Both Ben and Austin have posts up responding to some claims Zizek makes about nature. Ben writes:
For Zizek nature must be non-all or barred, but this nature never goes beyond the range of the earth. Zizek those go on to argue that the appearence of the whole in nature, that the very possibility of nature-in-itself is merely a result of subjective experience, an argument he ties to the experience of the sublime. Zizek then argues for ecology without nature thereby following Timothy Morton’s Ecology without Nature. I have unfortunately not yet read his text of the same name. From what I have read it seems that what he attacks as the concept of nature is a dominant mode of nature – one stemming from the rationalist tradition where is an immense but separate entity. Zizek writes: “what we need is ecology without nature: the ultimate obstacle to protecting nature is the very notion of nature we rely on.”
Here my largest issue (which seems to come up with many commentators on nature and ecology) is that the ecology of concepts of nature is severally narrowed for the sake of argument. Zizek seems to make a reversal when discussing the films of Tarkovsky and in particular Stalker but then shifts back to focus on transcendental subjectivity.
The ontological priviledge of the subject remains a serious stumbling block for any approach to nature that is not too shallow or too obfuscated. The finitude of the subject has become increasingly transcendentalized at the expense of nature, nature becomes merely an elaborate background. Nature goes right through the subject.
Following up on Ben’s criticism, it seems to me that there is a fundamental ambiguity in how Zizek refers to “nature”. When Zizek critiques nature is he referring to nature as such or the discursive concept of nature as it functions in a particular ideological discourse? If the former, it is completely appropriate for Zizek to critique this concept of nature and how it functions ideologically. Within this discursive framework, nature is treated as a whole that is harmonious and independent of culture. That is, culture is treated as something other than nature and outside of nature.
read on!
This is precisely the move that flat ontology cannot brook. As Latour demonstrates so nicely in texts like We Have Never Been Modern and Politics of Nature there is no “outside” that is other than culture and, more importantly, no inside that is other than nature. There is just the world or being on a single flat plane. Note, when Latour advances this argument he is neither culturalizing nature nor naturalizing culture. Latour’s deconstruction of the nature/society divide is not undertaking in the name of showing that all that we refer to as nature is really culture, nor is it undertaken in the name of showing that all we refer to as culture is really natural. To choose either of these options would be to fall straight back into the binary opposition between nature and culture where we choose one or the other. Rather, for Latour what we get is a flat plane of actants interacting with one another in a variety of ways that are perpetually non-all.
Within Latour’s framework, Zizek would go wrong in his thesis that nature is based on the transcendental subject. And this for two reasons. First, all actants are independent of one another such that no actant can be the condition of all other actants. Second, any collectivizations that do take place among actants are the result of many actants interacting with one another, not one particular actant unifying the rest. An actant can, of course, try to effect such a unification but all the other actants to be unified have their own input in these matters as well. Here, I suspect, part of Zizek’s problem lies in a rather outmoded metaphysics premised on concepts of sovereignity where unification issues from some master-agent that imposes form or order on the rest (Negri & Hardt have a nice critique of this model in Commonwealth).
Riffing on Ben’s observations, Austin writes:
There is a clear connection between this piece and Freud’s “Unbehagen in der Kultur” (“Civilization and its Discontents”, uneasiness in culture). It is not the case that fro Freud most of us socialize normally but some people “don’t quite make it” and so must be normalized. It is rather that culture as such, in order to appear normal, ordered, etc., involves a whole series of distortions, manipulations, and pathologies. We are then “uneasy” in culture as such. One of the goals of Zizek’s work on ecology is to show this as true for nature as well, that we are uneasy, homesick, in nature itself.
This is the alienation of subjectivity, which is essential to Lacanianism. The subject only exists as alienated, through alienation. But is it the case that the human being is fundamentally alienated from nature-as-such? Part of Zizek’s structuralist narrative that he inherits from Lacan, Levi-Strauss, Rousseau, etc., is the dichotomy of nature and culture, that there was some sort of transcendental rupture in reality when human beings developed the capacity for language and suddenly we went from being apes to human beings. In this process we began instantly to supplant nature with culture, imposing ourselves on the chaos of nature, ordering it. Is this the case? Isn’t it rather that the human being, and human culture, developed slowly out of nature? Zizek wants us to believe that either there is a radical break with culture or we are New Age obscurantists who want to naively go “back to nature.” There is surely a middle ground to this ridiculous dichotomy, one that will say that culture is thoroughly “natural,” while still being (clearly) different, in the same way that both animals and minerals are natural but different.
Right on. One of the narratives we find in Lacanian psychoanalysis is this idea that man is a fundamental rupture within nature that is perpetually alienated from, and out of step with, nature. This thesis is only plausible on the assumption that 1) nature independent of man is a harmonious whole, and 2) that other organisms, unlike the human, possess a harmonious relationship with nature. Working on this premise we get books like van Haute’s Against Adaptation that argue against evolutionary theory on the grounds that humans are fundamentally out of step with nature such that adaptation to nature is impossible for us.
The problem here is not with the thesis that humans are out of step with their environment (or, in Latour’s terms, the network of actants among which we dwell). The problem here is with the implied interpretation of evolutionary biology suggesting that any organism is in step or phase with their environment or the network of actants within which it dwells. What this cereal box understanding of evolutionary theory misses is that “adaptation” as understood in evolutionary theory does not mean “well-fitted”, but rather refers to a wager or gamble on the part of an organism. An adaptation is a gamble that certain features of the environment will remain stable and consistent. In this respect there is nothing unique about humans in their lack of perfect phase relations between innenwelt and umwelt. Insofar as any environment is always more complex than the manner in which the organism “represents” the environment, every organism is more or less out of phase with its environment. This lack of fit between environment and organism has all sorts of consequences for the life of each and every organism as it navigates its world. Psychoanalysis is right to critique the ideological conception of nature as a harmonious, self-regulating whole. However, it goes astray in believing that somehow the fissures and antagonisms of “nature” are unique to humans.
Larval Subjects . 
November 30, 2009 at 11:47 pm
Levi:
Precisely. As Gould puts it, the history of our evolution is a history of catastrophes, one after the other. I wonder, thinking along these lines, that in the wake of the death of God, this transcendentalizing of our fissures, breaks, discontents, etc, was done in such a way that the effect was one of making the human (so to speak) another exception (even if this exception is fundamentally “negative”). “Man” was still allowed this exceptional place even though the theological backdrop was lost. Part of what is exciting about SR and OOO in particular, and why the continuing backlash against it is so interesting, is that it takes these fundamental antagonisms of Marx, Freud, Lacan, et al, completely seriously — if anything, *its* wager seems to be that we have not taken them far enough, and that the death of God must imply, at one and the same time, the death of a theological concept of nature (this self-consistent sphere which would allow the -1 of humanity to appear).
Another very productive thing I have noticed about OOO is that, even in order for this ontology to begin, in its positivity, it also critiques much of these unsaid philosophical prejudices which, even in some of the most critical philosophies, still operate. This often subtle culture/nature hierarchy is one such prejudice that is very nicely displaced in a flat ontology.
November 30, 2009 at 11:56 pm
Joseph,
Thanks! Great comment. Your take on how the transcendentalizing of this fissure (nice way of putting it) is certainly one I would agree with. And does it come as much of a surprise that we’ve seen so many theological turns among these purportedly “anti-humanist” philosophical movements?
December 1, 2009 at 12:40 am
[…] Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Realism Leave a Comment In response to my post on Nature and Its Discontents, Joseph C. Goodson posts a terrific comment on what he sees as the significance of OOO/SR. Joseph […]
December 1, 2009 at 12:47 am
[…] The Nature of Psychoanalysis December 1, 2009 I think this is about right: Psychoanalysis is right to critique the ideological conception of nature as a harmonious, self-regul… I would only add that in Zizek, this is a tougher claim to make than one finds in Lacan, and this […]
December 1, 2009 at 9:46 am
How appropriate:
http://abstrusegoose.com/215
December 1, 2009 at 5:10 pm
Wonderful! I find so much here that speaks to questions that have troubled me forever–the problems that beset the possibility of ‘realist fiction, and all the unexamined suppositions that go with it, versus an aesthetics that would claim autonomy from representation.
Forgive me if I’ve egregiously misrepresented you… from the Barking Dog… “In another of Bryant’s posts, Nature and its Discontents (please, go to Larval Subjects and read this in full), I find the missing link, as it were: adaptation. As a species does not assimilate itself to nature, only imperfectly reacting and adapting itself to a nature which is both larger, and other, each maintaining a difference, as Bryant likes to put it, a difference that makes a difference, so the fabricating work of the artist is a continuous adaptation to another aspect of reality, a different kind of real. This leaves us open to a different ground for criticism–one that has no need to compare or test for verisimilitude in a work of fiction, nor to shift to the equally problematic tactic of treating the aesthetic object as autonomous: it is both and neither, no more autonomous from nature than the evolving organism, no more an indistinguishable conformity with nature than the always imperfectly adapting organism–the relationship endures, and finding and describing the imperfection of adaptation in the work of art, in the artist’s encounter, in the occasion that engenders it, provides the outline for a more useful critical method, as it is there that the distinction becomes visible and the character of the reality of each is given its due.”
December 2, 2009 at 9:08 am
I think the difference Lacan points out is clearly the mirror stage–hold a cat in front of a mirror it is bored and does not engage its reflection. Put a baby in front of a mirror and it touches the glass, it interacts with its own reflection, and according to Lacan it notices the disjunction between the functioning of its body and its will. Zizek himself points out that nature is a series of catastrophes–his critique aims at the discursive concept of nature but I believe his concept of nature is that of alienation itself, of non-self-coincidence. The problem is that the world is not always more complex than our conception of it, complexity adheres to the conception, and it is precisely because animals do not notice the limitations of their world-perception that they are not as alienated as humans, because humans infer a gap between their world-conception and the “real world.” Zizek does not claim that fissures and antagonisms are unique to humans, his entire ontology is constructed around “the gap,” the non-coincidence of the one with itself. Building on Hegel he recognizes that consciousness requires a gap, or tension, to exist, and this is true for any self-aware lifeform.
December 2, 2009 at 9:42 am
Tom,
I really don’t think this is accurate at all and, I believe, deeply misses the point. Yes, of course you’re right about the mirror stage and the difference between cats and humans. The disagreement here is not with the thesis that objects are different or that humans are different from animals. Nor does the disagreement revolve around the suggestion that the gaps between bats and the world are different between the gaps between clams and the world and that the gaps between trees and the world and the gaps between humans and the world differ from one another. First, I don’t think one can sustain the thesis that Zizek has an ontology, despite what my good friend Adrian Johnston and Zizek himself might claim. Zizek has an epistemology. One does not have an ontology unless one thinks being qua being, not being qua the human or language or society or any other term. Zizek’s philosophy is a philosophy of access or an epistemology through and through, not a genuine ontology. This point is significant because when you make the claim that Zizek’s “entire only is constructed around the gap or the non-coincidence of the one with itself”, this simply doesn’t hold. This is true of Zizek’s epistemology, but it is not an ontological claim but a claim about how humans relate to the world, i.e., through the non-coincidence of the one with itself. As a consequence of this, Zizek is not entitled to the claim that these antagonisms extend any further than how humans relate to the world. For Zizek to make that claim he would have to pass over into the realm of genuine ontology, not remain in the domain of the subjects relation to the world. Your point about self-reflexivity or humans being aware of their gap between the world and their conception of the world (I note you make the idealist gesture of placing “real world” in scare quotes, thereby suspending the realness of that world), is fine as far as it goes. I certainly wouldn’t deny that there’s something ontologically significant and important about self-reflexive systems, though I don’t think they’re unique to persons. However, this is not the issue in either Zizek or the psychoanalytic secondary literature. The issue rather is that nature and animality is presented without gap or antagonism, whereas humans are characterized as being a gap or fissure in being. It is not that Zizek’s characterization of the human is mistaken (though it’s problematic in a number of respects), but that his conception of animality and nature is deeply flawed.
December 2, 2009 at 9:58 am
I think part of Zizek’s project is to deconstruct the line between epistemology and ontology, suggesting for instance that The Real is precisely the unaccountable shift in perspectives between epistemologies, but I guess that isn’t the main point. I haven’t read much of Zizek on animals specifically, but in his bit in Examined Life he states very clearly that nature is a series of catastrophes, and that the idea of a “balance of nature” is just a way to escape the meaninglessness of industrialization, just as “God gave the gays AIDS” is a way to escape the meaninglessness of natural catastrophes.
December 2, 2009 at 10:36 am
Sure, that’s Zizek’s aim and when he deconstructs that line between epistemology and ontology epistemology, for him, wins. This is a pretty standard anti-realist move: claim that you’re deconstructing the difference between ontology and epistemology and then reduce everything to epistemology. I understand Zizek’s thesis, I just don’t understand why one would characterize nature as either a series of catastrophes or a harmonious whole. Nor do I see why we would treat culture and the human as something outside of nature. Note that when you talk about “The Real” you describe it as a shift in perspective. While I certainly agree that perspectives are certainly real, the real has no need of perspectives to be real. That’s where the difference lies and where you come down on this issue ultimately determines whether you’re an idealist or anti-realist or whether you fall into realist or materialist camps. And, of course, I know that Zizek describes himself as a materialist but I find nothing remotely materialist in his position beyond the use of the word.
December 2, 2009 at 10:59 am
You would presumably describe nature as a series of catastrophes to play devil’s advocate to the harmonious whole types, but ultimately it’s also a Nietzschean analysis which understands that there is no telos only the constant suppression of inferiority. I think Zizek can get away with describing himself as a materialist precisely because of his Nietzschean tendencies, even though he’s a Hegelian at heart. Zizek will analyze culture as sexual competition, but I think ultimately with “The Real” it again comes down to the gap in sexuality, just as in nature life is inconceivable without the gap between the living and the dead, which explains Zizek’s fascination with the undead. The gap between the inside and outside of a cell, the gap between the me thinking and the me hearing the thought. Zizek’s version of materialism goes “there is nothing which is not matter,” and the gap is precisely this nothing.
December 2, 2009 at 11:14 am
I’m not sure what I could have possibly said that would give the impression that I advocate a Nietzschean analysis of nature or that being has anything to do with supressing inferiority. Nor would I characterize nature as a series of catastrophes to combat the harmonious whole folks. Both characterizations of the being of being are bad. It seems to me that in your discussions of the gap you’re conflating cognitive characterizations of things with things themselves. Cold is not the gap between heat and cold, nor is cold in any way the absence of heat. Cold is a purely positive difference that need make no reference to heat because it just is that cold. Likewise, death is not the gap between the living in the dead, but rather death is a purely positive state and life is a purely positive ontological state. Notice your use of language again: you say “…in nature life is inconceivable without the gap between the living and the dead.” Here you are not discussing nature as such or ontologically, but are talking about the requirements of cognition to think nature. But that is not an ontological issue and is irrelevant to what nature is. It is very clever to say that there is nothing which is not matter and the gap is precisely this nothing, but that still is not materialism. That’s just a dressed up idealism. Then again, I have no dog in this fight as I’m not a materialist but a realist.
December 2, 2009 at 3:09 pm
I think, against the picture of Zizek that is given here, one could at least adduce the third and final chapter of “The Indivisible Remainder”, on quantum physics.
I don’t want to defend Zizek’s philosophy of quantum physics myself, but it seems that he at least makes some effort toward an explicitly ontological characterization of reality through it. Take, for instance, the very last footnote of the book (nr. 44), where he chastizes himself for his earlier lack of realism. He begins:
“In “Looking Awry”, I conceived the parallel between Hawking’s opposition of imaginary and real time and the feminine and masculine side in Lacan’s formulas of sexuation as an index of how the fundamental deadlock of symbolization (over)determines our approach to the most abstract problematics of physics.”
This seems to coincide with the accusation of “epistemologizing” nature, in this case physical nature. However, the footnote continues:
“Now, however, my position is that of ‘realism’: in nature we effectively encounter the symbolic order, inclusive of its constitutive deadlock, in a lower power/potential.”
Undoubtedly, Zizek has not given anything approaching a full story of how nature -beyond our epistemological grasp of it – in itself suffers from a constitutive deadlock; this would require something along the lines of an updated Hegelian or Schellingian philosophy of nature, I guess? The evident and quite formidable obstacles against the revival and execution of such a program should, as far as I can tell, be one of the main challenges facing anyone attracted to Zizek’s philosophy.
June 23, 2010 at 3:09 pm
[…] itself out rhizomically across the blogosphere. Picking up on Žižek’s ecological musings, Levi Bryant seems more or less in agreement with what I had argued here last week, as does Michael Austin, […]
July 27, 2010 at 1:30 am
“Insofar as any environment is always more complex than the manner in which the organism “represents” the environment, every organism is more or less out of phase with its environment. This lack of fit between environment and organism has all sorts of consequences for the life of each and every organism as it navigates its world.”
And this holds not only for evolutionary relations between the organism and it’s environment, but also relations between inorganic entities.
Here Harman’s theory is clear, actants support intentional relations as distinct objects wherein two others enter in relation; but which are nevertheless not-commesurate to the real objects themselves (which remain without relation).
The question of course then becomes in what precise sense we could speak of a continuity of actants, if they are ontologically irreducible and yet flat. Clearly this couldn’t be in a restricted naturalistic sense in Harman’s view: in which case it would imply their metaphysical priority.
But I’m wondering if one could propose something like a broader metaphysical concept of nature from which would be commesurable to the multitude of different sensual/intentional and real objects. This would have to be a way in which one doesn’t merely reproduce the argument between ontic nature of the natural science, and some wider notion of ‘ontological’ nature which uniformly spreads itself across all actants. This is unless we want to slide right back into the correlationist loop.
But it seems the choice then becomes between:
1) Making nature correspond to some relations only (those between intentional objects described by scientific relation and natural phenomena), while preserving their metaphysical univocity as actants.
But this seems to render nature separate from all Real objects, and seems to facilitate not only the separation between culture and nature, but between nature and potentially infinite number of other things.
It’s not clear how the phenomena of the natural sciences end up in this scenario.
2) Introduce a general concept of nature which pertains to Real objects as well as intentional ones. This runs the risk of producing something of ontological determination of nature which reduces the natural scientific sense of nature to a merely ‘regional’ or ontic sense.
I would to ask Levi how does a concept of nature work in his own version of OOO.