In the opening pages of Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Jane Bennett puts her finger on what I would call the central materialist aspiration of my own onticology. Bennett writes,
The political project of the book is, to put it most ambitiously, to encourage more intelligent and sustainable engagements with vibrant matter and lively things. A guiding question: How would political responses to public problems change were we to take seriously the vitality of (nonhuman) bodies? By “vitality” I mean the capacity of things– edibles, commodities, storms, metals –not only impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own. My aspiration is to articulate a vibrant materiality that runs alongside and inside humans to see how analyses of political events might change if we gave the force of things more due. How, for example, would patterns of consumption change if we faced not litter, rubbish, trash, or “the recycling,” but an accumulating pile of lively and potentially dangerous matter? What difference would it make to public health if eating was understood as an encounter between various and variagated bodies, some of them mine, most of them not, and none of which always gets the upper hand? What issues would surround stem cell research in the absence of the assumption that the only source of vitality in matter is a soul or spirit? What difference would it make to the course of energy policy were electricity to be figured not simply as a resource, commodity, or instrumentality but also and more radically as an “actant”?
The term is Bruno Latour’s: an actant is a source of action that can be either human or nonhuman; it is that which has efficacy, can do things, has sufficient coherence to make a difference, produce effects, alter the course of events. It is "any entity that modifies another entity in a trial," something whose "competence is deduced from [its] performance" rather than posited in advance of the action. (viii)
It could be said that there are roughly two types of materialism. There is, on the one hand, that materialism that sees “…matter as a passive stuff, as raw, brute, or inner” (vii). Conceived in this way, manner is purely passive and is thought in a matter akin to the relationship between wax and a signet ring. Here the wax, of course, is matter. The question is what is the signet ring? In this kind of materialism the answer is always the same: human intentionality and activity. Whether in the form of human concepts, language, signs, labor, etc., matter is seen as a passive stuff that merely receives the impress of the human. At most matter is treated as that which resists the human will to impress our form upon it. Matter is denied any agency of its own. Matter instead dumbly awaits our impress of form. Whenever we speak with Hegel of “objective spirit” or “externalized spirit” or with Marx of matter as “dead labor” we are implicitly endorsing this sort of materialism.
Of course, it is clear that this isn’t a materialism at all, but rather a crypto-idealism. If this is a crypto-materialism, then this is because it treats externalized human thought in matter as the only thing that is relevant. The matter is treated as if it were only a medium, a vehicle, carrying human concepts and intentions. Here our mode of analysis is one in which all of nature is but a reflection, a mirror, of us. We call ourselves materialists because we don’t merely analyzes concepts and thoughts after the manner of Hegel and Kant, but instead analyze institutions, practices, and “material conditions”. Yet oddly, in this “materialism”, we treat all of nature as an externalized reflection of our own aims, intentions, concepts, meanings, etc. In this “materialism”, the human somehow remains the central reference point and matter is like a canvas upon which humans externalize their own intentions. Lucretius would spin in his grave were it not for the fact that he’s dead and his consciousness has expired.
read on!
By contrast, the sort of materialism that Bennett argues for and which I advocate in my onticology treats nonhuman entities as full-blown actants or actors. Here nonhuman entities are never merely wax for human intentions and aims, but are rather actors in their own right irreducible to human intention. They are not passive stuff awaiting human imprint, but rather act in ways that exceed and condition human aims. They do not merely resist human intentions, blocking our goals and aims, but unfold in their own animated ways. Consider two ways of talking about cows. The crypto-idealist materialist would talk about the history of cows as one in which humans domesticated cows, clearing land and raising them so as to provide a reliable food source that allowed human populations to increase. This is not untrue, but is only part of the story. The onticologist, by contrast, would talk about how cows enlisted humans, domesticated humans, in their age old war against forests and their predators. Remember that from an evolutionary perspective, the only relevant thing is the manner in which different organisms devise strategies that enhance their possibilities of reproduction. Viewed through this lens, it is equally valid to say that cows exploited human desires for fat, compelling us to clear forests and protect them from predators, enhancing their reproductive possibilities. But domestication doesn’t end here. It is not simply that cows domesticated us in the sense of leading us to develop a set of practices such as raising cows and clearing forests so they would have more grazing land. No, the conspiracy of cows against humanity go far deeper. It is likely that cows also introduced extreme selective pressure on human populations dependent on cows for food, weeding out those members of our species that couldn’t tolerate high-beef diets and selecting for those that could. It’s likely that in many human populations cows changed our very genetics. As Scu has argued, we are addicted to meat. This addiction, in part, was carefully cultivated by cows themselves.
Note well, I am not saying this is good or that this morally justifies our ugly and ecological destructive treatment of livestock. I am saying that there are a variety of different teleologies involved in the evolution of cows. Some involved human aims. Others involved nonhumans such as chickens, cows, pigs, lamb, etc. The same could equally be argued for various grasses such as wheat, as well as a variety of other plants upon which we’re deeply dependent. And, I would argue, the same would be true of technologies, social groups, and texts.
At this point, sociology becomes, as Latour has noted in Reassembling the Social and elsewhere, entirely different. If it is true that the world of actants includes both humans and nonhumans, we can no longer assume, in the manner in the crypto-idealist materialists, that sociology is exclusively the domain of humans. There will never be a society composed just of humans because humans always dwell among a variety of different agencies including humans but also including all sorts of nonhumans. These nonhumans are never just wax for human intentions, but introduce all sorts of differences of their own that are irreducible to human intentions. We thus get an asymmetry. Following Whitehead there will be many societies that don’t involve humans at all. Such is true of the chemical processes taking place on Jupiter, or, until more recently, the sociology of coral reefs. By contrast, there will, at other times, be societies that include humans such as cities, while nonetheless containing many actants or actors of a nonhuman variety besides. Any social analysis that does not take these other actors into account is doomed to be horribly distorted and misguided. The question, then, for the vibrant materialist and onticologist will always be “what does it do?” The refusal will be any form of analysis that reduces nonhuman actants to mere wax for human intentions. There lies the fundamental dividing line.
As we watch the nuclear meltdown at the Fukishima power plant, here are some questions we might ask: What difference does an earthquake make? What difference does a tsunami make? What differences do nuclear power plants make? What do all of these things do in their specific affective circumstances? The point is not to deny the role of things such as capital, capitalism, and interests, but to understand these things as genuine actors in these societies or assemblages of association. For example, what new possibilities arise as a result of people’s encounters with all these agencies? So long as we remain at the level of the signifier, concepts, meanings, this level of analysis remains entirely invisible. We miss both opportunity and the manner in which all sorts of nonhuman agencies, all sorts of agencies that can’t be reduced to human intentions, condition us. The point is not to denigrate humans, but to see humans among other beings. If you don’t make this move your “materialism” has the flavor of a monotheistic narrative that continues to see persons as the sovereigns and lords of being. It’s difficult to see how such a position could possibly be materialist regardless of how much one insists that it is. A word does not a materialism or realism make.
Larval Subjects . 
May 21, 2011 at 3:13 am
Levi,
In an odd twist, would take your thesis even further, but in a different direction. I would say that as far as Society goes, the socius — as a single, unitary phenomenon, irrespective of borders or terrestrial boundaries — is only as old as capitalism. Before the rise of capitalism, there were only so many individual, disconnected societies. Only with the spread of capitalism and its homogenizing medium of exchange could we even begin to conceptualize this entity we call “Society.” It is thus no surprise that sociology would only carve itself out as a discipline in the mid-19th century, with Comte, Durkheim, Weber, and Simmel.
As regards “actants,” and agency in general, I would assign more free activity to Capital that I would to any biological organism — an impersonal, necrotic substance that is at the same time subject. If one reads about Hegel’s notion of Absolute Spirit, consciousness that has itself as its own object, it becomes clear that for him it is Mind actualizing itself through history that tells the story. But if we then look to Marx’s Capital, in his chapter on the category of capital itself, one can see that this is his version of the Hegelian simultaneous subject-object of history. It is self-valorizing value — or in other words, value that has value as its object, such that it becomes the “automatic subject” of its own activity. It ceaselessly seeks to augment itself, slipping through intermediate forms such as commodities, money, or labor itself in order to more fully realize itself.
Concerning humanity, I think you misplace human subjectivity within the context of Marx’s materialism. To the extent that it can be said to act at all, it acts under great constraints. “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Dead labor, the congealed social labor of all past generations, not only structures our own living activity, but acts in certain ways of its own accord. It is as if our great-grandparents — or the dead themselves — exercise a ghostly and yet material power over us. This is no crypto-idealism, it is instead the materialism of the crypt.
With respect to animals, however, I think that Engels makes a pertinent distinction:
May 21, 2011 at 3:58 am
And I would suppose the classic philosophical objection would be that only humans have intentionality as a sort of understanding of ends requiring certain means to accomplish them. So it would be erroneous to ascribe a teleology to any of these other things, because the purposivity inherent in the telos would be missing. This is not to say that they do not have their own consequences, or the results of their own dumb activity. The causa efficiens would be more proper to invoke than some sort of causa finalis. Unless you’re a Spinozist, in which case it would all be purely efficient causation.
May 21, 2011 at 4:18 am
Sure adds a twist to the phrase “idle hands are the devil’s play-things.”
May 21, 2011 at 4:59 am
Yes, it seems ‘politically desirable’ but…there can be a ‘matter’ which is certainly irreducible to human intentions but does not, nevertheless, initiate causal series, but reacts to or continues them (yes, matter is a ‘quasi-agent’ – i.e., apparently, but not really, a source of causal series. The causality is transeunt). It is not ‘idealist’ to argue that only empsyched beings (not necessarily humans) initiate causal series..
‘Cows and cars continue causal series coming from their milieu: both of them resume chemical reactions, from the remote past when burning off fossil fuel and from more recent photosyntheses when chewing grass.
News reported in this article allow us to better tell apart a cow from a car. The physical actions impinging from outside on the cow’s psyche generate in it what now appears as a special type of physical reactions, called intonations, whose causal efficiency gets exhausted – so that they cannot continue the causal series. In exchange, they get sensorially known.
The cow’s mind may then take physically efficient initiatives – the ones whereby minds acquire intellectual development – generating variations, in quantity or distribution of the motion they originate, as an effect of internal forces. This ap-pears to be why, during the course of evolution, minds become selected as the up-permost regulatory level of organisms thriving in environments that impel these or-ganisms to overcome the Turing machine’s limits (i. e., to progress toward adaptive goals through appropriate steps for which the instructions are nonetheless undefin-able), acquiring the ability to turn accidents into opportunities.
Those forces can be observed by their influence on the evolutionary process, and their action carriers’ features are found constrained by a number of neuropsychological and clinical observations.’ (Crocco, On Minds’ Localization).
(Crocc, Palindrome).
It seems that Stengers has recently written an essay on ‘animism’ in English. I’ll check the details.
May 21, 2011 at 5:36 am
In case of any ambiguity:
May 21, 2011 at 6:08 am
I’m not so sure that Marx’s dead labor implicitly endorses such a crypto-idealist materialism–Marx was very clear that “dead labor” carries a force and teleology of its own. His materialism was also very clear in showing how the force of human action can come into conflict with other nonhuman forces–his entire bit on soil science borrowed from Justus von Liebig, for instance, where he shows that the ends of the soil are not compatible with the ends of industrial agriculture. Yes, the materialist project of Capital is still anthropocentric, but that’s because it is a work on human economy–i.e., the “human metabolism with nature.”
I am also unconvinced that there are really just the two options you present here. I certainly agree with both as you’ve laid them out, but I’ve never entirely understood why the position of someone like Bennett need necessarily be vitalist in order to accommodate the force of non-human entities. It seems like the materialism of Lucretius or scientific naturalism more generally easily renders this sheer non-human force without portraying it as “agency” or necessarily “vital.” Maybe it is just a semantic distinction–but if it is, then why opt for the vitalist language which can so easily be conflated with a million different variants of spiritualist bullshit in popular culture? Half the time it is just begging for misinterpretation! I fully understand the usage if it is also associated with some form of pan-psychism–but if not, why can’t we just use ideas already well established within the sciences, rather than muddying what we mean by words like “intent” and “agency”? Why not go the opposite direction and make those words even more exclusive, applicable only to moments of specific plastic brain activity or explicitly reflexive consciousness? Why not “reduce” the rest to the language of contingency, emergence and formal constraint?
May 21, 2011 at 6:57 am
I love all of this and I must get Jane Bennett’s book. It sounds like an imperative read.
I had a tangential thought about this idea of actor as you quoted above from Bennett — and her quoting Latour — in relation to the Harmanian thesis of ontological withdrawal. To me, there is absolutely no conflict, or need be no conflict, between this more relational, Latourian analysis (actors defined as anything that makes a different, that changes the course of things, that makes a situation slightly different than it would have been [or very different]) and the idea that objects are withdrawn, fundamental units. To me, these are both necessary to form a cogent philosophy — we have to have the Latourian point, because if we do have to deduce object’s existence through its various effects, its agencies and powers, the times it acts and the times it refuses to act, its resistances and its submissions, all the while maintaining that that methodology doesn’t commit us to saying that, ontological, these entities are nothing but these contingent, relational effects and actions. The difficulty is only when, as Harman argues Latour in fact does against his own intentions, we transform this perfectly viable epistemological method into a first ontology of unity and relation. I only bring this up to improvise on your excellent post because I think for many this is a kind of stumbling block to accepting or understanding the cogency and coherence of OOO — even, maybe, by Latour himself (given the wonderful three hour dialogue between him and Graham that will be published soon). The step toward commodity (broadly understood) to actor is necessary, and then so is, too, the move from actor — an act-ing — to the fundamental or paradigmatic unity which produces that action.
Sorry that this is only tangentially related, but I wanted to hash what I often think is a sort of taxonomic confusion between the methods we use to sort and discern entities and the theory of those entities as they are themselves.
It also absolutely strengthens your “alien domestication” theory, as these actors, such as the cow, will always have a residual or reserved unity which, to steal completely inaccurately, but I think significantly, from the brilliant Kuhn, “cannot be fully reduced to logically atomic components which might function in its stead[.]” (p 11, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. We aren’t dealing with decontextualized or free-floating activities, but actions made possible by a basic organization (the object).
Your theory here about the coevolution of cows and humans reminds me of that fantastic Halloween episode of The Simpsons in which Homer creates a time-traveling toaster and continually alters biological evolution in some small way that sometimes has huge consequences, but sometimes only minimal ones. The exaggerated philosophical point here, it seems to me, is that, had certain actors not been in the environment (Homer steps on a fish and a bug at one point), this changes the course of the human’s coevolution, too. Animals, plants, other sentient agents and nonsentient ones as well are all on an equal ontological playing field when it comes to agency and transformation. And as Gould often so eloquently, if a bit darkly, put it, there is no reason to assume human consciousness separates or gives us any advantage to our evolutionary history and that, from the perspective of other actors this consciousness has come in very handy for their own advantages.
For me, your work, Graham’s, etc, is all part of a tapestry of seeing how consciousness and human history are not even in a “equal” binary or level dualism — it’s the point that there is, and never way, any binary, any fundamental ontological difference between humans the nonhuman in the first place. This completely changes the style of philosophy, and I await your book with great enthusiasm. I have a feeling it will be like Braudel’s fantastic work on capitalism. It isn’t that the information isn’t out there, but it needs people like you to bring it together into a powerful working theory, as you are doing here.
May 21, 2011 at 7:02 am
Ack, the punctuation and syntax of the above is not so good — I need to proofread before I hit “post.” Still, please forgive the mess.
May 21, 2011 at 8:24 am
[Principles of the Evolutionary Process from Sri Aurobindo Studies
Sri Aurobindo has outlined this very succinctly in this chapter: “At the outset, we can easily see that, since this is an evolution out of a material Inconscience into spiritual consciousness, an evolutionary self-building of Spirit on a base of Matter, there must be in the process a development of a triple character. An evolution of forms of Matter more and more subtly and intricately organised so as to admit the action of a growing, a more and more complex and subtle and capable organisation of consciousness is the indispensable physical foundation. An upward evolutionary progress of the consciousness itself from grade to higher grade, an ascent, is the evident spiral line or emerging curve that, on this foundation, the evolution must describe. A taking up of what has already been evolved into each higher grade as it is reached and a transformation more or less complete so as to admit of a total changed working of the whole being and nature, an integration, must be also part of the process, if the evolution is to be effective.” Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Book 2, Part 2, Chapter 18, The Evolutionary Process — Ascent and Integration]
May 21, 2011 at 12:35 pm
i’m with stanley on bennett, but have enough interest in stengers to see where this all goes (when it doesn’t lead to say aurobindo, or his student corrington):
http://www.extracity.org/en/projects/videos/52
May 21, 2011 at 1:08 pm
@Paul Bains: I may be missing something, but isn’t this view of minds as a different kind of entity, whose causation acts differently from that of non-minds and is self-initiated outside the usual causal chains (in the sense of “semovience”), rather close to a version of dualism?
It seems its effects are similar, at least: we have one kind of substance, inert matter, which reacts directly to causal chains; and a second kind of substance, minds, which can both act as recipients of those causal chains, as well as initiate new ones sua sponte.
And it seems like it would inherit all the problems of dualism: does semovient causation escape any of the usual problems that plague dualists’ theories of “mental causation”? Does it prove an account of how these minds, with their different kind of causation, could have actually arisen historically in the world (versus being posited or preexisting)? [The answers might be yes; those aren’t purely rhetorical questions.]
May 21, 2011 at 1:35 pm
Stanley,
A couple of points. With respect to Marx the thesis that he’s discussing human economy doesn’t fly as one of the central points is that there is no purely human social assemblage that could be separated out in the way you suggest. Second, I detest the term “vitalism” as it seems to be a slur word designed to suggest that one holds that entities have some secret inner mystical power that animates them. Neither I nor Bennett are suggesting such anthing. The point is that matter can’t be reduced to some passive lump upon which humans impose form, but rather acts in all sorts of ways. There’s nothing mystical about the chemical processes taking place in a land fill, but those chemicals are acting nonetheless.
May 21, 2011 at 3:19 pm
Levi,
Well, I doubt anyone would contest that matter “acts” insofar as they possess energies and inertias of their own. Yet this proceeds generally without consciousness, with dumb, unthinking efficiency. Even with nonhuman animals the extent to which their actions are performed in a conscious, purposive manner must be seen to be extremely limited. Matter and nature has numerous potentialities, which likewise can be actualized with or without the activity of humans. But again there is no conscious telos that they follow, unless one wants to posit some sort of providential deity that consciously directs the activities of nature towards certain ends.
I do not contest your theory about the domestication of humans, however. That clearly took place. But the manner in which it took place was more the subjugation of man by man, and of women in general by men. With the beginning of primitive agricultural societies, women were cruelly reduced “domestic slaves,” and most men also lived in conditions of unfreedom.
May 21, 2011 at 3:23 pm
Also, Stanley’s post and my own are again almost identical in their argument. Marx’s materialism was much more subtle and nuanced than you seem to be giving it credit.
May 21, 2011 at 3:42 pm
Marx has his moments where he approaches somethi g like what I’m talking about, but their far from being a center-piece of his though. Marx pretty much fully embraces the Hegelian thesis of spirit externalizing itself in matter. This comes out most clearly in his earlier work where he’s still speaking in terms of “species-being”, but persists throughout all of his work. I think the model I outline is especially evident in the Frankfurt school theorists where matter is treated as a mere vehicle of human meanings.
May 21, 2011 at 4:02 pm
Stengers on opening the Pandora’s Box of non-human actors and political theory:
http://www.international-festival.org/node/28646
May 21, 2011 at 4:05 pm
Thanks for the link, dmf. I believe that Latour’s essay “A Collective of Humans and Nonhumans” in Pandora’s Hope is the go-to essay for all of this. The whole point is to get in the habit of asking, with respect to everything, “what does it do?”… Not as a vehicle of human intentions, uses, and concepts, nor as a part of a overall system of exchange-value, but rather what differences does the thing in question itself contribute. There are models of analysis and interrogation that completely occlude this. If, for example, you’re entirely focused on the dynamics of exchange-value and the production of surplus-value you will miss all this.
May 21, 2011 at 5:36 pm
my pleasure Levi, I’m with you on the “what does it Do” question (I’m not part of the Marx is The Answer crowd), and so our mutual admiration for Latour and Pickering, I’m just not as sold on our ability to sort out our uses/desires of/for things/objects and our speaking for them as they are. But as a pragmatist I’m most interested (here blogging) in what our ideas/words can do or not, what difference they make (Stengers should drop Starhawk and all but I appreciate her emphasis on rhetoric and intentions), and so I agree with Stanley on Bennett, part of how I judge a theory/project is by what it attracts/echoes, and OOO/Sr seems to be haunted by something akin to pantheism. Reader response isn’t everything but it matters.
May 21, 2011 at 5:45 pm
For the Frankfurt School theorists, matter was not the vehicle of human meanings. Their positions were solidly materialistic. Adorno states explicitly in his Negative Dialectics that “It is by passing to the object’s preponderance that dialectics is rendered materialistic.” And further: “Materialism is not the dogma indicted by clever opponents, but a dissolution of things understood as dogmatic; hence its right to a place in critical philosophy.”
This is so not only for Horkheimer and Adorno, but also for Frankfurt School writers like Friedrich Pollock and Leo Lowenthal. They examined objects of culture, but always from a materialistic theory of the social. And so they produced sociologies of literature, music, and the culture industry. Their Marxist successors, such as David Harvey and Moishe Postone, have also been thoroughly materialistic.
And as far as “species-being” goes, you are right to point out that it was part of his earlier attempts to theorize capitalism and humanity. By the time he wrote Capital, virtually no trace of this thought remained, except, perhaps, sublated in the form of “generalized human knowledge.”
May 21, 2011 at 6:40 pm
Quite the contrary Ross. The project behind demystification consists in showing human meaning and power behind all formations. That’s thoroughly idealistic regardless of what it wishes to call itself. All of being becomes a mirror. Adorno’s non-conceptual difference remains in this orbit insofar as it still sees being or existence merely as that which resists human conceptuality, not as something positively contributing differences to assemblages. What I’m proposing would require a completely reworking of Marxist thought because it would prohibit us from treating “relations to things as merely disguised relations between men.”. Things would no longer be vehicles for exclusively human dramas.
Dmf, no disagreement. Humans have “thing-power” or are actants too. The point is just that they aren’t the only actants involved in assemblages.
May 21, 2011 at 7:58 pm
Bennett is a little bit vitalist. If you read her earlier stuff, on Thoreau, or her later stuff, on Whitman, her engagement with deep ecology is quite clear.
May 21, 2011 at 7:58 pm
Levi,
In that case I’m not really sure why you’d even want to still call it Marxism, because the central point of commodity fetishism is that relationships between things (commodities) mask or veil the hidden social relations (labor). Marx’s whole social critique is that human agency is limited (a) by nature, and (b) by dead labor, or preexisting social conditions, and the forces they entail. Once humanity would master its own form of social organization, and no longer be constrained by the impersonal, alien agency of Capital, humanity would become masters of its own destiny, and become the lord and master of nature itself.
So at this point I would simply advise you disavow Marxism wholesale, because I don’t think that his thought can be reinterpreted into this framework you’re proposing.
May 21, 2011 at 8:13 pm
Tim,
vitalism has a distinct meaning referring to animating forces other than matter. Bennett states clearly, in numerous places that she categorically rejects such a thesis. If she did I’d drop her thought and the thought of anyone else like a hot potato on par with enthusiasts of astrology.
May 21, 2011 at 8:16 pm
Ross,
if you’re looking for an orthodoxy here you won’t find it. I find some things of value in Marx just as I do in the case of a number of other philosophers. I also think he’s mistaken on certain points. As for the Frankfurt school I largely see these thinkers as a catastrophic betrayal of Marxist materialism and attempt to domesticate his thought back in the fold of bourgois idealism.
May 21, 2011 at 8:49 pm
I don’t agree that Marx thinks we will become lord and master of nature, he says we will bring our metabolism with nature under rational control, not nature itself. Of course many others have interpreted Marx the way Ross has, and its not a ridiculous interpretation or anything, but I think it’s wrong.
May 21, 2011 at 9:00 pm
Levi,
I could see you making a case for a “catastrophic betrayal” of Marxist materialism for Fromm, Marcuse, Habermas, and the late (1970s) Horkheimer, but not for Adorno, the early Horkheimer, or Lowenthal. And certainly not Pollock. The main inspirations for their work, Georg, Lukacs, Ernst Bloch, Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin were all staunch Marxists, as well. It’s with the French that Marxism gets dicey, with Althusser and Balibar and so on. Badiou is a Maoist; I think that speaks for itself. I would still say that Henri Lefebvre is salvageable. With all of these thinkers, far from assimilating Marx to bourgeois thought, their work was a relentless critique of bourgeois ideology from beginning to end.
And I would hardly claim that my own Marxism is orthodox, in the Stalinist-Maoist sense, where everything’s reducible to just class struggle and bourgeois ideology. I think that the central dynamic of capitalism is not private property or class struggle, but the category of capital itself. Indeed, in the areas where capital has most developed, the class struggle has been blunted by all sorts of measures. There has been no mainstream revolutionary working class movement in the heart of capitalism since the defeat and liquidation of the KPD by the Nazis. Yet you’ll still hear most Trotskyists (the Spartacists, ISO, IMT, etc.) and Maoists (RCP or FRSO) clamoring for immediate proletarian takeover, even though there’s barely anything close to an anti-capitalist consciousness among the workers.
So I don’t demand orthodoxy, I just question why you would still cling to the title of being a “committed Marxist,” as you characterized yourself to me before. If you just pick and choose which parts of Marx’s thought you want to integrate into your syncretistic overall philosophy, just say so.
And I’d be inclined to agree with Stanley and Tim Morton about the vitalistic undertones to this universal agency of nature. The only way you can posit some sort of teleology for creatures or objects that obviously have no consciousness of the relationship between means and ends is if you presume them to have some sort of inner life-force, driving them towards certain ends. I highly doubt that the cows you described sat down and conferred amongst themselves how best scheme to use humanity (at its stage of primitive agriculture) to protect them from predators. I certainly don’t doubt that animals act, but domesticated animals — and domesticatable animals in general — presume a certain pliancy in their “willingness” to live according to the needs and desires of humanity,
May 21, 2011 at 10:02 pm
Chris,
I didn’t suggest Marx says that. I pointed out that for Marx nature is mostly dead and passive matter that takes on human form through our practice. The project of demystification then is the project of revealing the human alienated labor in nature, i.e., nature gets reduced to a reflection of the human.
Ross,
I see figures like Adorno as betrayals of Marx because they turn away from Marx’s materialism and return to idealism. What is it that Adorno is constantly analyzing? Ideology or cultural content. That is, alienated meanings and concepts projected on to the world. When Marx analyzes things like the factory or resources he remains in the orbit of materialism. What we saw with the Frankfurt school was the increasing retreat from anything pertaining to the material, instead focusing on “spirit” or the cultural alone. The world got reduced to a text to be read or deciphered, treating materiality as a mere carrier of human meanings.
May 21, 2011 at 10:06 pm
I think that Bennett has referred to her own position as a “vital” materialism, allied with types of “critical vitalism.” Maybe this is just from others referring to her work. Nonetheless, as I pointed out above, it’s not the “full” vitalism that is causing the problem–I understand it when it is allied with a justification in pan-psychism or spirit or whatever singularized in each bit of matter. The problem seems much more semantic–it feels as if the terms used: actor, agency, intent–the idea of there being a “sociology” of chemical reactions on jupiter–all of these infer a vital force in the same way that Biology acts as the symbolic backbone of much of Deleuzeo-Guattarian thought, leading to an image of a permeating “Life” in everything, even when that is not necessarily what the philosophy might be trying to say. My question is WHY these vital terms are used when it seems that there are plenty of the same ideas already conceived in natural sciences. I don’t see why we need a “sociology” of chemical reactions on Jupiter–what is the difference between this and a “good” chemistry (i.e., a chemistry which is not reductive to its own detriment)? Otherwise, aren’t we just begging for misinterpretation by any kind of new age spiritualism?
When you say that “matter can’t be reduced to some passive lump upon which humans impose form, but rather acts in all sorts of ways,” I have to ask: Who, today, seriously thinks that it is? Isn’t it the central point of the natural sciences that nature is NOT passive–from Lucretius on, isn’t THIS the point, that we are made small by the vast forces acting around us? Lucretius made the point strongly with how he chose to end De Rerum Natura with long descriptions of the Athenian plague, the human body torn apart in the vilest of manners, showing that it is not something fundamentally sacred or impenetrable but rather highly permeable, helpless in the face of larger and smaller forces. Science is all about understanding these non-human forces. So why not use the language of the study of such non-human forces? Why extend sociology to everything, rather than extending chemistry, biology, physics and math into the core of human society and “agency”?
As far as Marx goes, I think Ross has more or less covered most of what I’d add. I’m not sure how you think that the Marxist project in Capital should have been executed? If it’s not fair to say that it’s anthropocentric because it’s whole idea is anthropocentric–studying a particular “assemblage” (that of humans and the many objects they are in contact with)–then should it simply not have been attempted? Marx is explicit in this project of showing how much an anthropocentric project is itself interpenetrated by the non-human–dead labor, nature, etc–this really becomes the central point of Capital, in a way.
I would also note that, demystification as disenchantment in its original sense–that of Lucretius, the Enlightenment, etc.–seems to mean the exact opposite of “showing human meaning and power behind all formations.” This is the point of Lucretius, mentioned above. It’s the original, nihilistic project of banishing all meaning and power from formations–assigning the Gods a useless space where they can touch nothing and birth nothing into the world. How exactly do you conceive it as otherwise? Or are you just talking about the demystification spoken of by the Frankfurt school?
May 21, 2011 at 10:32 pm
Levi,
Yes, their focus was on culture, literature, music, philosophy, and media. But their focus was on these objects as ideology, not as sufficient unto themselves, but as reflecting a material substructure. They also wrote directly about the class struggle (see Horkheimer’s Dawn and Decline or Adorno’s Reflections on Class Struggle). Even if one excludes these writings, which deal directly with the material conditions of the workers, I still have no idea how you arrive at the idea that because their objects of critique were cultural, musical, literary, etc. (all ideological) that they did not believe that there was a material basis for all of these ideological effervescences.
This is obviated in the following lines from Adorno:
and
At no point do the Frankfurt School authors suggest that these spheres, the cultural, the literary, or so on are autonomous. Rather, they mirror the underlying contradictions of society and express (in one way or another) the socioeconomic substructure of their time.
May 21, 2011 at 10:51 pm
Stanley,
You write:
Fair enough. I agree. I bristle whenever I see these sorts of terms used and think they’re more of an impediment than a help. The moment I hear terms like “vitalism” I hear evocations of spooky immaterial life-forces for which there’s no need or evidence whatsoever. I take it that Bennett is talking about things we’re all accustomed to by now under the title of “self-organization”, “emergence”, etc. I’d prefer to just talk about these things rather than drawing on the discredited tradition of vitalism. I’m even more hostile to panpsychism.
A couple of responses to this:
First, if it is true that “society’ is not restricted to humans, but always consists of collectives of humans and nonhumans, then sociology necessarily extends to nonhumans. We can’t simply treat nonhumans as vehicles of human meanings, concepts, language, and intentions, but rather have to treat nonhuman as real participants in collectives. Second, as a matter of ontology, it follows that there will be collectives or societies that don’t involve humans at all. We might not find the study of these particularly interesting, but that would change their legitimacy genuine societies.
You write:
The problem with Capital is not that it talks about humans. Clearly there are going to be assemblages where humans play a key role and where our interest lies primarily in mapping the impact on humans. The point is thus never to exclude humans. rather, the point lies moreso in the way that the objects in these assemblages are being conceived. Are they being conceived as full-blown actors in their own right playing a key role in the formation of these assemblages, or are they being conceived merely as vehicles for human intentions, meanings, language, power, etc? The first approach is what I’m talking about, the latter point is what I’m criticizing. And again, the point is not to exclude humans, but to discern the manner in which humans are imbricated or entangled with a variety of nonhuman actors. Now as you pointed out in your initial post, Marx has some really stellar moments where he approaches what I’m talking about. Here I’m thinking particularly of his analysis of factories in Capital, where the factory takes on a life of its own with its own aims, introducing its own positive differences, forming us in a variety of ways, etc., in ways that can no longer simply be reduced to dynamics of value and capital. Value and capital play a role, but the factory contributes unique differences of its own. An object-oriented Marxism would further develop these sorts of instances and similar ones you cite with respect to soil, attending to how things such as natural events (tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, epidemics of disease, climactic changes, etc), new technologies, ocean currents, availability of resources, animals, epidemics in animals, etc., play a key role in organizing social relations throughout history. Here we get a series of actors that can’t be simply reduced to dynamics of capital but which certainly get intertwined with capital in all sorts of ways. Insofar as the human alone isn’t the sole participant in these social assemblages the human can’t be treated as the sole explanatory ground of why societies take the form they take. This is a massive project that hasn’t scarcely been thought through. There are some pointers in Marx, but there are also a number of tendencies in Marx that work against this sort of anlaysis.
You write:
This is a fair point and the sorts of demystification that we find in Lucretius and Spinoza (two of my personal heroes), differ substantially from the sort of demystification I’m talking about. These sorts of demystifications reveal not the human in everything, but precisely that the human isn’t in everything (which is part of what makes Marx’s dissertation such a hoot and complete misreading of Lucretius). When I evoke the concept of demystification I’m thinking specifically of 20th century critical projects where the aim is always to reveal some hidden human force behind what we take to be out there in the world. The Frankfurt school would, of course, be included in this, but also psychoanalysis, deconstruction, Foucault’s analyses of power, Zizek’s critiques of ideology, etc., etc., etc. Let me be clear: I am not suggesting these modes of demystification are mistaken. All of these modes of critique reveal something real and important. The problem is their overstatement. There’s a marked tendency to see all material beings as disguised reflections of the human, ignoring the positive contributions of nonhuman agencies that can’t be reduced to the human.
May 21, 2011 at 11:25 pm
Yes, Ross, I understand that. The implicit subtext of that is the thesis that it’s primarily ideology that holds societies together. I don’t believe that’s the case. Indeed, I believe that substantial changes can be made at the ideological level through debunking and social relations can remain essentially the same. Ideology is only a very small portion of the story.
May 21, 2011 at 11:39 pm
Levi,
The reason I find your suggestion that Capital is anthropocentric so perplexing is that it ignores the primary actor or actant in the whole narrative: the category of Capital itself. Capital is endowed with far more agency in all three volumes of this work than any member of society or even class, either capitalist or proletarian. I mean, I suppose I can see why you consider it to be anthropocentric insofar as the drama is played out within the context of human society, but as Marx repeatedly stresses in his discussion of social labor, this is mediated by humanity’s metabolism with Nature.
More powerful than any natural or any other social principle, however, is capital itself. Just read how he writes about it:
Compare this with the Absolute Spirit for Hegel: subjective Mind that has as its object Mind, such that it comes to progressively realize itself more and more through history. Spirit becomes an entity which is simultaneously subject and object, substance and subject. Humanity, as Mind, is exalted.
Only in Marx’s own version, he has again inverted the Hegelian dialectic, and not in the form of some crypto-idealism. Rather than a personal, conscious, living, human entity, the identical subject-object and substance-subject is here Capital as an impersonal, unconscious, necrotic, inhuman entity. It is a terrifying and auto-agentic force.
May 22, 2011 at 12:43 am
Ross,
Did you see me criticize capital as an actant? You are aware that I just published an article along these lines, no? While I certainly look askance at your totalizing thesis that capital has unified all society (I don’t believe that totalities of this sort exist ontologically), I’m fully on board with the idea of capital as an actor in its own right. The question Is one of how much you diversify this pluralism of actors. For example, to what degree do you allow “nature” to metabolize humans. Your narrative is rather one way. What differences do tornadoes, nuclear meltdowns, the results of scientific experiments, earthquakes, the food we eat, etc function as an actor irreducible to capital for you? Again, I’m fine with things being entangled with capital. Nomdisagreement there on my part for many social assemblages, yet you seem to treat capital as a god-term, a divine principle, from which everything else issues without exception. That is anthropocentrism. You have a pat theological narrative that gives you an explanation in every situation. Let’s go back to ky post on “endology” and “ecology” where I used technology as an example. What’s missing in your discussions is what I called “endology”. You’re all ecology all the time, and a rather one sided ecology at that. In the case of the development of technology, dynamics of capital are one ecological factor among many others. I also argued that there are endological factors in the development of a technology where the elements fail, for example, fit together well, thereby calling for new developments. These dynamics have little to do with the ecological dynamics of capital, even if they might be entangled with it. The point or question is that of how far you’re willing to go in multiplying agencies. A good materialism, in my view, multiplies agencies and does not advocate a fetishistic anthropocentrism. A good deal of critical and cultural theory, in my view, does not live up to that despite calling itself materialist.
May 22, 2011 at 1:11 am
@ Mark .N
You wrote:
‘And it seems like it would inherit all the problems of dualism: does semovient causation escape any of the usual problems that plague dualists’ theories of “mental causation”? Does it prove an account of how these minds, with their different kind of causation, could have actually arisen historically in the world (versus being posited or preexisting)? [The answers might be yes; those aren’t purely rhetorical questions.]’
A few brief notes on this tradition taken from the work of Mario Crocco and Mariela Szirko:
Efficient causality is the same for nomic and semovient acts.
No dualism here means that causal efficiency is one and the same.
A Correction to previous post:
No scientist could aver that causation in the hylozoic hiatus (mindless nature) isn’t exerted by some personal agency – that would be pure metaphysics.
Science simply attests the fact that causation in the hylozoic hiatus is exerted,
not finding by whom or by who.
Thus no ontic distinction is in view, only the obvious constatation of the fact that for semovience the agent is the existential entity and in nomic causal action natural science cannot ascertain it.
A monism of causation is what we find, for now at least.
No dualism, because causation is one and the same everywhere – simply we don’t see its agent in the hiatus (mindless nature).
For this tradition there are no mechanisms underlying mindfulness. Once equipped with the notion and objective definition of mindfulness (see below), neurobiology and psychophysics encounter mindfulness as a primary fact of the universe.
In other words those circumstanced observers, although existing, like all nature, in only one physical instant every time, do presently consider non-present situations and sensations.
Thus, since gnoseological apprehension – the observing or noetic act – is never found apart from causally efficacious semovience, each of those circumstanced observers can transform herself semoviently by affirming only a selection of her constitutive antecedents, which constitutive antecedents certainly include her mental contents.
This selection of a subset of the known antecedents is done by varying the focus of attention and is enacted outside the finite mind (specifically, in the mind’s brain) by semovience.
In this mode of transformation in time these circumstanced observers differ from a table, a pebble, and all other things lacking a mind, which cannot avoid entering time transformation with the full entirety of their constitutive antecedents.
The relationship, of this parcel of extramental nature (a portion of the brain) with the grasp and semovience that are concurrent in, respectively, sensing and controlling only it [by way of overlapping fields), is called the “brain-mind connection.”
Its central feature is that, although efficient causation is unique throughout brain and mind, neither the parcel of extramentality nor the mind can in each case determine their mutual allocation (“circumstancing”): such and such a brain for such and such a mind, and vice versa.
Whence it is said that the mind “ecloses” (or “pops out”) at the causally
chained parcel or portion of nature; not that it “emerges in” or “is produced by” the parcel’s conglomeration…..
Eclosion: origination not accounted for by its immediate circumstances, such as the hatching of every quantum of field action out of its field (a hatching which because of basic constraints cannot be specified by the state of the field but only statistically, and is usually called “popping out” in physics’ informal jargon) and the occurrence of every person in his or her brain (the state of which brain cannot specify who this person will be). Eclosions contrast with emergences, which are originations exhausted in the local state of the immediate antecedents (or “boundary conditions”), independently of their historical irrepeatability (e.g. in the emergent origination of a hurricane or of a soup’s stickiness from microphysical exchanges) and practical unpredictability where, in Nietzsche’s allegory, “the iron hand of necessity throws the dice of chance.”
Hylozoic hiatus: the hiatus over dispersivity between empsyched portions of nature; the hylozoic hiatus enters time transformation with the entirety of its antecedents, while the empsyched portions of nature that it separates do the same with a selection of their antecedents.
May 22, 2011 at 9:58 am
Levi,
Do you not conflate the issue of, on the one hand, the scope of the analysis, and on the other, claims regarding anthropocentricism.
That Marx does not refer to tornado’s, nuclear meltdown’s etc… is not in itself indicative of anthropocentricism of his ontological commitments but the result of a targeted critique.
Will.
May 22, 2011 at 12:30 pm
Will,
The whole point is that things cannot be separated out in the way you suggest. Ergo a targeted critique is going to be an illicit form of anthropocentrism.
May 22, 2011 at 6:08 pm
Even if we have a multicentric view, are there not still centers to focus on an use for separating out others? Can there be no “-centrism” of any sort? Wouldn’t we examine the “sociology” of chemical reactions on jupiter in a chemicentral fashion, not to the exclusion of other factors on the macro, micro or horizontal scale, but simply limiting them the farther they are from this center? If not, how do you discern enough to even have a critique?
May 22, 2011 at 6:36 pm
Stanley,
I get the sense that we just have very different views of agency on these issues. My position is that there is no human agency that isn’t bound up with all sorts of nonhuman agencies. Put differently, a “society” involving humans will, in my view, always involve humans and nonhuman agencies. These nonhuman agencies play a key role in how humans come to be related in the way they are and thus can’t be separated out or bracketed in the way you’re suggesting. My point is that if we wish to understand and act on social assemblages involving humans, we can’t ignore the role played by these nonhuman agencies. Am I suggesting that we should ignore capital, ideology, etc? Not at all. These are agencies within these assemblages or societies too. I am contesting their overdetermining role within much Marxist theory. I simply don’t think they have that overdetermining role but that there are other agencies involved as well. Ignoring these other agencies, I believe, leads us to both miss a variety of political opportunities and to a failure to understand why power relations are organized as they are.
May 22, 2011 at 8:22 pm
The way I read Marx, Capital is indeed an automatic subject, but at the same time it is nothing more than dead labor that is valorized by living labor–in other words a sum total of human activities, processes and relations that has taken on an autonomous momentum and is no longer subject to rational control. But it is only from the perspective of Capital that nature is merely “dead labor” or even a collection of use-values–nature is NOT just fodder for production, one of the main problems with Capital is that it takes nature to be such when it is not and thus capitalism is ecologically disastrous, as Marx acknowledges at the end of KI chapter 15 (I think it is) when he talks about how capitalist agriculture depletes the soil. Use-value itself is a fetishistic category, it is the material body of the commodity but not a factor of nature, only a capitalist category. Admittedly Marx did not focus on this as much as we would want to today.
Anyway, this is why, as far as I can tell, Marx NEVER says we will be lord and master of nature, which is why people who claim this have to quote Lenin and Trotsky and the like. Marx says we ARE nature, and we are determined by our metabolism with nature which Marx never says is just rationally planned or imposed on our surroundings. In communism we will rationally control this metabolism, not nature itself, which will always have its own types of agency.
I’m not saying Marx emphasizes all this enough, my only claim is that it’s the proper direction for reading Marx in light of these questions.
May 22, 2011 at 9:28 pm
Thanks for your reply Levi,
Given your position, how do you keep an analysis from getting too unwieldy and judge what is and is not to be included?
Is one not just limited to piggy backing on anthropocentric ‘theories’ in order to critique their limitations, in for example – exploring the political implications of your position?
May 22, 2011 at 9:37 pm
Will,
Isn’t this a challenge for all positions? I’m not really sure how to respond to your queery. Clearly Marx could not analyze EVERY economic transaction and institution in his analyses and therefore had to talk about broad regularities and tendencies. Clearly, in addition to those broad regularities of economy, the object oriented ontologist can’t talk about every natural and technological actor, but we can analyze broad regularities that contribute to organizing people in a variety of ways and telescope our analysis in to finer grains of detail in specific instances.
May 23, 2011 at 4:13 am
Chris, I’m with you on your statement up until the point that you say that Marx and Engels did not advocate humanity’s mastery of nature.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on humanity’s dominion over nature:
“Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature.” — Capital, Volume 3 (posthumously published)
“[I]nsofar as man from the beginning behaves toward nature, the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labor, as an owner, treats her as belonging to him, his labor becomes the source of use values, therefore also of wealth.” — Critique of the Gotha Program (1875)
“We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. The two sides are, however, inseparable; the history of nature and the history of men are dependent on each other so long as men exist. The history of nature, called natural science, does not concern us here; but we will have to examine the history of men, since almost the whole ideology amounts either to a distorted conception of this history or to a complete abstraction from it. Ideology is itself only one of the aspects of this history.” — The German Ideology (1847)
“With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organization. The struggle for individual existence disappears. Then, for the first time, man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature, because he has now become master of his own social organization. The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face-to-face with man as laws of Nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him. Man’s own social organization, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by Nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have, hitherto, governed history,pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, more and more consciously, make his own history — only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.” Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880)
Now certainly I do not intend to quote Marx and Engels just as someone quotes scripture, and surely they could have been misguided in their ambition to see humanity rule over nature. But insofar as the overcoming of capitalism and the transition to freedom involves mastering our own mode of social organization and commanding the forces of the world around us so as to not let them dictate our own free actions, why not ruthlessly dominate nature, so long as this domination can be indefinitely sustained? Why not pursue the creation of weather machines, so that we can control exactly what sort of weather certain parts of the world (parts of human society or not) need? Why not harness the force of the shifting tectonic plates with a Jules Vernean clockwork at the center of the Earth? Why not enhance nature as we see fit? Why not reshape the terrestrial globe according to our taste and fancy, as long as it does not lead to unforeseen consequences?
May 23, 2011 at 4:11 pm
Ross,
The Engels quote is certainly unambiguous, but my claim was about Marx specifically, and the quotes you give do not seem to me to bear out the point that he said we will become lords of nature. In particular, the quote from KIII:
rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature;
“it” there clearly refers to our [i]interchange[/i] with nature, not nature itself, otherwise the last part of the phrase would be nonsense, saying “ruled by nature as by the forces of nature.” The point is that our interchange takes the capitalistic form of production for valorization as an automatic process, a kind of second nature. This is what we will rationally control.
Leaving Marx aside, I think that we can modify nature in all kinds of ways, nature isn’t a static thing or even a thing at all, ceasing to try to master nature will probably also mean ceasing to reify nature as something apart from us that we battle for control. I think that we will also recognize the agencies and initiatives from the larger environing world that Levi points out, and recognize that things are never merely our passive template, which is why I think the massive nature-controlling projects you envision are probably misguided and doomed to a certain extent as long as they assume an external nature as a passive medium for us to form as we please.
May 23, 2011 at 6:59 pm
Chris,
I agree completely with your assessment. Just as Lukacs argued that humanity builds a “second nature” in society that becomes a reified state of affairs, I would argue that so too has “nature” been hypostatized as something “outside” of us. Now there are very real historical reasons why this hypostatization has taken place, not the least of which is humanity’s alienation from nature (Economic Manuscripts of 1844). So we can’t just reunite with nature by simply “reconceptualizing” it. A substantial transformation must take place in society before such a relationship could be restored.
In order that nature no longer confront society as an “alien” force, imposed upon us from outside, which we interact with but from which we are separated, either humanity must become renaturalized in the sense of Rousseau, or nature has to be humanized (or more precisely, socialized). I certainly do not deny that nature has forces and powers in and of itself, and obviously am aware that nature often impinges upon human interests of its own accord. So that nature will no longer appear as something separate from us, we must internalize as part of us, simply an extension of society’s will, such that it can be radically reshaped at a whim.
While it is true that in the past the gods of religion have been unduly anthropomorphized, I believe that humanity has not been sufficiently theomorphized. Of course, humanity cannot attain to this mantle of deity until it has mastered its own mode of social reproduction. Perhaps I am here hearkening back to the Bolsheviks Anatolii Lunacharskii’s and Aleksandr Bogdanov’s project of “God-building,” whereby humanity undergoes a process of self-deification through an act of social revolution. Though this is dangerous territory, I cannot see why we should aspire to any less. Nature certainly has agencies of its own, but throughout history humanity has appropriated these agencies an incorporated them into society. Through an act of total appropriation, using all the means at our disposal, the total mastery of nature might someday become possible. All of nature’s agencies will be subsumed unto our own, thereby eliminating the contradiction between nature and culture, disalienating us completely.
May 23, 2011 at 7:02 pm
Just to let you know my argument for this position, I’ve actually written up a fairly detailed article explaining my reasons: “Man and Nature”.
May 23, 2011 at 10:20 pm
Levi: My question doesn’t have much to do with the controversy brewing in this thread, but your comment that we might “analyze broad regularities that contribute to organizing people in a variety of ways and telescope our analysis in to finer grains of detail in specific instances” brought to mind a question: how close do you think something like Latour’s analysis of the Aramis project gets to what you have in mind for the specific-instances case? Obviously it’s one particular instance, but I’d be interested to know (possibly in some separate writing of yours, perhaps already written?) whether it’s a model of how you’d go about such things, or if not, how close it is.