In response to my post on Object-Oriented Realism, the always interesting Nikki of prosthetics writes,
so nicely laid out, levi, from the positivist accusation onward. in response i have a very naive question, but one that i can’t wrap my head around with OOP, perhaps you have spelled this out elsewhere and if so, just let me know where and i’ll read it… so this issue is this: object-oriented philosophy, in its terminology as well as in its moves, seems to imply a subject oriented toward objects/object relations. yet i know it is precisely subjectivity that is (thankfully) under reconfiguration in OOP. yet even if/as we follow latour in the practice of actor-network tracing, there is always a sociologist behind the pen, behind the keyboard. the objects and object networks being traced are traced not from a place of removal but from one of the actors (as latour does clarify)… and it seems to me that this still leaves OOP mired in subject as ground. is this a fair reading of what is operative, have you answered this endlessly elsewhere? any and either way, looking forward to your response…
Rather that providing an answer to this question, perhaps the better move is to call into question the question itself. If I understand the issue Nikki is raising properly, then the question is that of how it is possible to have an object-oriented realism when, as in the example of the sociologist, it is nonetheless the sociologist that is tracing all these associations or relations among nonhuman objects. The problem then becomes that talk of objects ends up seeming ineradicably subjective.
In his charming essay “Do You Believe in Reality?” in Pandora’s Hope, Latour recounts an encounter with a Brazilian scientist who posed a similar question to him at a private lunch. Voice quivering and hushed, the scientist asked “do you believe in reality?” Latour was flummoxed with the question in that it had never occurred to him that reality was something a person might not believe in, but also because, as he and his science studies colleagues understood it, the entire accomplishment of their research was to account for the realism of the sciences.
read on!
While unapologetically affirming his realism in this essay, Latour’s strategy in responding to the troubled scientist is not to explain how we can have access to reality, but rather to analyze how we reached a point where it became possible to even ask this sort of question. In other words, what framework of thought allows such a question to be posed? Latour’s strategy, in short, is to investigate what sort of desire might motivate the epistemological question. What is it that leads philosophers to raise questions of knowledge? After all, in our day to day lives, both in the laboratory and in our ordinary dealings with the world, we seem to get along just fine without sophisticated epistemologies. Lest I be misunderstood, when I suggest that the laboratory scientist gets by just fine without a sophisticated epistemology, the emphasis here is on the word sophisticated. To be sure, the laboratory scientist raises all sorts of issues about the reliability of data, bias, double blind testing, etc., etc., etc.
Yet what we don’t find among the laboratory scientists is a pervasive anxiety that their mind might be thoroughly separated from the world. We do, however, find this pervasive anxiety among philosophers. Whether this anxiety be of the Cartesian “mind-in-a-vat” sort or the more contemporary worries that we might be so thoroughly trapped in language or history that never the world will we touch, this sort of fear and concern seems omnipresent in philosophy. How did we get to this place? After all, when someone in day to day life presents a bum argument or observation, we seem to do just fine in showing that the evidence doesn’t support this particular conclusion or correcting ourselves, yet in philosophy fear of error becomes so inflated that we seem to think that it calls into question the entire world. This is all very odd.
Given that rough and ready epistemology seems to do the job, we can ask what motive lies behind the hyper-epistemologies we find in philosophy. What is it that philosophers are looking for in their epistemological inquiries and why do they get so worked up about these particular questions? Latour traces the epistemological fetish back to Plato’s allegory of the cave and reads the history of philosophical epistemology as a series of variations on these theme and the desires that lie behind it. Far from being an innocent and simple question about how it is possible for mind to have a true representation of the world, Latour instead sees philosophical epistemology as deeply bound up in issues of a political nature.
We are all familiar with Plato’s allegory of the cave. On the one hand we have the prisoners who have been trapped in the cave shadows for their entire existence. The pass their days watching images appear and disappear on the cave wall and debating amongst one another as to which image will appear next. At one point, one of the prisoners escapes, ascends out of the cave, witnesses true reality, and returns to inform the unruly mob (the demos) of the truth that he now possesses. Of course, this philosopher-scientist should rule because he and he alone has possession of the unassailable truth… Of that truth that silences all debate.
In the allegory of the cave Latour discerns a philosophical horror of the unruly mob and a desire to find an unassailable point of purchase that would silence the endless debates of this unruly mob. Thus, on the one hand, you have the social (the unruly mob) that is the source of all confusion and falsehood, and on the other hand you have the world of truth that has the power to silence all dispute and debate. Like a Daimon, the philosopher-scientist has the unique power of traveling between these two world, the world of the social that endlessly speaks without ever producing any truth and the world of the truth that never speaks but is the source of all that is true.
The project of philosophical epistemology is then a purification of this second world from the first, maintaining it in its unassailable muteness, so that there might be something that always possesses the power of silencing the unruly mob. This, Latour thinks, is the real desire behind the philosophical quest for certainty, the project of critique, and the question of knowledge. First, the world of truth must be carefully purified and separated from corruption by the social. Second, it is necessary to maintain some point of leverage from which the unruly mob can always be silenced. These two aims are accomplished through a careful purification of the two worlds– the social world and the true world –so that they never touch one another. It is for this reason that we arrive at a picture of the real as a transcendent beyond– as in the case of Meillassoux’s model of the real as that which is anterior and beyond –that is thoroughly separated from anything mental or social. The philosopher-scientist is then that Daimon that has the power to make the mute truth speak and that can travel between the two worlds. In Descartes, this two world model takes the form of a world defined purely by its mathematical structure and a subject reduced to the pure gaze without knowing whether any of its perceptual data are veridical. Of course, when pitched in these terms the problem of knowledge is impossible to resolve without “skyhooks” (Descartes’ God as guarantor of rational truth, for example) as we are so thoroughly separated from true reality for fear that we would contaminate the true world where alone resides the power of silencing the rabble.
Latour’s strategy lies in affirming the rights of the unruly mob or the rabble. Where philosophical epistemology strives to purify the two worlds so that the world of truth might avoid any and all contamination from the social, instead Latour plunges us into the social world of associations. However, this collective is not a collective composed of only human actors and their debates, but rather is a collective composed of assocations of nonhumans with nonhumans and nonhumans with humans. The only form of association that is precluded is the exclusive association of humans with humans. In other words, all human associations are already plunged into endless relations with nonhumans and these relations are necessary for any human relations whatsoever. It is through these endless debates among actors forming collectives– and actors are always both human and nonhuman –that truth comes to be produced. Where philosophical epistemology dreams of a silver bullet that would silence all debate, the object-oriented realist wants to increase the number of debates and uncertainties. Where philosophical epistemology wants to purify the two worlds of one another, formulating either a pure social world or a pure objective world, object-oriented ontology wants to multiply relations and assocations among human and nonhuman actors. Where philosophical epistemology aims at absolute certainty, object-oriented ontology argues for local certainties and the multiplication of uncertainties.
However, perhaps the most important point is that we are always-already among things or objects in such a way that there can be no question of mind, language, the social, or the cultural somehow forming a shadow world that shares no relationship to the world. Yes, indeed the sociologist traces all sorts of associations between nonhuman and human actors in his investigations, but if he is not a sociologist that spends all his time in his office he finds that the actors he traces always have their say in matters as well. The square peg won’t fit in the round hole, and in our engagement with nonhuman and human actors other than ourselves, we find that while we would often like to present hegemonic theories that would place everything in square holes the pegs whether human or nonhuman often have their own say in these matters. I think this marks a significant difference between ontology and epistemology as understood by Object-Oriented Realism. Ontologically we can make all sorts of claims about what must be true of objects in principle regardless of whether humans are related to them. Epistemologically, however, OOP, I think, advocates a rather pragmatic epistemology that recognizes that our knowledge of particular things is hard-won and always partial, and that there are many things that are completely impossible for us to know. Probably a disappointing answer, but hopefully a start. I need to develop more about the nature of collectives with regard to these issues.
Larval Subjects . 
July 12, 2009 at 3:56 am
Great post. This is my first introduction to Latour and your elucidation in regards to the questions of epistemology was excellent. I particularly liked the part about Latour being more interesting in how we arrived at the ability to ask the questing of being. This reminds me of Heidegger’s “On the Essence of Truth”, where he says:
July 12, 2009 at 4:12 am
Much appreciated, Gary. This post really don’t deal much with Latour’s epistemology but mostly with why he questions how these issues have traditionally been posed. The essay following “Do You Believe in Reality?” in Pandora’s Hope, entitled “Circulating Reference”, gives a real flavor for Latour’s own epistemology. There Latour attempts to develop a theory of reference. He does so in the context of following a group of soil scientists through the Brazilian rain forests, observing how they do their work, organize data, measure, etc. and the different translations this activity goes through from field work to university to publication. Really great stuff that is both realist and constructivist.
July 12, 2009 at 4:44 am
Maybe the question of the subjectivist bias can not be properly addressed by OOP?
July 12, 2009 at 4:46 am
I’m not sure why, Glen. That question is far too open-ended to respond to. You’d have to say a bit more for me to see the reason.
July 12, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Very interesting. On the point of bringing up “Circulating Reference,” (which I have not had the pleasure to read) I was wondering if you might say more on how there comes about “really great stuff that is both realist and constructivist.” I’m working on a project that has to do with constructivism from a Hegelian perspective, but obviously, that, in some way shape or form, is going to involve absolute idealist constructivist.
Also, I just getting into OOP and Latour, etc. Looks like a lot of brilliant ideas.
July 12, 2009 at 5:55 pm
“the objects and object networks being traced are traced not from a place of removal but from one of the actors (as latour does clarify)… and it seems to me that this still leaves OOP mired in subject as ground”
will there not never be a primary “place of removal” in the formulation of any model of nonhuman-human (i would assume when concerning the -self or not), nonhuman-nonhuman relations while that formulation, although preceded by information pre-process, is received and sent from a subject that cannot know a non-subject world? what is the present stance on the legitimacy of secondary removal?
July 12, 2009 at 8:49 pm
Dillon,
I don’t understand your question. Can you clarify?
July 13, 2009 at 12:17 am
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July 13, 2009 at 12:22 am
oh, i must apologize, a latent confusion over a seemingly common “problem” – although, the removal labeled as ‘secondary’ would be the ‘primary’ and the removal labeled as ‘primary’ would be some type of non-removal – led me to publish a very non-creative, negative, question (the legitimacy of any level of removal cannot be questioned, in the realm of any positive philosophy, as non-removal will never be known).
July 13, 2009 at 4:26 am
levi, hello – i am thrilled to have this response to such a naive question on my part, which as you have so nicely pointed out… is all but naive in it’s history. the move from belief in reality to the question of politics has been ever on the tip of my tongue (or more precisely, my keyboard) and i appreciate your way of analyzing the latent. i haven’t read pandora’s hope yet, so i can’t adequately question further but i am toying collectivities in my work on ‘we’ and ‘with’ in heidegger right now… at least where being-with is concerned and love the move toward the rabble or what heidegger called the they (das man) in their inauthenticity (so different from heidegger’s move toward silence, the called and the solitary, the authentic).
all of which is to say: i’ll read more of latour and look forward to further discussion!
July 13, 2009 at 4:53 am
Thanks Nikki. I didn’t think your question naive at all, or rather if it was naive I appreciated its naivete as the naive question tends to be the most frustrating and thought provoking. I’ll be interested to hear what you have to say about the “we” and “being-with”. It seems to me that Heidegger tends to be fairly reductive when talking about “being-with”, seeing it as a homogenizing influence. There’s certainly some truth to this as I do think there’s a cognitive attitude where we already assume that “one thinks like this” or that everyone already sees things in a particular way. A collective, by contrast, is a whole other beast. It’s a mad assemblage of actors that don’t quite get along and that are simultaneously vying with one another and collaborating. In other words, a collective is a multiplicity that is neither a one nor a many, but nonetheless has a strange sort of organization proper to itself. Perhaps “being-with” is a sort of “defense” against the collective, in much the same way that the concept of the “people” is a kind of defense against the “multitude” (at least according to Virno). “Being-with” posits a consensus where none really is to be found. In this connection I’m still struggling over your remarks about “democracy” as I certainly don’t see radical democracy as an issue of representation.
July 13, 2009 at 1:46 pm
I agree that naive questions can often be very fruitful, which is why it’s a shame that people refrain from asking “dumb” questions.
It seems to me that the figure to examine on the question of the political ramifications of belief in reality is Foucault. Much of what you say above is summarized in his wonderful quote (which I obviously liked): “truth is a thing of this world.” Does he play a significant role in your work?
July 13, 2009 at 10:09 pm
Hi Lee,
Thanks for the comment! Foucault has been a big influence on my thought, but I don’t work with him in any sort of focused or sustained way. While having a great deal of admiration for Foucault’s work I think it suffers from placing too much in the “society basket”, choosing one side of the old division between nature and culture, rather than genuinely thinking assemblages composed of human and non-human actors without one or the other dominating the other.
July 13, 2009 at 11:09 pm
I agree with you that Foucault’s interest is with the human, and while he does decenter the metaphysical subject of transparent autonomous thought, it is in favor of historical & societal structures rather than rocks or molecules. We can see this favoring in his unwavering focus on the human sciences rather than the hard sciences (there’s that odd distinction of them in the prologue I think of _The Order of Things_).
However, I disagree with a point you may be making. I read Foucault as very much a “flat ontologist” in your sense, that is, even tho things like mental disease are entirely social constructs, that in no way disparage or lowers their status as real entities. In my book, I try to show that he inherited Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology (obviously avoiding lots of other elements of traditional phenomenology) which acknowledges all facets of our experience as real without sorting them into piles like primary & secondary qualities. Is that what you meant?
I do think that his conception of truth as radically immanent to our practices is very much in line with what you discuss in your very helpful post. Joseph Rouse talks about some of these issues too in a really interesting way.
July 14, 2009 at 12:09 am
Hi Lee,
I think I’m talking about something somewhat different. It is not a question of choosing one side or the other of the divide between culture (or society or mind or history or power or whatever we wish to place on this side of the divide) and nature. In other words, my gripe with Foucault isn’t that he talks about power and discursive structures rather than discussing biology or genes or neurons. Going to the other extreme, as for example, evolutionary psychology and sociology do would be equally mistaken ontologically because the entire division of the world into two domains of culture and nature is mistaken. The problem lies in how actors and networks are conceived in Foucault, just as the problem for evolutionary sociology and psychology is problematic in how it conceives of actors and assemblages. A genuinely immanent or flat ontology isn’t immanent to something like practices, subjects, history, etc. Rather, an immanent ontology is a flat ontology in which all actors or objects are on equal footing. And this is where the problem lies in Foucault. For Foucault the only actors that have a voice are human actors. All other actors– say the body –are mere vehicles of power and discourse. They do not contribute their own differences, but function purely as vehicles for socially-produced differences. A network or assemblage based perspective does not deny the sorts of roles that social forces play in Foucault’s account, but refuses the reductionism of other types of actors (nonhuman actors) to these roles.
Even though I’ve written a lot on the whole primary/secondary distinction vis a vis Meillassoux, Meillassoux’s realism, as much as I admire it, is a non-starter for me. The sort of realism I advocate could be described as a “democratic realism”. This realism does not begin from the premise that there is a “really real”– say “natural objects” –and a merely cultural or mental. Rather, if something makes a difference then it counts as a real object or actor. Thus, within the framework of my ontology, quarks, genes, biological bodies, trees, planets, etc., are all real, but texts, signifiers, fictional characters such as Harry Potter, diagrams, etc., are equally real. The trick lies in refusing any reduction of objects to one another while also recognizing relations of dependency and interpenetration. Moreover, it becomes necessary to think the imbrication of all these different types of differences in forming a network.
July 14, 2009 at 3:12 am
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July 14, 2009 at 1:31 pm
“For Foucault the only actors that have a voice are human actors.”
Yes, I agree with this; that’s what I was trying to get at with his exclusive focus on the human sciences, societal structures, etc. This keeps him from being a Speculative Realist.
I still think he’s a flat ontologist in the sense that being a social construct is compatible with being fully real for him. I meant the primary/secondary distinction as the early modern classification between what’s there independently of us & so counts as really real as opposed to what arises from interacting with our faculties & so is less real. It’s this kind of distinction that flat ontology denies—right?—and which I believe Foucault also rejects. Crime, man, mental illness are all products of specific & historical power/knowledge arrangements, but they’re also real entities. Isn’t that flat ontology?
July 14, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Hi Lee,
Whether or not one accepts the primary/secondary distinction depends on the sort of Speculative Realism one is talking about. Meillassoux and, I think, Brassier, are both attempting to resuscitate this distinction whereas the object-oriented ontologies are not. I think this gets to the nub of the issue:
On the one hand, it is impossible for something to be counted as a flat ontology where humans stand at the center or in some sort of privileged position with respect to everything else. Rather, what you get under this model is a vertical ontology where humans stand above all other things and things are passive matters that simply receive [human] forms without contributing any differences of their own. On the other hand, the object-oriented ontologist will question the notion of social construction. Where the social constructivist will make the claim that things are constructed of some mysterious ether such as social forces, discourses, power, history, etc., the object-oriented ontologist will argue that construction simpliciter is always a heterogeneous assemblage of objects or actants, each contributing their own differences, such that the human and human related phenomena cannot be said to have a particular privileged role. I outline this in the post immediately following this one entitled “The Factory of Truth”. I think part of the superiority of this approach can be seen in the problems Foucault encountered in accounting for change and resistance. Foucault makes the claim, of course, that power always produces counter-power or resistance, but just how this is possible is completely mysterious under his account as far as I can tell. The reason for this mysteriousness is that the only differences in his world are social in character so it’s difficult to see how his dispotifs are able to do anything but re-produce themselves since all the actors in these dispotifs are folds of these forces and therefore only have the capacity to re-produce those forces. By contrast, where you open up these networks to include a variety of different types of actants, human and nonhuman, each contributing their own differences or making their own differences, you suddenly get a world where you can’t talk about objects passively receiving form but rather where there are struggles of differences that produce all sorts of aleatory results that can never be fully mastered by one type of actor.
July 14, 2009 at 3:05 pm
We don’t have to keep going around, but I still fail to see where we disagree on the question of where you and Foucault agree & disagree. I concede your point that he limits construction to social & historical construction, not allowing a voice to nonhuman actors, and that this is an important point of disagreement (Graham’s R7).
The point where I see him in agreement with you is when you say:
“This realism does not begin from the premise that there is a “really real”– say “natural objects” –and a merely cultural or mental. Rather, if something makes a difference then it counts as a real object or actor.”
I see Foucault (as well as Heidegger) as fully on board with this democracy, this refusal to ontologically distinguish nomos from physis, i.e.e, in terms of the really real and the partially real. The rejection of the “merely” (Heidegger explicitly talks about it in these terms).
You make a really interesting point that the admission of nonhuman actors might have helped Foucault account for the massive epochal shifts he always found problematic, oscillating from finding them brute facts like Heidegger’s sendings from Being to giving very detailed explanations of them in terms of the economies of power (again, limited only to human actors, as you say). My criticism—it’s a common one—is that accepting the congealings of the present dispotif as exhausting the real makes it very hard for him to criticize it as untrue to our real nature or unjust in any deeper way than just, “I don’t like it.”
One more triangulation—what about Nietzsche? At times he seems to include the body (not as socially constructed, but as influencing how we construct), raw whorls of power, etc. Would he count as an object-oriented ontologist?
July 14, 2009 at 3:07 pm
This is a pretty big strawman, considering that, for example, a non-flat, “Heideggerian” ontology wouldn’t necessarily say that things never contribute any difference. Objects are extremely complex and can be dynamically intertwined on a causal level with other objects, even humans. Think of biological organisms and the tight causal coupling they have with themselves and the environment. Also, think of computer-human interfaces and dynamic robots; these things certainly “make a difference” but it would be a metaphorical stretch to call them “actors”.
This comes to the basic problem I have with this “flat ontology”, where “texts, signifiers, fictional characters such as Harry Potter, diagrams, etc., are equally real.” I fail to understand how it is useful to talk about the word “coffee” being “equally real” to the actual cup of coffee I am drinking. What is the motivation to place all these things on a perfectly “equal” footing? To do so goes against the entire discourse of society wherein we have distinction between “imaginary” objects and real objects, between something “in the head” and “in the world”. We can still talk about the idea of coffee being “real”, given that it can change people’s minds and influence behavior, but it is surely a metaphysical over-reaction to stipulate that it is “just as real” as actual coffee. I simply refuse to balk from common sense on this one.
This brings me to my next big beef, which is the application of the metaphor “actor” to anything and everything. This seems like a vastly over-simplified metaphor being applied to things where it isn’t useful to talk about them as an “actor”, which has many agent-based metaphorical connotations. For example, in what way is a grain of sand an actor? It doesn’t have feelings, emotions, thoughts, judgements, reason, memory, agenthood, or anything. It is just an inert physical object. But we don’t need OOP to tell us that “any difference makes a difference”; we have physics to explain how tiny sub-atomic interactions with the surrounding world can have profound causal effects. Any technical language used to espouse the mantras of flat ontology will probably be in terms of mathematical equations (dynamic systems theory for example), not linguistic metaphors of “acting”.
Hopefully, I am not coming off as overly hostile here. But these are the issues I have with OOP, and everytime you give a spiel about the virtues of OOP compared to “traditional” philosophy, I think you are simply attacking a conveniently parochial strawman. Many other systems of thought allow for the fact that ideas and fictional characters can have large causal impact that isn’t simply “passive”, but they do so without resorting to the seemingly bold claim that harry potter is just as real in the world as I am real, or my brother is real.
Basically, no one but your strawman of traditional philosophy says that the best way to talk about all objects is them “passively receiving form”. The very basic idea of interactive computer technology like the ipod destroys this simplistic model and I don’t know any contemporary thinker really making such a naive claim about non-human objects.
July 14, 2009 at 5:30 pm
Gary,
It seems that you and I understand Heidegger in very different ways. You write:
I really am not sure how such a claim can be made within a Heideggerian framework. For Heidegger we need Dasein for any objects to be disclosed at all. That is, human beings always hold pride of place or a privileged place. Any difference that we talk about in Heidegger’s framework always has the implicit qualification of “in relation to Dasein”. The idea of talking about objects without humans or Dasein for Heidegger is completely incoherent. Thus while I heartily agree with your second and third sentence, I do not think these are claims that can be properly made within a Heideggerian framework.
The terms “actor” and “actant” are Latour’s, not my own. If you dislike them because you find them metaphorical, then you are free to drop them. However, I do think the charge that the use of a term is “metaphorical” is generally specious in philosophy. It should be understood that any theory stipulates its technical terms. Heidegger, for example, chooses the term “Dasein” to designate human reality. In German the term “Dasein” means “existence”, not “human reality”. We could thus charge Heidegger with “using terms metaphorically” and reject his account of “Dasein”, but that would be silly as we understand that he is stipulating a technical term within the scope of his philosophy. Aristotle uses the term “category”. In Greek the term “category” is a legal term referring to a public claim or assertion. We could thus say that when Aristotle talks about categories as qualities or attributes of a thing he is speaking metaphorically. Scientists talk about forces exerting themselves or acting, and talk about organisms as adapting. These are all highly metaphorical locutions. I suppose I’m saying that I’m relatively unphased when it’s suggested that a term is merely metaphorical when the philosopher is doing work to stipulate a particular concept.
However, it is fair to ask why someone would argue that nonhuman entities are actors. In the minimal sense, an actor is just any entity that contributes a difference. In contributing a difference it acts or does something. That difference needs to be taken into account. However, I think you will find a more satisfying account of what is at stake in chapter 6 of Latour’s Pandora’s Hope, “A Collective of Humans and Nonhumans”. One of Latour’s central arguments there is that new entities are formed through the association or relation of entities with one another. Not only does an entity take on new affects or powers of acting in being associated or related to another entity, but goals and aims change as well. When a human actor, for example, is combined with an ipod actor, we don’t simply get humans using ipods, but rather we get a human-ipod actor with very different powers of acting, very different goals and aims, and very different sorts of social relations. The problem with the technological idea of humans using ipods is that we don’t really capture these new differential networks that emerge through the introduction of new networks. These differences do not entirely come from the human, nor entirely from the ipod, but rather are a result of their combination that transforms both of the previous actors not unlike Donna Haraway’s cyborgs.
Perhaps you don’t see contemporary thinkers making these naive claims about non-human objects, but I see this dominance of the human over the non-human everywhere in contemporary philosophy.
July 14, 2009 at 5:37 pm
Lee,
I guess that from my perspective the refusal to ontologically distinguish between nomos and physis always turns out to be a reduction of physis to human nomos. We’re told that we’re getting a democracy or flat ontology of beings, but it turns out to be human nomos that gets all the credit in these accounts.
Nietzsche is a hard call as there are so many different Nietzsche’s. There is, of course, the anti-realist Nietzsche we get in Derrida, and then the realist Nietzsche we get in Deleuze. I don’t think I would classify Nietzsche as an object-oriented ontologist because for the realist Nietzsche objects are congealed effects of these dynamics of forces, whereas the object-oriented philosopher is going to champion objects as the most primitive level of reality. In this regard, a Speculative Realist reading of Nietzsche is possible, but I think it would fall more in line with the realist ontologies of Deleuze, DeLanda, and what I understand of Iain Hamilton Grant than either the reductive materialist speculative realists (Meillassoux, Brassier) or the object-oriented speculative realists (myself, Graham, Stengers, Donna Haraway, and Latour).
July 14, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Gary,
I would also add that suppose you’re right that OOP presents a strawman of anti-realist positions and that they are able to talk about all the things OOP wants to talk about. Even if that’s the case, sometimes a shift in vocabulary, concepts, and themes allow for significant shifts in the sorts of questions we’re able to ask. In the last few decades of Continental thought there has been an obsessive focus on issues of self-referentiality and self-reflexivity at the level of both discussions of the subject and the level of language. Moreover, there has been a focus on analyses of human experiences of the world in phenomenology, and of texts, signs, and culture among the post-structuralists. What OOP opens is a shift away from these thematics to discussion of a much broader range of entities and issues. While certainly we’re going to wish to discuss human experience and discourses surrounding climate change, text and subject-centered approaches, as well as issues of self-reflexivity don’t really do a whole lot of good in helping to thematize these sorts of issues. Similarly, I would also argue that textual and phenomenological approaches are really ill-fitted to discussing technology and technological change. The list could be expanded indefinitely. One thing OOP offers, regardless of whether one is convinced by its critique of the various anti-realisms, is a little bit of breathing room that allows for new lines of inquiry and investigation beyond tired old analyses of human experience, texts, narratives, discourses, and power.
July 14, 2009 at 8:25 pm
Ah, that’s very helpful. I think I now see what you’re saying. My point was that for Foucault, the fact that something is a social construct doesn’t demote or eradicate its ontological status, which is a gesture of democratic inclusiveness when compared with the standard equation of construct with merely subjective, not really real, etc.
Your response is that Foucault’s inclusion of constructs goes so far as to exclude all other kinds of beings. What initially appears to be a gesture of welcoming a traditionally disenfranchised group turns into a tyranny of the minority, making it very hard to call it democratic. My point may apply to this one group but, when set into the bigger ontological picture, it ends up overcompensating and becoming counter-productive for OOP. Have I got it?
I certainly agree about the “many different Nietzsche’s,” but I find your reason for disallowing him a little hard to understand. OOP would reject any digging beneath objects for what they really are as reductive, is that it? One could give a reading of Nietzschean forces as merely making the same point you do, that anything real must make a difference. That’s identifying something common to all objects without being reductive, isn’t it? I don’t see his view of forces as clearly more substantive than this claim
July 14, 2009 at 8:46 pm
That sounds right, Lee. The Nietzsche issue is one I’m still working through myself right now, such that I’m not entirely sure where I stand. In his early work Irreductions, Latour articulates the fundamental principle of his thought in the thesis that nothing is either reducible or irreducible to anything else. When he maintains that there is always the possibility of a reduction of one thing to another, he is underlining the work involved in the activity of reduction. Thus, for example, when Freud interprets a dream, “reducing” it to its latent dream wish, he has to show each link between the manifest content and the latent-content. Freud very clearly states that despite the “translation” of the manifest-content into the latent-content there is always a kernel that resists interpretation and is irreducible to interpretation. Moreover, the manifest-content is not simply a passive matter that gets translated like in a code book correlating words with, say numbers, but introduces all sorts of surprises and perplexities. In short, translation or reduction is always a work and a labor that leaves remainders. In reducing food to energy my body is also changed in all sorts of ways by diet, for example.
Alright, so when Latour says that nothing is reducible to anything else, what he’s saying is that all objects are fully actual, that they are fully deployed. Consequently, no object is, for Latour, a mere effect of something else. Instead what we get are what Latour refers to as “trials of strength” among objects where one object might successfully subordinate another object or enlist another object in its own aims, but where this triumph of another object always involves a labor where something escapes and where the final result isn’t quite what we expected. Graham goes even further in his actualism and assertion of the autonomy and independence of objects, while not endorsing Latour’s principle of irreducition.
In my own ontological framework I find I have mixed views on these issues and am not entirely sure where I come down. Coming from a Deleuzian background I am of course “trained” to think in terms of processes of individuation, production, emergence, and the relationship between the virtual and the actual, such that the actual tends to be seen as an effect of these virtual processes. In this respect, Deleuze is very close to Nietzsche’s realism of the will to power where objects are effects of forces rather than the actors themselves (actual terms in Deleuze and one reading of Nietzsche being sterile or having no efficacy of their own). On the other hand, there’s certainly another realist reading of Nietzsche’s will to power that’s very close to Latour’s trials of strength among actors or objects where nothing is ever quite reduced to anything else.
July 14, 2009 at 9:21 pm
Thanks for bearing with me! It does strike me that the anti-humanism of Nietzsche, later Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Freud, etc. is a halfway house between the Cartesian autonomous self-transparent subject and OOP’s democracy. If they don’t go all the way to full democracy, they do depose the king.
July 15, 2009 at 12:56 pm
[…] and cognizes in terms of the “present-at-hand”. We then get Levi from Larval Subjects saying: For Heidegger we need Dasein for any objects to be disclosed at all. That is, human beings always […]