Object-oriented social and political theory can be illustrated with respect to Lacan’s famous Borromean knots. It will be recalled that the peculiar quality of the Borromean knot is that no one of the rings is directly tied to the other, but if you cut one of the rings the other two slip away. In evoking the Borromean knot I do not here intend to give a “Lacanian reading” of object-oriented ontology. Rather, I wish to draw attention to certain features of the social and political world that object-oriented ontology would like to bring into relief for social and political theorists. Consequently, in what follows I will take a certain degree of liberty in how I use the categories of the “real”, the “symbolic”, and the “imaginary” (abbreviated “R”, “S”, and “I” respectively), only loosely associating these with Lacanian psychoanalytic categories. I will not, for example, discuss the real in the Lacanian sense as the impossible, as a constitutive deadlock, as what always returns to its place, or as constitutive antagonism. This is not because I am rejecting the Lacanian real in these senses, but rather because I am here using the Borromean knot for other purposes. I have no qualms with reintroducing concepts such as constitutive deadlocks or antagonisms at another order of analysis. In short, I am using the diagram of the Borromean knot as a heuristic device to help bring clarity to certain discussions in social and political theory.
Thus for the purposes of this post, let the ring of the Imaginary refer to the domain of ideology, signs, group identities, political parties, images, the content of media, the sense or meaning possessed by cultural artifacts such as films, clothing, commodities, certain norms, etc., collective narratives, texts, and so on. It is important to emphasize that in placing these in the ring of the Imaginary I am in no way suggesting that these things are unreal or demoting their status. Here the category of the Imaginary retains some of its Lacanian resonances. Lacan associates the imaginary with the domain of meaning (hence the reference to cultural artifacts, texts, signs, etc). Likewise, Lacan associates the category of the Imaginary with images (visual, acoustic, olfactory, tactile, etc), as well as the domain of the ego and identity. Hence the placement of group identities, group narratives, and media in this category. By contrast, let the symbolic refer to the domain of laws, institutions, governmental systems, economy, as well as language, and so on. Again certain Lacanian resonances are retained here, especially with respect to placing law and language within the domain of symbolic.
read on!
It is likely that my treatment of the Real will receive the most objection from Lacanians. For object-oriented ontology the term “Real” doesn’t quite work in this context. In having one category for the Real that is opposed to the Symbolic and the Imaginary I risk giving the impression that the Symbolic and the Imaginary are not themselves real. However, for object-oriented ontology, at least in my formulation, this is not the case. Hopefully readers will keep this caveat in mind. Moreover, as Zizek has taught us, we can group the three categories together like a Venn diagram. Thus we can have an real-imaginary and a real-symbolic. These conjunctions are a lot closer to object-oriented ontology which, in my formulation (and in certain moments of Harman’s), treat symbolic entities, images, texts, etc., as objects in their own right that are genuine actors in the world. Honestly, however, it would be better to have a word other than “the Real” for this category as I’m here using it.
Setting all this aside, let the Real contain technology, resources, climate, environment, animals, infrastructure (such as road, signs, telephone lines, satellites, etc), modes of production, human bodies, stars, quarks, planets, gadgets, cars, iPhones, fiber optic cables, dominant forms of computer programming, game engines, solar flares, meteors, diseases, grain harvests, etc., etc., etc.. In other words, I am here treating the real as containing all the actors or objects Latour refers to as “nonhuman actors”.
At this point, let it be recalled that for Lacan the Borromean knots are separate and self-contained spheres that are completely independent of one another, but are intertwined with one another or tied to each other. So too is it the case with my Borromean knots here, where, in order to think collectives (my word, following Latour, designed to replace the word “society”) it is necessary to think the intertwining of the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic as they are used here. In other words, it is my view that we need an ontology robust enough to think these networks and their imbrications that doesn’t restrict us to analysis of one sphere to the detriment of the others.
For the last couple of years I have tried to draw attention to what I believe is a deleterious trend in Continental social and political theory. Occasionally I have referred to this as a focus on the “discursive”, on other occasions I have referred to it as a focus on the semiotic. In all instances, what I’ve been referring to is a focus on the Imaginary and the Symbolic to the exclusion of the “Real” (as I am using the terms here). In other words, the Imaginary and the Symbolic have been the privileged site of emancipatory critique in Continental social and political thought. I am, of course, making a generalization here. Certainly you get theorists that don’t fit this model. Clearly many of the technology theorists wouldn’t fit this model as they focus heavily on the role that technology plays in informing our social relations. The same would be the case with many environmental philosophers, as they are forced to discuss a Real that cannot be reduced to text, sign, or images to be decoded and critiqued. Also, a number of Marxists outside of French Marxist circles would not fit this model as they engage heavily with the impact of technology, factories, infrastructure, and economy that cannot be reduced to texts, ideology, or cultural artifacts to be decoded and critiqued. In these instances we might very well get the reverse problem where the domain of the real and certain elements of the symbolic (economy) are focused on while ignoring the domain of the Imaginary and the Symbolic as I’ve used the terms here. In short, I am talking about dominant trends, not absolutes. And I concede that my sense that these are dominant trends could be, in part, accidents of my own background, steeped as it is in French structuralist and post-structuralist thought, and German critical theory. No one these days has a panoptic view of the world of theory.
There are two reasons, I think, for this trend. The first good, the second not so good. First the good reasons. I think we are living in a historical moment– especially in first tier countries –where the exploitive nature of the system of capital has largely become invisible or disguised despite its insidious tendrils spread all throughout social life and the innumerable symptoms it generates, and where this form of life has come to seem natural. Here a passage from Jameson on Adorno, Marcuse, and Horkheimer comes to mind (I can’t recall which text this was in). There Jameson talks about how many of the early German Critical Theorists had lived “between two times”. In a very real sense they witnessed the rise of industrialization (after a fashion… yes I know they were on the tail end) and of mass consumer culture. They lived between two worlds. Most of us today have not lived through something comparable so the social system comes to seem obvious and natural, without alternative. This gave them a special critical perspective. In a lot of respects, however, the nature of the current social system just seems obvious today and for that reason appears just.
In this respect, ideology critique at all levels makes a lot of sense. Two necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for change are an awareness that current social organization is both unjust and that this form of social organization is contingent or not inevitable. Without the first people will not be motivated to change these conditions. Without the second people will believe that it is impossible to change these conditions. One of the major reasons that I began emphasizing the concept of networks or assemblages rather than systems or structures, is that I believe the latter concepts have a tendency to convince us that change is impossible by defining beings in social systems as purely a product of their relations, thereby undermining all possibility of agency. Network or assemblage theory recognizes that entities enter into relation while refusing to treat entities as consisting nothing but these relations. Thus it is able to make room for the discoveries of systems analysis and structural analysis while avoiding the theoretical pessimism that tends to issue from these ontologized models. At any rate, one of the genuine contributions ideology critique, cultural critique, etc., makes to empancipatory politics lies in this disclosure of how certain forms of social organization are oppressive and contingent.
Second, the less than nice motivation for this shift in focus to the domain of the Imaginary and Symbolic is, I think, more an occupational hazard than anything else. Here I take a page from the work of Bourdieu. In my view, because of the nature of our work or labor, there’s a tendency among academics to treat texts, narratives, ideologies, images, and cultural artifacts as the “really real”. As Bourdieu shows so well in his analysis of academia, each human practice has a tendency to interpret the world and all other human practices in terms of its own practice and the primary media with which it deals. Since those of us in the social sciences and humanities tend to deal with talk and texts, we naturally end up treating texts and talk as what is really real, ignoring the rest. There is nothing wrong with bracketing other domains of the world for the sake of analysis. The problem emerges when this bracketing is rendered “metaphysical” such that the theorist makes the additional leap of more or less denying all the rest. This leap can be implicit or unconscious, detectable only in the sorts of arguments one gives against other modes of analysis when rejecting those modes of analysis (e.g., charges of “technological determinism”), or it can be quite explicit as in the case of linguistic and semiotic idealists. When theory begins to function in this way I think it leads to a distorted view of collectives and bad political practices.
Having outlined what I believe to be the perfectly legitimate and value contributions of theory focused on the discursive and semiotic, it is now worthwhile to explain just why I think it’s necessary to include the category of the “Real” as I’ve construed it here in our social and political analyses. In this connection, I think we face a situation very similar to the one Braudel describes with respect to the Enlightenment. In his analysis of the development of capitalism from the 14th century to the 18th century Braudal asks “why, despite the fact that the idea were there (among Enlightenment thinkers like Hume, Spinoza, Rousseau, Voltaire, etc.), was change so slow to come? Why given that alternative models of governance were now available in the domain of political theory, and given that compelling critiques of reigning institutional structures had been put forward, were social relations so slow to change?” To answer this question Braudal argues that we have to shift from the domain of the discursive or ideational, the domain of norms, ideologies, texts, beliefs, etc., and look at what he calls material history. His thesis is that it is the domain of material history that inhibits change.
When Braudel refers to material history he is referring to the nuts and bolts of a society and how these nuts and bolts tend to perpetuate certain forms of social relations and social structure even when the discursive level has changed. These nuts and bolts refer to very concrete things that are not ideational or textual in character. They are things like the availability of resources, the type of food produced, how it is produced, and its susceptibility to climate shifts (here the “Little Ice Age” played a huge role in European development on a variety of levels), the nature of existing technology and how far developed that technology is, the presence or absence of trade routes and roads, the nature of cities, and so on. These sorts of things present human actors in social systems with a sort of forced choice, where their only option is to follow the logic of the system. The analysis of these sorts of actors requires social and political theorists to unlearn certain habits of thought– e.g. the tendency to immediately textualize everything and seek to understand it at the level of content –and develop new interpretive lenses that draw our attention to humble entities that initially seem rather boring and irrelevant if we’re immediately prone to raise questions of norms, discursivity, ideology, and the rest. For example, we need to begin analyzing things like the availability of resources, how certain economic structures lock people into particular ways of life, whether or not alternative resources are available (as in the case of energy), where infrastructure like good and cheap communications technologies are readily available, how urban and suburban life tends to lock people into particular structures as a matter of necessity, and so on.
The point is not that we should reject normative analysis, discursive analysis, cultural critique, and so on, but that if we don’t understand how things are actually put together at the nuts and bolts level of collectives we’ll have a very difficult time devising effective strategies for changing these structures. The reason for this is simple: We’ll have carried out the compelling ideological critique showing how such structures are contingent and exploitive, causing all sorts of suffering, and we’ll have carried out the normative critique showing how these social structures are unjust and theorizing abstractly what a just alternative might look like, but the material infrastructure will continue to hum along just as it did before, it’s ideological support system perhaps weakened, but with people still being locked into that structure exactly as they were before.
The biggest issue facing those of us searching for the means of emancipatory change is, I think, that of how human agents can act on collective structures. OOO shows that collective structures are emergent objects governed by their own patterns or laws quite independent of the wishes and intentions of human agents. It recognizes that collectives cannot exist without humans as a substrate, while nonetheless holding that the powers and functioning of these structures is quite independent of the persons that inhabit them. The good news is that unlike certain readings or appropriations of Althusser where persons are just effects of structure, OOO shows that persons are themselves autonomous agents independent of these collectives (while nonetheless being embroiled in them in a variety of ways). The really difficult question– a question I think all of us are more or less asking without realizing it –is that of how one object (persons or groups of persons) can act on another object (collective structures with their own autonomous functioning) so as to fundamentally transform that structure. Here, I think, we get a point where Harman’s questions about causation and his theory of vicarious causation converge with some pretty urgent questions at the heart of contemporary social and political theory. In other words, there are forms of engagement on the part of human persons that more or less leave collective structures intact as they were before, and hopefully forms of engagement that can cause a fundamental mutation and transformation of collective structures. If these latter forms of engagement are to be made possible all the resources of the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic as I’ve outlined them here must be mobilized and thought in their imbrication with one another, avoiding the pitfalls of a partial and one-sided analysis that leaves the other elements of collective structure largely intact as it was before. To do this I think we need to overcome some bad theoretical habits that have come to dominate political theory, thought, and training. If I’ve sided with object-oriented ontology then this is because, in part, I believe it provides the resources for doing this.
December 8, 2009 at 7:06 pm
Thanks for a informative post Levi
I am just finishing up my masters thesis on adolescent subjectivity. In the final chapter I argue for interventions into secondary education (In Australia) with regards to the relationship between screenagers (those that show an obsessive devotion to screen based technologies) and their screens. I am searching for an emancipatory intervention and in this chapter I frame the problem in Lacanian/Žižekian terms. I suggest the intervention must allow the agent (adolescent) to be able to see the screen as a tool of the ‘market system’ and work on short circuiting this relationship. In your terms I want to encourage autonomous agency by revealing both the affects of the Symbolic and Imaginary to the front of adolescent thinking. I also concede this is no mean feat. Once again your writing stirs me towards getting the right idea framed for these interventions. Thanks
Russell
December 9, 2009 at 12:44 am
This question may be as helpful as asking where and what the coccyx is in the analogy of the body politic, but what in your adaptation of Lacan would you do with the sinthome?
December 9, 2009 at 1:21 am
Dan,
I’m not really adapting Lacan here but simply using the figure of the Borromean knot as an organizational device to draw attention to what I’m trying to get out. I’ve found that many of the Continental social and political theorists I talk to don’t even see what it is that I’m referring to in the dimension of the real or why it is important to their political thought, so I hoped that three circles might bring it into focus. I take it that the concept of sinthome remains within the field of psychoanalysis.
December 9, 2009 at 1:26 am
Žižek claims it is psychoanalysis that can best measure the‘shattering impact’of subjectivity. It is therefore easy to see the screenager slip from the symptomatic fetishization of the screen to a blind, idiotic use of it as sinthomme. Staring vacantly into an inoperative screen becomes all too easy. Yet it is the expression of subjectivity we can intervene in. Again it involves the use of screens as creative and active rather than passive and stultifying objects.
December 9, 2009 at 2:36 am
rwm57,
I appreciate that you found something of valuable in this post, but I do want to emphasize that the key category I was trying to draw attention to was the real (as I described it, not as used in Lacan and Zizek), rather than the imaginary and the symbolic. In my view, emancipatory critique focused on the imaginary and the symbolic has become far too dominant in “critical theory” for the last forty years. It has an important place, but it has also generated a number of detrimental consequences, not the least of which is the inability to focus on the role played by material infrastructure in constraining humans and emancipation. This is something you simply cannot get at with the analysis of cultural artifacts and texts. You need a realist mode of analysis that starts looking at very concrete things that aren’t simply a matter of signs. In the school structure you discuss, these things would be things like the presence or absence of technology in the school, lunch menus, busing routes, classroom and school architecture, communication linkages (and I literally mean things like fiber-optic cables) within the school, to various other institutions in the state, etc., etc., etc., how the day time hours are structured, how afterschool activities are structured, the economy of the surrounding region, and so on. All of these sorts of things, I find, become invisible under current dominant paradigms of “critical theory” or treated as trivial mediators of symbolic relations. We then slap our foreheads in wonder when things don’t change in the wake of ideology critique, wondering why everything remains the same. I’m glad to see you’re working on things like screens. I wonder, have you thought of how simple changes in these sorts of relations to concrete objects might change subjectivities?
December 9, 2009 at 3:10 am
I take your point on Lacan and the Real, but what I was hinting at with the flowery language of emancipation is in reality, merely change. You suggest the concrete world of adolescent activity and the interconnectivity of the nuts and bolts in their lives could be altered. For instance putting students in front of screens in a wired up network may encourage them to transgress through escaping this formal network, back into the world of games for example. Perhaps we need to rethink, as you suggest the architectural layout of the classroom, especially the computer laboratory and its tendency to shape behavior. I’m afraid in this case we are going to have to fight city hall and you know the saying.
Regards and thanks for the time
Russell
December 9, 2009 at 11:11 pm
We might outline a few of practical tasks and/or questions that a OOO-influenced political science/theory could turn to:
1) A meta-organization of the sciences, social and natural, toward certain normative ends. This would be arduous, “bureaucratic,” and utterly necessary work.
2) What does OOO in and of itself have to say about normativity, anyway? What does OOO have to say about what ought to be? Let me say that I think it is a great strength of OOO that it could respect the contribution of practices other than ontologies on these points. For instance, there’s nothing preventing me from getting very interested in the analytic work of G.A. Cohen or Raymond Guess here. Can a political OOO be the “big tent” under which to gather? Levi, you’re always saying that our politics should not depend on our metaphysics. I wholeheartedly agree.
3) What kind of collective practically mobilizes people? Parties? Here we need to welcome organizational theory into the big tent. What is it to be mobilized?
4) What is it to achieve “equality” in a realist sense?
5) What is one to make of democracy, as it is commonly understood? Does American democracy, on it’s own terms, pass the OOO “reality” test on its own terms? What’s real about it? What causal power does it have? What does it cause?
6) I have a strong suspicion that OOO can help us do away with the boring binary of “reform…or revolution” that paralyzes many leftists. What do you think about that?
7) Does a movement need a name? A banner?
In every case I think the engaged theorist should utilize and respect the practical work that has been done by many other disciplines, and form networks and alliances. A political OOO gathering should showcase the serious work of people working in education, of scientists, workers, and artists. What is bad about the System is self-evident. A better politics would focus on mobilizing different actors toward an alternative.
December 9, 2009 at 11:18 pm
I should add on that last bit: what is lame about current oppositional politics is its purely symbolic nature. It’s incessant critique. When I say what is bad is self-evident, I mean that we don’t need so many protests where we shout about how bad our foreign wars are. We need the patient work of, for instance, an alternative federal budget that scales down those wars and ramps up education, etc.
December 10, 2009 at 1:34 pm
AMM,
I really don’t have answers to a lot of these questions as of yet.
What exactly is it that you have in mind here?
I think this is a question for an enterprising OOO theorist to answer. I’ve been busy just trying to get the fundamentals of the ontology down and haven’t been able to pick up the normative questions as of yet. I will say minimally, however, that norms are generative or causal mechanisms and are thus ontologically real for the OOO theorist (this one, at any rate). I certainly agree with respect to your point about the contributions of other normative theories and ontologies. I don’t see OOO as so much banishing other claims as requiring the integration of them within an OOO framework.
I find Sartre’s later work really interesting with respect to these questions.
More work for an enterprising OOO theorist.
Again, I think this requires a concrete OOO style analysis to be answered. Here I have in mind something like actor-network-theory. Such questions can’t be answered from the armchair. But of course American democracy is a real actor. When I use the term “democracy” however, I am not advocating any particular political form. I am just alluding to a flat ontology where there are a plurality of different types of actors or objects.
I hope so.
I’m sympathetic to Badiou’s view that the name of a group is itself an actor or part of the group.
Yes, absolutely. Not only does it foster a respect for different disciplines and practices, but it also fosters a respect, I think, for different theoretical orientations. In my view, these theoretical orientations become not so much opposed to one another but as practices investigating different fields or objects within the world. Consequently, I do not reject the work of the semiotician, for example, but merely hold that signs aren’t everything.
December 10, 2009 at 4:04 pm
Regarding norms in #2, I think we need to keep pushing on this. I think that norms are real in the sense that you describe, but I have trouble buying that there will ever by an (ultimate) ontological grounding for our notions of justice.
OOO helps us down the path when it encourages us to abandon anthropocentrism and bring non-human actors and wider ecological systems into our realm of moral or political concern. But when acting in the world we make a choice to engage with specific actors in specific ways. We must have a choice, and that choice of who to work with and what to do is not going to be guaranteed by God or ontology or some transcendent principle, etc.
It is interesting how Badiou tries to split the difference here. But of course I think he posits a transcendent realm of Truth that calls his authentic Subject into being. When we’re not that Subject acting in the service of a truth-procedure like love, science, or politics, we’re just human animals (acting in a world that is closer to OOO, do you think?). I like his work, but as an ontology, it’s just too close to Plato for my taste.
When someone confronts us with the question, “Why should I support your cause?” perhaps the answer should not be the self-evident negative “Because those bankers are parasites!” or the religious “because God/Truth compels you!” but maybe a description of the political coordinates and what is possible. For instance, it is possible for us to expropriate the unearned wealth of the few and build better schools and fewer bombers. It is impossible, in the United States, to trust the Democratic party to do this for us any longer, given so many betrayals, etc.
In terms of meta-organization, I think what I mean is this: the many different practices and theories in the sciences involve so many different formalizations of their areas of concern. OOO tells us that these theories are not reducible to one another, even as the sciences themselves attempt such a reduction (i.e. to human nature, to rational choice, to physical determinism). OOO also tells us that these theories are (and I’m with you here) real actors. What is the political theory that will put these actors to work in concert? What theory will coordinate the sociologists, artists, economists, managers, software engineers, steelworkers? I think that such a political theory will need to view the world with something like the realism of OOO. A political realism that is concerned with objects and not 24/7/365 criticism.
As it stands, all the interest groups in our politics stand in competition or disarray. The old Leninist theory tried to remedy this with everyone uniting through a single political organ, the Party. The Party would guarantee your norms, the Party would guarantee your commitments. The Party would coordinate your activities and put the different actors of society to work. As it stands, I still think there is work for political parties to do in our situation, but we cannot count on party membership alone to coordinate the work of social actors toward our goals, because everything we know about the world points to a world of fluid relations.