In email today an old friend of mine asks,
Currently I’m having a bit of a spat with other graphic designers over in another pocket of the Internet. My question is: can design be understood to have an ontology, can there be an ‘ontology of design’? Does this make philosophical sense?
I’m wondering if the assemblage that is my discourse, field, discipline, community, etc. can be understood as a thing? I like the notion of tracing it through all of those lenses and coming to a networked definition. A flat ontology perhaps? Does this make sense?
Hopefully he won’t object to me posting his question here as I think it’s an extremely interesting question that goes straight to the heart of what I’ve been working on with regard to cultural and social theory. Within the framework of my onticology, the criteria by which something is real lies in making a difference. As I put it with my ontic principle, “there is no difference that does not make a difference”. Thus, to be real is to make a difference. More recently I have described the ontic principle as a deflationary move. I’ve stolen the idea of “deflationary moves” from my buddy Nate over at the terrific blog What in the Hell. Nate praises Badiou for the deflationary move of placing ontology in the domain of mathematics. Where philosophy has been obsessed with the question “what is being?” or “what is the meaning of being?”, “Badiou’s” ontology is deflationary in the sense that it says “this question has already been answered and if you would like to know that answer go study mathematics.” As a consequence, Badiou is able to set aside the question of being, dethrone it from center stage, and instead focus philosophy on the question of truth. Deflating the ontological question allows the object of philosophical inquiry to be shifted elsewhere.
Unlike Badiou (and Heidegger), I do not think the central question of philosophy has been “what is being?” or “what is the meaning of being?” Rather, following Zubiri, I think the central question of philosophy is “what is reality?” However, like Badiou, I try to effect a deflationary move with respect to the question of reality. Since roughly the 17th century, philosophy has been obsessed with the question of how we might come to know reality. As such, reality has been treated as a transcendent beyond that must be reached, and which is to be distinguished from something else that is not reality. What this thing that is other than reality, I do not know. It seems to be mind, culture, language, power, and a host of other things relating to the human. The problem is that situated in these terms the question of how we can know reality is hopeless. Why? Because one of the central lines of thought we inherit from the 17th century is the thesis that we only have access to our representations. Well, if we only have access to our representations then we can only ever scan our representations to find the marks of reality, but since these marks are themselves representations we have no criteria for determining whether they are marks or simulacra: Descartes with his mind in a vat.
read on!
If the ontic principle is a deflationary move, then this is because it strives to undermine this question altogether. By beginning with the hypothesis that to be is to make a difference, it refuses the distinction between one domain, the real, that contains the “really real” differences, and another domain, the human, that contains some other type of differences. Instead it says that if it makes a difference, then it is. But really, this is a rather stupid, vulgar, and obvious thing to assert. And in certain respects, that’s the point. What is being said is “quit obsessing over this question of access and instead get busy investigating differences, how they’re linked together, how they form systems, how they relate, how they act, and forget all this glassy nonsense about how we reflect the world.” In this regard, I think there are certain resemblances between my position and the position Rorty outlines in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, where his strategy isn’t to solve certain philosophical problems or refute certain philosophical positions, but simply to abandon them. Like Newton who was unconcerned with explaining how two bodies could interact with one another across a distance so long as he could describe the regularities, the epistemological question as it has traditionally been posed is simply abandoned so we can get on with work. This doesn’t entail that epistemology is itself abandoned, only that we no longer begin from the “mind in a vat” stance (i.e., the mind as only relating to its representations) in posing these questions.
All of this is a roundabout way of saying to my friend that “yes, I do think design has an ontology.” Insofar as design makes a difference and engages with differences, it is necessarily ontological according to the ontic principle. However, the rub lies in the question of what it means to have an ontology. For some reason Nate is on my mind today, so I’ll say that this reminds me of a discussion Nate and I had when we first met online years ago. Even then I was “all ontology all the time” and had a deep suspicion of epistemology. Nate was just the opposite, having a suspicion of ontology and a certain fondness for epistemology. Now Nate has always been among the best interlocutors you could want. He is always charming, friendly, charitable in his interpretations, while nonetheless raising his criticisms and pointing out what he thinks is incoherent. In other words, he’s someone with whom dialog is possible.
As Nate and I explored our difference– and this has really been going on since about 2006, I believe –it became clear to me that Nate had a very specific understanding of ontology that justified his suspicion. For Nate ontology meant something like a theory of “the really real”, that then functioned to police human practices, thought, inventions, and so on. Coming from a perspective that could be roughly described as “historical materialist”, I can see why Nate would be suspicious of ontology. This is also, I suspect, why a number of people are suspicious of the position of realism. They see realism as an exclusionary position that functions to sort the real from the unreal, denigrating the latter. Anti-realism thereby becomes an attractive position because it is able to accommodate multiple epistemologies that account for the variety of human experience without this sort of exclusionary logic that has been so often associated with colonialism, ethnocentrism, and the police reign of the so-called [scientific] experts that are purported to silence everyone else.
This certainly is not the sort of realism I advocate, and, no doubt, with respect to these kinds of realists my position very likely looks like an anti-realism for with the anti-realists I advocate multiplicities and pluralisms, with the caveat that these are real rather than simply human. If it makes a difference, then within my framework it is. At any rate, I suspect that within the framework of my friend’s debate the thesis that graphic design has an ontology is very likely being heard as a police thesis that limits the creative possibilities of graphic design. Yet there is another way of understanding what it means to claim that graphic design “has” an ontology.
I have often remarked that texts are not simply about something, but also are something. In this connection, I hope to capture the materiality of texts, how their existence or instantiation in the world makes a difference, and how they circulate throughout the world. For example, one reason you might not want to publish a book with Kluwer or Palgrave is purely material. The outrageous price of these texts diminishes their ability to circulate throughout the world, insuring that only well stocked library and deeply interested scholars will pay for these texts. How much has the ability of Husserl’s texts to make a difference been diminished as a result of Kluwer’s editions that can run upwards of three hundred dollars? How much has the thought of Toscano and Brassier been held back because of the outrageous price of Palgrave books? These are purely material issues of circulation that have nothing to do with the content of the text, but they make an important difference in the degree to which a text circulates throughout the social space and make differences.
The process of difference-making can also occur at the level of style. Some texts lodge themselves in minds because, like the Oscar Meyer Wiener song we simply can’t get them out of our heads.
Popular self-help book, science books, philosophical commentaries, spiritual books, etc., seem to circulate and function in this way. There’s a way in which they reduce more complex things to highly iterable patterns that then easily circulate throughout the social field for whatever reason. Other texts circulate strongly for entirely different reasons. Thus, for example, Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, Hegel’s Science of Logic, and Derrida’s Dissemination seem to circulate in part, not because they are like stupid songs that stick in your head or teutonic chants that conveniently stereotype a philosopher, but rather precisely because of their elliptical, allusive, and suggestive nature. In short, these texts are difference engines. By a “difference engine” I mean something that does not so much replicate itself faithfully, so much as something that creates the occasion for many different and divergent replications that proliferate throughout the social sphere. In other words, these sorts of texts are difference-makers in the sense that they produce many different differences in their appropriation. Thus you have right and left Hegelians.
You have all sorts of different appropriations of Deleuze. You have hundreds of different versions of Marx. There is something about the style of these thinkers, its gaps, its allusiveness, its suggestiveness, and so on that makes it highly fit for cultural circulation. Drawing on a term from Husserl, we could say these texts have anexact essences. Unlike the essence of a triangle, for example, an anexact essence cannot be rigorously defined. However, there is nonetheless some abiding identity in such essences, even if it is fuzzy. Counter-intuitively, these anexact essences seem to guarantee maximal fitness where the circulation of texts is concerned as they contain just the right mixture of entropy and order to allow them to successfully resonate in a variety of different cultural contexts.
My point, then, is graphic design is real in the sense that the product of design itself makes differences and circulates throughout the world. However, it would be a mistake to simply investigate the ontology of graphic design from the perspective of its products. It must also be approached from the perspective of its production. Drawing on a term from Daniel Dennett, each type of object has its design-space, and these design-spaces play a central role in defining fields of constraint and affordance. “Design-space” might be described as the practices, techniques, available technologies, media, and existing design strategies available to designers at a particular point in history. Thus, for example, a design-space restricted to media such as paper, pencil, and paint structures possibilities differently than a design-space where photography becomes available, where the printing press becomes available, where digital technology becomes available, and so on.
There are real physics involved in design-spaces. You can do things with digital technology that you cannot do with analog mediums such as pre-digital photography, and vice versa. For example, when the camera companies decided to stop selling film for instant cameras there was outcry from a number of artists that worked in this medium because there are effects that you can get from this technology that cannot be achieved in any other way. Recently my friend Jacob Russell bemoaned the fact that my book, Difference and Givenness was not organized like my blog, with pictures accompanying text. Although it is certainly possible to publish illustrated texts (and we will see more of this as publishing continues to move online), part of the reason Difference and Givenness was put together in this way had to do with the design-space in which it was produced and published. This placed some pretty high constraints on how it was produced at both the technological level, the legal level, the economic level, and also the level of locating images insofar as the book was written at a time where the internet was only beginning to gain steam. With blogging, new styles of writing become possible that integrate text, image, video, sound, intertextuality (through hyperlinks), and which also have a very different temporal structure. Where written texts are very slowly produced over the course of years as you go from the research to the writing to the editing and proofing process, online writing has a very different temporal structure that both has its advantages and its drawbacks.
Here we approach something like what McLuhan had in mind when he said the “medium is the message”. What McLuhan is referring to is the manner in which different forms of media have different constraints and affordances that play a role in what types of objects are produced. You can do different things with a blog than you can with a printed text. These differences not only render new possibilities available, but they also change how people think and experience the world. My philosophical thought has changed fundamentally since I began blogging, as can be observed from the nature of my style when I wrote primarily on online discussion lists and in the early years of this blog. Part of this has been the evolution of my thought. Another part of this has been the nature of the medium itself. Discussion lists, for example, are organized around “master-thinkers”, so they tend towards scholarly discussion of the intricacies of that thinker or questions about where something might be found in the thinkers body of work. Writing articles for journals tends to be a largely solitary exercise that involves careful engagement with scholarship and composition. Blogging, by contrast, involves a cacophony of voices, each with their own interests and backgrounds, hyperlinked cross-blog discussions, multiple forms of media, and so on. The medium in all these cases plays a formative role in the formation of content.
However, when McLuhan claims that the media is the message he’s not simply talking about affordances and constraints that play a role in what sorts of artifacts are possible, but also the role that media play in affording or constraining certain forms of social relations. Only certain forms of social relation are possible when you have nothing but dirt roads and horse driven buggies and where messages are sent through regular male. It is said that part of the sexual revolution was kicked off through the wide availability of cars among teenagers that gave them a place where they could neck away from home. Indeed, Ford originally designed the first Mustangs to be cheep and to have a larger, flat backseat so that they would be available to teenagers and because he new that conveniences like large flat back seats are of particular interest to teenagers with raging hormones. And, of course, the internet creates social communities across wide distances of space that would never otherwise come together. All of these elements of design-spaces, of media, play a central role in the success of certain productions as well as the lack of success of other productions.
Finally, in any design-space there is what Deleuze, in Frances Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, called the “virtuality” of the canvas. According to Deleuze, no artist ever faces a blank canvas or piece of paper, but rather the canvas is always populated by virtual singularities which play a role in the genesis of the work of art. These virtualities consist of the history of art or other artistic productions, the manner in which the artist has been trained, features of the medium, familiar artistic themes, plot lines, and so on. The artist or producer of any sort faces a particular situation. On the one hand, as Lacan liked to say, we are all plagiarists in that we borrow themes, techniques, concepts, and styles from others. How could we not? Like bricoleurs, we work with available materials. On the other hand, there is a constant pressure to invent new variations within existing design-space, or to find new niches for our own work. Design-space is thus not fixed, but is an ever moving and shifting field of production that re-assembles itself with each new production.
Larval Subjects . 
July 28, 2009 at 8:47 pm
I think I have a talent for expressing myself badly. I live rhetorically inside that brass bull (of Minos?) which translated the incinerated insider’s screams into inarticulate bellows. So much of what you propose, Levi, I am warmed by but still I cannot grasp our places of divergence, and I so hope you can help me understand.
Let me take what I understand to be one bit of grammar from your evolving flat onticology and see if I can make my concern better understood. You have a notion of a thing as that which differs or more pointedly “which makes a difference.” However, it seems to me that one cannot imagine anything that does not meet this criterion. Indeed, it seems that any sector of becoming — to dodge for now the concept of “thing” — qualifies: any segment is differing. The question then might be how this segmentation into things is effected and by what? I say what because your flatter world wishes — I think — to remove the human privilege of naming, interpellating. This seems to propose that we are able to think that the concept of thing is thinkable without a something that picks it out as containing that assemblage that suits a particular prehension’s prehension of an other. If, however, every segment is not one set of interactive multiplicities but many that are not subject to hierarchy or coordination AND we are disallowed the old escape clause of labeling some “accidents” or trivial then how can the things we imagine even under dynamic differencing be other than a platonizing modeling – albeit more complex and multiple? My references to Duns Scotus or Levi Strauss are made to try to understand how this flatness does not end up replicating a kind of complex and fractal version of objectivity with all — in a different mereology — its incumbent worries of suppressing in the immediate exactly those ontic difference it celebrates generally.
Again, let me say I profit from your blog and that I only wish to understand you better.
July 28, 2009 at 9:05 pm
Hi Dan,
In a sense your observation that we can’t imagine anything not meeting this criteria is what I have in mind by the thesis that the ontic principle is a deflationary principle. Since nothing can be imagined that doesn’t meet this criteria, it flattens out the whole ontological problem. I’m hoping to deal with the issue you raise about “segmentation” in my book. To date I’ve only gestured at the solution I have in mind, so I sympathize with your confusion on the issue. I am, however, concerned about your language of “segmentation”. To me this seems to presuppose a pre-existent continuum that then gets carved up or individuated. The ontology I propose is atomistic in the precise sense that it is composed of discrete objects or events. Unlike, say, a Deleuzian ontology it does not go from a continuum to discrete individuations. I should add that in endorsing an atomistic ontology I am not endorsing atomism. That is, I am not endorsing an ontology in which there are fundamental units that are indivisible. The atoms of onticology are multiplicity that contain further objects. This is a rather strange result or idea because it allows for objects within objects that are nonetheless discrete and autonomous objects while at the same time being elements of other objects. This will take some ‘splainin.
July 28, 2009 at 10:17 pm
[…] July 28, 2009 And in an epic prose poem, LEVI SPINS OUT SOME MORE THOUGHTS ON HIS PHILOSOPHICAL POSITION. […]
July 28, 2009 at 10:32 pm
Hmm, is it this complicated? If we take object-oriented ontology seriously, then any field has an ontology, because things are everywhere. That includes design, where things can include things as diverse as drafting tables, Adobe Photoshop, sheet metal, Razor scooters, TBWA\Chiat\Day, the Fairlane drivetrain-chassis assembly, the Ford Mustang, brassieres, OPEC, Lee Iaccoca, and so forth. But one of the reasons that I like the term “unit” is that it allows us to consider more abstract things as things along side these concrete ones, things like the Van de Graaf canon, Goudy Oldstyle, Cascading Style Sheets, the kick-off meeting, the Gantt chart, the bagel delivery, the lunchbreak.
All of these units could be considered media, McLuhan style, which exert forces on one another. To me, the question is not “Does graphic design have an ontology?” but “What is the ontological nature of graphic design?”
July 28, 2009 at 10:35 pm
That’s a great way of putting it, Ian.
July 28, 2009 at 10:58 pm
Levi (or Ricky/Lucy given your last word),
Thank you.
I understand that one central concept of a thing is that it is discrete but equally it cannot be so discrete as to be unavailable. Further, as a material object it cannot be only — as I fear socialized things tend to become — an object of cognition solely (I am unclear how for you inhuman objects are known — I am willing to believe they can interact without us but I am not sure how we are to meter that differing between differences without it becoming “our” differencing too. You do not seem to be a Heisenberg of difference). Nor do I think you mean to limit yourself to things as only synthetic, engineered, if we are to flatten the world at hand to one in which the human is not valorized. But if we are limited to things we know, is not the human always already resident in our ontics (I think of The Fold — Deleuze’s “monadology” — and his idea in What is Philosophy that concepts are always “signed.”)? As to segmentation and this — that was a provisional vocabulary, but I think one can have segments without continuity as atoms without atomic theory. On that score, I am interested in the eruption of paradoxical metaphor — the “Schnitt” — in Dedekind’s proof: continuity by cuts.
Thanks again.
July 28, 2009 at 11:52 pm
Hi Dan,
I think the move I reject is the limitation to things we know or have access to. In my view, ontologically we can say all sorts of things about the general properties of objects while simultaneously having no epistemic access to a whole range of objects. I realize this sounds strange, but recall that ontology is a general theory of objects not a knowledge of specific objects. Additionally, I’m fully willing to concede that the claims I do make about these general ontological claims are hypothetical or “problematic”, and therefore subject to further revision. In this connection, I think Graham Harman’s move really pays off. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with Harman’s work or not, but his central thesis is that the withdrawal of objects is not unique to the human-world relation, but is characteristic of all object relations, regardless of whether or not humans are involved or not. In other words, the inaccessibility of the in-itself is not unique to human-object relations, but is characteristic of all relations among objects. While I wouldn’t put things in precisely these terms myself, I do say something similar. Regardless of whether we can represent the objects of the world in a mimetic fashion (i.e., as they are in-themselves), objects nonetheless afffect us and produce differences with respect to us. Here I am sympathetic to Leibniz’s position with the caveat that my monads (objects in my view could just as easily be called “monads”) are operationally closed (in system’s terms they constitute their own information), while nonetheless being systematically open to the world. From the standpoint of monads, the important issue isn’t whether or not objects are represented as they are in themselves (an ontological impossibility insofar as all received differences are translated by the receiving object), but rather that we are able to organize and discover salient differences in the world. I’ve outlined some of this process in my post “Circulating Reference”.
Two points are worth making here. First, I think a good deal of anti-realist thought is premised on the thesis that we share an immediate relationship to some particular feature of the world. This is the key assumption of all self-reflexive approaches to philosophy. Descartes’ argument is able to get off the ground on the premise that we share an immediate relation to ourselves, but don’t share an immediate relation to the objects of the world. Hume’s argument gets off the ground by arguing that we have an immediate relation to our impressions, but not to the objects that affect us with these impressions. Kant’s argument gets off the ground by positing an immediate relation to our minds, but not the objects that affect us. Husserl’s argument gets off the ground by positing an immediate relation to intentionality. Derrida and Lacan get off the ground by positing an immediate relation to signifiers, but not objects and world. And so on. The only thinkers that come close to breaking this thesis of immediacy are Bergson, Freud, Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze.
I bring this up because while reflexivity is clearly a property of certain systems (notably living systems, minds, and social systems), we should avoid confusing reflexivity with immediacy. To the same degree that objects withdraw from other objects, the inner being of reflexive systems withdraws from those systems themselves. Reflexive systems are opaque to themselves. Kant caught a glimpse of this in his Transcendental Deduction and the Paralogisms in the first Critique, but oddly he didn’t carry it through to its ultimate implications, abandoning the thesis that mind can be any more a privileged ground than experience. I outline this argument in detail in the seventh or eight chapter of Difference and Givenness. In my view, this simple observation is enough to secure the necessity of abandoning the critical dream and moving to a speculative stance in the full metaphysical sense of the word.
Second, stances that privilege some immediate term in a dual relation (mind, consciousness, body, language, society, etc) inevitably adopt a model where alterity gets treated as mere “data” that is then subordinated to whatever operative function falls on the side of immediacy (mind, language, consciousness, etc.). What such approaches cannot abide are multiplicities where no terms of the relation can be privileged as the overdetermining agency, but rather where organization is an emergent result of a number of different factors.
Finally third, throughout your questions– which I really appreciate though often I have difficulty understanding you, your language is, in the language of this post, a “difference engine” –I sense that you’re particularly pre-occupied with Meno’s paradox and the first argument for the immortality of the soul in Phaedo. That is, your move is to say “okay, you’re promoting an ontology of difference, but in formulating this ontology don’t you presuppose a concept of difference, and therefore doesn’t your ontology ultimately fall back into the logic of the same?” This is similar to Laruelle’s move where it is shown how every philosophy is implicitly circular in the precise sense that it begins with a transcendental factum (an identity in the form of the concept) that it then subordinates all faktums or data to. As a result, every philosophy becomes, in Laruelle’s view, viciously self-positing. Derrida’s strategy for dealing with this problem, of course, was a sort of infinite deferral marked by a sort of ironic self-reflexivity that perpetually undoes the move one just made. But I truly wonder whether this strategy is the only one possible for avoiding the problem. Instead, it seems to me that Darwin showed us the way of thinking about a genesis of species without presupposing pre-existent species or essences. I see no reason why we can’t adopt a similar strategy in epistemology and inquiry.
Okay, that was three questions, not two.
July 29, 2009 at 9:03 pm
hi Levi,
Thanks for the kind words. It’s been a long few days and I’m tired, so I can use the pick me up. You’re kind. I’m not with it enough to respond to the substance of this now but I’ll get back to you.
For now just want to say the fond feelings are mutual, and that I’m happy to have been a source for the term deflation/deflationary. Also cool to see you reference Rorty, it’s been ages since I read that book. Out of curiusity, have you read much of his other stuff and what do you make of it? (Vague, I know, sorry.) Rorty was a hugely formative influence on me (Alasdair MacIntyre was too, which is a bit embarassing), especially Rorty’s Philosophical Papers – I forget the volume that most struck me, I think the one subtitled Truth And Progress. I think Rorty’s where I got the term and the penchant for deflation. Anyway, more later. I hope you’re well.
take care,
Nate
July 29, 2009 at 10:16 pm
Levi,
Thank you for your long reply. Unfortunately I cannot fully match your generosity since I am bound for a conference and the bits of my paper are still wandering the office like the lumps of my golem-to-be (kind of Heidegger meets Jewish mysticism). Still, let me start.
You say “recall that ontology is a general theory of objects not a knowledge of specific objects.” I will recall this if you will grant that this theory is itself an object that in a flat world should have no special character. Indeed, if it has a special character it cannot be as a thing but as a symbolic instruction in a protocol of extant power. So, I dislike “deflationary” because it is not the reduction of humans to objects but the equal recognition of the contiguous infinitary in everything, but not the infinite of abstraction, of Cantor (except inso far as we understand math as ontology — something that still strikes me as Platonic), since ontological infinity is an openness to the im-mediacy of that which is adjacent but not as an iterative symbolic practice.
This trick word “im-mediacy” is a bit too out of fashion pomo but I am trying to work fast: immediacy is the denial of a mediation and so an allusion to a mediation in its erasure — this is not — saints forbid — a dialectic. It is rather the difference of relation that every cognition of becoming requires its two senses and the non-sense that conjoins them. I am not sure that you give Derrida a fair shake here since the trace is not just a function that accounts for itself but a thing before us that must be misunderstood.
I cannot think with Harman that there is a withdrawal of objects since I do not know where they would go. Rather with Hamann, I think the concept of the object per se is the withdrawal mandated by the prehensions of the rational and not by the wonder which is difference without limit, etc….
July 30, 2009 at 12:07 pm
To play Heidegger’s advocate here, how can you ask “What is reality?” without first having an understanding of the “is”? That your understanding of being is historical should point you into epistemological waters considering you need to ground the intelligibility of your flat-ontological project in terms that make sense of your already-given “knowledge” of what counts as reality and what doesn’t, even if that knowledge is now governed by the new understanding of flat ontology. You “got” to this understanding you have now through various modes of epistemological disclosure associated with texts and the reality of other philosophical work. Before this modified understanding was reached, you were likely understanding the “is” through basic is/seems discourse. Thus, one can’t really escape from the question of the meaning of being if you are asking “is-questions”.
Isn’t the very process of investigating the world in order to determine how differences are linked together an epistemological project? You, as a flat ontologist, are accessing the world, with it being disclosed to yourself, in terms that make sense according to your current philosophical projects. How can investigation be anything but epistemological? It is you, the agent, making an interpretation of the world in terms of your understanding of how the world “is”, which, in your case, is wrapped up on making differences. I would say that your perspective and bias towards flat ontology has given you a cognitive filter that sees the world in object-oriented terms, rather than human ones of access. But this view is itself a mode of access; you have the mode of access that is the “flat ontologist’s” perspective. You see the world in terms of flat ontology; the world is broken up and disclosed in terms of differences that make a difference.
While your philosophical project itself is not in terms of access, but in terms of the objects, if someone wanted to do “philosophy of Levi”, then they could certainly describe your being-in-the-world in terms of having a unique mode of access to the world in terms of your philosophical biases and filters. The philosophy of Levi would reveal epistemological modifications of access to the world in accordance with your self-interpretation as a “flat ontologist”.
So, I am not even really critiquing the project of flat ontology itself – I find it interesting and full of new, useful vocabulary – but I am concerned that the flat ontological position might be self-reflexively blind to its own epistemological biases. While this might be a methodological necessity to accomplish flat ontology, if we were to do an ontology of the ontologists, we would probably need an account of what kind of access the ontologist has given that what the ontologist “is” is an agent with a uniquely “flat” perspective on the world.
July 30, 2009 at 1:24 pm
I’m extremely tired this morning, so hopefully my responses will make some sense. You write:
I think Heidegger’s position is more refined than this. You will recall that for Heidegger Dasein has a pre-ontological comprehension of being, so this knowledge is already operative in our comportment towards beings. Your observation about my position on what counts as reality and what does not count as reality indicates that you’ve glossed over my discussion of deflationary accounts. As I outline in the fourth paragraph of this post, the ontic principle annuls this sort of sorting of the world into the real or the “really real” and some other type of thing that is unreal. If it makes a difference, then it is real.
I think the problem with talk of “grounding” is that it is premised on the idea that we can know before knowing. What do I mean by this? By knowing before knowing I mean that such an approach to inquiry wants a foundation in advance of actual inquiry. It wants to have the secure foundation of knowledge before engaging in actual inquiry so that it might render itself immune to falling into error. Actual inquiry, however, does not proceed in this way. With Heidegger, it begins with a “vague and average” pre-ontological comprehension of the beings it investigates, but it does not secure the grounds of these beings in advance. Rather, ground is the result of the process of inquiry, not the preparatory step that precedes engaging in inquiry. Here it’s worthwhile to make reference to Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. How do we learn virtue, Aristotle wonders at the beginning of the Nichomachean Ethics? We learn virtue or excellence by performing virtuous or excellent acts. That is, we learn by doing. Plato might respond, “but doesn’t this entail that you must already know what virtue is in order to perform virtuous acts?” No. We have a vague and average understanding of what virtue is, but we certainly do not know what virtue is as we learn it. Rather, through experimentation and lots of errors, we gradually discover and develop a knowledge of virtue. A set of rules is not something that we have prior to performing virtue acts such that we then simply apply them, but is rather the product of striving to live a virtuous life. So it is with all forms of knowledge, I argue. The problem with how philosophers pose the epistemological question, as I argue in “Circulating Reference”, is that philosophers begin with finished products of knowledge such as Newton’s Principia, ignoring the process by which this product was arrived at. The ontic principle should not be understood as a foundational principle but as a hypothetical thesis that will ground itself in the course of being experimented with.
You go on to write:
No. Epistemology is that branch of philosophy that presents a theory of knowledge. It is a reflection on those criteria by which something counts as knowledge or does not count as knowledge. Epistemology produces a knowledge of knowledge, but does not produce a knowledge of any particular region of beings. While investigation certainly seeks knowledge, it is not in and of itself an epistemology in that it is not a reflection on knowledge, but rather an engagement with a particular set of entities. When the biologist investigates organisms she is not doing “epistemology”, but is rather investigating organisms.
Again I think this is a rather obsessional concern. The obsessional, as Lacan so nicely analyzes him in his sixth seminar, is characterized by perpetual preparation. This is the tragedy of Hamlet who is always preparing to act, without ever acting. He wants to know before he knows, or to know in advance. Differential ontology is particularly immune to this objection of bias precisely because it carries the imperative of investigating differences. This is not to say that any local inquiry isn’t pervaded by biases. They all are. The point is that it gives us the resources for identifying those biases and blindspots and integrating them in inquiry. Again, I encourage you to read my post “Circulating Reference” which does deal with epistemological questions:
What prompted that post? A bias. My friend Jerry the Anthropologist pointed out a bias in Latour’s discussion of the four scientists I depicted in a previous post. “Aren’t you failing to take into account the knowledge and contributions of the locals?” he asked. Yes. This recognition prompted a revision and a development of theory. The key point not to be missed, however, was that this forgetting of a key difference that makes a difference wasn’t to be found at the outset of inquiry, but in the course of inquiry. The problem with self-reflexive approaches to philosophy is that they want to engage in reflexive analysis as a propaedeutic moment of philosophical analysis, prior to engaging in the world. Because of this, we never end up engaging with the world. The proper place of self-reflexive analysis is not at the outset of investigation, but at certain moments over the course of investigation. Moreover, this analysis should be left to those who are directly engaged in investigation as a function of their specific area of inquiry, and should not be a “one size fits all” epistemology decreed by philosophers engaging with no objects in particular.
July 30, 2009 at 2:51 pm
It seems like you are still making an is/seems distinction here just like everyone else because what “isn’t real” is simply “something” which doesn’t make a difference. Real things make a difference, non-real things don’t. If you say “everything makes a difference”, that is merely tautological because you are just defining “thing” in terms of making differences. Do stars outside of our light-cone “make” a difference? How could they? If they effected us at all, it would violate Einstein special theories of relativity. But we can still think of stars outside of the light-cone as existing, independent of us. The star itself – as an object – isn’t making a difference, because we simply have no access to it, but the star can be said to “exist” and be real. It must then be the idea of the star which makes the difference in regards to us being “effected” by the star so as to talk about them, but not the star itself. So we have a very real, ontically existing thing, which – theoretically – can never begin to interact with anything in our corner of the universe and thus does not make a difference. It is the idea of the star which makes the difference.
I don’t think you can really pinpoint Heidegger as saying something like this at all. As Taylor Carman points out, Heidegger is not making a causal claim that we need to first work out the pre-ontological stuff and only then can we work on the “real investigation”. Heidegger is rather only making a hermeneutic claim about the intelligiblity of investigation as an investigation. Heidegger wasn’t trying to find a “secure foundation” for knowledge, in the classic foundationalist tradition of philosophy, but rather, if Carman is right, he was placing a hermeneutic limit on the intelligibility of knowledge as knowledge, when we think about it.
I think this definition of epistemology follows only from Cartesian and Lockean models of philosophy, which deal with justification of belief-structures but merely assumes the ontological priority of those belief-structures as being the foundation of the mind. A more Heideggerian definition of epistemology would argue that epistemological questions must be ontological questions in terms of disclosure because our primary “knowledge” of the world is not of the propositional sort that lends itself to the meta-level “knowledge of knowledge” epistemology that we see with analytic philosophy. A Heideggerian epistemology would be more concerned with how we disclose the world, which is the basic constitutive factor in our “cognitive structures”, not propositional beliefs amenable to a “criterion” of justification.
Again, this can be answered by making a distinction between a “causal” story about how we need to actually “know before we know” and a hermeneutic story about a priori conditions of intelligibility when thinking about knowledge as knowledge. The actual investigation of entities does not “need”, causally speaking, to secure a foundation of pre-ontological knowledge in order to be successful. But if we are going to make sense, ontologically, of knowledge as knowledge, we need to flesh out the pre-ontological stuff.
July 30, 2009 at 3:02 pm
Yes, this is entire point! It is tautological and it is that tautology that allows for a flat ontology. The is/seems distinction is irrelevant here, because seeming or appearance is always a dimension of an object. I am not drawing that distinction. This is what makes the move deflationary.
You are here falling into the common anti-realist error of conflating epistemic questions with ontological questions in your remark about whether or not stars outside our light cone make a difference. “Making a difference” is an ontological affair or property of objects. All sorts of things make differences without us knowing anything about it, but they no less make a difference for all that. Whether we know the differences something makes has nothing to do with whether it makes differences.
Yet oddly you are suggesting that investigation can’t be intelligible unless we first engage in Heidegger’s mode of inquiry. I think 200,000 years of human history suggests that we’ve done just fine without it. Moreover, I think there’s ample evidence that this sort of self-reflexive move has been a tremendous hindrance to philosophy and its relevance.
No, I am not making a point about “causality”. I understand that the issue is one about conditions and that conditions are causes. My point is rather different. We don’t need such an investigation for investigation to be “intelligible”, nor does a foundation need to be secured. If Heidegger has made contributions to thought it lies not in “rendering investigation intelligible”, but in helping us to understand how humans experience the world. He’s given us a very fine meta-anthropology of human existence, but it goes no further than that.
July 30, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Okay, so how is the traditional story of knowledge intelligible? What does it mean for a subject to know an object, a mind to know the world, a brain to perceive an object,a consciousness to look at the world, a person to theorize about the world, an agent to act in the world, etc.?
How are those stories explicitly intelligible in non-circular terms? You seem to agree with me here that the standard approach is wrong somehow, otherwise you wouldn’t invest so much time into deconstructing the traditional philosophical approaches. But now I think I understand the deflationary approach better. We are both unsatisfied with the traditional subject/object story. However, you want to get rid of the distinction all together whereas I still want to account for it in some way. You have deflated the problem of knowledge by refusing to play along with the language game of subject/object. The phenomenologist, however, wants to somehow account for the subject/object distinction and make sense of it on its own terms. Would you say that is fair?
July 30, 2009 at 5:09 pm
Gary,
I referred you to the post where I address these questions. Perhaps you should take the time to read it if you’re curious. You are absolutely right, I am refusing to play along with the language game of that question because I don’t believe that way of posing the question remotely reflects how actual knowledge is produced by people. The post even has pretty diagrams and pictures. Nothing, however, prevents you from playing that particular language game if you think it’s interesting or important.
Knock yourself out, but please do it over at your own blog. I don’t mean to be rude, but I believe I’ve already addressed these epistemological questions repeatedly in other posts and am convinced that the question of access is based on a tautological thesis that entails you’re inevitably trapped in it the moment you acknowledge it. I instead choose a tautology I find more productive and less restrictive.
July 30, 2009 at 5:46 pm
Or allow me to put it this way: Why is it that philosophers never bother to refute the solipsist? After all, solipsism is a legitimate philosophical problem. Can anyone really show that either a) we don’t have any access to a world independent of our mind, or b) that the world independent of mind does not exist? Probably not. Yet philosophers blithely ignore solipsists and continue on with their work. The epistemological question as you pose it is a bit like solipsism. It’s one of those irrefutable positions that keeps you trapped like a fly in a bottle. Better just to drop the question altogether. Does this mean one abandons knowledge? Nope. My post “Circulating Reference” shows that I continue to engage with questions of knowledge and inquiry. It does mean, however, that one refuses to subordinate all questions of philosophy to the exhausted possibilities of the question of access. Rather than behaving in an irritating fashion like the solipsist who keeps asking “but how do you get out of your head” it is best just to leave those questions for your own philosophical ponderings and let others get on with what they’re doing.
July 30, 2009 at 8:11 pm
Well, I am sorry that I have given you the impression that I was in any shape or form an internalist, who wonders how we can get out of our heads. I am 100% with Noe here in saying that we are already out of our heads. We already have all the access we need. Heidegger argued the same thing with “being-in-the-world”. Being is the determination of entities as entities (access-disclosure). But that being is always already amidst in a world. Thus, being-in-the-world, or “I-am-in-a-world” as he also calls it.
Thus, I as a phenomenologist am not asking “how do we get out of our heads?” but rather, “how do we get from being in the world, where we have solid knowledge, to the metaphorical discourse of subjectivity and perspectivism, with talk of ‘inside/ouside’,’mind/body’,’spirit/flesh’ etc.?”
July 30, 2009 at 10:11 pm
Gary,
It’s an analogy. Yes, having studied phenomenology for years I know they’re not internalists. Note however, that claiming that you’re already outside of your head does not respond to the solipsists question or refute his position. You simply move on from it without having refuted it or shown why it is mistaken. On what grounds to you believe you’re entitled to do so? Don’t worry about answering that question, just reflect on how it resembles the sort of game you’re playing here.
July 31, 2009 at 12:21 am
August 1, 2009 at 7:01 am
Levi,
I still haven’t gotten the time and energy to engage at all (and in the meantime now there’s more comments and posts…!), just real quick two things –
are you familiar with Ian Hacking’s work at all? I’ve just read most of his Historical Ontology and some of it seemed resonant with what you’re doing, I’m curious what you make of it in part because I liked it and in part because I’m not sure I got all of it.
And – I thought this was really well put:
“The problem with self-reflexive approaches to philosophy is that they want to engage in reflexive analysis as a propaedeutic moment of philosophical analysis, prior to engaging in the world.”
I’m not sure why, but it reminded me of a book I read years ago and liked very much, Andrew Bowie’s book on Schelling and recent philosophy. I get mixed up between what’s in the book and what Bowie said in a course I had with him, he’s the guy who put me onto Rorty. I remember some discussions of a debate about whether being is a sort of empty category a la Hegel or whether being is a really quite full category, your point about engagement reminded me of that.
Sorry to ramble, it’s late. I’m off to sleep, hope you’re well.
cheers,
Nate
August 5, 2009 at 12:24 am
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