Ian Bogost weighs in on the question of materialism over at his blog, writing:
Maybe part of the problem is the singularness of materialism. Gratton cites Harman on materialism being reductionist, and this is what I’m getting at too. Rather than seeking to define definitively the nature of matter (a task that inevitably leads to scientific reductionism), or taking material to mean that which mediates or regulates human interactions (which leads to inevitable correlationism), instead we should desire a multitude of materials. True materialism is an aggregate. Or, put differently, “materialism” doesn’t exist, but “materialisms” do.
I get the sense that many people misconstrue object-oriented ontology as a singular material affair, as a reductionism: “everything’s an object.” But instead, proponents of OOO hold that all things equally exist, yet they do not exist equally. The funeral pyre is not the same as the aardvark; the porcelatta is not equivalent to the rubgy ball. Not only are neither pair reducible to human encounter, but also neither are reducible to one another. In this respect, McLuhan is a better place to look for materialism than is Marx.
There’s a lot more in the post, so read the rest of it here. Here I think Ian hits the core of the issue. Both materialism and correlationisms are reductive positions. The variations of anti-realism all seek to reduce objects to some human related phenomenon, while the variants of materialism always seek to reduce objects to some identical material “stuff”. What is always missing is a genuine ontological pluralism, a promiscuous or slutty ontology, that allows for a variety of different actants irreducible to one type of being. This is one of the reasons object-oriented ontologists tend to refer to themselves as realists rather than materialists. Here Latour’s essay “Can We Get Our Materialism Back, Please?” is rewarding reading.
Larval Subjects . 
February 22, 2010 at 8:16 am
Levi:
Since no-one to my knowledge refers to themselves as a correlationist, does this category have meaning beyond the implication of insult? Also, must all non-realist positions be subsumed in anti-realist?
I was recently accused of anti-realism in the review of a book proposal, yet I doubt this is fair assessment of my position(s) – I believe an electron has as much a claim to exist as you or I. But I do lean heavily towards non-foundationalism… I see this as distinct from anti-realism and realism, personally. I’m not convinced that these juxtapositions do anything more than constrain the debate.
As for “materialism”, this has the merit in that some people do use this term in regard of their own beliefs, although “physicalism” is appearing as an alternative which escapes some of the limitations of implying a single monadic material as the relevant point in hand.
It seems to me there are at least two debates hinging upon contrast with physicalism/materialism… on the one hand, there’s the question as to whether the physical universe (what Charles Taylor terms “the imminent frame”) is open or closed, the latter being the position of the physicalist (whatever terms they may use). This is the philosophical high ground in the “religion versus science” spat.
Then there is the (not unrelated, but not wholly distinct) position of the viability of perspectives that attempt to eliminate the human from consideration versus those perspectives in which human cognitive faculties are placed centrally – what I believe you are trying to collect under the umbrella term “correlationist”. I’m only just starting to dig into the arguments coming from your camp, but from what I’ve seen so far it appears to be a mistake to call Kant a correlationist in the way this term seems to have been deployed, which brings into doubt the way the term is being used, frankly, since it reads like an attempt to corral a quite diverse line of enquiry into one box, prior to throwing that box off a bridge.
I’ve not had a chance to look into Speculative Realism properly (let alone OOO), so it’s too soon for me to join this debate properly, but I find it questionable that prioritising the “view from nowhere” could be an escape from anthropocentrism since this viewpoint is something the orbito-frontal cortex allows humanity to (uniquely?) access… although I find much in your flat ontology appealing (and irreducibility a given at this point) I wonder about your roots. In this regard, please give me a chance to get through my current reading requirements and I’ll eventually get around to this! :)
Back in 2000 I wrote for an obscure publication about applying object-oriented principles from computing to ontology, talking about “the Object-oriented Mind of God” (by which I mean, the physical laws of the universe – i.e. a Spinozan/Einsteinian God) and seeing physical existence as a kind of virtual machine. I wrote the following, which I suspect has some sympathies with your views:
“In the VM Mind of God, every concept we have can be seen as an object. You might be an object of class, homo sapiens, for instance, as well as inheriting behaviour from other objects.”
So I suspect sympathies between our views, and hope we might have a fruitful exchange in the future. However, for now, my reading list is fully booked and I feel I need to do some proper groundwork if I’m going to contribute anything useful to your discussions.
Consider this comment as a prolegomenon, perhaps. ;)
Best wishes!
February 22, 2010 at 5:03 pm
Hi Chris,
I think the term “correlationism” has a pretty precise meaning and is far from being an insult. Correlationism is any position that argues 1) that any discussion of the world has to take the observer into account and that that observer is necessarily human, 2) that the observer structures reality, and 3) that reality as it might be apart from the observer is something that can never be known. The virtue of the term is that it is able to capture what is common to a wide variety of current philosophical positions. This position, I believe, is perfectly defensible and legitimate, so I don’t see it as an insult.
I differ from you regarding questions of foundationalism. As I see it, anti-realism arose out of foundationalist aspirations. The point was to ground knowledge in, as Kant liked to put it, an apodictic fashion. By contrast, at the epistemological level, realisms by and large tend to be anti-foundationalist because they recognize the provisional nature of their claims.
OOO, I think, is an unusual realist ontology because it is not proposing the Laplacian view from nowhere you’re rightly critical of. OOO’s thesis is a bit different. What it argues is that the difference between how a rock grasps the world and how minds grasp the world is not a difference in kind, but a difference in degree. In this respect, every object is an “observer” of other objects in the world in the correlationist sense. What the correlationist objects to is thus not the anti-realist thesis that we can never know the world as it is in itself– it fully integrates the anti-realist hypothesis –but rather the limitation of this claim to the human-world relation and the methodological practice of restricting ourselves to the reflexive analysis of the human-world relation.
February 22, 2010 at 5:17 pm
Levi:
Thanks for your elucidatory remarks here – very instructive. As I say, since I’m bogged down in my current reading list, I feel I should hold off any actual discussion until I can do justice to the position you’re actually espousing. With this in mind, where would you “send me” for a coherent summary of OOO as it current stands? Do you have a book as yet? ;)
Your comment makes it clear that you are moving in an interesting philosophical space and one that by-and-large seems to intersect with a number of key points I’m working on myself (albeit very slowly…) in my own ontological work. I’m particularly open to the proposition that “every object is an observer”; it makes me want to question the boundaries of your term “object”, but this is best saved for later…
Quite by accident I have ended up foraging in philosophy of art for a brief spell, and I shall endeavour to enjoy myself here while I can. :)
Best wishes!
February 24, 2010 at 1:36 am
Levi,
I am curious, would you interpret the following Heidegger quote (Basic Problems 175) as correlationist thing to say or a realist thing to say?
“intraworldliness does not belong to the being of the extant, or in particular to that of nature, but only devolves upon it. Nature can also be without there being a world, without a Dasein existing…The being of beings which are not a Dasein has a richer and more complex structure and therefore goes beyond the usual characterization of that extant as a contexture of things”
It seems like even early Heidegger was on board with the thesis that reality is, on its own, much more rich than our conception of it lets on. And if this is true, then Chris’ question about which philosophers, besides Kantians, “correlationism” is meant to refer to, seems to me a question which needs to be answered by those writing about a history of realism and anti-realism.
Cheers
February 24, 2010 at 2:55 am
Gary,
Few correlationists are Berkeleyian idealists arguing that esse est percipi or that to be is to be perceived. Most correlationists argue that there is mind-independent being, they’re just saying that we can’t say or know anything about this mind-independent being but can only speak of being in terms of our access or givenness to us. Kant, for example, held that there are things-in-themselves. The mark of a correlationist therefore does not consist in the claim that there is no mind-independent being, but rather in the claim that the being of being can only ever be discussed in terms of how being is given to humans. Here the issue is one of reflexivity. The correlationist says that any claim about the world says as much about the observer making the claim as it does about the world. For example, when James Dobson goes on and on about how the children’s show Teletubbies contains a coded or disguised homosexual agenda, we should not ask whether or not, in fact, the purple teletubby is a homosexual in disguise. Rather, we should ask why it occurs to Dobson to make this connection. To the same degree that Dobson’s claim states something about teletubbies it also reflexively says something about his own desire and psychology (perhaps he’s a closeted homosexual). This is the hallmark of the correlationist move. The thesis is that we cannot determine whether our claims about being map on to the world as it is in-itself, or whether it is us that is bringing these things into being through the structure of our own cognitive structure. And this is certainly the case in Heidegger (under the non-Harmanian reading) insofar as all claims about beings are also, for Heidegger, claims about us. What Heidegger can’t think is a relation between objects that doesn’t implicitly involve the human in some way or another. This point is further supported by the fact that for Heidegger we need to first analyze our pre-ontological understanding of being before the question of being can eve be posed (at least in SZ). In this regard, middle Heidegger very much remains in the Kantian critical tradition. For this reason he remains within the correlationist framework. Note, this is not necessarily a bad thing. As I said to Chris, “correlationism” is not an insult. It is a perfectly legitimate philosophical position based on strong and intuitive arguments that are very difficult to refute. The problem is that if one takes this route they’re necessarily committed to the conclusion that we are prohibited from making any claims about what being might be like independent or apart from humans.
February 24, 2010 at 3:04 am
Basically I think the correlationist argument is best summed up or articulated by cybernetic theory. On the one hand you have first-order observation. I say, for example, that my coffee cup is blue. Here the observation is directed at the object and the properties are attributed to the object. Second-order observation, by contrast, is not the observation of the object, but rather is an observation of how the observer observes the object. What it’s thus focused on is the distinctions and categories that the observer brings to his observation. I think Kant’s real revolution was to bring second-order observation (observing the observer) to the fore in philosophy. In fact, I’d say the idea of second-order observation or observing the observer is perhaps the single most influential idea of the last two hundred or so years. There’s no discipline that it hasn’t effected, whether we’re talking about the social sciences where we have to engage in reflexive analysis of the social scientist prior to investigating the object or whether we’re talking about relativity physics where we have to specify frames of reference or the instrumentalism of Heisenberg in quantum mechanics. All of these positions are, in one way or another, Kant. The core of correlationism is basically this idea of second-order observation or that all philosophy must begin with an observation of the observer and the categories, relations, and distinctions the observer brings to bear on the object. It is not the claim that there are no mind-independent objects, only that because we can’t get out of our own distinctions we can’t ever say anything significant about the being of these objects themselves.
February 24, 2010 at 5:46 pm
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