Over at Struggle Forever, my friend Jeremy has expressed worries about materialism, instead opting for the broader term “realism”. When I remarked on how I believe my variant of materialism as well as the work of the new materialists can allay these concerns, he responded as follows:
my objection is really only semantic and practical in that, by calling attention to materialism as the basis of your ontology (even though there is much more to your ontology than that), I worry that you’ll cause people to pay attention only to the material aspects of being. To me the descriptor “materialism” is the problem and not so much your approach to it (or any other approach for that matter). “Realism” allows for more flexibility – I can call attention to the reality of an object (how it makes a difference) in terms of its ideal qualities or its material qualities or both, depending on the situation. Whereas, in a materialist ontology (even one like yours), I feel as if one would have to always go back to the material qualities as a ground for all of the ideal consequences of an entity – (why does Popeye make a difference to me? because my neurons fire in a particular way when a pattern of photons bounces of of an image of him and reflects into my eye…). Even though I know your ontology is clearly more nuanced than that, I’m afraid that in practice it would end up being reductionism (substituting the material for the real).
First, it’s important to note that for me there is no distinction between ideas and matter. For me ideas are material things, just as everything else is a material thing. They are material things inscribed in brains, pieces of paper, radio waves, fiber optic cables, computer data bases, and that take time to travel through the void or space. This is what I was trying to get at in my recent post on Lucretius and simulacra. Far from being incorporeal entities, simulacra or atomic entities are diaphanous material entities that must travel from node to node in networks, and this takes time and has limits depending on which medium transmits the simulacra. Societies based on speech (air, breath, sound-waves) will only be able to reach a certain size due to the random variation that snippets of speech enjoy when passed from person to person. Moreover, as theorists such as Walter Ong and his student Marshall McLuhan have noted, the medium of air or sound-waves will tend to favor certain ways of transmitting oral teachings: rhythmic poetry that can be easily stored and repeated in neurological memory. This will have a decisive impact on how these societies develop and what regimes of knowledge are possible for them. It is very difficult, for example, to imagine abstract mathematics, abstract philosophy, universal law, science, and so on developing in an oral culture because of the constraints of material, neurological memory. With simulacra conveyed by writing matters change. Societies become larger because we no longer encounter the “telephone” problem, and new regimes of knowledge emerge because the material features of paper remember for us allowing 1) us to engage in long chains of reasoning that would be impossible for biological neurological reasoning, and 2) allowing us to assign names to abstract entities like the number “1″ without this entity referring to any particular entity such as “one cat” and begin to carry out operations on these entities. In each case the material medium of simulacra (speech, writing, the printing press, telegraphs, phones, internet, etc) will have a decisive impact on the form that social assemblages take, the sorts of knowledge possible within these assemblages, and the forms of political action possible within these assemblages. Materialism places these sorts of considerations front and center in a way that realism– that admits the existence of incorporeal entities free of the constraints of material finitude –do not.
read on!
Setting aside the issue of the status of ideas or simulacra, my response to Jeremy’s worries about materialism are two-fold. First, contra Jeremy, I think we should be thinking about things such as neurology, calories, fuels, etc.. Within the humanities and social sciences there is an almost visceral reaction to these sorts of considerations. Yet as I tried to argue above, there are neurological limitations to the information carrying capacity of brains that determine limits of what can be thought and how we can think in an oral culture. These sorts of biological constraints are necessary to understanding why certain social formations take the form they do (especially in an internet culture that has, in so many way, returned to oral culture do to how modern information has been transmitted). Understanding these things is a necessary component to devising political strategies and responding to our current circumstances.
Likewise, consideration of calories and fuel necessary to sustain certain forms of thought and life are necessary to understanding why societies get stratified in the way that the do and in understanding what is possible in these circumstances. Are the calories and fuels available to sustain another form of life and thought? For example, is it that certain segments of the population are just stupid and “duped by ideology”, or is it that energetically their form of life allows for no form of life because they’re worn out and do not have the energy to explore other possibilities? How we answer this question will have a decisive impact on our political strategies. In the first case we’ll spend our time debunking ideologies (which I believe we should do and that we shouldn’t abandon this practice). However, in the second case we’ll work to find ways to make time and calories available to those who have no time and calories. If it turns out that energy or calories play a decisive role in the ability of people to imagine possibilities and alternatives, than the value of ideology critique in producing political change will be highly limited because people simply do not have the time to read the critiques and understand them because they’re so worn out from labor and life. In other words, there are material constraints on revolutionary praxis.
However, this is not all. Consideration of things like calories and available energy do not simply lead us to strategies political intervention differently, they also help us to fight racism and sexism. Mary Wollstonecraft was able to demonstrate that women aren’t intrinsically inferior, but that their lack of opportunity to cultivate themselves coupled with their grueling labor conditions (considerations again of time and calories or energy) contributed to why the women of her time were the way they were. Whatever else you think of Jared Diamond’s ethnography and history, he was able to show that it is not that certain “races” of people are not “naturally” inferior to Eurasians, but that due to the availability of, among other things, calories, they did not have the time or energy to develop their culture in other directions. It’s rather difficult to do such a thing when your central source of calories come from the pulp of kava trees and the production of this food source takes extensive amounts of time and energy. We must never forget that societies take energy and resources, that they require an infrastructure of distribution and production, to sustain themselves and stave off entropic dissolution. This is precisely what materialism foregrounds and what tends to get lost in, above all, idealist orientations (where it’s all norms, beliefs, and ideologies that account for the forms societies take), but also in realisms where the bruteness of material conditions tend to get erased. And here I think philosophers especially, but academics in general, tend towards idealist and realist positions that ignore material conditions because since their own material conditions of enunciation function well, they become invisible and unnoticed. It’s hard to discern materiality unless you’ve been homeless or lived in different cultural conditions where infrastructure doesn’t support you.
Second, however, it seems to me that Jeremy’s only arise if we equate materialism with reduction. The worry seems to be that we will reduce discussions of society, for example, to discussions of neurology and biology. But this only follows if we equate materialism with reductivism. Yet the central thesis of the new materialisms is not that of reductivism, but of emergence. Following thinkers like Roy Bhaskar, Margaret Archer, and Dave Elder-Vass (thank you Craig!), emergence consists in the thesis that emergent entities have powers that cannot be located in the elements on which they are dependent. Emergent entities are both dependent on their parts and have powers or capacities that cannot be found among their parts. The properties of H2O are entirely different than the powers of hydrogen or oxygen. If I throw water on fire it produces a quite different result than if I threw oxygen or hydrogen on fire. Likewise, H2O freezes at different temperatures than hydrogen or oxygen (I owe this example to Elder-Vass and his Causal Power of Social Structures). H2O cannot exist without hydrogen and oxygen and is explained by the powers of hydrogen and oxygen, but in being explained it is not explained away. It’s powers remain unique to that configuration.
What holds for H2O with respect to hydrogen and oxygen holds equally for persons with respect to neurons and genes, as well as social institutions such as governments, revolutionary groups, corporations, etc. These latter entities certainly emerge from persons, but they have irreducible powers in their own right and capacities to do things in the world. They are real, material beings. Moreover, while they emerge from smaller-scale entities like persons, these smaller-scale entities and larger-scale entities can be in conflict with one another. This is the whole point of my meditations on the strange mereology of onticology or materialist-oriented ontology. Far from erasing the myriad actors or actants that populate the world, emergentist materialisms give us back these entities. Just as Latour requested, we “get our materialism back“.
Materialism presents us with a strange ontology in which matter is surprising and creative, where we do not know, as the phallusophers what have it, what being is in advance, where ideas themselves, including fictions, are material realities that travel throughout the world as simulacra, where there is no action at a distance but where every relation or connection must be physically forged, and where we are simultaneously able to explain the formations of superstition and ideology while critiquing them. If it is the true ontological position, then this is not because it determines matter as an idea as Harman would have it, but rather because what matter is is always in question. Materialism, throughout its history, has perpetually captured the radical alterity of matter to the determinations of thought, and has refused every and any gesture that would determine the being of being in advance. No doubt this is why the phallusophers have perpetually had an animosity towards matter: matter is precisely that which refuses armchair philosophizing or the equation of being and thinking called for by Parmenides. The message of materialism has always been that we must make a detour through the world and practice to know the world, and it has always been that knowledge is a becoming of knowledge, not an idea that is given from the beginning. As such, materialism is that which always returns us to the world, a love of the world, and an attendance to how things actually are in the world; thereby abjuring all a prioris of thought.
May 8, 2012 at 3:15 am
Yet again.. ‘no ideas but in things’ I love that WCWilliams was onto this in 1927…
May 8, 2012 at 3:16 am
Excellent post, Levi. Just a couple of points, though I think the disagreement may prove to be trivial. First:
“… In the first case we’ll spend our time debunking ideologies (which I believe we should do and that we shouldn’t abandon this practice). However, in the second case we’ll work to find ways to make time and calories available to those who have no time and calories.”
Yes, my point was just that we should do both, and thus a fully “realist” position rather than a “materialist” or “idealist” one. I fear that even a nuanced materialism would risk conflating “real” with “material” and thus leave out the ideal. I could be wrong – and maybe it’s worth the experiment.
Second:
“… it seems to me that Jeremy’s [concerns] only arise if we equate materialism with reduction. The worry seems to be that we will reduce discussions of society, for example, to discussions of neurology and biology. But this only follows if we equate materialism with reductivism. ”
Again, I recognize the vitality of the new materialisms, and yours in particular. I applaud that effort wholeheartedly, because I think the concept of “matter” could use a refresh. No more dead lumps of nothing that only take form through some transcendental essence, or by the actions of human labor upon it!
However, I still am concerned about reductionism, but in a different way. Not that it’s reductionism to “mere matter” as described above, but a reductionism to only matter at the expense of the ideal qualities of being. I would prefer an ontology that attends to the ways that beings make a difference through both their material and ideal qualities – as well as any other qualities a particular being might have. I think yours does, but I think there is a risk in calling it “materialism” that you (or someone using your approach) will have to fall back on the specifically material aspects for explanation rather than allowing both qualities to coexist in all of their complexity. Maybe I’m overplaying the risk – I don’t know – and maybe it’s a risk you and other new materialists are willing to take – that’s fine too. I just wanted to point out the risk so that it’s not left unrecognized.
That is, unless you’re suggesting – I just now see this possibility – that Popeye’s materiality is more than just the firing of neurons, the patterns of photons, and the emergent properties thereof. That the materiality actually includes the symbolic. This, I think, is far more radical than other new materialisms, and if this is the case (though I can’t quite grasp it – the work of more sophisticated philosophers than I am) then it would seem to me that your “materialism” is synonymous with my “realism.” That would mean that this whole discussion is moot, but it would also mean that you have your work cut out for you…
Thanks for the response! Always glad to have a discussion with you. Also thanks for pointing out Elder-Vass – looks like interesting stuff, I’ll add it to the list.
May 8, 2012 at 3:56 am
Jeremy,
You keep referring to ideal entities but one of my central points is that there are no ideal entities. There are only material entities. Ideologies are material entities. There’s no question of materialism ignoring them because they are among the material entities in the world. Signifying systems aren’t “ideal”, they’re material entities in the world. This is the whole point of my remarks about simulacra. And here it’s worth recalling that the very concept of ideology is an invention of materialist theory, not realist theory.
May 8, 2012 at 4:01 am
In other words, the point you seem to be missing in my remarks here and at your blog is that for me there are no “ideal” entities, only material entities. What you call “ideal” entities are variants of material entities for me. I’m not “ignoring” them but rejecting their existence in the sense you describe altogether. A signifier is not an “ideal” being but a really existing material being that exists in time and space. The thesis that there are ideal entities is the first step towards Platonism and idealism that degrades all really existing and concrete social formations.
May 8, 2012 at 4:09 am
I don’t think I’ve mentioned “ideal entities” – if so, I misspoke. What I’m concerned about are ideal qualities of entities. I think, in a realist position, any entity would have both material and ideal qualities to varying degrees. So, yes, ideologies are material, but they are also ideal. Materialism runs the risk of attending to the material qualities of an entity at the expense of the ideal qualities of the same entity. For example, materialism might explain Popeye by attending to his material existence as film reels, collectibles, patterns of photons, and firing of neurons, at the expense of explaining Popeye by attending to his symbolic existence and the way he alters and affects my thought, moods, etc. My argument is just that a fully realist approach to explaining Popeye – a full cartography of his existence – would have to attend to both qualities or it would fail.
May 8, 2012 at 9:49 am
Really interesting post. I thoroughly agree with respect to the the ideal.
It’s no longer a question of how to ‘bridge the gap’ between idealism and materialism but rather of how things work if materialism wins and ideas, while still existing of course, have to live by materialism’s rules rather than having rules and a realm of their own.
We just don’t need idealism any more. The cognitive labour it once valuably performed has been superseded — and where it hasn’t been it should be.
That said, there are many problems with adopting ‘materialism.’ There are ontological issues such as whether the entities of quantum physics can be meaningfully called ‘material’ (I think a case can be made for that but it’s hardly a simple question). Also, there is the problem issuing from the fact that the vast majority of people talking about ‘materialism’ mean something quite different to what is described here.
Your typical grouchy naturalist will shout about materialism until the cows come home but it’ll likely be a materialism deeply infused with reductionism, monism (in the sense of matter being a homogenous substrate) and, indeed, idealism insofar as matter will always be something ‘out there’ that is somehow mirrored ‘in mind’ even if said grouch no longer believes in the existence of mind having reduced it all to the frenzied flickering of synapses.
Of course such people don’t own ‘materialism’ but it’s a discursive or political problem at the very least, since it’s extremely unclear in what way we could consider such persons either allies or, indeed, foes. They are clearly both! And since they are undoubtedly far more populous we must reckon with the fact that lots of people will mistake our materialism for theirs and they will deny that our’s is a materialism at all.
Or, long story short, I agree that idealism has gone past being simply wrong and become actually unnecessary. People have ‘rejected’ it as a formal proposition for a long time while maintaining it’s presuppositions implicitly (this is the reason why most idealists refuse to accept that moniker!). If we haven’t gone beyond that altogether we’re getting there.
And yet if you strip all reductionism, monism and idealism out of matter what is left for any new materialism? It’s a problematic flag to fly, to say the least. And yet it’s probably the best term we’ve got.
You can see that I’m equivocating. Not an especially helpful comment, I apologise!
May 8, 2012 at 1:02 pm
Jeremy,
I guess I don’t know what you mean by “ideal qualities”. The best I can figure is that you’re talking about relational properties of signs and signifying systems. “Popeye stands for…”. Yet it’s difficult for me to see why any of these things, why semiosis, is precluded in a materialist framework. These are just operations of which certain types of complex systems are capable. Meaning is the result of material operations on material entities (signs). The question is whether one believes that artificial intelligences such as Deep Blue, the chess playing computer, are possible or whether one believes Deep Blue is not really playing chess and learning but only appears to be playing chess. If you hold that AI’s and AL’s are possible you’ve conceded all the materialist needs as the symbolic activity of these systems is not ideal, but material.
Your worry seems to be that materialism somehow erases meaning, affectivity (which necessarily has a neurological component), etc. for example, you seem to worry that a materialist account would somehow erase any analysis of the signifying dimension of an Incan ritual or artifact. But it’s not clear how or why this follows insofar as signification is a real event that takes place in the communities and brains that experience these significations. That doesn’t somehow get erased when it’s recognized that these are material phenomena.
May 8, 2012 at 1:34 pm
…a love of “the” world? ;-)
May 8, 2012 at 1:46 pm
In all seriousness, my guess is that part of Jeremy’s worry is that by focusing on “material,” everything gets “explained away” by biological, chemical, and other material factors, such that when I’m reading a riveting book of poetry, it gets “explained away” as simply being a serious of neurons firing, associations to my past and to my future hopes, different relays between my retinas and the physical paper in front of me, etc. I imagine that neither Jeremy nor most people (myself included) would ever willingly reject these “material” dimensions. However, I agree that their “explanatory power” does seem rather weak. Personally, I don’t see the contradiction between having a “supra-material” experience (such as a sudden epiphany, hallucinating on acid, or swooning in love) and also realizing that that experience is either grounded or even “wholly” materially in nature. But if Adolus Huxley would have spent the whole time writing about neurons in “The Doors of Perception,” it would have been a pretty boring book. Similarly, a book about death that only discussed the decay of bodily matter would, in my opinion, not really get at the real heart of the issue — the anxiety, the dread, the loss, the hopelessness, etc.
May 8, 2012 at 2:00 pm
Tim,
That ignores the dimension of emergence in the materialism I’m proposing. Emergent entities are real while also dependent on lower level entities. Pointing out that they are dependent on lower level entities does not explain away the powers or capacities that emerge in the larger scale entities. Water does not somehow lose its power to wet, put out fires, or freeze because it is dependent on hydrogen and oxygen. We have to explore water itself to discover these powers. Likewise poetry doesn’t somehow lose its powers of signification because it’s dependent on neurons. Here’s the most important point: believing that poetry is explained by neurology confuses levels of analysis. I can’t explain the dynamics of capital and money by recourse to neurology, nor are the signifying capacities of a poem explained by recourse to neurology. Rather, to understand these things one must remain at the relevant emergent level or scale. Both you and Jeremy seem to be confusing materialism with eliminative materialism, but the position proposed here is 1) not an eliminative materialism, and 2) eliminative materialisms are radical positions even within materialist circles. Long story short, I am not proposing the sorts of explanatory moves or eliminations that either you or Jeremy are worried about.
May 8, 2012 at 2:43 pm
“I can’t explain the dynamics of capital and money by recourse to neurology, nor are the signifying capacities of a poem explained by recourse to neurology. Rather, to understand these things one must remain at the relevant emergent level or scale.”
Yes, I think this is the key to all of this and a good response to Tim and Jeremy. This form of materialism is worth pursuing. However…
How is Harman also not a materialist in the sense defined above? I don’t think he denies neurology or chemistry as a level of the real, either. What is the “material” of this materialism? How is it not a realism?
May 8, 2012 at 3:08 pm
Joseph,
All materialisms are realisms, but not all realisms are materialisms. For example, one can be a realist about non-material entities such as universals and numbers. This would be one point where Harman and I diverge. I am a substance monist in the sense that there is only one type of being, material being (it’s important to note that this is entirely different than monisms that claim that there is only one substance and everything is a property of that substance).
Second, Harman is quite clear in holding that “science knows nothing of objects” (a claim that he makes repeatedly), and of treating any explanation of larger-scale entities in terms of lower-scale entities as an elimination of these larger-scale objects. For me the properties of smaller-scale objects coupled with how they’re related explain the property of larger-scale objects. H2O has the powers it has because of the powers of hydrogen and oxygen and how the hydrogen and oxygen are combined. This, however, is not an elimination of the powers of water and the powers of water itself have explanatory power with respect to other larger-scale entities. If this is not an elimination, then that is because the unique configuration of relations found in H2O are not found in the smaller-scale elements taken alone. “The whole (object) is greater than the sum of its parts (objects)”, not because it somehow departs entirely from them but because the whole is those parts plus their unique way of relating in an assemblage. Wholes, in their turn, can play a constraining role on their parts as in the case of individuals being regulated and conditioned by the social institutions to which they belong. I just don’t find this developed in Harman who is generally hostile to any discussion of the relation between wholes and parts. In other words, Harman’s position is strongly emergent in the sense that it rejects the thesis that objects can be explained at all by their parts.
May 8, 2012 at 3:22 pm
“In other words, Harman’s position is strongly emergent in the sense that it rejects the thesis that objects can be explained at all by their parts.”
You really think that Harman believes that there is no reason why objects exist? And what of his strong defense of the principle of sufficient reason?
May 8, 2012 at 3:24 pm
Joseph,
That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that do to the withdrawn nature of objects, for Harman objects cannot be explained by their parts. Here I would refer you to his review of Metzinger in neurology.
May 8, 2012 at 3:28 pm
Whatever, Levi.
May 8, 2012 at 3:43 pm
Levi,
I’m not sure why my comments aren’t going through. Earlier I was just voicing what I gathered was Jeremy’s concern, not trying to pin you down to those positions myself. I would imagine that you consider any level of “explaining away” to be something to be avoided.
May 8, 2012 at 4:29 pm
My mistake, Tim. I thought you were claiming that materialism cannot grapple with these sorts of things without eliminating them.
May 8, 2012 at 4:43 pm
I think my comments aren’t going through either… Just one more reiteration:
“…believing that poetry is explained by neurology confuses levels of analysis. I can’t explain the dynamics of capital and money by recourse to neurology, nor are the signifying capacities of a poem explained by recourse to neurology. Rather, to understand these things one must remain at the relevant emergent level or scale.”
None of this is inconsistent with the realist (read material-semiotic) approach I’m suggesting. However, I think there is a fine line between a non-eliminativist, non-reductionist materialism in philosophical discourse, and an eliminativist or reductionist materialism in practice. As an anthropologist, the latter is what I’m most concerned about. In realist ethnographies I would want to see equivalent (though not necessarily equal, depending on the subject) attention paid to all aspects, powers, qualities, operations, or what have you. That’s why I would like to keep the semiotic in my material-semiotic realism.
Beyond that practical distinction – i.e. the ontological status of the semiotic as entity, quality, power, operation, etc. – I’m not prepared to make an argument. I’ll leave that to the philosophers who can make those distinctions better than I can, so I’ll step aside in the discussion and wait to see where the philosophical chips fall.
I appreciate you taking the time to respond, Levi. These discussions always help clarify things for me.
May 8, 2012 at 5:00 pm
Jeremy,
I think that what you’re missing in my position is that signs are material entities. I can have my materialism and my semiotics too. Let’s go back to one of your earlier remarks. You worried that if materialism is true then we would end up talking about neurons rather than signs and would therefore end up missing all sorts of important things with respect to signs. First, this confuses materialism with reductivism. You seem to be assuming that materialism means that neurons are real and that signs are unreal, but that’s just not the case. Second, there are different levels of analysis here. The first point to note is that signifying systems are 1) relational (i.e., a matter of how signs relate to one another for a particular group of people), and 2) are not private. This second point is particularly important, because it entails that signs do not reside in any particular mind. They are collective entities, not entities in individuals.
This latter point is of crucial importance because it entails that we cannot adequately investigate signifying systems by simply reducing them to neurons or genes. We would be confusing levels of analysis and the phenomena to be explained. Trying to explain signifying systems through neurons would be like trying to explain weather and climate through individual particles of various gases taken in isolation. It would miss the larger-scale relational networks that govern weather. At most neurons can constrain what sort of significations are possible for individual cognition; they can’t explain the nature of signification because signification exists at a different material scale and requires different explanatory principles. And just as we don’t say weather is “ideal” because it can’t be explained through the individual gases alone, we don’t say that signifying systems are ideal because they can’t be explained through individual neurons and minds alone. This is the whole point of materialist emergence theories.
You seem to be insisting that my materialism necessarily leads to the position that I have to explain things like signifying systems through neurons. Recognizing that I don’t wish to explain things in these terms, you suggest that I should adopt the term “realism” rather than “materialism”. However, this only follows if one accepts your highly contentious conception of what “materialism” is. I can both be a materialist, recognize that signifying systems cannot be explained through neurons, and hold that signifying systems are real material entities that function in the world. I don’t need to admit problematic things like “ideality” into my ontology to give a rich, non-reductive ethnographic account of phenomena such as the one you’re looking for. If, by contrast, I take the route you’re proposing, I risk introducing all sorts of highly mysterious and philosophically questionable entities into my ontology such as “idealities”, opening the door for all sorts of other mysterious entities that undermine the value of object-oriented approaches, I think, altogether.
May 8, 2012 at 5:14 pm
Levi, I don’t mean to suggest that you adopt any term. You do what you think is best, because I know you have your reasons, and if you can redefine materialism as you’ve described, then I’m all for it. I only wanted to state my position – that until “materialism” means what you’re talking about, I’m going to stick with “realism” or “material-semiotic” for my own approach – I have my reasons, and I’m willing to take the risks.
May 8, 2012 at 5:28 pm
Gotcha, Jeremy. Careful with talk about “redefining” however. I’m defending a particular variant of materialism that’s been quite common throughout the history of materialist thought. Lucretius, for example recognized the reality of emergent phenomena. Like, Marx’s whole critique of commodity-fetishism is based on the thesis that value isn’t a property in the individual object itself but rather is a product of a material network of relations surrounding production and exchange.
May 8, 2012 at 5:39 pm
Jeremy,
You seem to be stuck on the notion that semiotics and meaning must be non-material? Everything you want to include (even in practice) can be included in the kind of non-reductive materialism Levi and I suggest. A african tribe is a material assemblage, a library is a material collection, a rock concert is a material event, a poetry reading is a material event – all these things are fully material but all involve very different combinations of matter and energy, with different extesive organizations and intensive relations that generate emergent properties and capacities (powers).
You and I are fully material entities but we also have irreducible / onto-specific capacities that give us our unique character (intra-ontic paricularity). Moreover, our interactions are a generative event called a conversation. You can’t explain ‘conversations’ by talking about atoms and matter alone. You also have to talk about layered complexity and emergent properties in order to explain or even describe conversations.
Semiosis comes from the differential interactions between vibrant material assemblages that have evolved the capacity for particular sensitivities.
From Wikipedia:
“Biosemiotics is a growing field that studies the production, action and interpretation of signs and codes in the biological realm. Biosemiotics attempts to integrate the findings of scientific biology and semiotics, representing a paradigmatic shift in the occidental scientific view of life, demonstrating that semiosis (sign process, including meaning and interpretation) is its immanent and intrinsic feature.”
The intrinsicality of meaning as consequence is an issue of combinatorial relation and differential intensities.
May 8, 2012 at 6:19 pm
I get what you are saying now Jeremy: we must be careful not to overdramatize “matter” less we exclude appeals to complex phenomena in practice. But, on the contrary, that is what Levi and I are arguing against. We want discourses that take our materiality serious, and in ways that enrich our eco-political understandings not limit them. The “materialist” label means nothing outside advocating for serious consideration of material existence. Understanding the social and material-biological basis of action, meaning and consciousness are of the utmost importance in the coming years
May 8, 2012 at 6:47 pm
I guess what I’m saying, beyond the misplaced preaching about what is or is not material (sorry), is that ‘materialism’ does not need to be an obsession with atoms at the expense of complex semiotic and functional achievements. Jane Bennett has shown us a way forward towards a reinvigoration of materialist thought with decidedly practical consequences. A “reenchantment” or at least a deep understanding of the cosmos, and thus a reinvestment of attention and energy to support the planet, flows from a synoptic vision grounded in a complex appreciation for material existence.
Related to this, I believe Meillassoux’s arche-fossils and Brassier’s extinction are important notions that place the human situation is a solid materialist perspective. Meillassoux pints to a time before the advent of any possible human-world correlation, and Brassier bookends that by gesturing towards a time when the human-world correlation not be possible. Both insights, I believe, bring us back to the intruding tangibility and wild-ness of emerging material existence in a way that can only shock, horrify and then inspire us to be more alive and awake creatures.
And so yes the risk is worth it, because anything less than some sort of deep materialism can only allow us to perpetuate an anthropocentrism as delusionary as will be destructive.
May 8, 2012 at 10:17 pm
I too can see Jeremy’s point but also don’t agree.
If what previously went under the title ‘ideal’ has been broken down and made material then, in doing so, the concept of matter itself hasn’t stayed static — it has been expanded. Those who speak of matter as if it were a brute, listless substrate do so because they are able to import the animating force to make it dance and surge, as it does, from somewhere else. From mind, god, some elan vital, and so on.
If ideality was subsumed into materiality and the latter remained unchanged then this would certainly be a ‘reduction.’ But that doesn’t seem to be what Levi et al. are doing. Matter emerges a different kind of thing, a thing with powers of self-formation, emergence and so on. There’s always a risk that one might stretch the category too far but it’s been pliant enough so far.
May 9, 2012 at 5:34 am
I am sympathetic with Jeremy’s concern about “materialism” being too limiting a term. I fully agree that every semiotic occasion is a material occasion, but no semiotic occasion is exhausted by a description of material interactions: a discussion of shifting dopamine or serotonin content or auditory vibrations does not, and cannot, encompass the fullness of a poetry reading. A different language is required, or even suite of languages. Materialism is a language, a mode of looking and speaking which privileges third-person, objective descriptors over others. It is absolutely essential, in my view, but not sufficient. And significant aspects of reality remain “withdrawn” if only approached with the material-o-scope.
May 9, 2012 at 1:01 pm
Bruce,
As was discussed in prior comments, this is a mischaracterization of materialism. Signifiers are material entities in their own right and must be discussed in their own terms.
May 9, 2012 at 4:53 pm
Bruce,
We can take or leave the term. What I advocate for is a hybrid langauge (theory) that takes materiality deadly serious. We have a boat load of conceptual baggage that a robust materialist perspective could cut loose or reconfigure, on the way to a more liberating and meaningful non-dualist realism. The key nuance Levi and I continue to argue for is the notion of emergence. Emergent realities are embodiments of irreducible complexity. What you and Jeremy seem to be worried about is reductionism not materialism.
So, for example, in the case of a poetry reading, appeals to dopamine, serotonin and auditory vibrations are important aspects of the story, but so are the emergent features of emotional affect, semantic resonance, cognitive apprehension, intentionality, symbolic heritage, personal narratives, existential concern, interpersonal imaginaries, social context, political affordances, etc. Understanding complex and multifaceted situations require what Clifford Geertz famously called “thick description”. Thick description entails, respecting all the contributing levels of influence and organization “below” and “above” particular entities that make up any event or composition, but it also means taking things on their own terms at the level on which they operate.
But all of that can fit within a materialist framework as well. Materials can be assembled into dynamic, multi-layered systems which generate all sorts of expressions and exchanges.
May 10, 2012 at 12:23 am
A bit off topic but I’m curious. You mentioned Bhaskar in your post and make reference to him liberally in TDOO. Have you written about Bhaskar since his turn to meta-reality, and how this might differ from his earlier work? And how this might or not relate to onticology? Thanks.
May 10, 2012 at 12:27 am
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