I’m a bit groggy this morning. Last night my three year old daughter smacked her forehead against the coffee table and we had to take a trip to the emergency room. Seven stitches and five hours later we finally got home around one thirty in the morning and then didn’t get asleep until four or four thirty. I’m amazed at how well she handled everything. She was a real trooper. After the initial shock of all the blood– and boy do heads ever bleed! –she was rather nonchalant about the whole thing, making offhand remarks like “I bumped my head a little! I hit my head on table. Blood was everywhere! Sometimes that happens!” in an amused voice and, while calmly playing before leaving for the ER, “I don’t need to see a doctor and we don’t have any bandaids”. We danced in the hospital room and she charmed all the nurses and doctors. After everything was over she actually didn’t want to leave as she was having so much fun. That’s my girl! What a ham and little attention addict. At any rate, hopefully I’ll make some sense in this post.
Responding to a couple of my posts from earlier this week on translation, Nate over at Un-canny Ontology writes:
What is translation? And why do some things get translated and others do not?
Translation is more than a simple replication. Translation always involves a certain degree of interpretation in which what is inputted is always changed or transformed – from photons of light to complex sugars. Objects translate each other, they change each other without encountering each other directly, which means that objects first and foremost recognize each other.
I am pretty uncomfortable with Nate’s talk of objects “knowing” each other and “recognizing” each other as I think this implies a degree of intentionality (in the phenomenological sense) that only belongs to a subset of objects (humans, many animals, certain computer systems perhaps, social systems), not all objects. In my view, it’s necessary to distinguish between reflexive objects capable of registering their own states and relations to other entities like social systems or cognitive systems, and non-reflexive objects that do not have this characteristic. In other words, where non-reflexive objects are in question it’s important to emphasize that intentionality is not required for translation to take place and be operative in relations between objects.
read on!
Nonetheless, when this qualification is made, I do think Nate is asking a good question. I’m of two minds about this question. On the one hand, my initial thought is that it is not for philosophy to answer how translation takes place in any specific relation between objects. Initially this response might look like a dodge; however, it is premised on a distinction between the sort of thing philosophy does and the sort of thing other disciplines do.
Since I am on a Bhaskar kick lately, this point can be illustrated by analogy to Bhaskar’s ontology. Bhaskar asks the transcendental question “what must the world be like in order for our sciences to be possible?” Among his answers is the thesis that things must be structured and differentiated, they must be capable of acting without us knowing them or being aware of them (his generative mechanisms), they must be capable of acting without producing effects in all cases, they must have powers or capabilities, it must be possible to form more or less closed systems (for experiment to be possible and significant), and in open systems these generative mechanisms must be capable of acting without producing the sorts of effects we encounter when triggering a generative mechanism in the closed system of an experimental setting.
Bhaskar’s thesis is that the world must be this way for our science to be possible and for our practice of experimentation to be intelligible; however, his ontological claims about what the world must be like do not tell us what generative mechanisms actually exist, how they are structured, what powers or capabilities they have, and so on. What generative mechanisms exist is a task for direct inquiry in various disciplines, not something that philosophy can answer a priori. The case is similar with respect to translation. Philosophy can tell us that objects must translate one another when they interact and therefore draw our attention to the differences produced in interaction, but it has nothing of its own to say about what translation machines or mechanisms actually exist and how they are structured. This is the job of inquiry in other disciplines. Thus, for example, it falls to the biologist to investigate how leaves translate light into energy. Likewise, it falls to folks like Nate in the field of rhetoric to investigate how audiences are selectively open to certain speech-performances and how these performances on the part of a rhetor are translated by audiences into something else.
Nonetheless, and this is my second point, we can make some very general ontological claims about what objects must be like for translation to be possible. Hopefully these theses somewhat address Nate’s question. My tendency at present is to think of translation in terms of information theory. This should come as no surprise as the ontic principle is, in many respects, adapted from Bateson’s definition of information as “the difference that makes a difference.” So how should this be understood?
First, the concept of information is to be distinguished from that of noise. Information, as a difference that makes a difference, is something that stands out in contrast to noise. If, for example, a student in an introductory philosophy course has great difficulty reading Derrida’s essay “Differance”, this is not because the text is difficult or poorly written, but because the student, having just come to philosophy for the first time, lacks the background in philosophy that would allow the student to encounter the elements of the text as information. Everything in the essay seems significant and as a result it all becomes noise insofar as nothing can be distinguished in the essay by the student. Information can thus be thought in Gestalt terms as a relation between what leaps into the foreground (information) and what passes into the background (noise).
It’s important to note that for self-reflexive intentional objects like students, this relationship between foreground is a dynamic, not fixed, relation. Not only can these systems evolve such that elements that before were mere noise can take on the status of information, but also relations between foreground and background can shift back and forth, such that something that a moment ago belonged to the domain of noise now comes to the fore as information or a difference that makes a difference.
Second, and of great importance, it should be noted that information and noise are not ontological properties of the world, but are object-specific properties. There is no information “out there” in and of itself. Rather, objects “constitute” information for themselves. The idea that information exists “out there” and not simply for an object constitutes a sort of transcendental illusion within ontology that I’ll have to write about in the future. To put this point differently, information is only information for an object. Likewise, noise is only noise for an object. It is not the world that is disordered or chaotic, but rather the world for an object that is disordered or chaotic. Here I am drawing on the manner in which information is thought by systems theory and autopoietic theory.
Third, objects are only selectively open to other objects in the world. Take the example of sitting at a coffee shop with friends. All sorts of things recede into the background in this situation: the actions of the staff, the conversations of other people, the traffic that could be discerned through the window, the talking head babbling away on the television, the music playing in the background, etc. In this scenario we only share selective relations to the world about us. The rest largely disappears until another shift takes place in relations between foreground and background.
It now becomes possible to say a few very general things about the ontology of translation and what must be the case in order for translation to be possible. First, there must be an ontological distinction between stimuli and information. The term “stimulus” is not the happiest term as it still implies a reference to a receiving object. However, I would like to stipulate this term not as a reference to a receiving object, but rather treat it as a difference transmitted by another object. At any given time there are all sorts of stimuli flying about in the world that are not information for various objects. Thus, for example, at this very moment there are all sorts of radio signals pulsing through the air about me. These signals are real things that are out there. However, for me they scarcely exist and are not information as I have no way of receiving them. In order to receive them I need an additional black box– my nifty new iPhone or my computer –that can function as a mediator allowing me to relate to these stimuli.
Second, if there is a difference between information and stimuli, and if stimuli exist in all sorts of ways without being information, it follows that information is not something that is already out there, but rather is constituted by objects receiving these stimuli. This, I think, approaches Nate’s initial question. For information to be possible, certain things have to be true of objects. On the one hand, it is necessary that objects (generative mechanisms) exist that emit stimuli. On the other hand, objects must have channels and an internal structure (endo-relational structure) that organizes these stimuli into differences that make a difference. Channels are modes of openness to other objects in the world, while endo-relational structure, in part, is the mechanism by which stimuli are transformed into differences that make a difference.
Thus, for example, no matter how much I talk to a rock, I cannot compel that rock to get out of my way. While the sound-waves of my voice might indeed affect the rock in a variety of ways because the rock has channels for receiving differences in this sort of causal way, the rock cannot encounter those sound-waves as speech because it does not possess channels or an endo-relational structure for constituting sound-waves (stimuli) as speech (information) in the manner of other reflexive objects. Likewise, last night I could not heal my daughter’s wound through speech; however, when I function as a psychoanalyst for someone else, it is possible to cure a psychoanalytic symptom through the intervention of speech. The channels and endo-relational structure that constitute openness to different forms of difference are something that must be surveyed in every instance and that cannot be determined by philosophy a priori.
This point can be further illustrated with respect to the periodic table of elements. The periodic table is not simply a summary of what we’ve discovered about the endo-relational structure of various elements, but also, for those who know how to read us, tells the chemist, biologist, and physicist all sorts of things about channels or different possibilities of relation that can take place between elements. On the one hand, each element is a generative mechanism capable of producing a variety of actualities. On the other hand, elements are only capable of selectively relating to one another according to very precise laws and these relations generate new properties or actualizations when they take place.
A couple of further points. Over at the Pinnochio Theory, Shaviro riffs on Nate’s post and my own, writing:
I think that the source of this problem, in Nathan’s account, is the following. He says that ” objects first and foremost recognize each other,” precisely because — here paraphrasing Levi, and also to an extent Graham Harman — “objects translate each other, they change each other without encountering each other directly.” But as I’ve said before, my biggest disagreement with both Levi and Graham is that, for me, objects do encounter each other directly.
There’s a lot more in Steven’s post, but I wanted to zero in on this particular remark as I think it conflates my position with Harman’s. For Harman objects are absolutely independent or withdrawn from one another such that you get the question of how they can enter into relations with one another. Within my proposed ontology, objects do touch one another. What that don’t do is represent one another in the manner of a mirror representing an object. Rather, every relation between objects is a translation and every translation involves transformation. In certain respects, this places me closer to Latour and Whitehead in the sense that I do not place objects behind absolute “firewalls” as Graham does. Where I differ from Latour and Whitehead, is in holding that objects have a being that is not reducible to their relations to other objects (their endo-relational structure), and that the relations objects do entertain to other objects are selective. Where Whitehead and Latour hold that each actual occasion holds a definite relation to every other actual occasion in the entire universe, I hold that 1) objects only share relations to other particular objects and are unrelated to a number of other objects in the universe, and 2) that even if all other objects in the universe were to cease existing a particular object could continue to exist (something that is impossible in Whitehead’s and Latour’s universe). In part I believe this must be the case as inquiry would become impossible were objects to be related to all other objects as it would no longer be possible to form more or less closed systems within which inquiry takes place. Insofar as inquiry clearly does take place it follows that this thesis cannot be true.
My gloss on the “occasional” in Latour is thus somewhat different than Harman’s. Discussing Latour’s reference to occasions in Prince of Networks, Harman writes, “A thing is not separate from its relations [for Latour], and in fact ‘each element is to be defined by its associations and is an event created at the occasion of each of those associations’ (Pandora’s Hope, 165, emphasis added by Harman)” (80). Where Harman reads this as a reference to the philosophical doctrine of occasionalism, I read the reference to occasions in temporal terms as in the case of referring to things like “on this great occasion…” To speak of objects entering into relations with one another in occasions is thus to refer to the selective and limited nature of those relations, along with the fact that objects contingently encounter one another or encounter one another in an aleatory fashion. I would differ from Latour here in hold that it is not the occasion or the relations that make the object the object. The occasions can modify the manner in which the object actualizes itself, but this is quite different from suggesting that the object is its relations.
Despite these ontological differences, Harman and I do arrive at similar conclusions. If I am comfortable talking about objects “withdrawing” from one another then this is because translations that take place within an object always differ from the other object that instigates the translation or provides the input for the process of translation. The other day I came across this comment over at Another Heidegger Blog:
Why do you not address the most obvious problem of why vicar’s (representations) are central to the mechanism of causation between two inanimate objects?
Do you read as coherent that when a baseball hurls into a windshield it must FIRST send a representation of itself INTO the glass, and then it must brush this “vicar” into a state of phenomenenal breakdown, a breakdown which THEN results in the baseball cracking the glass? Does this make any sense to you? Aside from projecting a human caricature of experience and cognition, in what way does this actually seem to reveal how objects interact without human beings?
This is an example of what I would call an uncharitable interpretation of Harman’s position. It is important that we understand just what I have in mind by the “principle of charity”. The principle of charity does not consist in passively endorsing another position or refraining from criticism. Rather, the principle of charity is a necessary condition for philosophical discourse, requiring that we present the positions of other thinkers in the most reasonable and plausible light before proceeding to criticism of that position. Working on the premise that our interlocutor is a reasonable and intelligent person that genuinely wants to get at the truth, explain features of the world, and understand things– a premise that should be granted at the beginning of dialogue and revoked only when proven otherwise –we should ask ourselves, with respect to our interpretations of the positions of others, “is this a position that a reasonable person would endorse or advocate?” If our impression of another’s position is that it is batshit crazy insane, then it is likely we have misinterpreted the other person’s position, not that the author is making the absurd claim. Note, that the claim that a position is reasonable or a position that a rational agent could hold is not equivalent to the claim that the position is true. Of course, it comes as no surprise that this person’s reading of Harman would be so uncharitable, given that he confesses he’s only read of Harman’s theory of causality as developed in his early work presented at the speculative realism conference, and that he has not actually read Tool Being, Guerilla Metaphysics, or Prince of Networks.
The characterization of Harman’s position above is clearly absurd. Harman’s thesis is not that objects must first encounter other objects under the form of a “sensuous vicar” and then relate to them. Nor is it an anthropomorphization of relations between objects. Rather, Harman’s thesis is that objects only relate to one another selectively with respect to particular qualities, never exhaustively in terms of all the qualities that an object might possess or be capable of. Austin over at Complete Lies drives this point home nicely in his recent post on Harman’s theory of vicarious causation:
In Aristotle’s Categories he distinguishes between subjects and predicates. The Greek word for “subject” is hypokeimenon (ὑποκείμενον) meaning “underlying thing.” Essentially, it is that which is predicated but remains beneath the layers of predicates. We can also understand this through substance and accidents. The substance of the thing is that which the accidents adhere to without itself becoming anything fundamentally new. My car is still a car even if I have it painted a new colour for instance. The predicate “silver” does not alter the substance “car” in any substantial way. So there are substances and there are accidents. Great. The chief occasionalist insight to be made here is through the chain of causality. The position is one that says substances don’t touch each other. Let’s use an example. When I have a relationship with a person, there is more to that person than our interactions. Let us assume it is a romantic relationship between lover and beloved. Does this relation exhaust the other’s being? Is it not the case that there is far more to the person than their relation to me? While we would likely share much of our lives with each other, there remains a fundamental gap between the two of us. Don’t we interact on the level of accidents and not substance? When I talk to or touch my girlfriend, there is always more to her than these interactions. This is also the case for my interactions with non-human objects, for instance the relationship I have to the laptop I am writing this on. There are infinite possibilities for relations within a thing, it can interact with practically anything else in the universe in any number of ways, none of which could exhaust its possibilities. This is the point of the fire and cotton example. Cotton can do a lot more than burn, and the fire only engages the cotton on that level and not on the part of the cotton (to use improper language) that could become denim or a Q-Tip. While the fire destroys the cotton, this does not mean it has exhausted those potentialities, it has simply destroyed them.
The point is that there is always more possibilities open to any object than those actualized in any particular relation the object enters into. In many respects, then, Harman’s claim can be understood in counterfactual terms. One of his key points regarding the inexhaustibility of objects pertains to the inexhaustibility of their possible relations. If objects are always in excess of or more than their relations, if they only relate to one another under particular aspects or in terms of “sensuous vicars”, then this is because there is always an excess of other relations they could enter into under different aspects. I hope to expand on this a bit in the near future in terms of the sorts of transcendental illusions generated through the process of translation, giving transcendental illusion not an epistemological grounding restricted to thought or the human-world gap, but an ontological grounding.
Larval Subjects . 
November 25, 2009 at 8:47 pm
[…] November 25, 2009 It’s the cutest only because it’s preceded by A PHOTO OF LEVI’S INJURED 3-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER AND A CUTE ANECDOTE ABOUT HER EMERGENCY ROOM TRI…. […]
November 25, 2009 at 9:37 pm
[…] Going Larval November 25, 2009 First, glad to hear Larval’s larval is doing well. But this is what he writes when he’s […]
November 26, 2009 at 12:31 am
I am glad you and your child are ok. I hope you have a happy Thanksgiving.
As always, your post has so much that a fair rendition would be 3 times as long, and I must do other (I am the cook). As usual then, let me take a bit and misrepresent it.
You say:
“Bhaskar asks the transcendental question “what must the world be like in order for our sciences to be possible?””
Could we not flip this and ask, “What must science be like in order for our world to be possible?” I do not think this leaves the same problems with just a different emphasis or at least maybe not. You call Bhaskar’s question “transcendental” perhaps because it takes the problems of the Critiques and fields them in a way that you would say was free or more free of epistemic rendering. B deals with this at the start of The Possibility of Naturalism where transcendental realism’s essence is “the movement at any one level from knowledge of manifest phenomena to the knowledge of the structures that generate them.” There still seems more knowing here than you seem to like though it can be undone if we understand knowing not as a category of representation but as itself a kind of object. Still, it is not an object like all others for humans and humans are objects that cannot be removed by the desire for objectivity. Instead we observe that in ever instance “manifest phenomena” and “structures” are aspects of the real that contingently and only temporally constitutes those things and laws that they study. This is not, again, “epistemology” but rather I think a more strict ontics which admits those proximal and causal differences that humans irrevocably constitute.
November 26, 2009 at 3:29 am
Thanks Dan.
The problem for me is not questions of knowledge, but rather idealisms that make objects a product of or dependent upon our relationship to them. You write:
I’m always perplexed by this sort of remark and wonder what a person must be assuming to make it. No one is removing the human, nor is object-oriented ontology motivated by a desire for “objectivity”. Rather, humans are simply not treated as being at the center of being and the idea that all beings must be related to the human is rejected. This strikes me as a rather obvious and modest claim. Adopting the sort of normative motivations that you’ve advanced in the past– i.e., your worries about how science inevitably lead to certain forms of domination and eco-catastrophe –I would also say that it is precisely this placement of the human at the center of all relations that leads to these sorts of things.
Bhaskar does not disagree with you about the contingency of structures and generative mechanisms. The point that shouldn’t be forgotten in Bhaskar is his distinction between the intransitive (mind-independent generative mechanisms) and the transitive (changing theories and practices in the order of history by which the intransitive or generative mechanisms come to be known). Bhaskar draws a distinction between epistemological relativism and ontological relativism. Knowledge is, of course, relative in the sense that it is a contingent result of history that easily could not have taken place or been produced. As such, there is epistemological relativism. The being of intransitive beings, however, is not “constituted” or made by this knowledge or relation. As a consequence, when you write:
the transcendental realist cannot agree. While the transcendental realist has no disagreement with the thesis that humans constitute knowledge (who would disagree with that trivial observation?), it does not follow from this that humans constitute the objects of knowledge. In the absence of a firm distinction between the transitive dimension of theories about the world and intransitive objects, our philosophical theories, scientific practices, and other practices become entirely incoherent and we’re led to an absurd position incapable of critique where aesthetic criteria and normative criteria become the sole means of arbitrating among theories which amounts to having no criteria for arbitrating among theories, thereby entitling anyone to simply reject the sorts of claims you’re making on simple aesthetic or political grounds rather than on grounds of whether or not they embody truth about the world. Given that you advance the sort of claim you’re making based on truth claims it already follows that you’re trapped within a performative contradiction that obliges one to reject the thesis you’re proposing.
November 27, 2009 at 8:03 am
The kitten has inherited the cat’s sweet dark eyes!
November 28, 2009 at 1:00 am
Levi,
Allow me to plead for forgiveness in advance. I know we have been over this before but I still do not understand. I am not trying to be a jerk — whatever this is seems as evident to me as the opposite does to you. Maybe if this is a philosophical intuition that is not really debatable, but since I really admire your work in general, I would like to try to figure out why this is so hard to align. Maybe I am something like color blind here, and I hate bothering you about something that you assert as if it were obvious and as if you are mystified by what I say. Certainly, I think the elaborated consequences of this elemental difference could go on a very long time, but I would just like, if possible, to understand this one point. You say:
I do not think I am assuming anything. If I believed in objects — including the “Dan” object — in the way I think you do, I would say ” The Dan object has always been in the center of the Dan field of relations and relata and this condition without exception has always been the case and seems to be the case for every human object.” This is not an “assumption,” but the opposite, an on-going observation. This is an ontological fact or condition, it is not a philosophical choice, as such it is the opposite of an idealism. Indeed, to me your position of “flatness” and “democracy” appears idealistic because it makes axiomatic conditions which are counter-factual. This is not, I hope this is clear, placing “the human” at the center as it is usually meant in humanism as a theory of abstract value or ethical rule, since it is “ontic, particular, factual, observable, and invariant” (all these terms would have to be qualified given world enough). Nor do I think this is liable to the claims made against traditional solipsism since that paints a — to me — weird picture of “the self alone or cut-off.” Your claim does not seem to me obvious or modest though it does seem traditional to one very strong and I think lately dominant mode of thought. Oddly, I think you see yourself within your theory, that the “real you” is the one you project and that your abstraction of your ontic character is more important to you than your ontic situation and that to me is exactly the standard move of idealistic humanism. Much what you seem to feel follows from what you understand as being my position, I do not think really follows, but this is your blog, and I only wish to understand your positions as they appear. Thus, the following though it seems about me, expresses a belief of yours I think:
This does not seem to me to be either necessary or true unless as “firm” you except law, habit, practice, or force. First, I have never met an intransitive object other than the theory of an intransitive object. Second, understandings, objects, and relations have always altered without being “entirely incoherent and … absurd” ( who can make such judgments and from where?). As far as I can tell historically, every truth or system humans have had has been imperfect and contingent, and I tend to think it will remain that way not because we do not try and not because I do not think that we cannot get some things better but because we have a limited capacity. Finally, I cannot fathom your final statement:
I assume you are attributing to me some notion of truth I do not hold and then pointing out that I do not hold it: if that’s the case, that sock puppet should be scolded and sent home.
I hope you and yours had a happy holiday.
November 28, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Dan,
I think the point is rather simple: relating to a thing does not make that thing what it is. This conflation of “relating-to” and “making-be” is common to each and every form of idealism and humanism. Here I must also add that I simply cannot agree that the position you describe is not a humanism. So long as you place the human at the center of being you fall into an anthropomorphic humanism. It could be that you’re confused about what ontology is. This seems suggested by your observation about the Dan-field and always being at the center, especially when you cite this as an ontological fact. Ontology does not ask what being qua Dan is or what being qua the human is, but what being qua being is. The question of how humans relate to objects is an interesting epistemological question, but we’ve fallen into error when we conflate this epistemological question with questions of what beings are. Honestly I find it a little surprising that in your response here we find the following:
You seem to be suggesting that because scientific theories change they should all be dismissed and are on equal footing. It is incredibly depressing for me to encounter this sort of argument from a fellow scholar with a sophisticated intellectual background. This is the sort of argument you hear from creationists who wish to dismiss inquiry on the grounds that theories change. Second you seem to miss the entire point as to why the intrasitive dimension is required for our theoretical praxis to be coherent. The point is that without a theory-independent object we are unable to explain 1) why people engage in experiment at all (as all relations would be on equal footing), and 2) how theories change at all. This second point arises from the fact that in the denial of intransitive objects shifts in social thought, belief, and theory become spontaneous productions of the human without any rhyme or reason as to why these changes take place. Next thing you know we start talking about Heideggerian sendings. It seems to me that you miss the point of the concept of intransitive objects. Intransitive objects are not something that a theory has but which a theory seeks. When we abandon the notion of the intransitive object our theoretical praxis falls apart insofar as we understand ourselves to just be spinning webs out of ourselves, rather than being constrained by something other than our theories. This is why all idealisms are ultimately dogmatisms incapable of anything like a critical stance. Having abandoned all alterity both of others and the world, they can only dogmatically assert their positions and decide among positions based on political or aesthetic grounds because they no longer have any purchase on truth or any criteria of fallibility. Everything becomes a game of competing world pictures where none of the details of the world pictures matter any longer because they’re all equally webs spun from spiders.
November 29, 2009 at 3:19 am
I have to grade another round of papers by Monday, so I will have to be much shorter than the problems for me in your response seem to call for in response. When I see what you seem to understand as my positions in your replies, they seem distorted as in a fun house mirror. I really think this is because you hold some ideas as true which I see as either false or partial, but I cannot tease those all out here. I would say I deeply appreciate, given who you seem to think I am, your willingness to write responses at all since I would be more intolerant of the supposed person you see. Let me not counter but maybe clarify or elaborate a bit.
You say: “relating to a thing does not make that thing what it is.” I guess the subjunctive did not hold. I do not believe in things or to say this more clearly I think the concept of things is an imposition by humans upon being. This does not mean, I hope, that I cannot understand, as much as it can be understood, what different individuals at different times mean by “things” but that any use of the term “thing,” is always already human and symbolic. This is not to me “my imposition” but rather the state of affairs in which “thingness” can appear. While you wish to help me with my definition of ontology — despite readings from Plato, Aristotle, Wolff, Kant, Quine — you name it — I do not find that helpful since it is exactly the elements of predominate definition that I think are in dispute. I do think I am interested in being, beings, becoming, etc. but I am not interested in a loyalty oath to a particular practice (Merleau-Ponty??? Liesnewski??). I am interested in observation and thought, but I think you do me a disservice when you say “You seem to be suggesting that because scientific theories change they should all be dismissed and are on equal footing.” I do not think I ever said such, nor do I believe it. This seems more like misprision to me than a fair reading, but as I try to admit, I have too little time to build a machine that can get between our parallel worlds. To hint that I have the status of a creationist seems particularly unfair. You then say “you seem to miss the entire point as to why the intransitive dimension is required for our theoretical praxis to be coherent. The point is that without a theory-independent object we are unable to explain 1) why people engage in experiment at all (as all relations would be on equal footing), and 2) how theories change at all.” Again, huh? I see why it is necessary given a particular set of commitments, but that need strikes me as about as solid as religion’s need for god. Certainly, what you say follows from a lack of intransitive objects, I do not agree with at all. I can still believe that relative to some standards and metrics, some theories succeed relative to those standards and metrics: that is I do believe the world exists and has some tendency toward repetition ( therefore, I am more sanguine about “laws” than I am about objects). About change “at all,” this cannot be aimed, as stated, at me, since change in all things seems to me to be evident, so I suspect you must mean “progress” or some such but that notion has so many problems of definition and application that I leave it to you to be clearer. Certainly, I did not mean to imply that shifts come from the human — can you show me where I said that? — since I think of the human as a moire of monist becoming more than the inverse though even that is too hermetic for my taste. You then shift to the metaphor of the spider, as if mine was an idealistic theory of human expression: again, I see not where this arose. I do not understand the human to be closed off, self supporting, individual, expressive, creating the world etc. These are your images of the human to which I do not subscribe: for me this is the sock puppet again. So in sum it is hard for me to reply, since all that you say is not who I am. I do not ascribe to you some nasty motive but rather as I have said a fairly basic incompatibility at an axiomatic level. Maybe to make this more positive, you could,if you feel this has not been run into the ground, talk a bit more about your axioms? For instance, you define a thing as something like “that which makes a difference.” Could not differences make differences without things?
November 29, 2009 at 5:17 am
Dan,
This is interesting because it describes precisely how I feel in your discussion of my positions:
Since I began writing about objects back in January and advocating a variant of realism you have 1) attributed to me the position that I am advocating Newtonian atomism, 2) constantly implied that I am adopting some form of scientistic naturalism, and 3) perpetually suggested that I am rejecting things such as humans, signs, etc., etc., etc.. That’s only the tip of the iceberg. Even the most cursory reading of my posts should indicate that nothing about my conception of objects resembles that of Newtonian atomism, that I do not restrict the real to the domain of so-called “natural objects”, and that I do not grant so-called natural objects a more privileged status than cultural objects.
You write:
Yes Dan, I’m familiar with the argument and the position. Those of us within the field of speculative realism refer to this form of argument as correlationism. I have written dozens, if not hundreds, of pages on this blog showing just why this position is mistaken or based on a conflation of epistemology with ontology. If you had payed attention to my numerous posts on translation you would, in the first place, know that I do not deny or argue against the thesis that our relationship to objects is mediated symbolically and by the human. It is thus frustrating, when all that material is readily available to you, to have to repeat this point again and again.”
Nonetheless, while our relationship to objects is mediated by all sorts of things human, I hold that we cannot reduce objects to the human or signs, or to what they are for humans. You will recall that in a previous post I asked “what must the world be like for our science to be possible?” You wished to flip this question and ask “what must our science be like for the world to be possible?” Here you repeat the standard correlationist line of rendering objects and the world dependent on humans. Now I cannot repeat here all the reasons as to why this is such a bad question. I’ve done that in previous posts. Here I will merely indicate why the transcendental question about the world is so crucial and of such great importance. If our science is to be possible it must have some very general ontological characteristics: Objects must have causal powers, they must be capable of exercising these powers without producing the sorts of effects we encounter in the laboratory, it must be possible to form closed systems, it must be possible to trigger the causal mechanisms of objects, objects must be stratified, and so on.
Note I have said nothing about what objects exist? I have merely said that objects must have these very general characteristics. Note also that I have said nothing that excludes all the conceptual, symbolic, and historical mediation on the part of humans. I have only said that independent of human formations objects must have these characteristics. Now why is this?
1) If objects did not have powers that can go unactualized there would be nothing to act when we engage with objects. We would literally be creating the world whole-cloth from our minds and society and the world would have no capacity to surprise us. Yet objects perpetually violate our linguistic, cultural, historical, and conceptual expectations, therefore there must be something of objects that is not derived from the human, the social, or the symbolic.
2) If objects must be capable of acting without producing the sorts of results and effects we encounter in the laboratory, this is for two reasons:
a) First and foremost, the very activity of experimentation (creation of a closed system where variables are isolated) would make no sense as there would be no point in creating an artificial setting to determine what objects are capable of doing. It is only because objects in open systems act in ways that do not produce observed results or where the causality behind the observed results is unclear, that we engage in experimentation. This, then, is the first point: the intelligibility of experimental practices is premised on the activity of causal mechanisms or objects without the object producing the anticipated result.
b) Second, when a cause and effect sequence fails to produce the anticipated result we do not reject the causal claim– at least when the causal relation has been well established –but rather hold that there must be intervening causal factor that either prevent or disguised the anticipated outcome. This would not be possible unless it were possible for causal mechanisms to be present without producing a regular sequence of events or outcomes.
3) Given that we do engage in experiments and these experiments do produce certain regular outcomes, it follows that it must be possible to form more or less closed systems in the world. As a consequence, it follows that relationism, metaphysical holism, and monism must be false. These positions all share the common metaphysical thesis that objects are 1) the sum of their relations, and 2) that every object shares a determinate relation to everything else in the universe. However, were this true it would not be possible to form a closed system. Given that experiment does exist and does produce results, it follows that holism must be false.
All of these are strictly ontological claims. They are not based on questions of our access to objects, but on what that access must presuppose in order to take place.
You write:
I’m sorry you feel as if I’ve misrepresented you Dan, but I can only take you based on what you actually write. In your previous post you wrote the following:
Your argument here has the form of a sort of quasi-enthymeme, containing, I believe, an unstated conclusion or inference. Here’s what I understand you to be doing in this argument, and in particular the portion of your argument that I have bolded. Pointing out that our theories and conceptions of objects change throughout history and from discursive system to discursive system, you are inferring the conclusion that all such theories should be rejected as groundless or as mere contingencies that can be ignored. If I compared your position to that of a creationist, then this is because your argument and observation here is a very common form of argument found among climate change deniers and creationists. They point out that theories change in time and thereby derive the conclusion that these theories can be dismissed out of hand. I apologize if you do not like this conclusion, but I see no other conclusion that can follow from your simple observation.
More importantly, I believe you are here failing to distinguish between intransitive objects and the dimension of the transitive. It would be quite curious were I to advocate the position that theories and beliefs about objects do not change over time. Yet you seem to attribute this absurd position to me. I can only conclude that the only reason it would seem plausible to you to argue against me in such a way is on the grounds that you are not drawing a distinction between theories about the world, perceptions of the world, beliefs about the world, and the world itself. All my position requires is that there be intransitive objects. This is required as a condition for disconfirming theories, which is something that takes place all the time. My position does not require that we know these objects. As I said in the previous post, and which you conveniently ignored, intransitive objects are things to be found, they aren’t already there.
You write:
No, they are entirely different. Simple question, Dan: What is killing that bacteria when substances are added to that dish? If I adopt your point about symbolic mediation, then I’m committed to the conclusion that somehow our signs, discursivity, language, and concepts are creating this whole-cloth. This strikes me as rather absurd, how about you? All I am doing is taking your claims about the symbolic and humans seriously and drawing out their logical conclusions. “But I didn’t mean that at all!” you protest. No, I suspect not. This means you need to go back and articulate what you did really mean. And I suspect here that your position is really quite different than how you articulate it and much closer to what I’m articulating. I certainly suspect that you’re a transcendental realist that believes in intransitive objects when you go to the doctor’s office and the mechanic. The thing you don’t seem to get about my position is that I’m simultaneously trying to make room for these intransitive objects and for your points about power, signs, discourse, concepts, human embodiment, etc. The problem is that you have such a knee-jerk reaction to any reference to science (it’s the only time you ever comment on my blog) that you’re blinded to this complexity… So blinded that you were even led to make silly arguments rejecting science on normative grounds as if these normative grounds have anything to do with the truth of these findings. Oh, and in response to your assholish suggestion that I accept scientific findings at face values, I’ll just say that I’m far more inclined to go with groups of experimental researchers that have ploddingly worked on certain things for years, doing all sorts of experiments and whatnot, than an English professor that has an a priori “knock-down” argument that allows him to reject all experimental evidence and findings without even looking at the actual work that produced it.. This, incidentally, is why I claim that all idealists are dogmatic totalitarians. From their armchair they believe they can reject everything on a priori grounds, pleading “discourse!”, “power!”, “language!” without even deigning to look at the actual work. The great irony is that they call the rest of us dogmatists.
You write:
Well gee Dan, what did you think I and my fellow realist friends were claiming? That we can have a view from nowhere? Perhaps you missed my earlier remark about the difference between epistemological relativism and ontological relativism. What did you think that epistemological relativism was? Do you think that all of us suddenly arrived at the rather absurd conclusion that our knowledge of the intransitive was independent of our measurements, experiments, frames and all the rest? This is always the problem with all you idealists. You present realists in such an absurd and simplistic light that you can’t even catch what’s being gotten at.
You write:
I made no claims about progress. The point is simple. If we reduce the world to human concepts, language, and symbols there is no alterity by which these things (the transitive dimension) might change. Whether implicitly or explicitly we are committed to the thesis that change must be a spontaneous product of the human rather than a friction between human conceptual systems and something other. Again, I think this is another example of me taking your position more seriously and rigorously than you do. I am merely inferring the logical implications that follow from your own “ontological” claims. In other words, I am taking you at your word and inferring what follows from those claims.
You write:
Not at all. If you place all your emphasis on the symbolic then you are committed logically to the world being spun whole cloth out of the symbolic like a spider spins the web. There’s no sock puppetry here. It follows directly from your claims. Now if that’s not your position you are free to revise your position and state why this is not the case, but then you’re led to a realist position.
You write:
No, there are no differences made without things. But here’s the fundamental point around which you’ve endlessly misread me: The world of things is not exhausted by natural things. Signs are things. Concepts are things. Humans are things. There are lots of things that make differences. My ontology seeks to do just to all those differences and their interactions rather than practicing an imperialism of either nature or humans.
November 29, 2009 at 8:27 pm
Levi,
You have been very generous and kind to write so extensive a reply. I appreciate it greatly. I profit from you not only directly by your intelligence and hard work but by your tremendous willingness and ability to engage others including me. I hope you know that I admire you intellectually and ethically and recommend you to others, students and faculty. However, here again I am totally mystified by how you read me, but I do not wish to argue since I think you have been tolerant enough of my “thoughts.” I profit too from the way in which you can see me missing you since this allows me a glass about how such appearance is possible. This is more exciting for me because, and I think you have recognized this as much as my failure to understand you on your terms, there is a great deal upon which we agree even when you think otherwise. So allow me to say that within the vocabulary of things, your concluding statement suits me perfectly:
” The world of things is not exhausted by natural things. Signs are things. Concepts are things. Humans are things. There are lots of things that make differences. My ontology seeks to do just to all those differences and their interactions rather than practicing an imperialism of either nature or humans.”
I would say, however, that the terms “nature” and “human” for me have no reference, that all things make differences,and that my understanding of such declarations is closer to Twardowski than yours. Again, thank you.
November 29, 2009 at 8:42 pm
Dan,
Could you direct me to what I should read by Twardowski? Thanks for the kindness of your response. My last post was a bit aggressive and frustrated in tone, though I did try to spell out my arguments. I’m hoping to throw up a post soon that will develop some of these claims more clearly, though it will be a while due to the end of the semester. All of this, of course, is a work in progress. I think this is one major difference between blogging and publishing in traditional academic venues. When you elect to develop thoughts in a blog format as I’ve done others get to basically peer into your “notebooks” as you work through ideas, arguments, and concepts. Rather than presenting a finished product to the public, one instead shows all the false paths, the halting starts, the revisions, and so on. One of the things I’ve found so valuable and remarkable about blogging is that it constantly confronts me with the non-obviousness of claims I’m making as others spin them in entirely different directions that would have never occurred to me. As painful and frustrating as this can be it at least forces me to stay honest and spell things out in detail.
November 29, 2009 at 10:17 pm
At first, I thought blogging and what I deem “blog rolling” was a superficial and unimportant form of exchange. For some, it still feels little better than twitter, but from bloggers like you I get a sense of the living conversation of the intellect, the collective, and I find that very exciting. I know I sometimes frustrate you, and that is not my intention since I very much want your blogging to be a net plus. Since I lack your courage and productivity and could not myself be the Madame de Stael of hyper-space that you have become, I very much want you to stay on line. Still, I even find the frustrations helpful since I get the reverse shot I could never see myself. At a conference, I would stand up and say something and you would see it as pure ignorance or stupidity (maybe it is) and likely indicate that though in a euphemistic fashion appropriate to the academy. Since there would be no extensive dialog, that would be it. At least here while you cite your repeated frustrations (in each, I feel I too was “missed”) I feel I understand a little better what you think though I am not sure there is even a non-Euclidean space in which we will meet. I am not sure either that agreement is really a pre-requisite for much of anything anyway and, in any case, since my “realism” (very heavy scare quotes) doubts the existence of permanence or things or fixity, it seems consistent that I should play with/on/to/about your thinking. I do believe in the efficacy (I see no exceptions) of working hypotheses (these to me have all the virtues you want and few of the liabilities). I have an allergy toward purity and finality and so I tend to be a counter-puncher and this — I recognize – can get quite annoying.
I should re-read before I mention an author, but I think I was speaking of On the Content and Objects of Presentations.
December 2, 2009 at 8:38 am
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