpler than it sounds, and it is offered to us by none other than Harlequin: ‘C’est partout et toujours comme ici, c’est partout et toujours comme chez nous, aux degrés de grandeur et de perfection près.’

Indeed, in the beginning was the Web: at least if we want to believe Plato’s hypothesis, which is anything but far-fetched. In the Sophist, Plato speaks of a συμπλοκή, an interweaving or network which can mean both the connection of ideas and that of syllables. It is not difficult to recognise here the ideal antecedent of the Web, providing that one explains the technological or metaphysical con-dition which makes it possible. Now, Plato also speaks about this condition: in the Timaeus he theorises the χώρα, which literally means ‘space’, ‘place’ (it is still a very common name for Greek villages), but which in a metaphysical sense indicates an ‘intermediate genus’, and which consists of a formidable ability to retain.

The collapse of Umayyad power happened within a decade. The North African revolts of 740 had begun the process, breaking away the western part of the empire from central control, while the failures in Sicily and Anatolia in 740 had also damaged the Syrian armies and weakened Hisham's prestige. When Hisham died, less than three years later, the extent of the rifts within the wider Marwanid clan and their armies were exposed. These fractures were widened by competition between other powerful groups close to the ruling family, among them the Thaqafi relatives of al-Hajjaj, the Makhzumi maternal relatives of Hisham, and the family of Khalid al-Qasri, the deposed governor of Iraq. Because of these conflicts, Hisham's death triggered a succession crisis and civil war in Syria. This breakdown at the imperial centre gave well-established networks of opponents of the Umayyads in Iraq and the East an opening. In the East, as with the ‘Berber Revolt’ in the West, it was the mass participation of non-Arab forces that gave the rebels an advantage on the battlefield against divided and demoralised Syrian armies.

The End of Marwanid Unity and the Killing of al-Walid II

Towards the end of his life, Hisham had made unsuccessful attempts to nominate his son, Abu Shakir, as his heir. Abu Shakir was to succeed in place of his cousin, al-Walid b. Yazid, who had been named as Hisham's successor by his father, Yazid II, in the early 720s. The tussle over the succession had pitted members of the Marwanid family against one another and had involved other members of the wider ruling elite whose interests were aligned with the succession of one or other candidate. Hisham's sons, his maternal relatives from the Banu Makhzum, his commanders in northern Syria from the Banu ‘Abs, and the senior religious scholar at the Marwanid court, Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri, are all said to have been in favour of changing the succession in favour of Hisham's son. In contrast, al-Walid b. Yazid's place in the succession represented the opposing interests of his maternal uncle, Yusuf b. ‘Umar al-Thaqafi, whose appointment to Iraq in 738 presumably marked the end of any ambition to alter the existing arrangements.