Flat Ontology

July 24, 2009

Flat Ontology

Posted by larvalsubjects under Anti-Realism, Assemblages, Constellation, Correlationism, Graham Harman, hermeneutics, Immanence, Latour, Metaphysics, Multiplicity, Networks, Object-Oriented Philosophy, Ontic, Ontology, Organization, Potential, Realism, Relation, Rough Theory, Speculative Realism
[52] Comments

When the term “realism” is evoked it often leads to associations with the distinction between nature and culture, the natural and the social, objects and language, the objective and the subjective, world and mind. Under this two-world model, reality is placed on the side of nature, the natural, objects, the objective, and world, whereas meaning, representation, values, and significations are placed on the side of the cultural, the social, language, the subjective, and mind. The natural, it is said, is the domain of the is, whereas the cultural is the domain of the ought. Such is the modernist constitution, so beautifully analyzed by Latour in We Have Never Been Modern, Pandora’s Hope, and The Politics of Nature. Based on this modernist constitution, a matrix of philosophical possibilities emerges. The obvious question, of course, is that of how mind is able to relate to world. If these two houses are so fundamentally different, one containing meaning and normativity, the other composed of senseless objects and causal relations, how do the two come together? Predictably, we get those who strive to reduce the one house to the other. Thus we get the naturalists or vulgar realists who attempt to show how all cultural phenomena are really natural phenomena (think sociobiology), while on the other hand we get the vulgar idealists who attempt to reduce everything to the second house or the world of meaning, intentionality, mind, the social, signification, normativity, and all the rest. And, of course, we get a million variants of intermediary positions that, like Epicurean wisdom, want a little natural indulgence here, a little cultural indulgence there.

When the object-oriented ontologist proudly adopts the term “realism”, it is immediately concluded that she is placing everything in the basket of nature, excluding the domain of culture, mind, signification, meaning, and all the rest. Hence charges of “naive realism”. To make matters worse, it is concluded that insofar as it is nature that the onticologist and ontographer are siding with, the human is being excluded, foreclosed, or disavowed in the name of natural phenomena. However, what this reading misses is that onticology is a flat ontology. What the onticologist asserts is not that there are two worlds, the real natural world and the ideal mental world of meaning, but that there is only one level: reality. Onticology thus draws a transversal line across the distinction between mind and world, culture and nature. Culture is not other than reality or the real, but is an element of the real. Since onticology begins with the hypothesis, wishing to know where it will go, that there is no difference that does not make a difference, it proves impossible to exclude the human. Why? Because humans make a difference. What onticology objects to is not the thesis that humans are elements in the real, but the thesis that every relation is a human-world relation.

read on!

When I suggest that correlationist approaches that privilege the human-world relation are not particular apt for thinking contemporary phenomena like the new technology, the ecological crisis, economy, and so on, I am open to the charge that all of these examples involve the human. “Given that the human is involved in all these phenomena,” the criticism runs, “wouldn’t the human-world relation be more than suited to the investigation of these phenomena?” Yet this thesis is only possible if one begins with the premise that there are two houses: the world of the human and the world of the natural or real. The object-oriented thesis is not that humans aren’t elements in these phenomena, but that these phenomena can’t properly be understood at the level of discourse, texts, normativity, meaning, intentionality, the signifier, power, or whatever else one might like to place in the culture basket. Yet with that said, discourse, texts, normmativity, meaning, intentionality, signifiers, and power are involved in all these phenomena as well. In other words, my sales pitch is that you get to keep, to quote Jack Nicholson as the Joker in the earlier Batman, all of the wonderful toys your anti-realism has invented, but you gain a whole new set of toys in addition to this. And the toys you get, I contend, solve a lot of problems your anti-realism has obsessively worked over.

The difference I propose is subtle. It is the difference between humans at the center of all relations and humans as elements in a network. In the former construal, the human overdetermines and conditions all other relations. In the latter, humans play a role in relations. The former requires us to analyze the contribution made by the human in conditioning every other relation, whereas the latter says that occasionally we must examine the role the human plays in a decentralized network in which it makes a contribution.

Let’s back up and draw an analogy to ecosystems. What is an ecosystem? Wikipedia tells me (and I know I’ll catch hell for citing Wikipedia here) that

Central to the ecosystem concept is the idea that living organisms interact with every other element in their local environment. Eugene Odum, a founder of ecology, stated: “Any unit that includes all of the organisms (ie: the “community”) in a given area interacting with the physical environment so that a flow of energy leads to clearly defined trophic structure, biotic diversity, and material cycles (ie: exchange of materials between living and nonliving parts) within the system is an ecosystem.”

In an ecosystem you have the interdependence of organisms on one another, but also this interdependent system of organisms and their relation to the environment in terms of light, temperature, flows of water, gravity, the gas composition of air and all the rest. Each ecosystem is absolutely unique and forms an irreplaceable system. We can generalize over the structure of these systems, but they are local logoi, rather than generalizable laws. The life emergent around deep ocean volcanic vents is enough to illustrate this point.

Now suppose the anti-realist equivalent of an ecologist comes along and proposes the radical “Copernican” thesis that “all ecosystems are necessarily correlates of photosynthesis-world relations”. Here the thesis would be that all processes in the ecosystem must be related to photosynthesis. On the one hand, this correlationist would be grossly mistaken as deep ocean vents do not involve photosynthesis at all as they are too deep to receive sunlight. Rather, the organisms of these ecosystems function through “chemosynthesis”. On the other hand, this generalization would have a withering effect on ecological analysis because while the photosynthesis of plants is a crucial feature of our most familiar ecosystems, this correlation would have the detrimental effect of leading us to ignore the role that weather patterns play, bacteriological processes play, soil composition, temperatures, gravity, and so on. Photosynthesis is a crucial element of many of these processes, but if we are to understand to organized complexity of these systems we must not give it a hegemonic role in these systems but understand it as an element.

Now let’s take the analogy home. In many of the systems we’re interested in as cultural, social, and political theorists, the human plays an essential role. But if we restrict our analysis to the human, the cultural, signification, meaning, minds, normativity, and intentionality, we will seriously distort the sorts of systems we’re examining. Technology and economics, for example, is certainly bound up with discourses, human intentions, significations, and power, but it is also organized around physical processes and forms of organization that have little to do with these elements. Here, I think, is something that distinguishes my own thought from Graham’s. In a lot of ways, Graham is far more inhuman than me. After all, he is a creature of the Iowa planes, the Middle Eastern sands, and was bit by a rabid dog. In many respects, Graham’s adventures are adventure of becoming-animal and becoming-desert. Take him seriously when he talks about the interaction between cotton and fire. Graham is a creature of cotton and fire, who’s quite monstrous for this reason. He’s a rabid realist, becoming-steppe, becoming-dog, becoming-fire. I’ve always had a great love of feral animals, and have collected them over the course of my life. However, me, I’m primarily interested in good social theory. Yet I believe that in order to produce good social theory, social theory that really offers us real potentials for change, we must pass through a sort of becoming-steppe where we are actors in a network, rather than sovereigns overlooking a field of play where we organize all the soldiers on the board.

Hopefully someone will recognize the joke and intimate reference in the images in this post.

52 Responses to “Flat Ontology”

glen Says:

July 24, 2009 at 6:42 am
“What the onticologist asserts is not that there are two worlds, the real natural world and the ideal mental world of meaning, but that there is only one level: reality. Onticology thus draws a transversal line across the distinction between mind and world, culture and nature.”

I am reading Harman’s book and he makes a similar argument. The problem I have with this, and which I have been trying to express for a while on your blog if you go over my previous comments, is that this is a profoundly humanist interpretation of reality. A dog/coral reef/waterfall/whatever does not engage with the things in the world formed through the same process of concrescence as that of human prehension (percept+affect).

Even calling a dog a ‘dog’ does not engage with the dog as the animal-human’s-use-language-and-call-a-dog would. The realist would take into account the affections of actants through which hey relate to each other. Discounting the mind-body split is going the wrong way.

There should be an infinite number of ‘mind-body’ splits if the mind and body are not reduced to a simple binary but the complex continuum between mind-brain-nervous system-body is taken into account and understood as a series of transformative affordances. If so, then language, perceptions and affections of all actants would need to be incorporated into a truly ‘flat’ analysis.

Discounting the variable capacities for affection and perception between actants is an imposition of a human frame of reference when trying to comprehend the relations between actants. I am not sure how Harman gets around this problem with his interpretation of Latour’s conception of time as prehension requires duration, but I haven’t finished the book yet so maybe he does engage with it somehow.
Asher Kay Says:

July 24, 2009 at 9:47 am
Good sh*t, Levi, as always.

I realize that my perspective on these matters is a little oddball and outsider, but I think the heart of the opposition to a flat ontology (from the “anti-realist” side, at least) is mostly to do with methods. Put bluntly, you just can’t do flat ontology work from an armchair. There is stuff that simply cannot be teased out into the open without equipment that produces enough magnetism to suck an office chair across a room.

It’s simply impossible to be a decent philosopher without being a polymath. You have to be interested in just about everything.

I think a lot of people feel that their skills (or maybe even they themselves) are devalued by an approach that requires unaccustomed and unfamiliar methods.

Of course, if I’m honest with myself, the big draw of a flat ontology for me is that it incorporates a lot of complexity theory and cognitive science stuff that I happen to be interested in. But to some extent at least, I’m interested in that stuff because I think it’s true, and because I believe that it points to a bunch of important things that philosophy has been mostly missing out on.

But what’s most beautiful about a flat ontology is that it abandons the idea of revolution. It’s a Copernican convolution.
alan Says:

July 24, 2009 at 9:59 am
Some random pre-caffeinated thoughts from a long-time lurker in this neck of the woods/steppe: Every time I read about SR, I think “but isn’t this just Deleuze & Guattari with new terminology?” (Ironically, given their predilection for neologism) I know that D&G seem to privilege flux over the concretions snd individuations it produces, but that’s more of an emphasis than an either/or. Maybe Harman’s OOP is more definitively non-D&G if it’s “objects, all the way down,” but then again, Deleuze’s beloved Spinoza is also “bodies, all the way down”… Harman also denies a Bergsonian concept of time, but I think he and philosophy in general needs to be more explicitly and rigorously engaged with relativity and quantum mechanics if claims about space and time are made. Does Harman’s time as a consequence of object relations stack up with the latest conceptions of space-time? If not it’s surely just a nice idea. (Mind you physics is full of speculation as well – dark matter etc.)
Paul Ennis Says:

July 24, 2009 at 1:11 pm
‘What the onticologist asserts is not that there are two worlds, the real natural world and the ideal mental world of meaning, but that there is only one level: reality.’

This is the clearest expression of that which intuitively draws me toward the speculative realist crowd. Academically this is a necessary step in transposing us into a (genuinely) post-Continental intellectual atmosphere.

Flat ontology gives back to nature (‘naive’ realism) its position without leaving behind culture (human-all-too-human). It does so by tracing a line not between or across them, but around them: they both belong and contribute to reality.

Paul
Levi on flat ontology « Object-Oriented Philosophy Says:

July 24, 2009 at 2:05 pm
[…] 24, 2009 Levi has a nice post up about FLAT ONTOLOGY, and I especially like his photosynthesis analogy. The post is also lavishly, even hilariously […]
larvalsubjects Says:

July 24, 2009 at 2:07 pm
Hi Alan,

I certainly owe a tremendous amount to Deleuze and Guattari, as I think is obvious from both my publication history and my own more recent thought. I do not, however, think the ontology I’m developing is simply D&G with a new vocabulary. I think I differ from Deleuze markedly on two related points: First, Deleuze’s being is a continuum that gets parceled or congealed into discrete bits at the level of the actual. The actual, as it were, is a sort of epiphenomenon of this continuum and really does nothing of its own. Rather, all the work takes place at the level of the continuum. Between the options of a continuum and atomism, I side with Whitehead, proposing an ontology composed of discrete objects, rather than congealed actualizations of a differential continuum. Second, and in a related vein, for Deleuze all processes of actualization move from the virtual to the actual, without there being actual-to-actual interactions. As Deleuze clearly states, movement does not take place from actual object to actual object, but from the virtual to the actual. By contrast, in my ontology all interaction takes place between objects, not from the virtual to the actual. These differences might be slight and it’s possible that I’m simply reworking Deleuze’s own ontology in perhaps language that is more clear. If that’s the case, I’m happy to contribute to an understanding of the thought of Deleuze and Guattari. However, I do think these subtle shifts in ontology help to clear up a number of incoherences in Deleuze’s account of time. As for the issue of quantum mechanics and relativity, I think this confuses materialism and realism. The hegemony of relativistic and quantum conceptions of time and objects only makes sense if one is working from the assumption of a materialist theory of objects. From the perspective of object-oriented ontology, however, material objects are only a subset of the real. Thus, while relativistic time and quantum phenomena are entirely real for OOP, they are not characteristic of all inter-object relations. With that said, you will find some engagement on my part with both Bergson and relativity in my article “Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism: Notes Towards a Transcendental Materialism” in Thinking Between Deleuze and Kant: A Strange Encounter (Willat and Lee, 2009), where I attempt to engage some of these issues about time.
larvalsubjects Says:

July 24, 2009 at 2:22 pm
Hi Glen,

I see that Graham already engages your remarks over at his blog in a way that I’m largely sympathetic with. I think his observations about Whitehead and concrescence are particularly to the point.

“this is a profoundly humanist interpretation of reality. A dog/coral reef/waterfall/whatever does not engage with the things in the world formed through the same process of concrescence as that of human prehension (percept+affect).”

No one is saying that it’s the same process of concrescence. Humans have language, dreams, and cognitive processes that I would never wish to ascribe to cotton or fire. But this continues to ignore the major question: is the difference between human and non-human relations to the world worthy of giving rise to a basic ontological dualism.

The entire Kantian tradition say (or rather, assumes): Yes.

I say No. So does Whitehead, whose term “concrescence” glen uses without signing up for Whitehead’s explicitly anti-Kantian position. The whole point of the term “prehension” in Whitehead is to put the human and non-human back on the same ontological level. Of course there are differences between humans and stones. But that doesn’t mean it’s justified to view human experience as a special rip in the cosmic fabric, incomparable to anything else.

What I do instead (and so does Whitehead, and so for the most part does Latour) is to start with something more primitive. The relation to any reality does not replicate that reality. It translates, distorts, transforms it. Whichever word you prefer. And by necessity, this is true of any relation, not of special, poignant features of human psychology or neurology.

These are all points I share with Graham. I think one of the key points here– and I’m in a rush so I can’t develop it as much as I would like –is that OOP is not a representational realism. That is, it is not the epistemological thesis that objects themselves are like we experience them. Rather, the human-world relation is one way in which two different objects grasp one another. The manner in which a dog encounters a tree or water encounters wood is entirely different and has its own structure of translation. In other words, it seems to me that both my position and Graham’s is already making the point you’re making.

Second, and this will become clearer when my article “The Ontic Principle” comes out in The Speculative Turn (I can make it available to you if you want, another set of eyes is always a good thing), I define objects in terms of their affects or their capacity to be acted upon and to act upon other objects. It seems to me that this understanding of objects gets at what you’re trying to articulate in these criticisms.
Ian Bogost Says:

July 24, 2009 at 3:34 pm
Good stuff. A few thoughts:

When the object-oriented ontologist proudly adopts the term “realism”, it is immediately concluded that she is placing everything in the basket of nature, excluding the domain of culture, mind, signification, meaning, and all the rest.

This reminds me so much of the kind of reaction Nick Montfort and I get when we talk about our work on platform studies, that I am sure our commonly heard objections are actually identical. Just replace “nature” with “technology.” Interesting that those two would seem common enemies to so many.

Culture is not other than reality or the real, but is an element of the real.

I’m not sure why this is such a difficult idea to grasp for so many. Perhaps because the mechanisms by which culture and the real interact have been held apart from philosophy and cultural studies for so long. When one lives in misunderstanding, who can help but make up stories?

The difference I propose is subtle. It is the difference between humans at the center of all relations and humans as elements in a network.

Despite the fact that I use complexity theory and ANT in some of my work, I find myself increasingly resistant to the trope of the “network,” in part precisely because it flattens things too much, perhaps risking doing more than just leveling the playing field between humans and other objects. Perhaps it’s just a rhetorical issue, I don’t know. But the idea that all things can be reduced to nodes of substance and edges of relation risks obfuscating the very differences you advocate?
john Says:

July 25, 2009 at 3:06 am
alan wrote: Harman also denies a Bergsonian concept of time, but I think he and philosophy in general needs to be more explicitly and rigorously engaged with relativity and quantum mechanics if claims about space and time are made. Does Harman’s time as a consequence of object relations stack up with the latest conceptions of space-time? If not it’s surely just a nice idea.

Larval subjects wrote: As for the issue of quantum mechanics and relativity, I think this confuses materialism and realism. The hegemony of relativistic and quantum conceptions of time and objects only makes sense if one is working from the assumption of a materialist theory of objects. From the perspective of object-oriented ontology, however, material objects are only a subset of the real. Thus, while relativistic time and quantum phenomena are entirely real for OOP, they are not characteristic of all inter-object relations.

John: Not long ago on this blog, Levi, were you not yourself arguing that one must defer to physics with regard to the question of what space and time are? (“I do believe that scientists should tell us what space/time and motion are.”) Did you not pour scorn on the idea that it might be possible to discover the nature of space and time a priori, from the philosophical armchair as it were, without paying attention to the momentous developments in physics over the past century? Did you not insist that the question “what is time?” is not a philosophical question at all, but rather “an empirical question requiring observation and experiment”? Did you not lament at great length the way in which philosophers has failed to engage with developments in physics, biology, mathematics, neurology and the rest? Did you not implore your fellow philosophers to embark upon the task of producing a metaphysics worthy of the sciences and to rise to the great unexplored philosophical challenges that they confront us with? Did you not bemoan the fact that ours is the first period in the history of philosophy in which philosophers have failed to keep abreast of developments in the natural sciences? Did you not suggest that to posit objects that are “transcendent to materiality” was analogous to believing in voodoo word magic or invoking Zeus to explain thunder? Did you not compare trying to do metaphysics without reliance upon scientific findings to trying to do neurosurgery with a butterknife? Did you not argue that philosophical hypotheses about the nature of space,time, objects, consciousness etc. must “at the very least be consistent with” our current best scientific understanding of the physical world? Did you not ridicule the idea that “philosophers can say whatever they like about consciousness, the nature of the world, the mind, etc., and expect to be taken seriously”? Did you not put this conception of philosophy down to a “narcissistic defence-formation, seeking to hide from just how much things have changed”? Did you not berate philosophers for assuming that they can blithely continue to talk about the nature of the mind as if Darwin had never written, or about the nature of spacetime as if Einstein had never existed? Did you not argue for the reality of the scientific image of the world as against that of the manifest? (“For my part … I am happy to agree that the world, the real world, is not as we perceive it to be and that perception is not a reliable guide to the nature of the real … The real, as it has so far been disclosed to quantum mechanics, relativity theory, molecular biology, genetics, evolutionary theory, neurology, etc., shares little resemblance to our phenomenological experience.”) Did you not conclude that the moral of the story was that “there are no shortcuts” to truth, that “we must do the hard empirical work”, and that if philosophical theories about the nature of reality turn out to be inconsistent with the findings of our best sciences, then the only reasonable thing to do would be to abandon those theories?

The inevitable, ineluctable question then: WHAT HAPPENED?!!!
larvalsubjects Says:

July 25, 2009 at 3:30 am
John,

I continue to hold the position that philosophy needs to remain abreast of developments in the sciences and mathematics, just as I have always maintained that philosophy must remain abreast of developments in art, politics, etc., etc., etc.. Note the difference between these domains: they are all domains of reality in my view, but are all outside of philosophy. The debate was about whether or not philosophy has a legislative role with respect to all other human practices, not over whether or not the hard sciences deliver us to “true reality” or the “really real”. I have never advocated the position of reductive materialism. The discussions you refer to revolved around the issue of a form of philosophical practice that believes it can blithely legislate the nature of these things a priori without having to consult any other forms of engagement with the world and with objects in the world. With that said, I do think that different knowledge practices can overturn other knowledge practices. For example, I would argue that the discovery of neural plasticity definitively overturns Kant’s model of mind as it shows that we cannot posit anything like hardwired categories of the understanding. Referring to categories as Kant does, I take it, would be equivalent to evoking Zeus to explain thunder as it confuses the result of a developmental process with the ground of a certain form of cognition. This in two ways: First, Kantian-type transcendental explanations strike me as a failure of philosophical imagination. Like creationist arguments for the origin of species where one argues that “x is far too complex to have occurred randomly, therefore it must have been intentionally designed”, transcendental arguments often have the form of “I can see no way in which we can arrive at this type of knowledge but we have this kind of knowledge, therefore it must be the result of an a priori category in the mind.” Second, while I do not disagree that we have concepts, I see our concepts as emergent results of developmental processes, rather than as pre-existent operators that condition phenomena. Transcendental approaches begin at the end, confusing outcomes of cognitive processes with sources of cognitive processes.

I think my response to Alan is fairly clear as to why I disagree with his position. Time manifests itself in a variety of ways ranging from the sort of physical time we find in relativity, to the way in which processes in organisms temporalize themselves, to the way in which cultures temporalize themselves, to the way in which subjective time is lived, and so on and so forth. I contend that all of these different times are real. This is consistent with my position going all the way back to the so-called realism wars, as I maintained, prior to those discussions, the principle of irreduction or that nothing is either reducible or irreducible to anything else. Now, in the context of the realism wars, those defending the anti-realist position and, in particular, Kant, kept situating my position in the framework of reductive materialism. However, that missed the whole point of what I was arguing. My position was never that neurology, quantum mechanics, relativity theory, molecular biology, etc., gets at the “really real” whereas consciousness, signs, cultural artifacts, and so on are just “epiphenomena”. My argument was rather different and, I think, never quite understood by my rather dogged interlocutors. My point was that any position that holds that all other objects must be thought as correlates of the human is necessarily inadequate. What we need, as I have argued in this post and as I was already arguing at the time, is a flat ontology that places all entities on equal footing and which recognizes their autonomy without reducing them to another type of being, whether they be humble quarks on the other side of the universe, the black hole at the center of our solar system, the chemical reaction taking place on the ocean floor, the mailbox out in front of my house, the film I just watched, the signifiers we are exchanging, and so on. The reason those discussions took the particular form they took was that I was looking for instances of objects that don’t fit within the framework of human lived experience or cognitive structures, thereby exceeding anything like a phenomenological correlation or givenness.

Hopefully this won’t re-open the vitriolic debate about correlationism as I’m really very finished with that discussion. I also confess that my position has vacillated as I’ve developed my thought, having moments that are more materialist and reductive than others.
Asher Kay Says:

July 25, 2009 at 5:16 am
“But the idea that all things can be reduced to nodes of substance and edges of relation risks obfuscating the very differences you advocate”

I would say nodes of substance, edges of relation, and the juice that it’s all pickling in.
Mikhail Emelianov Says:

July 25, 2009 at 5:21 am
Now, in the context of the realism wars, those defending the anti-realist position and, in particular, Kant, kept situating my position in the framework of reductive materialism. However, that missed the whole point of what I was arguing.

This meme of “you simply misunderstood me” or “my opponents simply missed the point of what I was doing” is strangely reminiscent of the figure of Minotaur that, if I remember correctly, you yourself have introduced into the bestiary.

I know we’ve disagreed in the past and most of the disagreements were real and not apparent misunderstandings and you yourself have made a point repeatedly about how it’s okay to disagree and how annoying it is when your opponent evades real disagreement by suggesting it’s all a matter of “missing the point” – although I think John’s condensation of your views into a short comment is largely unfair, I sort of get the spirit of it, which seems to be – “doctor heal thyself” – or perhaps I’m missing the point.

PS. I like how when you get defensive, your first reaction is to kick Kant around (he was wrong here, unimaginative there, he got it all wrong on these levels, ruined for all of us etc etc) – just an observation…
larvalsubjects Says:

July 25, 2009 at 5:39 am
No need to open old wounds, Mikhail. I certainly don’t have the energy to rehearse all those debates, nor the inclination. I think we’ve all reached a rather nice place since the Braver reading group began and a more genuine dialogue has opened up. You’re right though, I do kick Kant around a lot. I also say a lot of nice things about Kant too if you pay attention… My exchange earlier this morning with Lee being a case in point. I suspect part of this is because I’ve thought so intimately with Kant in my own intellectual development (there’s really not a page of Difference and Givenness that isn’t heavily invested in Kant’s critical project and trying to work through it). Kant, no doubt unfairly, becomes a sort of foil for developing my own thought, not unlike the foil of realism Braver employs, reducing realism to the rather vulgar version of it we find at the beginnings of Analytic thought. I don’t begrudge Braver that at all as he needs that foil to develop the rest of his terrific work and bring it into relief.
Greg Seigworth Says:

July 25, 2009 at 6:07 am
Hi Levi-Graham,

Color me confused. Where to begin? So, your definition of ‘objects’ above, in reply to Glen, is identical to Spinoza’s definition of bodies? capacity to affect and be affected (and this is something shiny and new in/for O-OP)? [… and never mind that I am confused too about why Graham still hangs onto to a Badiou-esque misreading of Deleuze’s Spinoza as a philosopher of monism when this One of Spinoza is never numerical at all, but that’s another story for another blog-post, and I no doubt missed kvond pointing this out somewhere along the line … though Keith Ansell-Pearson, I thought, covered this some time ago]…

but, also, I want to bounce off Glen’s mention of ‘concresence’ because it seems to me that what happens, with OOP, is a stuttering, freeze-framing of an object and its forever-arrested moment-by-moment agglomerations (because there is no flow or duration: never mind that curious human construct called ‘time’) and, so, say, the non-human object wakes up in the next moment, after the strobe-light flash [‘strike a pose’], and perhaps something [a relation, an alliance] has stuck or peeled-off and it’s a different entity all-together, in the perpetually renewed stillness of its capacity to affect or be affected (but capacity cannot be potential because there is no room for that in Latour’s universe, says GH) … ‘change’ to this affectual object-as-it-was happens in the blank spots or behind the object-as-it-were’s back as Bergson might have said, but actually of course that is not right because change never happens: wake up as new human or non-human object and in new world over and over again, Graham plays Momento to Gilles’ Groundhog Day: forgetting all the way down, or across. (I do sometimes wonder what becomes of memory and of memories that inhere in matter, in duration– and not just brain matter — with OOP). Startle, lurch, and surprise replaces flow, repetition, and event. There are no gradations of inclining-declining capacities in O-OP [it’s all affectio, no affectus] and so, instead, again the flash: the more or less strength-in-reality (of Popeye and mountains) in the palimpsest of strobed allies attached to or fallen from ‘object.’

I get it, (I think), O-OP that is and I don’t get it. And I have admired Latour (and Stengers and Whitehead and Haraway and Ihde and …) for years. But I’m not really down with OOP (to half-remember Naughty By Nature). So, we call them ‘terms’ call them ‘objects’ call them ‘actants’ call them ‘units’ and then call these other sets of things ‘alliances’ or ‘relations’ or ‘assemblages’ and call the whole shebang ‘real’ and preserve the externality of terms and relations, and, yes, questions of whether human/non-human are no matter. Agreed. But I’ve yet to see a real practical ‘advance’ in trading up to a staticky, voguing occasionalism and away from one or several process-/becoming-/event-philosophies. Except the inbetween-ness of the capacity of the ‘object’ to affect or be affected and the (external) relations that come to play a role in the gradations or modulations of that capacity become, in OOP, the vacuum of the vicarious [‘gaps multiply to infinity’] and not a prudent/providential line of nonhuman experience/experiment (resistances of life, as strung from inorganic to incorporeal: thinking here of the last chapter in Deleuze’s _Foucault_ or the final pages of Clarice Lispector’s _Passion according to G.H._ for example).

Anyway, I wonder how you, Levi-Graham, reconcile this blog’s title-explanation (haunted as it is with process and becoming and virtuality) with O-OP:

“Larvae are creatures in a process of becoming or development that have not yet actualized themselves in a specific form. This space is a space for the incubation of philosophical larvae that are yet without determinate positions or commitments but which are in a process of unfolding.”

There was more. But it is past my bed time.

A favorite sentence from Prince of Networks (p.155): ‘It might thereby seem that we are taking the side of boring common sense if we insist that all the polarizations surrounding objects must be taken seriously.’

Well, not exactly but then what to do with this boring common sense of the object? ‘There are indeed actors and subjects, but these are larvae, since they alone are capable of sustaining the lines, the slippages and the rotations. Afterwards it is too late’ (Diff & Rep, 219).
Asher Kay Says:

July 25, 2009 at 6:20 am
Confused and confusing.

Maybe my philosophical videogame will be a version of Truth-Or-Dare. The dare would be to talk normal for one week.
larvalsubjects Says:

July 25, 2009 at 7:03 am
Greg,

I’m still working out my own account of objects and just how I treat affect in the context of objects. In my own view, and expressed with great admiration and sympathy, I think the internal structure of objects in Harman’s OOP is underdetermined, though this might just be a misunderstanding on my part. I don’t know if you’ve been following the blog or not, but for this reason I am developing an account of objects in terms of their capacity to affect and be affected which also draws heavily on DeLanda’s account of attractors. This will become clearer in a couple of publications soon to be released. The account of affect is drawn more from D&G– specifically in the Becoming-Animal chapter of ATP –than Deleuze, though there’s certainly a strong connection there. Oh, and you might be excited to hear that DeLanda is himself writing a new book that is organized around affect. I was quite startled to discover this in a recent conversation with him as I had made it one of the center-pieces of the work I’m doing.
glen Says:

July 25, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Hi Levi,

My above comment had a rushed tone only because I was rushed and I had to hammer out the thought into the blogosphere before heading off to work.

I need to read Whitehead again before I comment about the interpretation forwarded by Graham and with which you agree regarding temporality. From what I remember actual occasions are formed from prehensions prehending each other. The temporality of prehensions is not that of the temporality of actual occasions. Actual occasions exist within their own time-space, what a Bergsonian would call a spatialised time.

Does an actual occasion need an observer to witness or experience this time-space? Yes, but the only possible entity to experience the temporality of the actual occasion is the actual ocassion itself. As soon as another concrescence of prehensions prehending each other as an actual occasion comes into ‘experiencing proximity’ (for want of a better phrase) then another actual ocassion is formed with yet another temporality. Objects may populate these transformational relations, but from what I remember of Whitehead, actual ocassions are not objects. I will need to check this in my notes as this seems central to both Graham’s and your own interpretation of Whitehead. Objects are only given objecthood within the spatialised timeframe of the actual occasion itself.

So on my reckoning there is already two conceptions of time at play here. The spatialised time of an actual ocassion, and the not-yet-concrescent temporality of prehensions. I don’t know what this temporality is because it can’t be experienced as such. Humans experience as non-cognitive awareness (or the not-yet-experience) of the spatialised time emerging from the not-yet concresecent through intuition. I don’t know how (or even if) other entities in the cosmos have such an experience.

After reading The Fold I read Whitehead’s concept of eternal objects as being congruent with Deleuze’s conception of a singularity as forwarded in the Logic of Sense. Following Deleuze, singularities ‘always’ exist and they are neutral. So that is three different cocenpotions of temporality in Whitehead.

Harman presents Latour (so far along in the book as I am still reading) as offering a temporality of pure alterity. ‘Time’ comes from another actant through the character of the relation, actants in themselves do not ‘have’ a temporality, they exist ‘in’ a temporality: a spatialised time the character of which is produced through the relation between at least two actants. Is this an accurate reading?

If so, then it troubles the notion of an allegedly flat ontology. Actant1 must ‘force’ actant2 to inhabit actant1’s purely external temporality. This relation is never equal as one actant (1 or 2) will be forced to ‘sync’ with the imposed temporality, which does not, in turn, belong to the other actant at all, but to yet another actant which has imposed its temporality in yet another. Hence the paradox of infinite regress where nothing seems to get done because no one has any time (boom tish), it is always imposed from outside. When does the ‘happening’ happen? How can we know this if we form yet another actual occasion and another spatialised time from within which we can relate with objects? From where does the ‘spatialised time’ come from? Following the argument then, actants can’t create a temporality because it is an infinite regress of temporalities handed down. To me this reads like an ontological version of Zeno’s paradox.

It seems to me more likely that there is a pure duration from which a spatialised temporality can be cleaved and backformed in accordance with the apprehension of parts of an event (with and as the event).

It is late and i hope this comment doesn’t have too many spelling/grammatical errors!
Mikhail Emelianov Says:

July 25, 2009 at 4:19 pm
No need to open old wounds, Mikhail.

Good point. I’m not trying to get us back to our discussion of Kant and such. I’m just saying that it looks as though you and Kant have an abusive relationship scenario where you only hit him because you love him, and when you hang out with your buddies and there is a tense critical comment here and there in which you feel pressed you excuse yourself, go to the kitchen and we can all hear poor Kant’s screams and sobs.

I think the essence of the comment was that you don’t seem to know what to do with time/space – sometimes you’re fine with science taking over and doing its thing (one time/space), sometimes you want philosophy to have a say (many times/spaces) – a legitimate criticism of your views? I can’t say, but it had nothing to do with Kant and I don’t see why you needed to go there, that’s all.

[To Kant: You know, you don’t have to take it, here’s a number you can call, they will take you in tonight]
Asher Kay Says:

July 25, 2009 at 4:31 pm
I swear I am not trying to re-open the realism wounds, but Levi’s comments about Kant are buzzing around in my head, scared up by recent obsessions about historicity and metaphor, so I need to comment to quiet them down:

“Kantian-type transcendental explanations strike me as a failure of philosophical imagination”

I think this is right on. But given that Kant had no metaphor in his head concerning neural plasticity (or plain old plasticity, or even plastic – or neurons, come to think of it), we can probably cut him some slack.

But it’s ultra-important to realize that this mistake is both common and Dangerous. We find it hard to believe that it is impossible for us to reach point B due to the lack of a conceptual metaphor, and that our species might lack that metaphor for many generations. Kant’s failure of imagination is not that he failed to imagine the true state of affairs – it’s that he failed to imagine that he was confronting a state of affairs that only his grandchildren’s children could properly conceptualize.

I am not sure why this failure occurs so often, but my suspicions lie with our belief in mathematics as a pure, universal and a priori language, when in reality it’s just as rooted in metaphor as any other language, and its truths are just as historical.
larvalsubjects Says:

July 25, 2009 at 5:17 pm
Mikhail,

I think what you’re discerning as not knowing what to do with time and space, is in fact a fundamental ontological difference in how I think about time and space. Within my ontological framework there is neither time, nor space, but rather times and spaces. In other words, I’m a pluralist concerning times and spaces. Just as I don’t advocate the existence of one type of real object (say material objects), I don’t advocate the existence of one time and one space in which all things are contained. As I recall, you’ve read DeLanda’s Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. With a few reservations, I’m largely sympathetic to his pluralistic account of time in the third chapter. Lurking behind all this is a Whiteheadian principle of philosophical criticism. Whitehead contends that philosophies are seldom wrong because they are mistaken, but rather because of overstatement. That is, there is a grain of truth in just about every philosophical position but the position goes astray when it expands that philosophical thesis to everything. This would be my problem with Kantian accounts of time and space that treat it as a homogeneous container imposed by mind on things. Kant is entirely correct in his thesis that humans experience time in a particular way– though I think he’s mistaken in his understanding of temporality: for human temporality we need to look to Husserl, James, and Heidegger, not Kant –but quite mistaken in subordinating all other times and spaces to this form of time.
Mikhail Emelianov Says:

July 25, 2009 at 6:04 pm
In other words, I’m a pluralist concerning times and spaces.

I do understand this point, I think I was simply saying that John’s comment was directed at this pluralist view because not so long ago you’ve advocated a very univocal view of time/space where it was what physics tells us it is, period. I think as I wrote before I am much more sympathetic to your pluralist view because I don’t think we should let scientific view take precedence (for a number of reasons). But I can see the confusion that prompted John’s comment (is he coming back to interact or was it just a one-time shot?), before you seemed to “hit” Kant precisely because of his view of time/space as relative (versus physics’ absolute time) and now you seem to be okay with it (pointing out that he can only think of one type of time which is true, of course). I personally think you are closer to what I would whole-heartedly agree with vis-a-vis time/space, but I suppose I’m still cautious as I’m not sure we mean the same things here.

My issue here is the matter of arriving at these conclusions, and by “issue” I mean a genuine question/inquiry – how do you decide whether there is one time/space or many times/spaces? is it a matter of observation/experience or it is a matter of conceptual/aprioric postulation? I think regardless of our opinion of Kant, he is in a long line of thinkers discussing time and his reflections are again presented in a strict logical form – is time/space substance or accidents? is it relative or absolute and so on? So at least there is a demonstration of how one arrives at this or that view – how do you arrive as “pluralist view”?
larvalsubjects Says:

July 25, 2009 at 6:20 pm
Mikhail,

This simply is not true:

I do understand this point, I think I was simply saying that John’s comment was directed at this pluralist view because not so long ago you’ve advocated a very univocal view of time/space where it was what physics tells us it is, period. I think as I wrote before I am much more sympathetic to your pluralist view because I don’t think we should let scientific view take precedence (for a number of reasons).

To see why it’s important to recall the context of the discussion of Kant. Much of Kant’s account of time and the first half of the Critique is devoted to grounding natural science. As such, in that discussion the relevant issue revolved around whether or not Kant’s understanding of time is adequate to natural science. Hence the focus on physics in particular. Nothing in that discussion entails that physical time is the only real form of time. In fact, I continuously emphasized, in that discussion, that there is such a thing as human time, it’s just not a foundation of all other times. If philosophers are going to make claims about scientific knowledge and science in general, then they can’t simply talk out their asses about what knowledge is without being acquainted with these things, their actual methodologies, and so on. You seem to be situating me in a model of realism where their is the “really real” on the one side or nature and the mental and the cultural on the other side. However, as I have argued for months and in this post, that is not the sort of realism I advocate. Additionally, when this sort of two-world model is abandoned, the epistemic question as you pose it no longer makes sense as the world is no longer some “beyond” that we have to get access to, but rather we have a field of interacting objects of all sorts– including the human and culture –interacting with one another and forming various systems. I repeat this point until I’m blue in the face for literally months, yet I still get asked questions based on a realist model that places the real on the side of the world and mind on the other side and wonders how they interact. In my position there not a duality but just a real in which all objects already are.

As always, I’m not particularly interested in discussing the epistemological issues with you. Each of these discussions has ended badly and unproductively with epithets like “naive realism” being hurled about, reductions of highly complex epistemological issues reduced to vulgar empiricism, and creationist lines of argument to the effect that “I can’t see how we can explain the ability to do x so it must already be a structure in the mind”. I don’t care to repeat that discussion because the outcomes and lines of argument are already predictable and frankly I don’t need to elevation of my blood pressure over ground that has already been staked out. There’s a 3500 word post immediately following this one– “Circulating Reference” –as well as a couple of other posts related that schematically discuss epistemological issues. In fact, maybe you could do the realists you’re arguing against the actual courtesy of reading the works they reference like Bhaskar or Latour, rather than unreasonably request the outline bodies of theory that are already fairly well developed and available. After all, we’ve done the anti-realists the courtesy of carefully reading their works. I think the representational model of posing epistemological questions is so fundamentally inadequate and distorted for reasons internal to how philosophy is practiced and its history that the discussion isn’t even worth having because it’s already working from the wrong presuppositions. I explain why I think this is the case in the “Circulating Reference” post. I’ll also note that I thought we agreed not to rehash the question of knowledge, access, and the realism debates yet here you are again trying to bring them all up. There are far better ways to spend a gorgeous Saturday afternoon than repeating things we’ve both already said and arguments we’ve both already made.
Mikhail Emelianov Says:

July 25, 2009 at 6:37 pm
I’m not trying to bring anything up, Levi, you don’t have to be afraid that this will “end up badly and unproductively” – I am actually expressing my sympathy with you pluralist version of time/space and I’m not interested in debating Kant at this point, especially since you are foreclosing any possibility of questions such as “how do you know that?” or “how did you arrive at this conclusion?” – I don’t see how any real discussion can take place if the issues of truth/falsity cannot be raised…
Mikhail Emelianov Says:

July 25, 2009 at 6:43 pm
I think I’m starting to get the drift here a bit, if one cannot really contest your theory with annoying epistemological question like “how do you know that?” then anything you say goes as long as its sufficiently creative and “fresh” – this way my interpretations of Kant are just as correct as yours (despite our continual mutual accusations of the opposite), in fact, anything is just as true as anything else, it seems.

One thing is true, of course, it is a beautiful Saturday, I think I’ll take your advice and go outside now.
larvalsubjects Says:

July 25, 2009 at 6:44 pm
I am not foreclosing questions of “how we know that”. I referenced my post responding to precisely that issue! What I am rejecting is the dual simplistic options of knowledge through observation/experience or conceptual/apriorist postulation. My post on circulating reference outlines an option that is neither of these. The problem with both of these options is that they are based on the model of the knower as passively gazing at the object, which leaves only the options of sensations (experience) or conception (the a priori). I outline why I believe philosophers are led to pose the question in this way in my post “Circulating Reference”, and present an alternative drawn from Latour.
larvalsubjects Says:

July 25, 2009 at 6:48 pm
Au contraire, Mikhail. You have always contended that we have to have criteria of knowledge at the beginning of inquiry, advocating what I believe to be a dogmatic approach to thought and philosophy. I have always contended that knowledge is a result of inquiry and that an ontology is a set of hypothetical claims about the nature of beings that only subsequently establish their truth and knowledge value through being applied to the world such that their inadequacy becomes apparent and revision takes place. This is why I’m not particularly interested in the foundationalist approach you advocate as I don’t think there are any foundations to be found. Color me pragmatic and instrumentalist where questions of knowledge are concerned. An ontology proves its salt not by telling us what reality is in advance, but through the manner in which it opens up all sorts of fruitful domains of inquiry and investigation in fields outside of philosophy.
larvalsubjects Says:

July 25, 2009 at 11:34 pm
Hi Glen,

The difficulty I have with Bergson’s understanding of temporality is that I find it difficult to see how anything could ever emerge from it. I think this is a difficulty with Deleuze’s ontology as well. We have the one-all of the virtual populated by singularities and whatnot, but it’s not at all clear why something would ever be actualized from within this pre-individual field. Similarly, in Bergson’s pure duration, it’s not clear why anything would ever become spatialized at all or why we wouldn’t just have pure and endless flux. Here I think Bachelard provides a convincing critique of Bergson in The Dialectic of Duration, though I don’t agree with his solution. Your discussion of Latour, and Whitehead for that matter, is unrecognizable to me. For Latour it is not that objects don’t have time but rather that time arises from objects or actants. Where physical time is concerned, this is actually pretty accurate. For example, in relativity theory time and space are not pre-existent containers but arise as a function of the speed and mass of objects. Similarly, biological time is variable depending on the rhythms of an organism. DeLanda does a good job with this approach to time in Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, I think. You seem to be drawing a distinction between prehensions and actual occasions in Whitehead as if they were two different things, but I don’t see how they can work as Whitehead is committed to the thesis that only actual occasions exist. Any distinction between an actual occasion and its prehensions can only be formal.

A quick note about flat ontology. The thesis of flat ontology is that being is composed entirely of individuals that are all on equal ontological footing with one another. In other words, flat ontology rejects the claims of vertical ontologies such as theisms that posit god as beyond or outside of being (other theologies are possible in flat ontology, just not this sort of Plotinus’ sort), Platonisms where forms are transcendent to being, essentialisms where essences are eternal and enduring, etc. Rather, you have a single plane with entities interacting on that plane, all contributing differences. Flat ontology is not the thesis that all beings are equal in terms of their power or capacity to act. From the standpoint of flat ontology there is nothing controversial, contradictory, or surprising about one entity forcing another entity to act or enter into sync with its own organization. For example, a couple hundred thousand years ago our bodies colonized mitochondrial DNA for use in its own cell. Mitochondria were, prior to this, independent organisms and very much remain so in our own bodies. Yet in colonizing mitochondria, they came to function within the cells of our own body becoming integrated with the rhythmic temporalities of our cells. Similarly, your body daily, I presume, colonizes other actants such as the food you eat. As Deleuze says of flat ontology in the first chapter of Difference and Repetition, being is said in a single and same sense of difference in the sense that all differences are. However while all differences are, it is not the case that differences are equal amongst themselves. It would be very odd, I think, were anyone to suggest otherwise given the contentious universe we live in with actants perpetually striving to form alliances with other actants forming systems that then overdetermine the others.

As I final note, I don’t find Deleuze’s distinction between temporality and spatialized temporality particularly useful, and feel that it is one of the more unattractive features of Bergson’s and Deleuze’s ontology. Better to speak of space-times, than to denigrate space to a secondary status. It is not space that is the problem, but rather simplistic spaces. What we need is more interesting conceptions of space, that’s all.
glen Says:

July 26, 2009 at 2:54 am
I get the notion of a flat ontology as forwarded by Latour and others. The problem with existence is that it ebbs and flows, so if something is existing in a different ebb and flow to something else it seems problematic to reduce the difference in respective ebb and flows to merely purport that they ebb and flow in the same way. There is no difference in terms of the character of being in the world between things, for sure, but how they come into and out of the world depends on the rhythms of ebbing and flowing. Hence, the ontology is only flat along one dimension. I am not sure how useful it is to proclaim that this one dimension of ‘flatness’ is flat, with which I am in total agreement, but it doesn’t seem to do anything. Looking at different rhythms of becoming and the differential repetition of events, ie the bits of ontology that certainly are not flat, seems far more useful for actually thinking about and engaging with the world.

I wrote a substantial comment on ‘time’, but I am shifting it to my actual blog as a continuation of my critical comments on Harman’s book and to save you blog being burdened with my comments.
Mikhail Emelianov Says:

July 26, 2009 at 3:34 am
“Au contraire, Mikhail” simply must become our signature phrase, I insist.
john Says:

July 26, 2009 at 10:32 am
Thanks for the reply Levi, which helps to clarify quite a lot of things. I’m still puzzled as to why you hold that philosophers attempting to develop theories of mind and cognition must pay attention to the neurosciences but that those who develop theories of space and time are free to ignore the sciences entirely, however. If philosophers who talk about space and time are free to ignore physics on the grounds that “material objects are only a subset of the real”, why should philosophers who talk about mind and consciousness be obliged to engage with cognitive neuroscience? Couldn’t they, too, just claim that “material objects are only a subset of the real” and blithely continue to proceed “as if scientific findings made no difference” (an attitude that you recently claimed claim to deplore)? I actually think that the claim that science investigates “only a subset of the real” and that the laws of physics “do not hold for all inter-object relations” is not only completely false but also deeply pernicious, and I’m surprised that you don’t think the same. I also very strongly doubt that your Latour-inspired project for an egalitarian ontology (or a ‘democracy of objects’) will ultimately survive serious scrutiny (any more than the claim that science is but one of many discourses with no claim to cognitive privilege survives serious scrutiny) – a wholesale/promiscuous realism according to which “everything is equally real” is not a realism worth fighting for, it seems to me – but I wish you all the best in trying to make it work. Finally, I don’t know if you’re aware of the work of Jonathan Schaffer, but I suspect that it would be of some interest to you given that he too claims to have found a way to secure an “egalitarian ontology” according to which “all entities are equally real” (see, for example, his ‘Is there a fundamental level?´, which can be accessed here: http://rsss.anu.edu.au/~schaffer/papers/Fundamental.pdf). I don’t personally find Schaffer’s arguments persuasive but there’s plenty there, I think, which resonates with this Latourian / Harmanian line that you are evidently so taken with.
john Says:

July 26, 2009 at 10:46 am
PS: A bunch of other papers by Schaffer on related issues can be accessed here: http://rsss.anu.edu.au/~schaffer/Papers.htm
larvalsubjects Says:

July 26, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Well gee, John, thanks for the vote of confidence! It certainly helps to promote and further discussion. The reason that philosophers developing theory of mind must pay attention to the neurosciences is because both of their disciplines are talking about the same thing. The issue is different in other areas. By way of analogy, so far it looks like the principles of quantum mechanics are of very little relevance to the exploration of cell structure in biology or how polyvalent cells undergo cell differentiation over the course of development. This is not because cells do not involve quantum processes, but because the organization of cells relevant in biology is scale specific. The case is similar when we talk about different temporalities. The manner in which an individual animal or social system temporalizes itself has a scale specific form of organization. Yes, yes, of course it is constrained by the laws of physics, but it is also an emergent form of organization that has its own principles and reality. My thesis, by the way, is not that “everything is real”, but rather that if something makes a difference then it is real.
Short-Circuits « Larval Subjects . Says:

July 26, 2009 at 4:30 pm
[…] is expressed because I am alleged to reject neurology, quantum mechanics, and relativity theory (here and here). Needless to say, I suspect I won’t be posting any further comments from John as I […]
Mikhail Emelianov Says:

July 26, 2009 at 4:40 pm
My thesis, by the way, is not that “everything is real”, but rather that if something makes a difference then it is real.

Can you give an example of something that does not make a difference?
john the obnoxious asshole Says:

July 26, 2009 at 4:47 pm
Levi, I think much the same applies as I said before: If your argument is that there are emergent forms of space and time that somehow fall outside the ambit of scientific inquiry then I fail to see that you’re in any position to object to philosophers of mind who pay no attention to neuroscience. You may insist that philosophers of mind must pay attention to neuroscience “because both are talking about the same thing” but, as you well know, this is something that most philosophers of mind explicitly deny: consciousness and mind are not the same as the brain, they will say, but rather scale-specific emergent properties that are irreducible to brain-states, etc. Moreover, employing your own line of reasoning above, could they not simply maintain that since science only investigates “a subset of the real” and since “nothing is reducible to anything else”, therefore neuoscience is as irrelevant to the study of consciousness as quantum mechanics is to the study of cell structure?

I of course agree with you that biologists studying the structure of cells need not concern themselves with quantum mechanics, but I fail to see the relevance of this to the original discussion. Alan’s suggestion was merely that when philosophers hold forth about the nature of space and time (and note that the author mentioned in Alan’s post is clearly using ‘space and time’ as univocal concepts) they ought to pay attention to what physics has to say about these matters and consider whether or not their own pet metaphysical ‘theories’ (using the term in the loosest possible sense) are consistent with the same. So, it seems to me that whether or not physics is directly relevant to everything it pleases you to refer to in terms of ‘temporalizing’ is not really relevant here. Indeed, my point is simply a reiteration of one you yourself made in discussion with Mikhail a couple of months ago: namely, that the idea that philosophers should be able “say whatever they like about consciousness, the nature of the world, the mind, etc. and expect to be taken seriously” is farcical. It just seems to me that to maintain that philosophers may legitimately make any claim they like about space, time or anything else, completely unconstrained by anything that science has taught us in the past three hundred years (and this on the grounds that science only deals with “a subset of the real”), is a recipe for complete and utter philosophical disaster.

I don’t wish to prolong this, but I would urge you to go back and reread your own (in my opinion, quite superb) posts on naturalism and materialism from a few months back and consider whether or not you really want to continue towing the Latourian line you’re presently taking on such all-important metaphilosophical issues. My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that it would be a great shame if you were to forget all your excellent advice from those previous posts when writing your new book, especially if you’re doing so (as I somewhat suspect) because Plato has lately become a more dear friend to you than truth.

So, in spite of the impression I may have conveyed, if I am not giving you my “vote of confidence” on this issue, it does not mean that I do not support many other things you have written, it’s just that my vote of confidence is not evenly distributed across every Levi time-slice.

Anyway, best of luck again with your project, which I think is undoubtedly one of the most promising to come out of Continental circles in some time.
larvalsubjects Says:

July 26, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Mikhail,

Nope, I can’t. This is the transversal onticology cuts across discussions of the real and reality. Rather than treating reality as a beyond that has to be reached, it begins from the premise that if something makes a difference it is real. Now before you jump all over me– and I urge you, if you have the time, to read my post “Short Circuit” –note how this move shifts the nature of philosophical discussion. Rather than asking the epistemological question “how can we represent the real”, the question now becomes what kind of difference does a particular thing make, how are differences related, what type of linkages do they have, and so on. Using Nate’s language (from the whatinthehell blog), you might call my move deflationary. In other words, it attempts to deflate the irresolvable epistemic question by treating as real whatever makes a difference. This, of course, does not prevent us from asking what sort of difference a particular thing makes.

Now, going back to our brief epistemological discussion yesterday, I take it that this move also shifts the way in which we think about epistemology. Modernist philosophy finds itself in a deadlock because it places reality on the side of nature and treats mind as distinct or other than reality. It then finds itself trapped in endless questions of how these two domains are linked to one another or how it is possible to represent that reality independent of mind. Posed in this way, I think the question is irresolvable.

By drawing the transversal line of difference across the real, the first thing I’m able to do is hold that knowers aren’t other than the real, but are already situated in the real. However, in claiming that knowers are already situated in the real, I nonetheless do not fall back on the epistemological position of representational realism where mind has a “glassy essence” that immediately reflects the world exactly as it is. Rather, insofar as all relations among objects– including human-world –relations are differential or productive of difference, questions of knowledge become questions of how certain differences are produced for an observer. This is why I object to the epistemological choice between sense-data empiricism or a priorist conception. Rather, under my construal, coming-to-know is neither a passive gazing at objects to reflect them nor a process of simply conceiving objects in an a prioristic fashion.

Rather, knowledge is arrived at through engaging with objects in a way that produces differences. What do I mean by this? I mean that we never come to know objects by simply “gazing at them”, but rather that we provoke objects through acting on them. By acting on objects by varying their contexts, conditions, circumstances, and through the use of instruments and so on, salient differences characterizing the object gradually come to be disclosed in the object. Just as the infant gradually begins to discover very rudimentary dimensions of gravity and engineering by playing with his blocks and discovering those arrangements where the building falls apart, those where it stands up, and so on, we discover properties of objects through perturbing them in various ways. I outline this more formally in my post “Circulating Reference”. It is important to note that this process of knowledge production is not a subject-object relation, but a collective process that unfolds gradually over generations. Moreover, I take it that knowledge claims are probabilistic claims (i.e., this is most likely the case) rather than certainties.

One sense I get is that philosophers warp the epistemological question because, when asking themselves the question “how do I come to know x” they take whatever object is available beside their desk, stare at it, and wonder how they can perceive that it is made up of, say, atoms. They thus filter out all of the perturbing activities by which these properties are discovered. In other words, the question is so underdetermined in philosophical epistemology that it becomes irresolvable and completely mysterious.
Asher Kay Says:

July 26, 2009 at 5:45 pm
I’m a little confused too. The relevance of the cell-biology analogy would be that the features of time at the “physics level” disappear at the “doing ontology” level? An ontology, it seems to me, would have to be consistent with just about everything science knows about.

In my reading of a flat ontology so far, one of the most important features is the recognition that the mind is “embodied” in the world. This solves a lot of problems, because it means that our concepts are intimately connected to reality — they are translations of one chunk of reality by another chunk. We can be pretty sure, in other words, that if we think about something in a particular way, it’s because reality is such that it would produce that effect via the translation of the brain.

So the question for me would be whether scientific aspects of time produce any such effects. And the answer is an overwhelming “yes”. In fact the effects are so encompassing that we have trouble conceptually separating them from the background.

Maybe it would be helpful to the discussion to pull out some specific examples of “scientific time”. I think it’s a discussion worth having.
larvalsubjects Says:

July 26, 2009 at 6:21 pm
Asher,

My point is quite different:

I’m a little confused too. The relevance of the cell-biology analogy would be that the features of time at the “physics level” disappear at the “doing ontology” level? An ontology, it seems to me, would have to be consistent with just about everything science knows about.

The point is not that the features of time disappear at the physics level, but that when we investigate cells we are working at a system-specific level and set aside discussions of quantum mechanics. Cells, like anything else, would not be possible without quantum phenomena, but cells have a distinct organization that is the object of biology. This organization can only be found from investigating cells. Were we to reduce ourselves to quantum mechanics, we would not be able to deduce something like cells. At best we could infer that something like cells is a physical possibility within quantum mechanics. Going back to Glen’s point about the need for OOO to engage with quantum mechanics and time as understood by relativity theory, my point was simply that we want an ontology robust enough to capture different levels of scale in the order of being and to be capable of investigating those forms of organization in system-specific terms. Situating the temporal organizations of, for example, a particular tribe of people in terms of time in relativity is simply not very helpful for the ethnographer. Clearly, since people and communities are physical objects, this organization must be consistent with relativity theory if relativity theory is true. Nonetheless, the temporal processes at work in this particular tribal system is itself a unique form of organization that has its own internal principles.

I think the issue vis a vis neurology is more complex than John lets on. Unlike John, I think phenomenologists, transcendental philosophers, etc., have made a number of contributions to our understand of mind and should not be dismissed. They’ve discovered real ways in which consciousness is organized and functions. Moreover, without this sort of research our neurology reveals nothing to us because we’re unable to determine what it’s related to. I think we can safely set aside the dualists in these discussions altogether because no one seriously entertains the thesis that mind and body are distinct any longer. Observations of stroke victims should have been enough to dispel dualistic models of mind centuries ago and Lucretius’ arguments against dualism in the third book of De Rerum Natura are as fresh as ever. If, then, we can safely set aside dualism as a respectable position, the question then becomes what sort of physicalist theories are problematic. On the one hand, we have Husserl saying that nature cannot be a condition of mind because consciousness is the condition of nature. Similarly, we have folks like Fodor telling us that there is something called psychology that is independent of neurology because mind is “substrate neutral”, i.e., the hardware makes no different to the organization of mind. This would be a great thesis if it were true, but the problem is that it’s not true. When we begin to examine neurology, we discover that synaptically no two brains are alike, that synaptic connections aren’t hardwired, that they continue to form and come undone throughout life, etc. Husserl reveals a number of important things about how we experience the world and these things should be retained. However, because he cuts off consciousness from the physical body (not the phenomenological body) in the way that he does he ends up essentializing structures that are the result of a development. Likewise with Fodor. Not only is the LOT he describes very likely not a priori, but the result of a development, but it is also not essential but can take on a variety of different forms. So I guess my point is that you’re going to get things wrong if you don’t take into account the plasticity of the brain. The hardware does make a difference. Indeed, the whole hardware-software metaphor is extremely problematic where mind is concerned and leads to all sorts of mistaken theorizations and false problems.

John seems to think that I am arguing that philosophers can make whatever claims they might like about the nature of objects, time, space, etc. What he seems to miss is that my position is more subtle than that. We have to determine what type of time is being talked about in these debates. When Kant makes his claims about time in the first Critique, he is trying to give an account of physical time and space. That is, he’s attempting to provide a foundation for the natural sciences. This means that Kant should be measured with respect to natural science. And lo and behold, what do we find? We find that Kant’s understanding of time and space doesn’t measure up well with respect to contemporary physics, regardless of what the Kantians would like to say. By contrast, when the sociologist Niklas Luhmann talks about the different structures of temporality in modernity and pre-modern society, we’re not talking about the same thing any longer. We’re still talking about something real because these times organize bodies, make an impact on life, etc., etc., etc., but the time being talked about is not the time of orbiting bodies or gravity. We need a place for the analysis of these sorts of structures of time (why would anyone else claim otherwise?). Where Luhmann would go wrong would be in the claim that this type of temporality is time as such or that all other times are dependent on this type of time. Here it’s worthwhile to note that we can have asymmetries. For example, it’s likely that all temporalities must be consistent with physical time and are dependent on it, but physical time is not dependent on the various forms of temporality that exist at the biological level (the time structures of cell processes and organic processes) and at the social level. Similarly, all cultural phenomena are dependent on the existence of brains and bodies– at least for now, machine cultures are becoming possible –but brains and bodies are not dependent on culture. The point is that while culture is dependent on brains and bodies, it also has its own organization in much the same way that every ecosystem is unique.
Asher Kay Says:

July 26, 2009 at 7:24 pm
LS – That clears it up for me. I can’t claim to know what John is getting at precisely, but for what it’s worth, he sounds like a potential ally.

I think I tend to get confused when the discussion revolves around things like dismissing, acknowledging and incorporating. Not only do I think that different phenomenologists, transcendental philosophers, etc., have made valuable contributions (especially by providing metaphors that we didn’t have before), I think the ones who reach wrong conclusions are just as instructive as the ones who were right. That is to say, a wrong conclusion is as interconnected with reality as a correct one, and our wrong conclusions are reached through the same processes as our correct ones.

One other note – I think it’s critically important to reject “foundational” modes of discourse. Maybe this is one of the things that causes confusion with your thought. The presumption is that some form of time (or whatever) must be the primary one from which the others emanate. There’s no reason (as far as I can tell) to assume that this is the case for you.
glen Says:

July 26, 2009 at 9:32 pm
Your point above about a radicalisation of Kant is precisely one of the points I’ve been trying to make all along. A kind of Kantianism of everything. Not just one ‘nature culture’ or ‘subject object’ split but an infinite number of ‘splits’ depending on how the cosmos is folded into entities with no special place for humans. I would call it a non-human correlationism, or maybe ahuman correlationism is better because it does not rely on humans at all but can include them.

You say this is the same position as Graham and yourself. It very well may be your position, based on your previous writings, but I hardly think it is Graham’s position based on his book and blog comments. What do you think?

I am getting to the end of his book now and the end certainly makes more sense to me than the first few chapters. The Latour he was presenting in the first parts of the book was unrecogniseable to me mainly cause I use the later Latour. For example, the first chapter makes no reference to what Latour’s calls ‘plasma’ ie the missing masses.
larvalsubjects Says:

July 26, 2009 at 9:35 pm
Glen,

It’s a point that Graham makes all the time. It comes out with particular clarity in Tool-Being. Graham’s point is not that Kant is mistaken, but that what Kant says of human-object relations holds for all object-object relations regardless of whether or not humans are involved. Graham continuously praises Whitehead for this. In my onticology, this point is embodied in the principle of translation: there is no transportation of a difference that does not make a difference. In other words, whenever one object interacts with another object the receiving object transforms the differences it receives in a system specific way particular to that object. This is a thesis I draw from Latour, who holds something analogous. Graham does discuss Latour’s concept of plasma in the second part of his book.
glen Says:

July 26, 2009 at 10:37 pm
Second part! Yes! I have been reading it from the front! WTF! He doesn’t make the point in the first 130-odd pages of Prince of Networks! Only now is something appearing in the book that approaches what you have written above.

So what is he trying to do in the first section? I really don’t understand. Whenever there is a possible opening for him to make this point he slides into ‘attacking Kant mode’ by attacking a simplisitic human-object binary.

The object-centric focus is problematic. I look forward to seeing how Graham deals with Latour’s conception of the ‘social’.

Plus I don’t think it holds for all object-object relations because some entities have the capacity to incorporate a fold of the cosmos through whatever representational mechanism that the entity has, while others do not.
larvalsubjects Says:

July 26, 2009 at 11:03 pm
The problem with Kant is that for Kant every relation is a human-object relation, you never get a relation in Kant that is object-object sans any relation to the human. Given that nearly every dominant stance in philosophy treats the human or human phenomena as the center of all relations, this is entirely appropriate. There are just a handful of non-anthropomorphic realist ontologies out there: Deleuze, DeLanda, Whitehead, Latour, etc. His interest in Latour is that Latour’s ontology is an ontology that does not place the human at the center but places all actors on equal footing. I’m not sure what is problematic about “object-centric focuses”. “Object” is just a generic name for any entity, i.e., humans are every bit as much objects as are chunks of coal. Where nearly all the other reigning approaches to philosophy treat humans as something special that differs fundamentally from objects, OOO treats humans as no more special than other objects.
larvalsubjects Says:

July 26, 2009 at 11:21 pm
Glen,

One additional point. It’s important to note that Graham models his understanding of objects on Heidegger’s play of revealing and concealing. In the ready-to-hand (roughly tools), objects belong to relational networks that define themselves in a set of referential relations of significance. I’m not sure how familiar you are with Heidegger, but the idea is that when objects are encountered as “ready-to-hand” they disappear in this network of signfying relations. Thus, for example, when using a hammer, the hammer becomes invisible because it is caught up in the network of its doings. The hammer as object withdraws or disappears in being used. It is concealed. Heidegger argues that we only become aware of the hammer as a sort of brute object when something breaks down in this network of interrelations such that it is unable to function. This is what Heidegger calls the “present-at-hand”. Now clearly Heidegger understands our relationship to objects in very human-centered terms. It is humans, as it were, that throw this network of relations over top of brute objects in such a way that they disappear in their equipmental contextures.

Graham’s move is to take this Heideggerian account of revealing and concealing, withdrawal and presentation, that Heidegger restricts to the human and generalize it to all objects, regardless of whether they are related to the human. Thus, for Graham, whenever any object interacts with another object, the second object withdraws (like Kant’s in-itself), veiling itself behind the relation between these two objects. Based on this line of thought, Graham is able to argue that the true being of objects is this absolute withdrawal from any relations, such that every object is absolutely autonomous and “vacuum packed”. In this way, Harman argues against conceptions of objects that reduce them to their relations. There is, for him, always this withdrawn excess that escapes every relation. The upshot is that the inaccessibility of the “in-itself” is not something unique to human-object relations but is characteristic of any object-object relation. In this respect, I suspect Graham would be sympathetic to your claim that there are objects that do no enfold other objects in the universe, but for a different reason. Because, according to Graham, objects are absolutely independent of any relations they might enter into, they are not simply folds of the rest of the universe.

This is what distinguishes Graham’s positions from the positions of Latour and Whitehead. Both Latour and Whitehead are relationists in the sense that they hold that objects are nothing but, their relations. For Whitehead actual occasions are their prehensions, whereas for Latour objects are the relations they enter into with other objects in trials of strength. If, nonetheless, Latour and Whitehead are “object-oriented ontologists” then this is because neither argues that the human is included in every relation. For Latour the Zebra’s running across the steppe get along just fine without human correlation.

My own position is a bit of an intermediary between Graham’s position and the positions of Latour and Whitehead. Like Graham, I reject the thesis that objects are their relations and defend discrete and independent objects rather than a wholistic universe. However, while there is some resemblance between Graham’s “withdrawn objects” and my principle of translation, these two views are nonetheless very different. Graham is fascinated with the manner in which every object withdraws whenever entering into a relation. By contrast, my principle of translation is fascinated with the manner in which objects integrate, translate, and transform the differences they receive from other objects, producing new qualities as a result. In this respect, I have a hard time accepting the thesis that there are objects that do not fold in elements of the universe in some way. Can you give an example of such an entity?
glen Says:

July 27, 2009 at 12:11 am
The point of difference is life. I am assuming that a rock does not fold the cosmos into itself, if it does, then it is certainly not in the same way a living entity can. Non-living objects, what I would call an object compared to Graham’s expanded definition of the term, act upon and with the world but cannot react. There may be contingency, but there is no possibility for a rock.
larvalsubjects Says:

July 27, 2009 at 12:18 am
While I agree that rocks and living things do not fold things into themselves in the same way, I do not agree that rocks I do not agree that they do not fold differences into themselves. This is what I’ve been trying to get at with phase space attractors. An attractor is a state or set of states towards which a system tends. This set of states is what is called a phase space. The state that a system actualizes at any given point in time is partially do to its internal composition, partially due to the world about it. The actualization of a state can be called a “quality”. The sense that rocks do not fold in differences from other objects arises from viewing objects in a predominantly stable environment. Thus, for example, a very different set of attractor states is actualized at the qualitative level of the rock is significantly heated or if the rock is significantly cooled. Moreover, the color properties of the rock are attractor states. As the rock interacts with differing lighting conditions, the color of the rock changes. Certainly these interactive processes of the rock are far less complex than those of an organism, but it would be incorrect to say that they are not real processes and ways in which differences are translated.
glen Says:

July 27, 2009 at 12:47 am
Awesome! The issue then becomes one of where does the phase space belong? To the object or objects in relation or to the event of the translation? Does the phase space of ‘boiling’ belong to the water as it incoporates thermal energy when translating into steam? Or to the steam as it emerges?

I argue that the event of boiling has its own ontology and should not be reduced to either water or steam as the singularity of the boiling/condensation point belongs to the assemblage (water + heat or steam – heat, with complications around pressure etc) within which water boils or steam condenses. Yes, they are real, but necessarily linking them to objects is problematic.

The first problem I had with Graham’s book was the definition of events in terms of objects. Until we can speak purely in terms of strings of energy as the basic unit of the universe or something we need bridging concepts that do not falsely shackle events to objects deduced purely from our capacities as humans. To say something is an event is to admit uncertainty, including and especially a temporal uncertainty, to say something is an object gives it an instantaneous permanence. The section of Graham’s book I am up to now deals with some of this.
larvalsubjects Says:

July 27, 2009 at 12:58 am
Glen,

These issues are what I’m working out in my next book. When I refer to affects, it is these phase spaces I’m referring to. I agree that the qualities of an object and its phase space structure are distinct.
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knudgeknudge Says:

August 4, 2009 at 11:22 pm
this is all way out of my league but i did write a little book on relations that might interest some. ‘The Primacy of Semiosis: an ontology of relations’ (UTP,06)
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