Having just finished writing my preface for Adam Miller’s Speculative Grace, I find that this book presents the most startling theology, theory of religion, and account of grace I have ever encountered– I’ll be recovering from this book for some time –but that, apart from Harman’s Prince of Networks, it also contains some of the finest pages ever written about Latour’s ontology. In particular, I find myself especially fascinated by the account of truth Miller develops through Latour’s onto-epistemology. I myself have, in the past, written quite often about Latour’s epistemology and theory of truth— especially in the context of discussions with Pete Wolfendale –yet never before have I encountered a discussion as clear and profound as that developed in the pages of Miller’s Speculative Grace.
My remarks here will be brief as I’m falling over with exhaustion, yet the core of Miller-Latour’s thesis is that truth must be assembled or constructed. For reasons that I hope to clarify in a moment, it’s necessary to forestall confusion. The claim that truth is constructed or assembled is not the claim that truth is fabricated wholesale from the fabric of mind, language, or society. It is not the claim that truths just erupt from our imagination however we might like them. In a number of respects, Miller-Latour’s thesis calls us to a standard far more rigorous and challenging than that that dominates modernist epistemology, and that is far closer to Plato than Tarski. Where Tarski understands truth as a property of propositions about the world, Plato understands truth as a property of the things themselves. For Tarski propositions (and “propositional attitudes” or “mental contents”) are true or false such that truth is a relation between a proposition and a state-of-affairs, while for Plato things themselves are true or false regardless of whether or not anyone says anything about them or thinks about them.
In the case of Plato, there is indeed correspondence or a relation of adequation, but that relation is not a relation between a “saying” about the world and the thing in the world, but a relation between an entity and a form or universal. Truth is a function of how closely the thing approximates its form, and thus resembles the way in which a tangent approaches a point on a curve. While a tangent never perfectly hits a particular point on a curve because a true curve is characterized by a constant rate of change that can never completely be pinned down, nonetheless there is some maximum where the tangent most closely converges with the point on the curve. That is, there’s a point of maximal convergence between curve and tangent that is “most true” for their “intersection”.
This is how it is with entities in Plato. The closer an individual entity approximates its eternal form, the more true that entity is. The truth of the entity is here a property of the entity itself, not a proposition or assertion we make about the entity. Initially this sounds like a very strange way of thinking about the world– what could it possibly mean to say that entities are true or false? –but upon reflection we can see that we talk about the world in this way all the time. Thus, for example, upon drinking a German ale someone exclaims “now that’s a beer!” Taken at face value, this exclamation is saying that this beer is true. And in claiming that the beer is true, one also presupposes that there is some sort of ideal standard or form against which the beer is measured. The truth of German beer resides not in the relationship between the proposition and the beer, but in the relationship between the beer and the perfect ideal of beer.
read on!
The truth of German beer resides in the fact that it approximates or approaches the eternally existing, universal form of what beer ought to be. Needless to say, that form is not a property of our minds or culture, but rather is an independently existing entity in its own right. By contrast, if we can say that Busch Light is false, then this is not because we have asserted a claim about Busch Light that fails to correspond with Busch Light existing out there in the world, but because Busch Light itself is untrue such that it fails to correspond with its form. Regardless of whether anyone was around to drink Busch Light (Life After People), regardless of whether anyone says anything about Busch Light, regardless of whether anyone thinks about Busch Light, in a Platonic universe Busch Light would be a false beer not because it doesn’t exist, but because it fails to approach or approximate the form that defines what a beer should be. Busch Light is a poor copy of Beer, and if this is so then it’s because it’s made of the recycled, drunken urine of college fraternity boys (at least that’s what we surmised when I was at Ohio State).
But I digress. For our purposes, the important point to retain from Plato is not the relation between forms and individual entities, but rather the thesis that truth is a property of things themselves. For Plato truth is not a property of thoughts about things, nor is truth a property of propositions about things. Rather, truth is a property of things, such that truth would be there regardless of whether or not any sentient beings were about to think about those things. And, as Latour remarks, “…you missed the galloping freedom of the zebras in the savannah this morning, then so much the worse for you; the zebras will not be sorry that you were not there…” (The Pasteurization of France, 193). The truth of the galloping zebras resides not in the gaze that beholds them and makes assertions about them, but in the galloping zebras themselves.
In Miller-Latour the thesis that truth is a property of the things themselves receives a thoroughly original interpretation. For them the thesis that truth is a property of the things themselves translates into the thesis that truth must be assembled. Here truth is not an adequation or approximation between ideal form and existing entity, but rather a product of an activity of assembly that manages to stand. True beings are those that conquer entropy, that manage to stand and maintain their order, while false beings are those that are poorly assembled, that fall apart, that return to entropy. The true entity is an entity (and no, that’s not a type-o). It is that assembly that manages to stand on its own as a unit. In this respect, the Sears Tower is a true being. And so long as it resists entropy or equaprobability, it remains a true being. It stands. And in standing its truth resides in itself, not in any gaze, thought, or proposition about it. It’s truth consists in its ability to continue standing, enduring, or holding itself together against all of those forces of entropy that beset it from within and without.
Yet already we must proceed with care, for in suggesting that truth is a product of assembly we suggest an assembler behind the activity of assembly and what is assembled. We suggest that, like a homunculus, there is some agent that assembles this other agent. Yet in assembling, fabricating, or constructing a truth, there is no assembler that presides over the assembly; rather, the assembly of the assembly is distributed among all those agents involved in the assembly. It is here that we encounter Miller-Latour’s most original “epistemological” hypothesis: assembly is a product of all the entities involved in the assemblage in the process of being produced and for truth to take place, all of the entities involved in the assembly must be persuaded. In other words, it is not simply other people that must be persuaded that something is true, but the nonhumans— animal, botanical, mineral, etc. –that must be persuaded as well.
Contra Plato and with the Sophists (the rhetoricians), Miller-Latour will thus declare that truth and persuasion are inextricably mixed. The persuasive dimension of truth can never be separated from the veridical dimension of truth. To be true is to persuade. Yet contra the Sopists, persuasion is not simply addressed to persons, but is addressed to nonhuman things as well. The nonhumans must also be persuaded and the nonhumans also play an essential role in the assembly. As a consequence, experiment becomes the mark of every potential truth. We can imagine the following scenario:
So, based on the Biblical story of Genesis you wish to claim that the creation narrative there depicted is true, that all of the beings (their forms) were created by a divine being in a single stroke, that Earth is only 6,000 years old, and so on.
Fine, try it! Conduct the experiment!
But understand that in conducting your experiment, in attempting your assembly, your challenge is not simply to persuade your flock or parishioners, your fellow humans, but also the world itself. For your truth to stand, you will have to persuade the soil, fossils, the chemical elements and so on. All of these entities will have a say in the process of assembly you’ve initiated and will be participants of assembly. It will not simply be a matter of whether your fellow humans come to share your “propositional attitudes”, but also whether the things you share the world with share your thesis. And if your thesis comes to be true, it will be because you have, against all odds, managed to rope this herd of cats together in something that is able to stand. But of course, in roping this herd of cats together in an assembly, it will not simply be you that accomplished this feat, but all these other agencies– human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic –together. Each of them will be an actant and participant in this truth and the truth– should it happen –will be a product of the work and collaboration of this crowd.
Miller-Latour’s hypothesis invites a revolution in how we think about the nature of truth and being. What, for example, would it mean to think of a novel as true? Here it would not mean that the novel is an adequation or correspondence between what is depicted in the novel and the world, nor would the truth of the novel be the reader’s response to the novel. No, the truth of the novel would be the ability of the novel to stand. Readers, of course, offer interpretations of novels, yet it’s a mistake to think that it is other people that they must persuade. Rather, in hazarding an interpretation the entity that a reader must persuade is the novel. The question is “does my response/reading persuade Kafka’s Trial?”, not “does my response/reading persuade my professor, the editors of a journal, or my daughter?” It is the reader that must persuade the novel, not the novel that manages to persuade or not persuade the reader. And so too would the same principles hold for every scientific hypothesis, every religious rapture, every activist political group, and so on. In each case it is a question of a distributed process or activity of assembling and of persuading all entities involved so as to generate something that manages to stand for a moment or eons.
Larval Subjects . 
March 1, 2012 at 1:26 pm
Very interesting analysis. I’ll have to pick up the book. The idea of persuasion being on the part of the investigator (“The nonhumans must also be persuaded”) seems inverted to me. If the investigator is the one posing the hypothesis (a concept, a problematic idea in Deleuze, right?), then they are ultimately posing a question to the world. The answer would be in the assembly; the investigator would be the one being persuaded, and must be open to this fact in order for any true progress to take place.
It might be a semantic point, but it seems to resonant with a much wider understanding. As soon as its phrased as this way, it forms a nice assemblage with Deleuze, Feynman (thinking the speech against ‘Cargo Cult Science’), etc.
Any thoughts? Am I missing a technical definition or a crucial reason for why the investigator is the one persuading?
March 1, 2012 at 4:45 pm
[…] Levi Bryan has a nice blog post about Adam Miller’s Speculative Grace. It has a nice discussion of truth as assembled. […]
March 1, 2012 at 4:51 pm
Mike,
When Latour claims that the nonhumans must be persuaded he’s being somewhat cute so as to draw attention to his point. What he’s railing against is social and linguistic constructivism where theorists seem to have the odd idea that society and language can create the world however they might like out of language and social forces, such that the world are just some flux of unformed matter awaiting formation through words and social forces. Latour’s point is that the things of the world are resistant and that they must be brought in line for the experiment to work. That’s what he has in mind when he says they must be “persuaded”. Take my poor garden. A linguistic idealist might claim that the things of the world are nothing but effects of linguistic categories that cut up the world in particular ways (they’d never express their thesis this crudely, of course). My garden suggests otherwise. Were my garden simply an effect of words or signifiers I could speak it into being however I like without any resistance from the garden itself. But in gardening I find something different: I encounter the essential weakness and impotence of language and social forces. For my garden to be “true” or to stand, I have to surrender myself to the soil, plants, fences, manure, compost, shovels, hoes, rabbits, birds, worms, insects, weather patterns, light, water, etc., so that they might be brought together in cooperation in the formation of an assemblage that’s able to sustain itself. I don’t have mastery over any of this, but can only collaborate with all of these entities and negotiate, opening myself to surprise and the tendencies of these agents, in much the same way that a politician has to deal with an unruly constituency (Latour says that every entity is both a politician– because it must negotiate the resistances of other entities –and that we’ll never do better than a politician or negotiation; precisely because entities are real and therefore resistant).
This is what he has in mind by “persuasion”: that work of working with other entities, of our action always being distributed among a variety of things such that it is never purely our own and such that it never purely originates with us, and such that we have to follow the tendencies or resistances that we find in the things of the world about us. In my case, I failed to persuade the things I wanted to assemble in my garden. The rabbits wouldn’t listen and ate the lettuce, the fences I tried to erect didn’t obey and let the rabbits in, the weeds decided to take over and commit genocide on the fruits, vegetables and onions I sought to grow, and the soil dried up in the hot Texas sun and drought, killing off my peppers which were, at any rate, eaten by the rabbits also. The only thing I managed to persuade was my rosemary. As a consequence, truth did not take place in my garden.
March 1, 2012 at 4:51 pm
It ends up being pretty similar to the notion of semiotic evolution in Peirce as well.
March 1, 2012 at 5:49 pm
So plato’s forms exist in a strategic space as strategies of structuration so effective as to be eternal?
To put it another way, the river that does not reach the ideal of riverness is a “good try” at being a persistent river.
Reminds me of Spinoza and the degree of power of ideas.
March 1, 2012 at 5:54 pm
Hey Josh,
In the crude interpretation of Plato, the being consists of two domains: the domain of the forms and the domain of worldly things. The world of the forms is the world of the intelligible, universal, identity, rational, eternal, perfect, and unchanging. The world of physical things is characterized by becoming, difference (what becomes perpetually differs from itself), the imperfect, particular, the irrational, and the mortal. For Plato what is “really real” and really true are the forms. The world of physical things consists of copies of these forms that more or less approximate the standards of perfection set by the forms without ever fully reaching the embodiment of those forms.
March 1, 2012 at 8:18 pm
[…] was considering Levi’s great post on Adam’s new book. (I hope to comment on Adam’s book shortly) The issue ends up tying […]
March 1, 2012 at 11:27 pm
[…] Bryant has a great post up today riffing off of an forthcoming book by Adam Miller called Speculative Grace. In particular, Bryant […]
March 2, 2012 at 10:35 am
Levi,
I do not find this convincing for the reason Harman recently alluded to in his post regarding the ‘democratization of correlationism’. Why OOO is vulnerable to this charge is the difference between auto/allopoetic objects is only in degree and not in kind.
Your response to Mike not withstanding, that (nonhuman) objects need to be persuaded is a case of, stricto sensu, the shadow of the human object among the nonhuman objects. AKA objet a – which is not secondary, but a primordial supplement if you will.
But this hinges on ones position regarding the role of lack, and the position of objet a of being imaginary though occupying the place of Real. On this point you state in the Democracy of Objects when apparently completing Zizek’s line of thought…
“And to complete Žižek’s sentence, we can say that the gaps and inconsistencies in the symbolic produce these effects of the real.”
You overlook that this appearance occurs in a retroactive fashion, (if I knew how to put ‘appearance’ in italics – I would), necessitated by the subjects lack. You seem to have confused castration with the Real itself in your reading of Zizek. The gap between Real and symbolic does not mean that Zizek holds that the Real is a product of the symbolic, precisely because Real is that which eludes the clutches of the symbolic, and so, is only indirectly registered via the breakdown of smooth running of the symbolic.
I find further support for my contentions when in your summation of Zizeks position on subject/object relationship is reduced to Lacan’s ‘early’ mirror phase, overlooking again the role of objet a in Zizek’s thought.
Will.
March 2, 2012 at 3:09 pm
Will,
Zizek directly argues that the real is a product or effect of the symbolic in his discussion of the difference between Einstein’s special relativity and general relativity. It’s an effect of the inability of the symbolic to completely formalize itself, i.e., the manner in which it leads to Russell’s paradoxes and Goedel’s discoveries.
March 2, 2012 at 5:30 pm
Posted as a comment at Larval Subjects
Hmmm. . . . So much, so much . . .
I mostly know Latour’s epistemology from Politics of Nature, of which I’ve read big sections. There he’s certainly got truth and persusian linked and, as I understand the book, is setting out idealized institutions for intercalating the two in a way that’s more effective than current arrangements. And he writes in a metaphorical and allusive way that one must accept in order to get anything out of the book at all, but one need not accept it at face value.
I found your older post, Levi, the one you like at the beginning, to be most helpful as I gave me an example of a case where Latour had traced the steps between raw sense data and final polished assertion. He is, of course, right in pointing out that, when we forget about all the intermediary steps, the remaining relationship between the world and the assertion about it becomes dangerously mystified.
But when you get around to asserting that “the truth of the novel would be the ability of the novel to stand” I’m puzzled. One could gloss it as a variation on the cliched notion of the classic as something that’s “stood the test of time.” And so it differentiates the classic from all those other novels that have not stood up, though industrious graduate students and professors may dig them out of the stacks at read them.
In that case, what’s standing is not the codex, but the what? the meaning? that’s inscribed in the ink spots in the codex. That the codex stands, more or less, is not so interesting as that meaning. But our ability think about that meaning as an assemblage of what? signifiers? affects? desires? is not so impressive.
Forget the codex for a moment and think of a tale in an oral culture. How is it that the tale more or less stands from one telling to the next, from one teller to the next, across generations? Not the same words and phrases from one performance to another, but the same characters and the same events. In THAT context, does the tale have any existence independent of the social group in which it is told? Is it as dependent on that group as a shadow is upon the source of light, the occluding object, and the projective surface?
Is the tale an autonomous object at all?
March 2, 2012 at 5:51 pm
Yeah that makes sense, I just like the idea of rehabilitating them within a more mundane context.
If the “level of truth” is produced by structural stability reinforced and accepted by all the adjacent interactions, then you can see plato’s forms as an infinite limit of the attempt to become more true. Because, by the criteria given for truth here, this goal automatically makes them eternal (as the limit of “more stable”) and profoundly coherent (as the limit of “having their relations become more consistent with their self declaration”).
In that sense they are not what is “really real” but what could be most real if they existed.
If you take a more jolly and less derogatory description of copying; ie as
a homomorphic map created by a control process taking one side as it’s objective, (or in other words, the embodiment of similarities via reference to a specific target, so that we can display to ourselves forms of similarity in the character of the copying itself) then you get a way of asking if things are copies without sort of mentally binning them as you talk.
But as a process, this may not actually be realisable:
In dynamic systems theory, there are inaccessible stable points; points which if you start on them, you will stay there forever, but any tiny deviation from that stability will actually cause you to diverge further from it. Balancing on the very tip of a mountain basically. Or there are points that can be orbited infinitely without ever getting any closer.
You can still deduce the presence of the mountain top even when everything is rolling away from it, so you might say that many systems are not copies of the forms we recognise from them, in that they are not historically or currently the products of a control process to emphasise certain similarities, but they are nonetheless similar. They are “on the mountain” even if they are not approaching the top.
So you might try to create these counterfactual transformations, cross-referencing the decomposition of various social structures you recognise as “similar” so as to find the ultimate eternally stable equivalent at the peak near each of their individual apexes (Apexes just being the closest points in their particular trajectory to this stable point, measured in terms of “local manifestations”). Of course, that’s also a bit daft, as if you are seeking a single infinitesimal point with non-perfect accuracy, you will not get it! But you could still suggest it’s existence.
But where is this mountain? This plane of ideas? It’s just the notional limit of the exercise of plumbing the powers of all the objects. You look at what other objects will let each other get away with, and what their internal structure will let them get away with, and for how long.
I just tried using a differential-geometry-inspired picture dealing with the stability maps of trajectories of “structural deviations”/”autopoietic drift” but it got too involved for me!
Anyway, I’ve hopefully expanded this enough to give the basic idea.
It’s a shame we stopped our plato/maths discussion early before, because what I’m suggesting is that some of these concepts can loose their “ontotheologically oppressive” character if phrased as imperfect characterisations of emergent immanent destiny: That essences or forms do not “stand over” the processes of change and action, but are extreme cases of the processes of it. So you could say that an object approximates it’s adjacent forms to various extents, not because it is a copy of them, but because it is moving past them (or maybe even towards them).
March 3, 2012 at 10:26 am
Hi Levi,
I am familiar with the analogy he draws, and Zizek uses it in several places. I believe that it actually supports my point as Einstein’s shift from special to general relatively is used to mark the paradoxical point at which substance becomes subject. As it is only a google search away I will use Z’s essay ‘Trouble With The Real’ as my reference.
Where I think your misreading stems from is taking Z’s comments out of context, in this instance the analogy is used as one stage (of several stages) in developing a thesis of the Real. The next stage he situates it in relation to trauma comparing special relatively to early Freud in which trauma is a foreign intrusion that breaks up symbolic space and compares general relatively to the later Freud in which trauma a result of a deferred effect that is retroactively posited by the self-reflective subject. Hence my corrective insistence regarding your summation of Z’s position as you fail to weigh the significance for Z of subjectivity and the transformative effects regarding causality. No doubt that your reading of Z is a product of your claim that subject in just another example of an object which prejudices your reading of Z enabling you to overlook the peculiarity he attaches to the subject. This isn’t a problem per say as a bit of philosophical buggery, though becomes one when you are claiming to surmise the important aspects (important for whom?) of a thinkers position. I think this is the weak spot of Democracy of Objects, and OOO more generally is in its situating and engagement with Hegelian/Marxist tradition – though in recent posts you have begun to make inroads.
Some of the clearest writing on this topic by Z is “Does the Subject Have a Cause” found in the book “The Metastases Of Enjoyment”. It is drier and the thesis is developed more by positive statements than analogy that you tend to find in his ‘pop-philosophy’ works.
Relating all this to the post at hand, as usual my bug bear is with the conflation of nature/culture and find Miller-Latour exposition less convincing regarding persuading objects which I find tantamount to democratization of correlationism. Then your example of the novel, seemed to exemplify the blending M-L and objet a, but what is sacrificed on the alter of OOO of Zizek’s/Lacan’s oeuvre vis-à-vis objet a is precisely objet a as a reflective moment. The result of which is the disavowal in the Lacanian sense of the reality that some objects do not have a voice. My critique is thus: the blending is a way of smuggling in one’s anthropomorphic attributions.
Will.
March 3, 2012 at 2:55 pm
Will,
Actually I think Zizek’s discussion of Freud’s transition from the trauma theory of neurosis to the fantasy theory supports my reading. the theory argues that there was a real event that precipitates neurosis. By contrast, the later fantasy theory argues that neurosis is structurally engendered by the psychic system itself without any reference to an external reality. Neurosis is here not a continent effect, but internal to the nature of the system (hence, there’s no longer any normality). The real here becomes a twist of the symbolic.
I’m not sure how you’re seeing correlationism in my remarks in this post. OOO does not reject the existence of human beings, nor does it argue that humans and other objects never interact. Discussing interactions between humans and other objects does not amount to correlationism. Rather, for something to be a correlationism it has to argue that all relations necessarily include a relation to human thought, culture, or language. I don’t make this claim.
As for the Lacanian subject (not Zizek), I try to integrate his subject into my own work. I see it as one more object among others with its own unique properties and dynamics just as any other object has its own unique properties. What I refuse is the thesis that ontologically it is privileged. It’s important to us, of course, but not a ground of all other being. I think there are a lot of problems with the Hegelian/Marxist tradition, especially on the Hegelian side. I see one of my projects as rescuing Marxist thought from it’s contamination by Hegelian thought. There’s plenty of overlap between OOO and Karx, but OOO and Hegel can’t mix insofar as Hegel is an absolute correlationist in his assertion of the identity of substamce and subject.
March 4, 2012 at 12:05 pm
Since Josh W has put complex dynamics on the table I’ll offer some further remarks.
Dan Sperber seems to have such dynamics in mind in Chapter 5, “Selection and Attraction on Cultural Evolution,” of Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Perspective. He talks of cultural items (“Little Red Riding Hood” is his example) evolving toward “attractor regions” in “a space of possibilities” (p. 111). He observes (112):
Well, um, err, yes. He goes on to suggest “two kinds of factors: psychological and ecological” (113).
Sperber doesn’t cite any sources for this train of thought, but it seems clearly based on dynamical ideas. Maybe he just picked it up hanging around the water cooler at CNRS.
My own thinking on music is a bit more detailed and explicit in its use of dynamics, which I have from the nonlinear neurodynamics of Walter Freeman. In Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture I decided to 1) treat rhythm as the basis of music, 2) to treat music as a phenomenon of people interacting in a ground, and 3) to do this at the neural level. So I’m interested in the group’s trajectory through the state space defined by the nervous systems of group members considered as a single system in which some signals are passed electrochemically (within individuals) and others sonically (among individuals). (See remarks on the music-making group in this post.)
Now, the interesting thing about people making music together is that each individual gives up many many degrees of freedom so that they can be precisely coordinated with all the others, with agreement on the basic pulse of the music as the most fundamental agreement. I thus conjectured that the state space of the (the collective nervous system of the) music-making group is no larger than the state-space of a single autonomous individual. In contrast, when individuals in the group are not making music but, instead, are going about their daily business, their actions will be much more loosely coordinated with one another, making the collective state space vastly larger. So, if we follow the group’s trajectory through its collective state space we can see that it takes a path that moves to and from the region of tightly-coupled music-making. (One might think of this region as the group’s ritual home-base.)
Let us further imagine that, when the group makes music, they tend to much the same pieces time and again. Just why they perform those pieces, the nature of the relevant “micro factors” (to use Sperber’s term), that’s outside the scope of this discussion. But that they DO return to the same pieces time and again, that’s what’s interesting. The trajectories of those pieces would thus seem to be attractors in the collective state space. Those are the trajectories that “stand” (to use Levi’s word) against the flux of collective neural flux.
March 5, 2012 at 6:07 pm
Makes sense to me! And I’m glad you mentioned that stuff about giving up degrees of freedom to coordinate, that’ll probably make my “what objects will let each other get away with” much clearer. I also like the analogy of persistently performed objects as bands with favourite songs, as if (stretching a little) you could call the human body the favourite song of it’s cells and environment/(audience?).
Although I don’t think you should just assume that the state space of a band is equivalent to that of an individual, especially as the experience of musicians suggests otherwise:
I’m guessing you’ve probably been in a band, so you know there is a feeling you can get where you produce something really cohesive, and you have this feeling that you could go on doing this for ages and produce “your band’s” music.
Then there’s that feeling where you do not know where you are going at all, whether it’s going to explode or what, and yet it keeps going, and you keep producing unexpected stuff.
Then there’s the time when you are stuck in a rut and just keep going round the same territory, and you feel more inspired and creative improvising by yourself.
You could call the first roughly equivalent to a single creative individual, the second more than a single individual, and the third less than one.
This runs into rather a serious problem given that there’s a pretty underdefined datum for comparison, in that people vary massively in creativity, self knowledge and appreciation of their own ideas, both in time and across people, so you could find examples of all of those experiences within a single individual shifting between different modes of creativity on their own.
My interpretation is just that you shouldn’t A-priori lock off the possibilities of groups of musicians being potentially more or less novelty-creating than the limits of single musicians, when interacting as a unit over the same channel.
March 5, 2012 at 7:01 pm
The general creativity available to a group is a different from the matter of the state space available in a performance.
Let’s forget about improvising (which I know well) for a moment and consider a more or less completely notated piece, such as a Beethoven symphony, let’s say the good old Fifth Symphony. It’s generally performed by an orchestra having between 60 and 100 players or so. But Franz Liszt prepared a piano reduction that can be peformed by a single player. One player vs. 75, that’s quite a difference. But the state space required for the Beethoven is the same in either case.
If the required state space were larger than that of a single individual, then none of the performers and none of the audience would understand the music. Why? Because they don’t have larger than individual state spaces. However many musicians are involved in generating the sonic output, they hear it as individuals. And so with audience members. If it really required a more-than-indivual state space then, as I said, the music would become unintelligible.
Adding improvisation into the mix doesn’t change that, even if we’ve got collective improvisation where everyone is making it up as they go along. They’re also listening to one another and fitting their outputs into the the total context; that is to say, they’ve given up many degress of freedom in what they’re doing and disciplining their playing by the total group context.
March 11, 2012 at 1:39 am
http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2011/10/simon-o%E2%80%99sullivan-two-diagrams-of-the-production-of-the%C2%A0subject/
March 12, 2012 at 12:54 pm
Click to access SingletonLaw2012DevicesAsRituals.pdf
March 13, 2012 at 11:35 am
Levi,
Less correlationalism in your remarks, more correlationalism in your position arising from treating objet a as big Other. I do think you tend to privilege early Lacan which is a problem when Zizek emphasises different aspects of Lacan/Freud oeuvre I think you too quickly reduce Zizek to your interpretation of Lacan and miss his peculiarity. This creates space for a Zizekian critique of OOO. It probably hasn’t escaped your attention that Zizek is a hegalian and there is a particular form of argumentation associated with being a hegelian. You can see where I am going with this, Thesis: early trauma theory, Antithesis: later trauma theory, where the synthesise of the positions does not privilege one over the other. I think there is ample evidence to support that Zizek does not reduce the Real to the Symbolic…
“The Cause qua the Real intervenes where symbolic determination stumbles, misfires – that is, where a signifier falls out. For that reason, the Cause qua the Real can never effectuate its causal power in a direct way, as such, but must always operate intermediately, under the guise of disturbances within the symbolic order… However, the fact that the Real operates and is accessible only through the Symbolic does not authorize us to conceive of it as a factor immanent to the Symbolic.” (p.30 Metastases Of Enjoyment)
Other examples can be found are a google search away i.e. the essay “Spinoza, Kant, Hegel and… Badiou!”. When you do seem to take account of Hegelian mode of argumentation you seem to interpret a double negation as an affirmation. For example in your reading of appearance of the split subject in DoO fails to account for how, in Zizek’s understanding, that the return to self has a performative force i.e. “…the Spirit that returns to itself, is not the same as the Spirit that was previously lost in alienation” (p190 MOE).
To summarize thus far: Your interpretation of Lacan seems to conceive the phallic signifer on the model of the mirror stage. You reduce Zizek to this reading. My argument is that Zizek in addition to the phallus based upon the the unity of the ego-image in the mirror stage is also dialectically mediated with the phallic signifier modelled on castration in which the Real of the drive comes into play.
Turning to final paragraph of the original post where you position the novel in the position of big Other which needs to be persuaded, when according to my Zizekian critique it is implicitly in the position of objet a. This is facilitated by conflation of nature/culture divide (hence the importance of Latour for your thought), so that the Lacanian Other as social law can be transposed into a domain which was formerly considered to be qualitatively different, so that Lacanian Other is now considered as natural law. This is the anthropomorphic analogy at the heart of OOO.
Will.
March 13, 2012 at 3:29 pm
Will,
I’ve never claimed that Zizek reduces the real to the symbolic. I’ve argued that he treats it as an effect of the symbolic. That’s quite different. The point remains, however, that if that’s the case there’s no real independent of the symbolic or the human. Zizek is quite clear on this. It has nothing to do with privileging the imaginary, which I don’t even discuss.
March 13, 2012 at 3:50 pm
Will,
I would also argue that you’re significantly misreading this passage:
You appear to be treating the objet a as something that is already there in the world and that subsequently disturbs the symbolic. Yet as every Lacanian knows, the objet a as cause is a precipitate of symbolic castration. It is what falls away, the remainder, when the subject is alienated in language. This is represented quite clearly in the discourse of the master. Here I would invite you to review seminars 4 – 6, 9 – 11, and 14 to get a clear picture of this. Bruce Fink’s Lacanian Subject also does a good job outlining the logic here. As Lacan says in Television, “the real is not reality”. Reality is, Lacan argues– in his discussions of the Borromean Knot –a synthesis of the imaginary and symbolic. The real, by contrast, as we learn in Seminar 20 and earlier, is an impasse of formalization. It is not something that arises from elsewhere, but arises immanently in language through the impossibility of language formalizing itself (hence Lacan’s interest in Russell, Cantor, Goedel, and Wittgenstein in developing his later account of the real). It is in this respect that the real is an effect of the symbolic. It is the result of failed formalization. Yet this remains in a correlationist orbit as there’s no question of a real independent of the world. In Zizek this comes as no surprise as his Hegelianism commits him to the thesis of the identity of substance and subject… A thesis that no realism nor materialism (despite Zizek’s contortion to describe his position as materialist to the contrary) can accept.
March 13, 2012 at 4:03 pm
@Bill Ah, that seems a different limit; I was thinking about the complexities of fitting everyone into the same song, but this suggests that both a group and an individual perform for the human ear and so are capped in complexity by it.
My suspicion is that there could be a space between an immediately grasped coherent whole and a cacophonous mess, where the listening required to perform is less comprehensive than the listening required to understand it.
That would probably require some kind of encapsulation, some way to stop players stepping on each others toes even if they don’t fully understand each other’s playing. This would also reduce the available state space per member, but you might still be able to come out ahead.
I wan’t thinking about people following score at all, it feels like it should be possible to escalate the complexity ridiculously in that situation, given how practised motions, tuned and synced by visual signals (conductor & score) could replace auditory signals.
There’s likely formal limits governing both of these; how complex a sound can be and still have human comprehensible music in it, depending on how you tune your ear, but I’ve no idea what they might be.
March 13, 2012 at 6:15 pm
@Josh: You’re introducing factors that I don’t know how to deal with. There’s a certain basic situation that I just barely know how to think about. Here’s how that goes.
The number of states a system can assume depends on two or perhaps three things: 1) the number of elements in the system, and 2) the number states each element can take. If there are no dependencies between elements in the system so that the actions of any given element have no effect on the other elements, then that’s it. But brain obviously is not such a system. Neurons are connected to one another so that the state of any given neuron is likely to depend on the states of many other neurons. This dependency among the elements that has the effect of reducing the size of the overall state space available to the brain.
As a crude first approximation, the effect of learning and development on the brain is to reduce the size of the overall state space. Learning entails creating dependencies between neurons. This reduction, of course, is not random. Rather, it’s “sculpted” by the environment, an environment that includes other people. Further, I assume that, for any given brain, there are many possible states that are never visited at all.
My point about people making music together is that, if the performance is to be coherent, then they are highly dependent on one another. What’s going on in one person’s brain is strongly constrained by what’s going on in another person’s brain. As I said in my original formulation, each has given up many many degrees of freedom so that they can perform together. Whether they’re performing from a score or not is irrelevant.
Now, whether or not, for example, a Beethoven symphony is more or less complex than a Charlie Parker improvisation, that’s an interesting question. But I haven’t the foggiest idea of how to attack that question within the framework I just set out. Obviously learning the rules of bebop jazz is different from learning the rules of European art music in the classical period. A brain has to acquire different sets of dependencies for each, though it is, of course, possible to acquire both sets of dependencies. But that doesn’t get us any closer to figuring out whether the music consistent with one set of rules or more or less complex than the music consistent with the other set. That’s a different question.