Over at the inaccurately named Struggleswithphilosophy, Edward proposes the sort of analysis necessary for avoiding the Hegemonic Fallacy and demanded by object-oriented philosophy. Meanwhile, Carl, over at the amusingly named Dead Voles (why this name, Carl?), chants “object-oriented philosophy, what is it good for?” As Carl puts it,
Among the various things ideas may be for, what they’re nearly always for is constituting discourse communities, conversations and like minds. For ideas in the present, then, that I don’t have a professional obligation to backtrack through all their assembled agendas and contexts, the questions for me are first: whether they’re getting anything done I see a need to get done; and second, whether I find the conversation and/or conversants compelling. In the case of the new philosophy I’m solid on the latter, which is why I’ve been engaging with it. But I’m really shaky on the former, which is why I keep feeling so dissatisfied. What the hell is this stuff for?
To this, Edward, without realizing that he’s responding, remarks,
The main objective of hybrid model analysis is to construct an object-oriented approach for researchers that avoids what Larval has termed the “Hegemonic Fallacy.” Instead of the researcher relying on one style of analysis, the hybrid model forces the researcher to explain the object of analysis in its diversity. For example, when the researcher is examining the object of cars in the world, the hybrid model would not allow the researcher to select one particular dimension of cars to explain their existence. The problem of selecting one dimension is that it would only reveal and prioritise one aspect of cars and neglect other factors. Imagine if I analysed the discursive construction of cars in various discourses. While the analysis of these discourses would prove invaluable, its language bias would fail to capture the hybrid nature of the object in question. The result of examine the discursive construction would be to remained traped within the hegemonic fallacy. The hybrid model would not neglect the importance of discourses disseminating meaning about cars, but it would claim there are other dimensions (political economy, environmental factors, technological capability, and so on) that construct the object. The challenge for the researcher is to conceptualise how all these dimensions interconnect and influence one another in the object of analysis.
Quite right. My particular version of Object-Oriented Philosophy arises primarily from a dissatisfaction with the social and political theory that has been my bread and butter for over a decade. Here it’s important to keep in mind, as Harman has repeatedly emphasized, that there is no entity floating about called “Speculative Realism”, such that all Speculative Realists share these positions. Between Graham Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant, Ray Brassier, and Quentin Meillassoux there is no discernible shared position to be found. Indeed, there is a great deal of conflict among these positions, such that each of them is making very distinct ontological claims about the nature of the world. If, as Graham argues, there is some unity among the Speculative Realists, this is not to be found among their shared positions but rather in what they are against. That is, the common thread linking the Speculative Realists is a dissatisfaction with correlationist and anti-realist paradigms of thought. In this respect, it wouldn’t be inaccurate to claim that there are a number of “Speculative Realists” that don’t refer to themselves as Speculative Realists. For example, Deleuze, under one reading, could be classified as a Speculative Realist. DeLanda certainly fits the bill, as does Alfred North Whitehead. Harman argues that Latour fits the bill, and I would add Stengers to this list as well.
read on!
At any rate, back to my particular path to Object-Oriented Philosophy or Speculative Realism. As I remarked, I arrived at this position due to dissatisfaction primarily through the sort of social and political theory I was immersed in. My background is primarily characterized by an engagement with Deconstruction, French Post-Structuralism, Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Phenomenology, and German Idealism. In fact, my master’s thesis, written paradoxically after my dissertation, was on Husserl, Derrida, Peircian semiotics, and semiology. There I proposed a semiotic conception of objects (it was entitled “The Sign-Structure of Objects”) drawing heavily on Peirce, Derrida, and Saussure. And, of course, I later became heavily involved in Lacanian psychoanalysis, both practicing as an analyst and going through analysis myself, and have published a modest number of articles working within a Žižekian and Lacanian framework.
My way to Object-Oriented Philosophy arose primarily out of a growing sense that these modes of analysis are inadequate tools for approaching social and political philosophy. Although thinkers like Derrida or Žižek commit what I call the Hegemonic Fallacy when the former claims that there is nothing outside of the text or the latter treats the real as a twist in the symbolic (rather than something independent of the symbolic), the issue is not that these modes of analysis lack value, truth, or importance. Quite the contrary. Rather, the issue is that these modes of analysis impoverish those elements belonging to the social, restricting it to cultural formations such as texts, pop-cultural artifacts, etc. Drawing on my recent article on Žižek and discourse theory, these forms of analysis can only target the domain of immaterial labor, missing the other crucial dimensions of social assemblages.
In my view, this myopic approach generates a series of false problems and ineffectual forms of practice. Readers of Adorno and Horkheimers’s “Culture Industry” will, perhaps, readily recognize the false problems this “culturalism” generates. The cultural comes to seem like a monolithic entity that is completely closed and without avenue of escape, such that agents are thought as mere products of the cultural. This is a common vein in a variety of culturalist forms of theory. Thus, in Althusser, there is no subject, but rather we are always-already interpellated by the ISAs. In Derrida, of course, we get the endless play of textuality from which there is no escape, such that while the text never achieves the closure it seeks it is nonetheless perpetually haunted by the specter of ontotheological assumptions lurking within it. Similarly, in Foucault, we are products of assemblages of power and knowledge. To repeat, all of these forms of analysis are valuable and worthwhile. The problem emerges when we treat them as the ground of everything else. It is here that bad solutions emerge. Because of this conception of the social, thinkers like Žižek, Badiou, and Rancière contend that we must conceive a pure subject, a subject that is nothing but a void, such that this subject is completely undetermined by the social and therefore capable of agency, resistance, or escape. In other words, we have a dialectic between the cultural that overdetermines everything else and the subject that is completely free and undetermined, thereby offering a point of leverage where engagement might become possible.
Under this model– and I’m painting with a broad brush –the primary site of engagement becomes culture. Derrida and his followers place their money on the deconstruction of texts, hoping to open the space where something beyond philosophy, beyond ontotheology, might become possible. Žižek focuses his analysis on cultural artifacts, endlessly revealing the workings of ideology deep in their depths, hoping to effectuate a separation of the subject of the void from the subject in the imaginary or the field of ideological interpellations. Badiou envisions his subject of truth as recoding the elements of culture in terms of the event heterogeneous to the encyclopedia of the situation, and goes so far as to claim that economy is outside of politics, that it doesn’t belong to politics. I contend that, in one way or another, all of these solutions result from the Hegemonic Fallacy where it is held that culture overdetermines everything else, or rather that all entities (persons, objects in the world) are merely vehicles of cultural significations.
These are substantial ontological claims. As K-Punk recently noted, it is not that disputes over ontology are disputes over politics, but rather that disputes over politics are disputes over differing ontologies.
My instinct would be to reverse this, i.e. it’s not that ontology is always constructed through a political battle, but that politics is always constructed through an ontological battle. Politics certainly presuppose ontology – to take a glaring example, the key slogans of Thatcherite capitalist realism, for instance (“There is no such thing as society, only individuals and their families” and “There is no alternative”) were explicitly ontological claims, claims about what sort of entities can be said to exist in the world. But that isn’t to say that all ontologies presuppose a politics.
The social and political theories I have gestured to, perhaps unfairly, above presuppose a particular ontology: an ontology where objects and persons are vehicles of the cultural, whether in the form of the signifier or language or some other cultural agency. Those working in the fields of social and political theory should take a break and play SimCity. The reason that SimCity is so instructive for the social and political theorist is that it reveals the importance of non-discursive, non-signifying differences in the morphogenesis of the dynamics of groups. The absence of a road or a power plant in a particular portion of your city will cause the utter decay of that portion of the city. The population begins to rally, calling for the mayor’s head, crime rises, etc. Placing a road in a particular portion of the city suddenly becomes the occasion of homes being built, businesses coming into being, etc. Natural disasters and events lead to shifts in the dynamics of the population, becoming the occasion of new political trends, and so on. It will be objected that, with the exception of natural disasters, things like roads and power plants are cultural in character. This is true. They are cultural in character. However, they are not discourses. Rather, they are avenues of connectability around which discourses come to be woven, but without being reducible to these discourses. Yes, a hurricane leads to the weaving of all sorts of discourses. A student from New Orleans told me, yesterday, how many in Dallas informed her that God was punishing the sinful people of New Orleans. However, Hurricane Katrina was not itself a cultural difference, but it was an occasion for massive shifts in social dynamics among both the people of the southeastern coast, and arguably throughout the country.
When it is declared, through the Ontic Principle, that there is no difference that does not make a difference, or, through the Hegemonic Fallacy that it is a mistake to treat one form of difference as overdetermining all other differences, what is being said is that we must learn to think assemblages of differences in a network, how they are woven together, and how they function to (re)produce certain forms of relations. This requires, as Edward, following Latour, has put it, a hybrid form of analysis that is capable of shifting between the semiosphere or the empire of signs, technology, nature, individual persons, social systems, etc., without one of these domains overdetermining the rest such that all the others are mere vehicles of this one overdetermining difference. By “vehicle”, of course, I mean relating to an entity in such a way that it merely carries another difference– say a signifier –without contributing a difference of its own. Thus, for example, I treat clothing as a vehicle when, like Barthes, I reduce it to its semiotic dimension without asking what difference the clothing itself introduces. It is certainly valuable to ask what semiotic system burkas belong to; however, we can also ask what difference this form of clothing itself introduces into the life of a person independent of its function in a signifying system.
This way of thinking requires substantial ontological shifts in how we think about the world. On the one hand, it requires us to shift from thinking of in terms of their relations to thinking of them in terms of their independence as entities. If we are to think of Hurricane Katrina as a difference that makes a difference, then we must grant Hurricane Katrina the status of an individual or autonomous actor or entity that exists in its own right, rather than reducing it to a vehicle for a system of semiotic relations. This is not to suggest that Hurricane Katrina does not enter into relations with other actors such as signs and discourses. It does. Rather, as opposed to the structuralist and semiotic idea that holds that a sign is defined by its diacritical relations to other signs, this move instead argues that entities have an independence and autonomy that is not exhausted by their relations. Entities always contribute and contain their own differences. Not how liberating this thesis is in relation to, say, Althusser’s notion of interpellation. Interpellation takes place, yes. But the person interpellated is never exhausted or summed up by their interpellation, and interpellation is never entirely successful because the person interpellated is not simply a place holder in a system like a quarter placed on a chess board to serve in the stead of the missing pawn.
If, then, entities are not products of their relations but have some autonomy or independence from their relations, it follows that we must shift from thinking in terms of an ontology of systems or structures where all terms are interdependent and cannot exist apart from from that system, to assemblages where elements of an assemblage both are related to one another in the assemblage and are independent of relations in that assemblage. At the ontological level, assemblage thinking invites two things: First, assemblage thinking invites us to pay particular attention to how a) relations are put together, b) what is put together, and c) the processes by which an assemblage produces itself, reproduces itself, and maintains itself in time. Because the individuals entering into an assemblage are autonomous, assemblages constantly face the risk of falling apart or dissipating into thin air like so much mist. Anyone who’s formed groups and organizations is aware of just how precarious and fleeting these assemblages can be; or how much work these assemblages require to be maintained. The difference between assemblage thought and system or structure thought is that the former is aware of just how precarious assemblages are, whereas the latter treats structure or system in an ontologically reified way that explains, rather than needing to be explained. Where the assemblage theorist thinks the real miracle is that some assemblages manage to persist through time or stay together, the structural or system theorist thinks the real miracle is that change manages to take place. The assemblage theorist says “the social does not explain, but must be explained”, whereas the structural or systems theorist says “the social is that substance which explains and individual actors are what need to be explained”. The assemblage theorist is interested in connectability and connections, how they are made, what is connected, and how they maintain themselves.
Second, the assemblage theorist is, above all, interested in the heterogeneity of the elements associated in an assemblage. Connections must be made or built. The connections made or built are connections among heterogeneous entities that come from very different ontic domains. Where the structuralist reduces the social to a single ontological strata (language), and where the systems theorist reduces the social to a single type (communications), the assemblage theorist discerns connections between signs, language, technology, persons, natural entities, media, etc., etc., etc. In other words, there is not one ontic domain that is privileged over all the others, but rather a heterogeneous where very different ontic domains must be woven together in ways that never quite work out. This ontological pluralism significantly broadens the possibilities of political engagement, while also shifting us to a hybrid mode of analysis that is happy to concede that often we artificially limit what is analyzed for the sake of research, while also recognizing that there are many other differences that make a difference and that are irreducible to the difference being analyzed.
Larval Subjects . 
February 5, 2009 at 2:49 am
Levi: “Second, the assemblage theorist is, above all, interested in the heterogeneity of the elements associated in an assemblage. Connections must be made or built.”
Kvond: One wonders if this is a hegemonic overdetermination of a Theory of Assemblages. The Asssemblage theorist asserts that all must be reduced, through theoretical work, to the heterogeneous so that that we can locate the “work” in building our preferred object, assemblages. Work itself becomes what is hegemonically produced by the theory, in hopes that such an invented explandum, the wielder of the explanans can hegemonically over-code.
If a Principle of Irreduction is to have real traction, then the reductions of the Assemblage Theorist need to be examined.
February 5, 2009 at 2:59 am
Thanks for this conversation. This first response will not be adequate, but it’s a start. First, this is starting to look like the introductory material to something of real value in the specific contexts you’ve begun to identify and analyze. Second, the trick for us humanistic intellectuals is to notice that because for us words are everything, we translate everything into words/texts/narratives and we’re highly vulnerable to magical thinking. It’s good reflexively to correct for that, and it’s also good to notice that this is not a universal affliction.
February 5, 2009 at 2:59 am
Kvond, that’s a good “gotcha” point that follows your general practice of arguing that something has either been thought of before (your recent remark of the two bodies of the king over at Shaviro’s blog) or correcting others, but I don’t think it really follows. No doubt this arises from a desire for recognition and to find your own place, which would be better served by simply articulating your own positions rather than arguing that other positions are wrong or derivative from Spinoza’s position. The Hegemonic Fallacy addresses the issue of reductivism where one type of entity is used to explain all other entities. Thus, for example, Plato, under one reading, commits the hegemonic fallacy insofar as all entities become vehicles of the forms such that when they deviate from the forms, they are simply seen as deficient, rather than contributing their own difference. This is the force behind Deleuze’s discussion of the importance of the simulacrum in Difference and Givenness. He shows how Plato is forced to acknowledge a form of difference that isn’t inscribed in the forms. Likewise, Lacan commits the hegemonic fallacy in submitting everything to the requirements of the signifier. He fares better than Plato in that he at least acknowledges that there’s a remainder and something irreducible to the signifier, but still falls short in acknowledging that these non-signifying differences are only negative rather than committing their own difference. At any rate, an assemblic form of thought would be at odds with any sort of hegemonic reduction.
February 5, 2009 at 3:01 am
Btw, love the chant link.
February 5, 2009 at 3:08 am
Carl,
Thanks. I generally think your posts have been right minded and asking fair questions. I’m enjoying the discussion as well. I kinda think of all of this in terms similar to how Kant described his second Critique or the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. That is, Kant said that he wasn’t saying anything new about morality, nor “teaching” anyone anything. Similarly, I think the sort of ontology I’m trying to develop articulates a number of things that are (or should be) obvious. For some there will be nothing new to hear here as they’re already doing the sort of work I’m talking about, e.g. they’re not referring everything to the signifier, the discursive, or power, but recognize differences produced by things like natural events, technology, connections among agents, roads, etc. It doesn’t surprise me that a historian coming out of Gramsci and Braudel would respond with a “so what”, because such a historian is already implicitly working with such an ontology in their day to day work. Indeed, the historian knows that the intellectual is not the only “actor” in history and works with this in their daily work. Not so much in the world of social and political theory or philosophy proper. I plan to throw up a post on anti-humanism soon. In my view, the anti-humanism that follows from my particular version of Speculative Realism is paradoxically a humanism. That is, whereas anti-humanisms arising from structuralism, Heidegger, and the philosophies of 68 were the result of the claim that there is only structure and signifier, not subject, my position necessarily leads to the conclusion that the human is a real object-ile among other object-iles that cannot be reduced to something else like language, structure, or economics.
February 5, 2009 at 4:15 am
Yes, I see and agree that I’m not what you’re up to here and I appreciate your patience with my marginalia. And of course it’s pleasant to be in an exemplary ‘state of nature’ but I’ve still got lots to learn here. You won’t be able to take this mountain by force; I’m very interested to see what strategies you come up with. It’s work, just as you say. The resituated humanism is a nice move.
I don’t think kvond is entirely in gotcha mode. It’s got to be important even in assemblage theory to be mindful of the leverages strategic reductions can generate, not just analytically but existentially. Sometimes shit gotsta get done and all that complexity hasta get bracketed for a moment. A dimension gets turned into the breeze of the situation. Taking moments as constitutive dimensions of objects, isn’t this moment every bit the object?
February 5, 2009 at 4:15 am
Levi: Kvond, that’s a good “gotcha” point that follows your general practice of arguing that something has either been thought of before (your recent remark of the two bodies of the king over at Shaviro’s blog) or correcting others, but I don’t think it really follows. No doubt this arises from a desire for recognition and to find your own place, which would be better served by simply articulating your own positions rather than arguing that other positions are wrong or derivative from Spinoza’s position.
Kvond: Excellent advice. Except for the fact that you already have declared that my position is not welcomed here at all, that panpsychism is something you have no desire at all to “waste digital ink” over (I think that that was your phrase). Given this, a priorty of difference as heterogeneous ground is someting that cannot just be declared, but the reduction needs to be justified, in particular when someone also declares a Principle of Irreduction.
Additionally, part of my position is noting when others are expressing something that seems to have been throughly expressed in other prior forms. When I ask how a notion of celebrity allure is different than a concept of the second body of the king, this is genuine question, and I hope that the answer is the assertion of a difference. One draws the connection so that someone’s declared original thought can be distinguished from what preceded. If I ask you how your notion of difference departs from Spinoza’s, it is not to minimize your voice repetitive, but to give it a chance for a distinction (or the embrace of a tradition). Or, for instance when you emphasize your newly named Ontic Principle without any reference to its near pre-statement almost 3,000 years ago, its good to ask, how is this principle different than its Sophist counterpart? So generally, when I point out a homology in past thought my implicit request is that the thinker please, and I do mean please, make clear how this new thought is different. The plea is, let me orient myself to the assertion through what is familiar. Please tell me, “Yes, it is something like that, but in this very important way it is not” or even, “Gee, I’m not familiar with that past form of a similar thought, maybe I should check into that to deepen my own position” (I for instance love when someone points out a similarity of my thought with something that has proceeded! failing to have that disease that Harold Bloom suggests is pervasive).
But further to point out how other philosophical positions are wrong or possibily derivative is essential to philosophical critique. This is the way it goes. And part of this is that if one is going to state unequivical “Principles” then their own philosophical project I believe should be subject to these so-called Principles. I find for instance Wittgenstein’s own normatives of use to be undermined by his language as game presiding descriptions.
As to your appropriation of Bateson’s defintion of information, and your essentialization of heterogeneity, you neglect Bateson’s primary meaning of difference, which is that the difference is a difference to a pre-existing system, a unity. It is of course fair to take his defintion and twist it a bit into an essentialization of a kind, I do a similar thing. But the translation has to be traced and not just posited as Bateson inspired.
As to whether you are saying something new or not, the question of originality isn’t a question of great value to me (although you have stressed that your ontological metaphysics is entirely your own), the question is, what is the relationship of your assertions to the assertions of the past such that they now stand in relavance to specific conditions of our time, this context. This can be something very old, or something never thought of before. It don’t see that that in particular matters. But if it is something old, then it must position itself within the context of past reactions to, and synthesis of that old thing, so that we can do something new with it.
So when you say: “Fallacy addresses the issue of reductivism where one type of entity is used to explain all other entities.” I remain unconvinced that you are not committing this just such a fallacy since you are primordeally concerned with heterogeneity for its own sake, and for the sake of establishing a vector of “work” which may or may not hide the “work” of your reductive theory. This is one of the problems of those that champion a Principle of Irreduction, for instance, I want to know by what paths of work Latour has reduced all of existence to Actors and Networks (and possibly plasma). To my ear this is a fair question, if one holds just such a Principle.
February 5, 2009 at 4:25 am
[…] Find an enlightening response from Larval Subjects here. As I had hoped, the effort is thoughtfully targeted and it is indeed work that needs doing. […]
February 5, 2009 at 4:27 am
Kvond, I just don’t think you play very nice and therefore don’t find discussion productive with you. Coming from a different interlocutor I might take a defense of panpsychism seriously, but from a person with whom I wish to discourage discussion because of how they comport themselves, it’s easier to just move along and address valuable and productive criticisms from those from whom I actually draw something. The issue here isn’t about whether or not there’s criticism (criticism welcome, please!), but about how rhetorically criticism is conducted and whether it helps to advance something or is aimed at demolishing something. Rather than simply stating your positions and going from there, you have a tendency to diminish the positions of others. You seldom acknowledge anything in the other person’s position and tend to trace it all back to the position of some other thinker rather than simply attending to the claims being made (for example, your plea for Harman to link what he’s saying to Spinoza today). That’s not a productive discussion for the person on the receiving end. That’s all. To put it in softer terms, I’m trying to work here and I just don’t find your remarks very conducive or valuable to my work. In Spinozist terms, they just don’t much contribute to my conatus, and therefore I rightfully ignore or exclude them.
As for Bateson, the issue is neither here nor there. Of course I don’t use Bateson’s definition of information as the difference that makes a difference because my claims aren’t about cybernetics or the functioning of information systems, but about ontology. or what is. The claim that there is no difference that does not make a difference is a claim about what beings contribute, not what registers in a cybernetic code. That is, information and cybernetics is a subset of such an ontological position. As I politely asked you before, go away!
February 5, 2009 at 4:41 am
Oops, sorry to intrude on a running dispute.
I once heard a wonderful story about a Japanese custom, when confronted with unfamiliar and unpalatable food, of not offending the cook by saying “I don’t like this” but rather, “I haven’t learned how to like this yet.”
February 5, 2009 at 4:56 am
And of course I would be hostile to panpsychism given that the foundation of my ontology is the Ontic Principle or the thesis that there is no difference that doesn’t make a difference, therefore excluding any reduction to a form of difference that reduces all other differences to its type of difference, i.e., universal (pan) mind.
February 5, 2009 at 9:35 am
[…] https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/02/05/object-oriented-philosophy-what-is-it-good-for/ […]
February 5, 2009 at 5:01 pm
Levi,
I perfectly accept, and now much more thoroughly understand what it means when you say that my comments do not serve your conatus well (excellent use of terms!).
I would respond to your counter-claims against panpsychism, or your guarding of Graham’s conatus against my suggestion to him that Spinoza’s ontology at the very least bears strong resemblance to what he is saying, in particular in resolution to his biggest and admitted problems with his own position, but my conatus does not affect yours well – hopefully not everyone shares your conatus, or is an actor merely in your Network…if I can put it that way.
Also, I would not take the time to describe your rhetorical strategies, the way that you characterize positions that do not readily embrace your assertions. You see, for me I have a certain naive approach to philosophical claims. They are to be questioned, and they present themselves publically in order to be challenged (and not just embraced…it is after they have been tested that you make the claim “Good show…my boy!”). If Latour is right, and you, Levi, are merely another an actor attempting to build a black box that whose internal working parts (translations) are to be hidden from everyone, I certainly do play the cremudgeon who keeps trying to take your black box apart. But, if you want a stronger black box, one that is more immune to the critique of others, you might want to build it with my objectionable points in consideration, Why is it that you are not violating the Principle of Irredicibility and the Principle of Hegemony? What are the specific acts of translation that have brought you to your reductions to favored elements out of which all else is contructed? What specific relationship does your Ontic Principle have to rather famous and similar assertions of the same (Plato’s Sophist, Spinoza’s “the more ways a body is affected…), Bateson’s “a difference that makes a difference [to a Unity]”, to name a few. Even if my tongue is poisoned for you, the questions are germane to the black-boxiness of your coming theory (and maybe only someone who rhetorically speaks like me is the kind of person who would dare or imagine to raise them).
Now this is the Internet, and I may just be a half-crackpot who does not play the academic game of argumentative decorum. I do not stick my pincky out when I raise an objection to my lips (and I do not want to minimize this too much because questions of Culture, violations of behaviorial norms go a long way toward circumferencing what passes for Truth or integrity of discourse). Part of the glee academics feel when they have finally been let out the prison-house of boring Journal publishing recidivisms is that suddenly they have the new ground, the freedom to be creative; they can become what Graham calls the “intellectual Gambler”. Well, one of the drawbacks of this new freedom (!) is that one has to mix with the unwanted types, the swarthy others. The rules of conduct become slightly challengable, people object to you not just as a Kantian from the kingdom of Kant, one with whom your own family line has a long and established, if contestable, diplomacy. In this way a person who challenges your thought might not be a product of a comfortable University pedagogy showing the breeding of ideas that are easily recognizable, one such as you admirably displayed earlier in the post, firm lines of accepted thought progressions, from papers to disseration, to book. Someone like me, a rhizome one might say, might spring up in the English Garden that has recently been let to grow a bit wild. I am a footnote thinker, someone at the margins. My thoughts have developed through the chasing of footnotes, linking books through the back door, not the front.
So yes, when academics condemned to the lower rungs of a respectability ladder are suddenly given a chance to finally express themselves, to “gamble” a bit, the very nature of the new environment is going to be of a gradated border. People who have not learned to deliver the backhand blow properly, with the glove, might assume a wrong tone, use an inappropriate image. Someone like you will feel that their conatus is under assault in this nether region of potential new intellectual development, as the weeds get in, and rightly retreat into a space more amenable, more nuturing, something of the old academic journalistic ways, but with more “freedom”.
But now the problem is with the question of “gambling”. If Graham is calling for the Intellectual Gambler, one has to ask, what is one Gambling with. If one gambles with marbles among a few friends, this is not much a risk (or even significant pleasure), it is? For one to truly Gamble, one has to be at risk. It always amuses me that the great risks of those we most Intellectually admire are seldom shared by those who do the admiring (and hoping to equal or surpass). Instead, philosophy becomes meta-philosophy, which is worse than metaphysics. Unless the risk is equaled, the payoff at the table becomes triffling.
So yes, guard your conatus closely, be careful not to expose it to things that are bad for it, nurture its quiet border, but as we {and I mean all of us] appraise the value of new topographies for intellectual development appreciate that if one’s thought is novel so too must be its challenges. The places from which and the forms out which questions come should be necessarily alien. The very people who do not share your micro-culture are those that may best inform the richness of where you stand. Odysseus did not stay in Ithica.
February 5, 2009 at 6:03 pm
Hi Kvond,
These are great points and I appreciate the time you’ve taken to compose them. I do not, however, think you know much about academia if you think that it isn’t riddled with petty infighting and a lot of silliness. Academics can be the worst of the worst.
Like you I am on the margins, not an insider. I teach at a small two year school that is not a research institution and that doesn’t require research from its faculty (though many do research). Most of my philosophical engagement in the last twelve years has been on the internet, whether on email lists or in forums like this, not in journals or at conferences.
A couple of points as to what I think are the necessary conditions for discussion to take place between people. You seem to be under the impression that I am hostile to criticism. While it is certainly true that criticism can be painful, it is also, as you outline in this email, valuable. Rather, what I am hostile to are particular forms of discussion and criticism that I find to be of little or no value in terms of what I am doing. First, I find little or no value in discussion that attempts to assimilate my positions and claims to that of another thinker. For example, charges like “didn’t Aristotle say that?” I have no patience for this sort of discussion because it attempts to shift discussion from a discussion about the claims being made to a discussion about Aristotle. Aristotle may or may not have made such a claim, but since I’m not interested in having a discussion about Aristotle but rather working through the position I’m developing, I politely bow out (and often not so politely) when such a move is made in a discussion.
Along these lines, compare the manner in which Alexei approached discussion and the way others defending Kant approached discussion. Alexei was defending a Kantian position, so why did his approach differ from others defending a Kantian position and earn a very different, generous response despite the fact that he was criticizing my position in a fairly strong way? The difference was that where others wanted to make the discussion about Kant, arguing either a) that Kant had been misunderstood (turning it into a discussion of participation), or b) claiming that Kant had already done such a thing, Alexei squarely acknowledged that claims were being made and put forward his own claims (from a correlationist framework) and why he thought the position was problematic. In other words, in the case of Alexei the discussion remained about the positions rather that becoming a discussion about some other philosopher. In this way it’s possible for discussion to proceed. I find it difficult to proceed in a discussion with someone else when they’re attempting to subsume my work under the work of another thinker because, well that’s my work and such a subsumption would undermine the possibility and reason for doing that work, leading to the conclusion that I should instead be working on Aristotle, Kant, Protagoras, Heidegger, Spinoza, etc. This is why rhetorically such moves generally fail in allowing socio-genesis to take place in a discussion. It’s one thing to say something like Aristotle or Spinoza would be helpful in relation to such and such a point. It’s quite another to subsume another’s work. Under such circumstances discussion simply can’t proceed, because the person working on what they’re working on, whether it be a book on Marx or their own philosophical work, is working on what they’re working on and cannot afford the textual detour to continue that work when the discussion shifts from a discussion about the claims being made to a discussion about a particular philosopher. Consequently, when you write:
I agree! All of these influences are there. I’m not denying that. Everything has its material cause and part of the material cause of any philosophy is the philosophical soil out of which it grows. But I am not interested in a discussion about Plato’s Sophist, Spinoza’s account of how the body is affected, Bateson’s definition of information, etc., but of the implications of what I’ve called the Ontic Principle. By way of analogy, I am not interested in who made the hammer or what the hammer is made of, but with using the hammer.
The second context in which I walk away from discussion is when I sense that the other person is being an uncharitable reader and looking to find something wrong with certain claims. A lot of this will have to do with background experience with the person I am talking to, and usually such behavior can be detected through uncharitable readings of what I’m saying that attribute absurd claims to me. In this case, I simply don’t have the emotional energy or desire to continue the discussion as I have little to gain from it. If I respond or continue another absurd point will be attributed to me, my blood pressure will rise and time that could have been spent doing other things will be lost.
Third, of course, I walk away when there are a high number of ad hominems in how the person is addressing me. In that case there’s little or no reason to continue the discussion for obvious reasons.
Since you are a fan of Bateson you are probably familiar with the concept of schismogenesis and can see the reasonableness of trying to avoid situations that tend to invite schismogenesis. Barring these things I’m more than happy to engage in discussion and critical discussion.
February 5, 2009 at 6:47 pm
Also I would humbly suggest this little experiment. You write:
Try making your case without mentioning the name of Spinoza or the terms Spinoza uses at all. Instead of saying “Spinoza solves your problem” (which implicitly says to the person you’re addressing “therefore you have no work to do”), instead simply state your claims and how you think they have a particular solution to problems you discern in the other person’s position. The first approach generates schismogenesis between you and the interlocutor. I think you can readily see why this generates schismogenesis if you carefully analyze the propositions of Book III of Spinoza’s Ethics. The second approach, by contrast, where Spinoza is, as it were, “black-boxed”, opens the possibility of dialogue with the other person because now the discussion isn’t about Spinoza nor is the implicit subtext that the other person should surrender themselves to Spinoza, but rather the discussion remains squarely within the context of the claims being discussed. In your post here you make the case for acknowledging criticism coming from strange places as valuable to the person to whom that criticism is directed. Perhaps. However, given the volume of what you’ve written here and elsewhere in response to the work of others, it’s clear that you very much want to engage in dialogue. There are ways of promoting this and ways that tend to diminish that possibility. If dialogue is truly your aim it’s good to reflect on what tends to diminish it and to develop strategies to promote it.
February 5, 2009 at 7:09 pm
There are ways of promoting this and ways that tend to diminish that possibility.
If I may just pass the Stalinist filter for a moment, please, I think you’re ignoring your interlocutors’ implicit complaints against the AFFECTIVE style, dr. Sinthome, for statements like the above clearly show that you want to be in control of the situation. The content may be democratic, but the context is militant. And though without shame I admit this turns me on, I find it a major letdown that you’re doing it for the sake of some Egyptian diva’s Phallic hegemony. I mean first of all you’re better looking. We also all know that you’re brilliant, you don’t need to chase away your friends and foes just to get to Cairo. I’d rather watch the Swan Lake with Mikhail than see you turn into a GRUMPY ASSHOLE.
February 5, 2009 at 8:26 pm
Fair enough, Dejan, though I don’t see this as having anything to do with said person in Cairo. One of the things that’s interesting about these discussions about communication is that even as they aim to diminish conflict by citing just why someone has a problem with a particular form of address, they tend to promote more conflict. The better option seems to be simply refraining from getting into those discussions which one senses will be frustrating and unproductive, without mentioning why at all. Some encounters make me feel like a grumpy asshole, which is something that can be seen on this blog from its very beginning. In other words, I’m not turning into a grumpy asshole but have always been a grumpy asshole!
February 6, 2009 at 11:09 am
What seems significant to me is that there is an assemblage that values the production of itself at the same time as it values putting this production of itself at the maximum tolerable risk of destruction. Larval produces his theory, his reputation, his assemblage by opening his productivity up to influence by the productivities of other assemblages to the maximum extent he can tolerate, to the verge of a threshold where it would be a different assemblage producing itself. I know I’m not familiar enough yet with the terminology to have said this correctly, but badly or well-expressed, this is what interests me about assemblages.
February 6, 2009 at 8:33 pm
[…] Subjects, in a charitable gesture proposed an experiment of argumentation, that instead of me simply eluding to a certain thinker from the middle of the 17th century, or […]
February 6, 2009 at 8:47 pm
Aside from particular points made, I appreciate the offer to make my thougghts regarding Spinoza and OOP at least a little bit clearer (now posted). I’ve been away from the computer for a bit, so could not answer quickly on this. I’ve tried to refrain from the use of Spinoza terms (in the body of the argument), and such, as you requested. Perhaps this will give you a sense of how I see the relation between Spinoza and the aporias of OOP.
I don’t know how this bears upon your own philosophy, for your metaphysics seems to be transitioning back away from OOP, but I do appreciate the offer for an “experiment”.
February 6, 2009 at 8:57 pm
I look forward to reading your post, Kvond. Perhaps you could say a bit as to how you see me transitioning away from OOP. Do you mean that you see me transitioning away from Graham’s ontology, or something else? If the former, I don’t think I was ever an advocate of Graham’s metaphysics; which is not to say that I don’t find a good deal of inspiration there. When I refer to Object Oriented Philosophy I have in mind any philosophy that affirms the reality of objects independent of human beings. Thus, for example, an Object-Oriented Philosopher affirms that atoms are real (if indeed they are real, the science could be mistaken) and exist regardless of whether or not humans know about them or think about them and that atoms are not just constructions for-us such that it is meaningless to talk about them outside the context of human existence. This affirmation allows for wide variations among different metaphysics. Consequently, two thinkers can both, in my view, be realists or Object-Oriented Philosophers, while nonetheless giving very different accounts of what objects are and how they behave. Just as you get a variety of different idealists while nonetheless all of these thinkers are idealists, you get a variety of different Object-Oriented Philosophies while nonetheless they are Object-Oriented Philosophies.
February 7, 2009 at 12:16 am
Levi,
Then perhaps there is a mistaken conflation of terms. The way that you define OOP is usually under the simple (but sometimes misleading) heading of Realism. I assume you mean not only that objects exist apart from human beings, but also that forces do, and any number of things or conditions. But the question of Realism is a complex one, and not one that I specifically entertained in my post. This requires a strict distinction between “reason” and “cause”. So that you know, my position is non-Realist under the question of truth, though I certainly believe that atoms (or some such) exist without human beings; the justifcation of true statements about atoms and other things is not due to reasons that are directly connected (correspondent to) that reality. The production of reasons is a historically contingent and immanent process. And justification of statements is a question of reason, and not cause. What is real does not justify true statements, at least not directly. But this is not a distinction I draw on here.
As to whether or not you ever embraced Graham’s OOP, on this too I was a bit confused. I could not really follow your rally to defend Graham against Spinozist emendations if you had not stake in the matter, but perhaps this was just a matter of your sense of collegiality. Further complicating is that your turn to Latour’s Irreducibility seemed to mark a move towards Graham’s OOP; also if I am not mistaken, you entertained his ever-retreating essences for a while, trying to fit their “difference that makes no difference” into your otherwise global Ontic Principle. I did not read your shifting posts at that time very closely, due to their seeming transitional character, but I thought I recalled you weighing whether you should abandon Graham’s disappearing essences or not, a sign that at least you considered yourself someone metaphysically aligned(have you now abandoned them?). And then I had the curious evidence that Graham felt it significant to post on his blog that you were moving further away from a Latour influence, now falling back into your Deleuze/Bergson heritage. This comment on Graham’s part only made sense if there were a time when you were actually closer to Graham at some point.
All this was additionally clouded by the fact that you like to characterize your own metaphysics in its own terms, seldom giving strong critical analysis to exactly who your influences are, but more importantly, how you have broken from them. Your influences show themselves instead in phrased conceptual distillations, such as your appropriation of Bateson, or of Latour. As a reader I am never show how closely you follow the structure of their thought, or simply were moved by an idea and thus must abandon many of the structures of their own defenses of such concepts. So in this way as you experimented with some of the ideas that Graham was putting forth (at least it seemed like experimentation), and were reading again Latour, I really had no sense of how critically close you were to Graham’s OOP.
All this being said, I welcomed your offer to speak to Graham in his absence, with you as my audience, if only have an avenue to express my ideas in a new way.
Thank you very much for the opportunity and suggestion.
February 7, 2009 at 12:39 am
Hi Kvond,
I have never endorsed Graham’s account of objects as infinitely withdrawn beings. I did remark, at one point, that there is a certain truth to his claim that objects are inexhaustible in that, within my ontology, objects must constantly reproduce themselves in time such that there parts are perpetually changing. This prompted Graham to claim that I was returning to my Deleuzian/Bergsonian roots, but I don’t endorse a Bergsonian conception of time so I don’t see how that follows.
When I reference other thinkers in my own work I am referencing particular concepts, not their entire philosophical position. I do this for one of two reasons: Either 1) to help illustrate a concept I’m developing by reference to a familiar philosophical concept in the history of philosophy, or 2) to make the concept my own and use it within the framework of the ontology that I am developing. This latter move can involve considerable violence to the original soil or territory of the concept. However, I think this practice is justified within the framework of my ontology for, insofar as I hold that all beings are assemblages and that the elements of assemblages are themselves individuals that cannot be reduced to their relations, elements can be detached from the assemblages to which they belong. Thus, by this premise, a philosophy is an assemblage composed of elements (concepts, among other things) and those concepts can be detached from their origin and placed within new assemblages. Consequently, when I reference Lacan, or Deleuze, or Kant, or Lucretius, or Spinoza I am not referencing their positions or advocating their positions, but taking a concept as my own. The exception to this, of course, would be those circumstances where I am outlining another philosopher’s position as in the case of my post on Spinoza long ago that first attracted you to this blog or posts developing Lacan’s account of sexuation, etc. In this cases I am elaborating the philosopher’s position without necessarily sharing it.
For me a philosophy must meet two conditions to be counted as an Object-Oriented Philosophy. First, it must be realist, and second it must affirm the autonomy and individuality of objects. These are minimal conditions that allow for a wide range of dispute as to just what the real is or what objects are. Leibniz’s thought would count as an object-oriented philosophy as the monads are both real and exist as individuals. Spinoza would not be an object-oriented philosopher because, while he is a realist, he holds that all individuals are a part of one substance. In this respect, it is likely that Deleuze is not an object-oriented philosopher either, though he certainly can offer much of interest to an object-oriented philosopher. Likewise, Lucretius would be an object-oriented philosopher as the atoms are both real and individuals that exist in their own right. The comparison of Leibniz and Lucretius is instructive in that while they’re both object-oriented philosophers, they advocate entirely different metaphysics. Whitehead is a harder case. Whitehead is a realist, so he meets one condition. Moreover, Whitehead’s universe is made up of actual occasions which are individuals and independent. Nonetheless all these actual occasions belong to one organism or system, which seems to tend more in the direction of a Spinozist realism.
I don’t know that I’ll ever reach a time when my thought isn’t in transition or undergoing changes. It seems to me that philosophies are not fixed things but are rather things that constantly develop and shift in a variety of ways. The materiality of books gives rise to a sort of illusion that a philosopher’s thought is a completed thing, when a book is just an inscription on a project that perpetually changes and grows in a variety of ways.
February 7, 2009 at 12:59 am
In addition, my defense of Graham in relation to your remarks about Spinoza wasn’t a defense of Graham’s position, but was an illustration of a particular point about the conditions of dialogue by way of example. It’s very difficult to engage in a discussion with someone who says “why can’t you illustrate your claims in terms of Thomas Aquinas”, because either a) the person isn’t capable of doing so as they just don’t know Aquinas very well, b) because doing so would require so much additional work that is secondary to what they’re talking about that it would be a significant waste of their time, or c) because someone can’t be sure just what they’re committing themselves to philosophically by saying something like “yeah, what I’m saying accords with a lot of what Aquinas argued”. In this respect, it’s far more effective to stick to the claims that are explicitly being made– even when references to other thinkers are evoked (i.e., I am not endorsing all of Latour when I name a principle “Latour’s Principle”, but am using an element of his thought in a particular way that might depart widely from Latour’s own use) –and to simply make one’s own counter-arguments in their own voice.
February 7, 2009 at 1:02 am
Levi,
Thanks for the clear-up. You can see though how this could lead to a confusion on the position you hold (even if you are not worried about this), in particular when the concepts you take out from philosophies are well-known. And I still am not quite sure how it critically works when taking a concept out from a philosophical position.
For instance, if I told you that “meaning is use” or language is fundamentally a Language Game process, each a Wittgensteinian concept, without rigorous distinction drawn on my part, I would think that you would assume that I am arguing a Wittgensteinian position (a position of great detail used to elucidate, but perhaps not exhaust these concepts).
Or, if I were to tell you that Reality must be understood as one Great (and many other smaller) Bodies Without Organs, a powerful Deleuzian/Guattarian concept, you might struggle to understand just what I mean if I am not interested in the philosophical position of Deleuze or Guattari.
It was in large part some of these ambiguities that have lead to the questioning of your assertions. Perhaps this does not concern you for you are writing to others who know very well what you are trying to say, but as far as my own comprehension goes, I don’t readily read the border between a concept and a position as clearly as you do. I’m not saying that one cannot appropriate a concept, exapt it out of its past philosophical contexts, but when you do I think one should at least expect questions like, In what way is your position different than the position you have taken a pivotal concept from?
Again though, thanks for the clarifications.
As for your Realist/Anti-Realist dichotomy, and attempting to locate thinkers in it, I can’t see the critical substance of it in regards to my own position which seems to cut across both ends. Perhaps this is idiosyncratic to my position though, which I take to be Non-Realist in terms of justification, but make of true statements real ontological shifts in power.
February 7, 2009 at 1:26 am
Kvond,
I can see how this might cause confusion (though no one before has ever said such a thing to me), but this practice of drawing concepts from other thinkers is an extremely common practice throughout the history of philosophy. One need only think of the relationship between Plato and Aristotle with respect to the forms. Aristotle certainly draws on Plato’s concept of form but makes very different claims about it and marshals it for an entirely different metaphysics. Another example, of course, would be Deleuze. Deleuze’s writings are littered with concepts from thinkers too numerous to mention. These thinkers are neither consistent among themselves, nor is Deleuze’s position the same as the thinkers from which he draws his concepts. One need only think of the way Deleuze uses the concept of “transcendental” (that originates in Kant) or “Idea” (which originates in Plato) to see this point. Deleuze is certainly not a Kantian or a Platonist but rather takes up these concepts and develops them in another way. Our ability to understand Deleuze is fundamentally halted if we restrict ourselves to thinking of Kant’s transcendental or Plato’s Ideas (though certainly being familiar with Kant and Plato help). However, to understand Deleuze we have to see what definiens he attaches to the definiendum in his own work. He outlines all of this in What is Philosophy?. I would agree with much of what he claims there about concepts without sharing his ontology. If you said “meaning is use” I wouldn’t assume you’re a Wittgensteinian but would instead look to how you actually put the concept to work in your thought. We’ve gotten in a number of arguments that result from precisely this. I evoke some concept in relation to a previous thinker and then you attribute the previous thinker’s entire position to me, ignoring the highly specific and idiosyncratic way I’m putting the concept to use in my own work.
Here’s an analogy that might help. Fuel injected engines (or maybe it was carburetors, I can’t remember) were made possible by the invention of the perfume mist bottle. The perfume mister provided the technology that allowed for this innovation in engines. Now clearly when a perfume mister is put to work in car engines it has been deterritorialized and reterritorialized in a way that significantly changes its function. It would be absurd to suggest that when the engineer puts the perfume mister to work in a car engine he is concerned with perfume. He’s interested rather in a very different technology. The case is similar when one philosopher picks up another concept from another philosopher. He’s reterritorializing that concept elsewhere in a way that changes its function and which might be based on very different ontological commitments. While it can certainly be illuminating to read a thinker in terms of the thinkers that influenced him– the material causes of his thought or the material he works with –this genealogy of material cannot replace the philosophy itself, but rather we have to look at how the philosopher puts that material together and makes it work. To do otherwise would be a bit like thinking you could explain Michelangelo’s David by talking about the marble from which it’s carved.
February 7, 2009 at 1:46 am
Levi: “In addition, my defense of Graham in relation to your remarks about Spinoza wasn’t a defense of Graham’s position, but was an illustration of a particular point about the conditions of dialogue by way of example. It’s very difficult to engage in a discussion with someone who says “why can’t you illustrate your claims in terms of Thomas Aquinas”
Kvond: It seems you are referring to my comment on Graham’s blog, which was an extension of an emailed discussion we had already had on the issue (you could not know this). If this is your reference, you would remember that what I said was something like, “Sometimes I wish that you could state things in Spinozist terms”. This was a mere gentle frustration in the ability for us to communicate on this question of Spinoza. A large measure of this frustration was that Graham repeatedly and simply has expressed a distaste for Spinoza merely in terms of his current popularity. A kind of “yuck!”. This, though understandable, is a very difficult thing to talk through. I am left not knowing if he is only talking about Deleuze Spinoza, which really ends up being quite far from Spinoza, or some other fashionable version.
When you advise me to stick to the terms of the claims being made, and perhaps wisely so, I have a much more difficult time pulling concepts mobilely out of the fabric of a philosophical position than you do. I mean, if I wast to tell Graham that his retreating essences bear stricking resemblance to Spinoza’s modal essences, it is pretty damn hard to yank the concept modal essences out of Spinoza’s philosophy without a great deal of explanation of what Substance is, etc. In fact though, it is not the concept of the modal essence that I want to draw Graham’s attention to (he already has a concept that is somewhat homologous), it is the rest of the explanatory mechanism, the rest of the position, which helps fill out some of the very aporia’s Graham’s philosophy seems to be self-admittedly strained by. He may not be interested in this solution, preferring to set out on his own and invent his way forward (which can be exciting), but as he inches closer and closer to panpsychism (a shift he also admits), I personally cannot help but feel him growing closer to Spinoza, what can I say.
(There are other correspondences which he and I share, for instance an appreciation for Plotinus, someone who I read as fundamental to Spinoza’s position, not to mention a love for late Renaissance heretics.)
But when you say,
“i.e., I am not endorsing all of Latour when I name a principle “Latour’s Principle”, but am using an element of his thought in a particular way that might depart widely from Latour’s own use) –and to simply make one’s own counter-arguments in their own voice.”
I am left (and you might not care about this), not really knowing what philosophical concepts are necessarily implied by your use of the Principle taken out of historical context. I am unsure just how you justify for instance the exact nature the second face of Latour’s Principle (The Principle of Labored Reduction), something you do not mention much. Perhaps you don’t have to justify the second-face of the Principle because in your version you don’t really much care for how Reductions do happen, or what their ultimate nature is. Or perhaps you have an emphasis on this second-face and have a very non-Latourian answer, as I would. All I can do is put myself in the ballpark of what you are saying, and ask the questions that seem germane.
Perhaps this would be all resolved once you have written your master work, with every last piece of the metaphysical puzzle laid out, and readers would know very specifically how you differ from Latour when you mention his Principle, and differ from Bateson when you mention his. Until then I only have the historical context of the concepts you use, and what you assert of them (which is not yet systematic) to figure out just where you stand or are attempting to stand.
I’m very sorry though that my questions sidetrack you in your development. I can certainly understand that they would. You can always just not respond to them, silence never offends me.
The best.
February 7, 2009 at 1:55 am
Levi: “I can see how this might cause confusion (though no one before has ever said such a thing to me), but this practice of drawing concepts from other thinkers is an extremely common practice throughout the history of philosophy.”
Kvond: I have to say that this sounds like you are lecturing me, and so perhaps we should pull off this path for now.
As for using Deleuze as the exemplar of Historical Appropriation, he is much criticized for his undisciplined use of terms, concepts and ideas. Further though, in terms of Kant, he had the good graces to say outright that he was attempting to ass-fuck Kant and give him a monstrous baby he would never want. If you came out and said that you were attempting to ass-fuck (Deleuze’s term I believe) Bateson or Latour, I would read your appropriations much differently.
As to the analogy of to mechanized invention, this is also a strong disanalogy. But if you want to maintain it, it is not enough to hold a part taken from a bicycle, hold it up, and call it the Bicycle Principle. The part must be connected newly to a great other number of parts until we realize that you are not just making another kind of bicycle.
We’ve had a good stretch of communication until now, so let’s quit while we are ahead (or behind as someone recently wrote). Thanks for the charity of your interpretations, and for clearing many things up.
February 7, 2009 at 2:01 am
Hi Kvond,
My mistake about your wish that Graham could express himself in terms of Spinoza. I wasn’t aware of the background discussion.
As for Latour’s Principle, I have repeatedly emphasized the dimension of labor or work in the process of translation in just about all my evocations of the principle. This is the whole point of claiming that there is no transportation without translation. All I can assume is that you have not been reading my posts where I discuss the principle and put it to use if you think this (and, of course, I don’t think you’re obligated to read my posts). I think it’s a fairly simple affair to determine how a thinker is using another thinkers concepts… You look at how they’re using those concepts. If Deleuze never mentions a particular concept by say Bergson, it’s a fair bet that he’s not employing that concept or element of his thought. The point then is that you don’t just have “the historical context of the concepts I use” but you have the text I’m writing where I use the concepts. If you don’t see it being used in a particular way then you can assume I’m not using such an such an aspect of another thinker’s thought. You can then ask whether that aspect of the other thinkers thought is being used and I can say “no, I don’t find much of use there” or “yes, I’ve talked about it here” or “yes, but I haven’t gotten to that yet”. For example, I don’t much share Latour’s notion of trials of strength, hence the reason it seldom appears in my own work. I would think this would all go without saying or be rather obvious as it is part and parcel of reading any thinker.
February 7, 2009 at 2:14 am
Kvond,
I’m really not sure what all of this is about or why we’re discussing this rather than the actual philosophical issues of the post above. I’ve told you since I first met you that I use concepts like a bricoleur and have reminded you of this often. There’s no secret here. I am not lecturing you but simply responding to your questions.
February 7, 2009 at 2:31 am
Well, I responded to your request of a criticism of Graham’s OOP, in Spinozist conceptual terms, not using the actual terms that Spinoza used. For what that is worth.
The rest seems to be my attempts to interpret your bricolage of concepts in terms which are coherently interlated, perhaps something that will have to wait until your project is closer to completion. This may be my burden. In the end though, even, or really esspecially, a bricoleur is judged by what works. In a certain sense, if others are convinced, or are inspired, then what you have put together does work.
Until next time, I wish you the best on your philosophical journeys.
February 7, 2009 at 2:52 am
Well I tend to think there’s a high degree of systematicity in what I’ve developed, though perhaps that’s just me. You can find the major claims and terms of my ontology conveniently listed together here:
I don’t know that the bricoleur is judged by whether or not what he puts together works, but rather the success of the bricoleur is based on it working, whether or not anyone judges it as working. My position would be that it is constitutively impossible for any thinker not to be a bricoleur. Every thinker works with material (the historical tradition, their time, their influences, etc) out of which their work is built. The issue, however, is what is built, not the material itself. It’s noteworthy that with the exception of your first post in relation to this diary you haven’t raised a single question about my ontology but have instead discussed issues of style and how one works with the concepts of others. I addressed the first claim regarding your criticism of assemblages as, what you believed, to be a violation of the Principle of Irreduction… Though perhaps not to your satisfaction. You haven’t raised any subsequent issues pertaining to the actual claims I’m making except to express dismay about how I work with other philosophers despite the fact that I’ve repeatedly told you that I do that. It’s rather difficult to have any discussion at all about my ontology when my ontology isn’t being discussed! It is even more difficult to have such a discussion when the person claiming that it seems disjointed and disconnected makes no mention of how and admits to not reading the very posts where I’m developing the ontology closely.
Certainly you would concede that someone opening Spinoza’s Ethics for the first time and simply skimming it could find it lacking in connection or order (and no, I’m not suggesting I’m a thinker of Spinoza’s caliber, just a guy trying to figure out things as best he can). Indeed, reading the opening of each part of the Ethics one could argue that the definitions and axioms are perfectly arbitrary. Yet wouldn’t you say to such a person that they need to read more carefully to discern not only the reason behind the definitions but the connections between the propositions?
February 7, 2009 at 3:01 am
We read the nature of my questions differently, and also the satisfaction to which you have answered them. I’m sure that this is a limit we have run up against.
Thanks for the link to your collection of Principles, Fallacies and Defitions [smile], I’m sure though that this is for the benefit of other persons, since as you read my post closely you surely noticed that I had already linked this page for the benefit of others.
I don’t consider such a list a Philosophy, or even a metaphysics, but perhaps it is the beginning of one. I wish you the best.
February 7, 2009 at 4:28 am
I see that my comment never made it through moderation – too bad, I think you’ve seriously gone awry with this whole object-oriented philosophy – Harman is good at it because he writes well, he could be writing fiction easily, your prose, on the other hand, is horribly boring, I hope you realize it soon and do something productive with your life…
February 7, 2009 at 5:05 am
I as a non-specialist disagree with Mikhail’s verdict regarding Levi’s prose. The clarity, courage, and honesty with which he conducts his ontological quest is really commendable. May I take this opportunity to ask, why Merleau Ponty continues to be ignored by him. [TNM]
February 7, 2009 at 5:14 am
Tusar,
I really have no excuse for the absence of Merleu-Ponty in my thought. I’ve always felt like I’ve had something of a missed encounter with him. While I’ve read the Phenomenology of Perception and a number of his essays, he’s never really clicked with me for some reason or stuck in my mind.
February 8, 2009 at 11:13 am
I noted with some delight that you distinguish between an objectile or assemblage, on the one hand, and an aggregate, on the other. This move fills me with delight because it seems to address an insufficiency that is found in both Latour and DeLanda. Namely, this is the awareness of only a certain type of ‘bounded’ unity and stability. An unyielding wholeness or completeness, for want of a better way of putting it.
In keeping with the them of this post (“what is it good for?”) I am led to ask whether this move is partially there to allow society to show up within your ontology. More explicitly stated, is society an aggregate for you?
February 8, 2009 at 10:25 pm
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