Over at notes for a later time, Thomas has an excellent post up responding to my critique of theoretical monism yesterday. There’s a lot in Thomas’s post, but I wanted to draw attention to this passage in particular:
The difference Levi draws between theoretical monism and pluralism (which I may have to borrow), correctly captures the bricolage quality that should overcome a lot of the pitfalls of closed structures (reductive? hegemonic? hierarchical?) that rely on a singular, static master concept for their explanation. This is one of the common threads in Latour’s critique of the “sociology of the social”, Whitehead’s “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”, Parsons’ critique of Positivism/Idealism, and Marx’s critique of Political Economy. In each case, we have a conceptual agent that does all the work in the order of things without itself being explained.* We may as well have recourse to “God”. Flat Ontology’s position that all entities are agents in reality activates material and immaterial conditions to create an action situation that is active in the truest sense [my emphasis]. Instead of an instance of action between subject and an object, we have an interaction of multiple agents that initiates a variety of processes that are identified by their significance to the observer.
There’s a lot of nice stuff in Thomas’s post, so please take the time to read it. I hadn’t thought about it in quite these terms before, but I think Thomas is essentially right. There are two basic criticisms I’ve heard directed against OOO, one based on just plain ignorance and word connotation, the one slightly better yet still based on connotations. This first line of criticism seems to hear the word “object-oriented” and concludes that OOO is a scientific realism that wishes, after the fashion of Ayn Rand, to champion a sort of “objectivism” against “subjectivism”. This criticism still works in the nature/culture distinction, where either nature or culture is the real. Yet it’s precisely that thesis that OOO elides. Cultural entities, for OOO, are every bit as real as natural entities and vice versa. The second criticism worries that OOO has no place for the subject. Yet here the problem is the same. One still thinks within the framework of an opposition between subject and object and concludes that if OOO is championing objects, it must be rejecting subjects. Yet for OOO, subjects are one type of object among other types of objects. In other words, for OOO there is no subject/object opposition, there are just objects.
This second criticism also seems to worry that OOO reduces everything to passivity. The subject/object opposition is indexed to the active/passive distinction. Subjects are the active in that they act on the world, while objects are the passive in that they are acted upon (Zizek formulates exactly this position at the beginning of The Parallex View). As a consequence, the person adopting this criticism might concede that for OOO subjects are objects, while objecting (pardon the pun) that OOO has thereby reduced subjects to passivity, undermining their agency. What I like about Thomas’s formulation is that it captures the sense in which for OOO the point is not that everything is passive, but rather that OOO wishes to think everything as an agent or as active. Hence the idea of agental realism.
November 26, 2010 at 4:26 am
I wonder, however, what realm of movement we have after culling passivity from the realm of objects. Not that there are any objects which are truly passive (though maybe after the asymptopic heat death of the universe? Except you still have the dark energy and is it then a passive object in its constant, even exhalation or is it just the last active object and how then do we define THIS activity of expanding the fabric of space-time into boundless dimensionless NOTHING-nothingness without portraying this NOTHING-nothingness as a passive background?) BUT — can we still have a plurality of degrees of activity/agency within objects and, if so, how do we avoid some of the problems brought on by pluralistic monisms (i.e., wouldn’t passivity simply become an ideal, unstated and empty background for the agency of everything, similar to the NOTHING-nothingness against which the universe expands)? This reminds me of Poe’s idea of ascending degrees of substance leading ultimately to the mass/matterless substance which composes the panpsychic mind. But these spectrum models always feel like they settle too much in lukewarm equilibrium. Can/does OOO operate with a cut or split ontological base, as in Zizek and Badiou? If so, is it just shifting this foundational cut (the subject/agent) from individuals or collections of individuals to all objects in varying degree?
November 26, 2010 at 3:00 pm
Hey Levi, I’m emerging temporarily from a haze of persistent sickness and busy-ness just to mark my absolute agreement here. This, I think, is the key (re?)discovery of what might be called the “ontological turn” be it Latour, Harman, Bryant, Ivakhiv, or others – that the world is made up of many different kinds of actors. That to reduce the world to a single type of agency – signifier, power, economics, humans, etc. – is to do violence to all of the other types of agency that come into play, including ourselves!
We recently had a discussion in my ANTH theory class talking about structuralism. One of my classmates – who is very good with critical theory – said something to the effect that, while systems may change, the underlying power structures don’t. For example, unions may win an 8-hour work day or enact child labor laws, but it doesn’t change the fundamental structure of capitalism and the underlying power relations. I found myself asking, then, how do we account for change? And what is this thing – “power relations” – that is so determining and so rigid that it never changes?
The discussion became very bleak, realizing that there is nothing we can do to change the system. But I think that the despair is misplaced. Of course there’s nothing to be done about something as abstract and determining as a “power structure.” But what does that even mean? If we operationalize that term – draw out the myriad processes and relations that constitute the “power structure” as a good OOOist, PROist, etc. would do – then we can see possible avenues for change, possible points of intervention, possible bifurcations.
This is why I like this ontological turn so much – it opens these processes up to look at what’s actually going on and cuts through the iron cage of despair like a hot katana through butter.