In response to my recent post where I offhandedly remark that object-oriented ontology does not advocate a representationalist epistemology or a correspondence theory of truth, Jim expresses some worries:
Representationalism, crudely construed, is the thesis that we can represent the world as it is. Thus representationalism is both an epistemological thesis (a thesis about the nature of our knowledge) and a naive realism (the thesis that the world is like the manner in which we perceive it). This is the only way I can understand Vitale’s questions: Vitale seems to be working on the premise that OOO is a representational realism that argues that we can represent objects as they are.Please help me out here. I am a big fan of OOO, but now I am a bit confused and a little bit worried. I am also very, very frustrated!
Primarily, I’m worried about your rejection of ‘representationalism.’ Maybe I just don’t understand your critique.
If we start saying things like: “We can never really hope to know the world as-it-exists,” then what is the point of doing science? We might as well just stop studying physics, chemistry, astronomy, biology, etc.
Seriously, I am looking for a reason to study these things.
If we can never hope to come to ‘represent’ the world as-it-exists, then what is the point of carefully measuring things–e.g. taking blood samples, core samples, urine samples, etc–and putting all of our observations and measurements into notebooks, etc? What a waste of time!
If we can never hope to understand and represent objects ‘as they are,’ then why should anyone study the (so-called) natural sciences? We might as well just stop pouring money into these silly, naive disciplines. That money would be better spent elsewhere.
I hope I am just misinterpreting your views; but, I thought OOO was different from social constructivism, which is also sceptical about science, and feminist critiques of science, which make it seem as if science is somehow evil, wrong, ‘patriarchal’ and ‘masculinist,’ etc.
Seriously, who wants to study something that is either ‘horribly, horribly evil’ or hopelessly naive?
If we can never hope to represent things as they REALLY exist, then what the hel* are we doing?
I’m in a bit of a hurry to get out of the door right now, so I’ll have to keep my response brief, but a couple of points are in order. My rejection of representation is not a rejection of knowledge. One of the central distinctions in my version of object-oriented ontology is the distinction between the virtual proper being of an object and the local manifestations of an object. The virtual proper being of an object is what is withdrawn and is that which can never be directly touched, encountered, or represented. The local manifestation of an object is the particular manner in which an object actualizes itself in the world in the form of qualities and properties. The point of this distinction is that an object can locally manifest itself in a variety of ways depending on the relations it enters into with other objects. However, none of these local manifestations exhausts the virtual proper being of an object.
Local manifestations take place by objects interacting with one another. A rock encounters flowing water in one way when it sits at the bottom of a stream. It encounters water quite a different way when it’s falling from the sky towards that water at hundreds of miles an hour. Right now British Petroleum is discovering that objects behave quite differently when they’re under thousands of feet of water.
When we’re doing science what we’re doing is placing objects or generative mechanisms in particular contexts or relations to other objects to discover how they act or what they do. That is, we’re acting on objects to provoke actions in objects so as to see how objects act under these conditions. And in doing this, we are placing objects in relations. I’ve written about this in my post entitled The Mug Blues.
So here’s the nub of the matter: Objects are independent of their relations and withdrawn from their relations. Knowledge-production always consists of placing objects in relations or acting on them to provoke actions in them. Consequently, what objects are independent of these relations is something we can never know precisely because we only ever encounter objects in relations and objects only ever encounter one another in relations.
Does that entail that knowledge is useless or an illusion? No. It just entails 1) that knowledge is a description of actions within these relational networks, and that 2) other actions can be provoked in objects when placed in different relational networks. Think about cooking. What is the being of garlic? Can you really say? No, all you know of garlic is how it behaves in a variety of different ways when cooked in a variety of different ways and related to a variety of different ingredients.
Jim seems to have a problem with feminist and social constructivist critiques of knowledge. If these critiques are taken to entail that knowledge is illusory or a fabrication, then I quite agree. Unfortunately, because of distinction between the natural and the artificial that haunts the tradition of Western thought, our tendency is to hear the word “construction” as implying “artificial” or “false”, rather than entailing the arduous work of assembling diverse objects together in a formation that manages to stand or persist. However, if feminist epistemology and social constructivism is understood as the careful investigation of networks of relations among objects in the production of local manifestations, then I’m all for these sorts of investigations as I believe they follow directly from my ontology. All manifestation or actuality is local manifestation or actuality. In this connection, I’m quite in agreement with Donna Haraway’s concept of situated knowledge.
The point is not to confuse objects with their local manifestations or actualities. These actualities or local manifestations are produced by objects, but objects always harbor a volcanic excess and the power to surprise when placed in different networks of relations to different objects. When I reject representationalism I am rejecting naive realism’s tendency to equate the being of objects with what is essentially local or a situated manifestation. As a consequence, I am drawing attention to the relations in which an object enters in producing a manifestation and the manner in which we act on objects to produce particular manifestations.
June 12, 2010 at 8:05 pm
It still seems to me that we can infer or indirectly come to know some — some — of the garlic’s being in that we can say that under this or that condition, it is garlic that is acting or producing changes (even if we wish to avoid linking change to the substance of garlic). I say this because many of the things we can learn about garlic we can say, “well, even in different conditions, the powers that garlic evidences here are still actual within the garlic itself, even if no relation provokes them,” or something to that effect. Since it is this particular being that has a pungent aroma or that keeps the vampire and other monsters at bay, I don’t see why we can’t say that, under certain conditions, we do discover certain salient endo-relations of the garlic itself — even if this discovery is only indirect, by virtue of a proxy of relation, a vicar, etc. It reminds me of the arche-fossil argument — any kind of indirect knowledge of what the object would do or be is certainly laborious and difficult to reach, but if we can say what an object would probably be like outside any human perception, it sounds like we are saying outside any sentient perception, and also, by virtue of the ontologization of the Kantian thing-in-itself, we are also saying, at least in an indirect way, something of what this object would be without any relation, whatsoever.
On the other hand, perhaps we can say that, while we may be able to say what an object is like without a sentient observer, we can’t subtract it from every single relation which might impress itself at any given moment in our experiments.
Then again, reading Harman, my sense is that whatever can be said in any sense — predicated — of an object is still not predicated of the real object, but of a quality. The real object slips incessantly beyond any kind of relation, like a giant squid resting just below a raging tempest.
I could very well be wrong, but I find myself contrasting Harman’s real object with your endo-relation — Harman’s seems asymptotic with regard to any knowledge whatsoever, whereas your endo-relation seems to partially — but only ever partially, to be sure — reveal itself in its exo-relations. In any case, just thinking some things out, here. Both of your cases are so incredibly close as to be nonantagonistic, it seems to me, but more research on my part is necessary.
One more thing, it seems you both would come to similar conclusions with your thought experiment of “last object in the universe” — I wonder if Harman weighed in on this experiment, or if he would? Of course both of your objects would still exist — rejecting relationalism as you both rightly do — but I wonder if more might be said of the quality of that existence. For instance, the endo-relation might be partially or indirectly revealed when we see certain features or consistences of the object disappear when absolutely isolated from other objects. You had some interesting things to say about that in terms of powers, etc. But Harman doesn’t seem to speak about the powers of the real object, as he does not want to risk even the slight confusion of the real object with potential or the virtual (not your virtual). It’s a very interesting and subtle distinction in your respective ontologies that I can’t wait to further explore when the texts come out.
June 12, 2010 at 8:14 pm
Thanks for taking the time to respond to my questions. I’m going to read the posts you recommended in your reply and write my response later.
Just a few things:
I would like to say that my ‘problem’ with ‘feminist theory’ isn’t with Donna Haraway. Personally, I think her Cyborg Manifesto is inspiring. Rather, my problem is with theorists like Sandra Harding (e.g. Newton’s rape manual) and Luce Irigaray (e.g. fluid mechanics). I just find it difficult to want to do science after reading their work. They are not exactly what I would call inspiring.
Actually, as a scientist (and a man), they make me feel quite horrible.
At the moment, I suppose, I am struggling with the whole idea of science.
June 12, 2010 at 8:31 pm
Just one more thing: I have to say that, while the sciences are certainly indispensable for understanding objects in and under certain conditions and so on, I completely agree with Harman when he says that pro-sciences and pro-real are not identical. While we don’t want a schizophrenic practice of philosophical and scientific investigations utterly disconnected and not talking to one another, we have to, at every turn, affirm the radical disjunction of the reality of the object with any of its contexts, while at the same time affirming that the object is working behind what it appears to be in some sense. I’ve always been fascinated by the rose when it comes to the fault line of knowledge of the rose and the rose’s being. I think Žižek’s idea of parallax views needs to be rescued from his own epistemology and rechristened with the ontological champagne bottle: instead of reality being a gap between knowledges as such, a kind of negativity, an empty space, the real object positively and actively resists all attempts at knowledge, drawing further within itself as knowledge, in a desperate attempt to penetrate the object carnally, splits and splits into an epistemological legion outside the walls of the object itself. Knowledge, therefore, can only proliferate and multiply in the face of the dark night of the object. It certainly reveals both the value and necessity of our knowledge but, maybe more importantly, its radical limits when discussing the heart of things (whereas relations seem not to hide too much at all).
June 12, 2010 at 9:45 pm
Nice thoughts here.
Whenever someone worries about what becomes of knowledge under this model, my first thought is to ask them what became of knowledge in the hands of Socrates in the Meno? Not much left of knowledge there, but that doesn’t mean all our statements are reduced to sophistry.
When in doubt about what philosophy really is, Plato’s always your man. We’re so used to “overcoming” and “reversing” him that we’ve forgotten most of what he taught us.
June 12, 2010 at 11:06 pm
I don’t think it’s entirely a mishearing that “construction” is heard as implying “illusory” or “false”. A rhetoric of illusion is the most common opening move I’ve heard from science-studies circles. Something like: scientists think their experiments reveal something about X, but if we investigate further, we will uncover that what they actually reveal is something about the discourse surrounding X. Folks like David Bloor say that pretty explicitly, taking up the thesis that the outcome of every scientific experiment must be read as revealing something only about humans, human institutions, human discourses, human ideologies, etc., and ought never to be read as giving any information about nonhuman objects.
June 13, 2010 at 10:01 am
Jim. Latour is the guy you want to read if Haraway is a bit too bleak. he has two short 1996 essays on his site that work on time and just what happened when Pasteur and the microbes intervened in each others histories: “trains of thought” and “do scientific objects” have a history?” (http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/1996.html). he makes use of Whitehead in the latter, not to do epistemology (as he might be accused of around here?), but for an ontology of occasions. if you’re alright with objects never being selfsame in history it should work for you though.
now going from that kind of master-ontology he has gone on to describe somewhat formally what science does/should do. that’s scattered, but the best essay for me is “how to talk about the body” (http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/77-BODY%20NORMATIVE.pdf). with the help of Stengers and Despret he develops a theory of good scientific knowledge generation.
alternatively you might also want to read Karen Barad (Meeting the Universe Half-Way). here agential realism is as hard-nosed as any of the old epistemologists pretended to be, with the simple difference that scientists and the things they study are allowed to make more differences with each other.
crucial to both is the notion that after science is done nothing comes out unchanged, time is a serious player, whereas so many epistemologies pretend to be able to act in freeze-framed scientist-object worlds.
Mark. David Bloor means it when he says it. Anyone working with the many post-ANT approaches would not fall into that trap. but I agree, although precisely on-point the word “construction” has been discredited with a wider public. I like to think with the notion of “making-do”. the things implied in a happening “make each other do” (here the scientist and her setup) and they “make-do” because they have no recourse outside of history, acting to make difference with whatever will be moved with their action.
you use the word in-formation yourself. I feel that that captures a lot of what science does. it has certain methods for putting things in various form. it does ordering operations that change the scientists brain, his papers and the “object” she plays with. all are in-formed in process. the revealing-metaphor only works if you think that science does not in-form as it inquires. pulling-the-veil worked with stable-subject-object narratives, but not when time and more-than-human agency are taken seriously.
cheers.
stefan
June 13, 2010 at 6:39 pm
[...] a Comment In response to a previous post responding to Christopher Vitale and my post on OOO and Epistemology, there’s been some interesting discussion of precisely how objects are individuated. [...]
June 14, 2010 at 12:04 pm
Levi wrote:”When we’re doing science what we’re doing is placing objects or generative mechanisms in particular contexts or relations to other objects to discover how they act or what they do. That is, we’re acting on objects to provoke actions in objects so as to see how objects act under these conditions. ”
The claim that objects have potentialities or virtual aspects that are differentially manifest is appealing. But presumably we need an ontology of virtualities which can account for their manifestation and explain science’s success in understanding those powers.
The claim that experiments tell us about how things behave in experimental conditions doesn’t seem satisfy this desideratum as it stands. What’s the point of an experiment? Crudely, to isolate a system such that we can determine the effects of some hypothesized causal influence – an independent variable (IV) – on some observable or measurable dependent variable (DV).
Suppose the predicted change occurs. The orthodox assumption is that this fact together with the fact that we’ve isolated the system from extraneous variables provide defeasible reasons for the existence and extent of the IV.
But if we add the generalization that experiments only tell us how things behave under experimental conditions this inference is blocked, no matter how well the effect is experimentally replicated. We wanted to know if an IV exists and the extent of its power to influence the DV, not an empirical generalization about the behaviour objects under artificial conditions. Claims about the existence and extent of causal influences go beyond generalizations about the behaviour of the DV under experimental conditions.
I’m not contesting the central ontological claim, but I just wonder if there is a way in which we can retain it in a way that accounts for for the rationality of scientific inference?
June 15, 2010 at 1:49 pm
[...] to some of the claims that Levi has been making for a while (most recently in this series of posts: here, here and here) to the effect that ontology must ground [...]