One of my worries about the new turn towards realism is that it will end up washing away all of the valuable social critiques that arose out of Marxist thought, the early Frankfurt school, structuralist, post-structuralist, feminist, queer, and race theory. In particular, I worry that situating these discussions abstractly as debates between monolithic positions of “realism” and “anti-realism”, deeply risks ignoring the ontological specificity of the field out of which social constructivist positions arose and the political and ethical considerations that have motivated these positions. It also, I believe, risks glossing over unique ontological features of humans and social systems, oddly shifting away from a “realist” position (i.e., one would think that realism is particularly attentive to the genuine ontological features of entities). When I hear questions at conferences about where the place of feminism, post-colonial theory, and queer theory is in OOO responded to with the claim that “maybe we need to stop worrying about these things”, I find myself deeply disturbed. I find myself disturbed because 1) I think variants of OOO are capable of addressing these issues in a satisfying way (I try to outline such a model in chapter 4 of The Democracy of Objects, though perhaps my account remains too abstract or too much at the level of “pure theory”), and 2) because I think we can’t ignore these issues. The forms of oppression that arise from essentialist conceptions of human “types” continue to have very real consequences for human lives as well as play a key role in perpetuating capitalist systems of exploitation that both cause misery for billions of people and are destroying the planet. If SR simply turns away from these things out of a zeal for defeating anti-realism, then it has little to offer for concrete struggles around the world.
Nonetheless, for me, at least, there were very real political and ethical reasons for turning to a realist/materialist position. It wasn’t because I had suddenly abandoned the lessons I had learned during my anti-realist days from theorists such as Lacan, Zizek, Butler, Foucault, Adorno, Derrida, Baudrillard, etc., it was because I increasingly began to experience the limits of these positions with respect to the problems we face today. Encountering the limits of something is quite different from rejecting that thing. To reject something is to banish it entirely from ones theoretical edifice as in the case of the theory of the humors was banished as an explanation of sickness, or phlogiston was banished as an explanation for why things burn. Encountering the limits of something, by contrast, entails that one retains the theoretical advances of that thing, while also recognizing that there are a broad body of things this theory does not explain. In such a moment one recognizes that their ontology needs to be expanded to cover entirely new domains that exceed those of the field of investigation in the previous domain. This is the moment where one recognizes that a new discipline needs to be forged (and no I’m not making the pretentious claim that I’m forging a new discipline). This is what happened with me and anti-realism. It wasn’t that I had somehow come to reject Adorno’s reflections on the culture industry, Foucault’s analysis of epistemes in the social sciences, Butler’s reflections on the construction of gender, post-structuralist accounts of the construction of race, Marx’s critique of commodity-fetishism, etc. No, as I make clear in the introduction to The Democracy of Objects, I continue to endorse these accounts as I always did. Indeed, one of the reasons I chose Luhmann’s account of the autopoiesis of objects was that it was the most radical account of constructivism I was familiar with and was therefore capable of integrating these lines of argument.
read on!
Rather, what I discovered was that the Lacanian axiom I had advocated for so many years– that “the universe is the flower of rhetoric” (Seminar XX) –was limited in its ability to respond to the problems that were of importance to me. Marx was an adequate theoretical framework for thinking the dynamics of global capital. Thinkers like Zizek and Adorno were adequate for thinking ideology. Thinkers like Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari (though I think D&G are realists) were adequate for thinking desire. Thinkers like Foucault were adequate for thinking about how institutions and scientific discourses in the social sciences discursively and through power produce subjects. Thinkers like Baudrillard and Bourdieu were adequate for explaining why certain objects take on cultural value. Thinkers like Butler were adequate for thinking the social construction of gender. Etc.
Yet none of these things were adequate for thinking problems like climate change, the impact of technologies on the world, or the impact of geography on social formations. (Tim, if you’re listening this is my explanation of why I think realism, materiality, and networks are philosophically important. Perhaps we’re just asking very different questions?). If you’re going to think seriously about things like climate change, for example, discussions of lived experience or how “the universe is the flower of rhetoric” will not do. You need to take seriously real properties of greenhouse gases, the earth’s albedo, methane gases released from garbage dumps, cow farts, diets, the flight of people to the suburbs and what this entails as a result of car travel, fluctuations in the sun’s output, ocean temperatures, etc. Analyses of lived experience or the social construction of objects are thoroughly inadequate for responding to these things. At some point you need to hang your hat on the peg and recognize that you’re not just talking about discourses or signifiers. Yes, yes, you want to talk about discourses, texts, and signifiers too. Yes, yes, you want to talk about lived experience too. But this is not enough. You need to take into account the mind, language, and sign independence of these beings as well. There’s no way around this. At least, I don’t think there’s any way around this.
I want to have my social constructivism and have my realism too. In fact, I want to go so far in my realism that I even count social constructions as real. They are all too real for those who live with their negative effects and like an ecosystem they regulate the possibilities of lives, our ability to respond to pressing problems like climate change, and the lives of countless nonhuman beings. However, recognizing that a theoretical framework is limited and that more theoretical work needs to be done broaching different domains of analysis does not leave the original theory unchanged. In The Democracy of Objects (sorry to plug my latest book so much in this post), I claim that I’m able to integrate the findings of Zizek. In Tim’s post, a participant who describes me as a psychotic because I treat words like things, says that I can’t really integrate Zizek unless I embrace his Hegelianism. Apparently this reader forgets that 1) Freud describes the psychotic as revealing on the surface the truth of the unconscious, and 2) forgets that in his final teaching Lacan described himself as a psychotic and praised Joyce for finding a non-Oedipal solution in the case of his own psychosis. I’d say I’m in good company, especially for those who have understood the argument of Anti-Oedipus (which Lacan, incidentally, praised)! Finally, I would argue that this reader seems not to understand the difference between the letter and the signifier in Lacan. Based on over 15 years of engagement with Lacanian theory both in the clinic and in the letter of the text, working, in both the clinic and with the theory, with some of the most eminent Lacanian theorists alive today, I’d be more than happy to go toe to toe with him if he’d like a more detailed debate.
Setting that silliness aside, this respondent doesn’t seem to recognize that integration doesn’t entail sublation of all elements of a theoretical edifice. Theoretical changes, even where they don’t reject all elements of the previous theoretical edifice, do not leave that previous theoretical edifice unchanged. Things need to be reworked in light of the new additions. Other claims need to be abandoned. New elements need to be introduced into the previous theory. The previous theory, while not rejected, is not the same as it was before. And this is how it is with Zizek’s Hegelianism. I believe that I can integrate the framework of Lacanian theory of the subject, desire, and jouissance within a Luhmannian framework of sociological autopoietic theory, but this is a far cry from endorsing the claim that there is an identity of substance and subject. No, the whole point of the realist move with respect to problems like climate change was that we can no longer claim that signifying articulations are the structuring agency of all being. We can no longer say that “reality is a synthesis of the imaginary and the symbolic” (Lacan, Television). No, reality has to become something closer to the Lacanian real, and the Hegelian real is something that evades all dialectical sublation, even the fraught, contradictory, Goedelian, and open sublation that Zizek advocates. At best Zizek gives us a nuanced version of commodity fetishism. But there’s more to heaven and earth than commodity fetishism. In this framework, all sorts of things, following Guattari, would have to be included in the Lacanian framework that tend to be ignored: the literal architecture of the institution where the clinic is practiced, the relations between the people that are there, the sort of work that is done by “patients” and “analysts”, the media used, artistic practices, economics, the material sociological setting of the neighborhood, etc., etc., etc. In addition to the signifier, we would have to attend to the role these things play.
To recognize the limits of a theory is also to recognize the limitations of a theory or the domain to which it is limited. Whitehead famously said that the shortcomings of a theory are not generally the result of outright false claims or logically incoherent arguments, but rather overstatement. A philosophy or theory discovers something that is true of the world and the next thing you know, like an obsessional man whose partner has told him that something “works” for him or her, he repeatedly tries to do the same thing over and over again in the bedroom making it unbearable. Recognizing the limitations of a theory thus means recognizing the domain to which it is limited, the domain where it “works”, but also being open to the domain beyond this where other theoretical tools are needed. Over time the social constructivists became like the obsessional man in the bedroom. In their meditations on social construction they had found something true and real, but the next thing you knew they were trying to apply this discovery everywhere and always, ignoring everything else. Suddenly everything was socially constructed and there was nothing outside of social construction. And, of course, as we all know, what began as something valuable and pleasurable, becomes in these circumstances something painful and destructive.
Ian Hacking, I think, provides us with the means of retaining the truth of social constructivism while also recognizing its limits. In The Social Construction of What? Hacking distinguishes between interactive and non-interactive concepts. His thesis is that the social constructivists are speaking of interactive concepts when they speak of social construction. What, then, is an interactive concept or category? An interactive category is a category in which the people named by the category can be affected by the category. When a person is diagnosed by a family practitioner as an alcoholic, that category is not simply a description but rather 1) the person so defined can adopt behaviors and thoughts in accord with the category, and 2) the category can change their social relations. The person defined by the doctor as an alcoholic might, for example, begin to draw on cultural narratives about what alcoholics are like– for example, the film Leaving Las Vegas –and begin to enact those behaviors where they didn’t before. Likewise, the person’s social relations can change as in the case where the doctor’s diagnosis has legal ramifications, leading them to be forced into some form of treatment or even sent to an institution. Here’s it’s worth remembering that these sorts of categories aren’t simply a personal affair, but rather are a collective affair.
The point is that unlike rocks, persons and social systems interact with the categories that befall them. They take up attitudes and behaviors with respect to these categories. It is in this sense that people and social institutions are formed or constructed by signifiers and concepts. A media report that says the economy is bad is not simply a description of the economy, but becomes a call to action upon economic institutions, governments, and individual people regardless of whether its true. By contrast, rocks adopt no attitude or behavior with respect to the way we categorize them. They go on behaving rockishly just as they always did before. The important point is that these categorizations are not simply a matter of us adopting an attitude pro or con with respect to how we individually have been categorized. Rather, these categories function independent of us, socially, even where we think they’re bullshit. Herman Cain might think that racial categorizations are bullshit and that we’re all free neoliberal subjects, but the social system still codes him in ways to which he must respond. Even where he doesn’t adopt an attitude towards these things, the effect of these signifying structures still has a causal impact on him that delimit possibilities for him, that situate him socially in such a way, and that contribute to his life experiences and how he develops.
My point is that if we’re true realists– and hopefully materialists! –we should be attentive to the properties of different types of systems. We should recognize those systems that have capacities of reflexivity or of taking up attitudes towards ways in which they are described and those systems that do not have these characteristics. And given this we should heartily embrace theories of social constructivism, recognizing that categorizations and signifying structures have a real impact on the operations of reflexive systems leading them to develop in particular way. It does not have to be an either/or where we’re forced to choose between lived experience and semiosis or the real effect of cow farts on climate. Rather, it should be a both/and where we recognize that for certain types of systems descriptions have real constructive effects and for other types of systems descriptions do not. We should be able to have our Baudrillardian analysis of the system of objects as commodities imbued with symbolic value and our realism too.
Larval Subjects . 
May 9, 2012 at 1:07 am
Levi,
Perhaps some of the frustration stems from the very limits of theory itself, or at least, theory as a discourse meant to analyze or intervene in reality. When you write persuasively (and I agree) that theories need to be overcome (not necessarily rejected) and supplemented by new theories, I cannot help but feel like there is an outer limit to that potentiality as such. Or at least, beginning from the material concerns that seem to animate you the most, I wonder if theoretical analysis will ever be enough, if a framework to understand everything involved will ever be enough. This is obviously not to denigrate the endeavor– I in fact think it is required for theorists today to move on from a narrow-minded view of social-constructions, just as you say. In that sense, there is a parallel movement going on here — just as you insist we recognize the material conditions of our discourse, somehow our discourse has to enter into material conditions in order to alter them. If, in the past, it was enough to intervene in the ‘symbolic’ or the ‘imaginary,’ now it really is as if the real has punctured through (Tim Morton’s recent presentation at non-human expressed rather well). This means that theory has to give up its ideational interventions, not only on a matter of principle, but because material conditions itself have changed. Then, one isn’t so much ‘against’ the ideal interventions of the past; one is simply recognizing that something has changed. And that change then must take place on the level of ideas as well. In other words: they have to become material, invest material, become bodily, become things themselves, interrupt/disrupt/cultivate networks, etc. Simply put, one cannot rely on the idea to do it for them. One has to push further.
I think I understand you here, if what I’ve said has made any sense, and I couldn’t agree more. My training began as a poet because poetry has always understood the link between words and things. In poetry, words are things that operate on you; and you are not a mind operating with “words.” For the poet, there are either no such thing as “words,” or words absolutely are their materiality. “Material” not in the sense of some toolbox to choose from, but actual phenomena, disruptive things, uncontrollable things, unknowable things par excellence. That’s why it isn’t without trepidation that I ever “take a position” or try to advance theoretical arguments, and when I do, they can only come from the flux of material things within them. In my eyes, things, materials, these things are exposed, themselves but also exposed, exposed to themselves from within, and exposed to the outside on their borders. In a certain way, “thing” = disruption. But saying so, I don’t advance an idea, or at least I don’t mean to. Something happens in the material, it is a felt something, it is a return to the uninhabitable thing called thinking. If it were just an “idea,” it could mean and it could do nothing, precisely because “meaning” and “doing something” (materially) have to mean/do the “same thing” from here on out. Call it what you will, but psychotic is far preferable to proud.
I’m going to leave this text as it is. I enjoyed this post of yours.
Tim.
May 9, 2012 at 1:20 am
Tim,
I believe all theories have limitations but that that can only be discovered through working through the theory in thought and practice. As Hegel said, fear of error is error itself. You have to act to discover those limitations.
In other matters, you have accused me of having a rhetorical edifice that tries to absorb everything else and that requires everyone learn it. First, I feel as if you perpetually throw an opaque and mysterious jargon at me that requires one to assimilate it to speak. Second, my writing is replete with examples from daily life, social interactions, and the world to illustrate my claims. Third, I daily work with people from a variety of disciplines and walks of life both on this blog, my publications, and in my classroom teaching. Do you do the same? I’m quite offended by the linguistic imperialism you try to practice with respect to me and the charges you make against me which poorly reflect my communicative practices. It’s not as if Nancy speaks immediately to everyone.
May 9, 2012 at 1:20 am
(Part 2)
I should have waited and returned to my initial paragraph, because the initial opinion that “perhaps theory is never going to be enough” can obviously only be overcome through a new way of doing theory as such, a new “style” of doing theory. Above all, it cannot be a “hands off” approach. What I admire and always have admired about this blog is the voracious need to push forward and be unsatisfied with whatever landing stone has been reached. But what this most recent analysis of my own has reminded me of is that this need to push forward has less to do with theoretical concerns than with material concerns. The theory has to push forward because the theory does not auto-constitute, and there is not a mind behind the theory to guarantee it or to constitute it. The theory has to push forward because materiality itself pushes forward, and for the theory to continue to be “viable” in any way, it must be “lived,” that is, it must push itself again and again into “the material” — both the “actual material” and the “material of theory.” And the whole point would be that there can no longer be any difference between the actual material and our materials, our theoretical materials.
Again, it strikes me that this is not our “choice.” Something like the Real has punctured through and rendered ideas not only inept, but detrimental and caustic when left at the realm of ideas. That’s why politics, religion, etc., all these ‘ideologies’ so reliant on signification and meaning, are so redundant and inept themselves: they miss the work that needs to be done. They are afraid to get their hands done, too content to rely on beliefs, on common agreement, etc. I recall that in the past I have critiqued your idea that relations must be forged, but from this standpoint, it is clear that there would be no end to the forging of relationships, because there can be no end to digging in to the material. Any view that considered the relationship “forged for good” would quite simply be a forgery. For the relationship to be forged “for good,” this means forged continually. In other words, no transcendental signifier or system of meanings/ideas to hold either the group or the theory together. Frightening, but true: nothing holds together. Could there be a more ‘apt’ eruption of the Real than that? It’s not so much that we reject Lacan, since I imagine his hands were as dug in to the material as we require ours to be. Perhaps the same goes for Hegel, all back down the line. But no matter, because what is incumbent upon us to realize is that we have to keep up with the Real, we have to keep up with “the material.” We can’t believe in anything — not a belief, not a semblance of knowledge — but we have to get our hands dirty.
Just as one knows we can’t abandon words and human speaking for the sake of saving the rainforest, we know that we can’t abandon theory for the sake of intervening materially. If anything, we have to push ourselves to accord to the word the honor it deserves — as a material thing, capable, I believe, of quite a bit.
Tim.
May 9, 2012 at 1:30 am
Levi,
At no point was I trying to make charges against you. Quite frankly, it is strange that you are reading my comments that way, since I was articulating what I believe you are articulating, that theory/words have to dig in to material/things because it is only on the level of material/things that theory/words can have any effect.
When I say “we have to push ourselves to accord to the word the honor it deserves — as a material thing, capable, I believe, of quite a bit,” I am not intending to be a linguistic imperalist. I am agreeing with you that to write one must dig behind the idea that words exist on some semiotic or purely significative level, and accord them the reality or thinghood that they actually deserve. If we don’t do that, we stay in the realm of ideas, meanings, significations, instead of making our theories/words things that are alive, constantly moving, etc.
Tim.
May 9, 2012 at 1:43 am
Levi,
It seems like you’ve interpreted my “it must” with a “you must,” when really I only meant to echo your “it must.” I’m not here to pass judgments on anyone’s life. I’m just voicing from my vantage point what it means to write and/or develop a theory that is invested materially, not only with significations.
So I apologize if what I write seems to be full of jargon to you, it certainly is not intended to be. I too am grappling with the contingencies of developing a material thought. I’ve not tried to be mysterious or opaque. I am just writing, I am just thinking, materially being here and acting as best as I can, just as I imagine you are doing. Why are we getting in to the game of comparing one another to each other, taking things so personally, accusing one another of not being up to snuff, when in fact there are an infinity of translation errors going on here, an infinity of behind-the-scenes activities (material, textual, etc.) that can never be seen? I refuse to go down that route, and I’m sorry if my words have been interpreted that way, as they certainly were not meant as such. I can only hope a second reading bears that fact out.
Tim.
May 9, 2012 at 12:08 pm
Dear Levi, just wondering, but what exactly does OOO contribute to things like greenhouse gasses? I keep on reading arguments that say ‘we need to be able to deal with quarks’, but the thing is, isn’t any philosophical system that has a niche for science already capable of dealing with quarks?
I really get the idea of moving away from linguistic obsession, but I think several writers have done this for some time. Marx, Althusser in his insistence of the materiality of ideology, and so on.
May 9, 2012 at 12:59 pm
Borgese,
This link will perhaps give you a sense of what I’m after:
May 9, 2012 at 1:18 pm
I really think there’s a case to be made that Marx does all this. The metaphor of ‘topology’ directly implies that the conditions of reproduction of productive relations alter from geographical place to place, that greenhouse gasses have a part to play as well as strikes.
Practices are necessarily in contact with rice and wheat, and if all ideology is ”practical’, it makes perfect sense to consider them as non-human agents. But that’s just a Spinozaist move already made by Althusser and sometimes Bourdieu, so while I really like the stuff you guys are writing, I just don’t get the feeling of specificity.
I mean, this is exactly the thing that annoys me every time I read Foucault. He really is a great thinker, but he consistently ‘covers his trail’ in regards to his sources, which makes his theories seem much more original than they actually are. I don’t really value originally, but I think that it makes it harder to study, especially for poor undergraduates tramping their way through tracts that are as much philosophical manifestos as philosophical experiments.
May 9, 2012 at 1:43 pm
Borgese,
I’ve written quite a bit about Marx here and elsewhere. I think Marx did do a lot of this and that there is an OOO version of Marx. I do, however, think that Marxism came to be dominated by cultural Marxism, effacing these things in Marx’s work. While I consider Marx an ally, the project of OOO is broader than that of Marxism. It is an ontological orientation that is also trying to understand the being of being in addition to responding to certain political issues.
May 10, 2012 at 12:04 am
Levi, as always I enjoyed your post, and as is usual for me, I have questions. I am afraid I will for the nth time be either unclear or stupid or both, but…. You say: “By contrast, rocks adopt no attitude or behavior with respect to the way we categorize them. They go on behaving rockishly just as they always did before.” First, let me say some things I believe we share. Even if rocks “themselves” do not react to our attitudes toward rocks, we certainly may act toward rocks in ways that are mediated by our beliefs, convictions, perceptions, theories, etc. Further, from the human side these relations which are “discursive” or “epistemic” are not to be simply discarded in a realistic appraisal as they too — although of a different order — are real and can influence real and more physically/environmentally consequent actions in regard to rocks. Is that ok with you? I think it is so far. But then let’s go back to your assertion. Are the rocks in your sentence that are not under current observation/experimentation/interaction, individual specific rocks? If so, is there not a risk in continuing to address their character in their absence? Specific rocks may melt or even — in strange cases — deliquesce. They may oxidize or dissolve. In that case these rocks — models of durability — are no longer what you were saying, so one might wonder what you were doing. If on the other hand you were speaking of “essential rockness” or “ideal rockness” does not that version of realism seem sort of Platonic? Or is there a kind of ontomorphic eternal return here where you think, yeah ok there is a characteristic of rocks that is a recurring attribute of elements and physical law (even though are notions of elements and physical law are — at least to a degree — historical)? So then you are not pointing to specific rocks or ideal rocks but scientific rocks? Still, one might point out that that depends on the kind of rock one is referring to. Some rocks are aggregates of others. Some rocks have voids. Some are populated by other things or organisms. So which persistent rocks or persistence itself were you alluding to? We can even imagine and maybe must imagine (Difference and Repetition) that no two rocks are the same and that addressing them in the plural is always then an abstracting and reductionist gesture which is not, in itself, necessarily realistic. BTW as I am a bit gun shy, let me say that I am not committed by this to a neo-Berkeley position of esse est percipi, nor does such a group of questions — I think — imply Kant or correlationalism. What all this means for me is that only that which relates relates. I believe this is ontological but then I think the epistemic is ontological.
May 10, 2012 at 12:28 am
[…] immediately visible in a modernist framework). Rather than just engaging in critique (which should not abandon), rather than simply debunking or revealing the fetish behind an artifact we took to be […]
May 10, 2012 at 1:09 am
Dan,
I’m not against your epistemically questions per se. Luhmann and Uexkull are two of my heroes and constant references, both of whom radicalize Kant and phenomenology by extending it to nonhumans (which also means Kant and phenomenology are retained in my framework). This is why I can comfortably say every object is a monad or a being that perceives the world from a particular point of view.
What I am inviting people to do, however, is to abandon the critical attitude and epochs for a moment, suspend the question of how we intend or signify x for a bit, and just attend to the object itself, what it does, and how it encounters the world. Yes, I’m referring to the individual rock itself. No I don’t think the rock is unchanging (certainly you’re familiar with my distinction between virtuality and local manifestation, my claim that all beings are processes in becoming, and my claim that they’re all struggling with entropy?).
May 11, 2012 at 1:09 am
Levi, Thanks. Yes, I have some understanding of your being as process etc. It strikes me as a more modern conatus and in itself, I have no problem within its range of action. And yes I think I get your ability to retain epistemology within — forgive the twisting — ontological brackets.However, I honestly do not understand how one can, at once, refer at all AND suspend the need to model reference effectively without making the associated realism more questionable than seems desirable. However, I will understand that as my problem – as a kind of color blindness or tone deafness — as you are as always generous and I see no path that will not appear ungrateful. Be well.
May 11, 2012 at 1:23 am
Dan,
It’s exactly the same problem as relation to the Other. Are you committed to the thesis that we can never know anything of others and that there’s no difference between how the narcissist that only sees himself reflected in others and how other people relate to others?
May 11, 2012 at 3:49 pm
[…] whether these claims are ontologically true of human beings and social systems (cf. here, here, and here). When thinkers like Foucault and Butler challenge these sorts of essentialist claims about […]
May 12, 2012 at 12:11 am
Since you ask, I will try to answer. “Are you committed to the thesis that we can never know anything of others and that there’s no difference between how the narcissist that only sees himself reflected in others and how other people relate to others?” To me, these terms seem loaded: a little like the classic prosecutor line “Have you stopped beating your wife?” Simondon suggests we should “understand the individual from the process of individuation rather than the process of individuation by means of the individual”(Zone 300). To this I would add that individuals are never other than epiphenomena of the processes (plural or even innumerable) whereby they present their individuality. Said another way: individuals are never individual but multi-relational. In your question, then, with its “we” and “others” you seem to have gone to what I recognize as an orthodox ontic default of the presupposition of individuals but this is exactly what I think is at issue. I obviously do not mean that I cannot understand how these terms are used in regular parlance, but that these tacit notions are to me unsustainable when interrogated closely. Given my dispositions, I can give some hints how I would handle what I would call the force of your question without using the concepts that seem to inform it. For me, anything known is known because a current, extant, and local relation is in activity by which the supposed “knower” and “known” become available to each other as they are – already as it were – mutually constitutive. I do not think there is usually one relation at a time between two adjacents but many that are not nested and so there is never “one thing” at issue. Further these relational variables are not mutually “intelligible.” By this last, I do not mean that thought and extension are the only attributes existing but as I think Spinoza says these are those whereby we make “sense” (insert LoS here). Intelligibility in a non-human fashion would mean the capacity to be affected as it does in the human limit but by variables that become available to sense and science only to the degree that they relate through the available relations they have (this seems tautological to me). Thus, the knowledge of other relations than those that constitute our current sense nexus must be available only in so far as they enter transduction with those of sense, becoming thereby sensed, however this too is itself a dynamic relation. There’s something close in ATP, but they speak of rhizomes and flows and that does not always seem a happy double to me unless I understand rhizomes as “slow flows” which –BTW – I think they are “in fact.” But as in all other flows they are not coherent themselves but only in interactivity with those appositional flows of different velocities and directions that bound them. This bounding as in hydro-dynamics is one that is laminate for a while but chaotic and complex soon after. This may seem a little like ANT but I think it is quite different as both the nodes and the modes are not stable or definable as single and stable except by reductions not applicable except for pragmatic ends.
May 12, 2012 at 2:25 am
Dan,
I always find discussion with you frustrating because you seem to read a lot into my claims that just isn’t there and I find your own mode of expression exceedingly opaque such that I’m not at all clear just what I’m supposed to be responding to or what it is that you’re claiming. Are you really suggesting that I believe I can know any other person or thing independent of relating to them? This is a very peculiar claim given 1) my concept of local manifestation, and 2) my core thesis that objects aren’t collections of properties but are powers of acting. Given that, how would one discover the powers of things without dynamically interacting with them to see how they respond to these actions? And how could those responses fail to modify the person who acted?
May 12, 2012 at 2:32 am
Which is to say– as I’ve said many times on this blog –my ontology necessarily leads to an experimentalist epistemology in Dewey’s sense of the the word. That epistemology is one in which terms dually respond to one another on the sense you describe. As I argue in the first chapter of The Democracy of Objects, however, ontological questions precede epistemological questions and epistemology is not coherent without a realist ontology.
May 12, 2012 at 9:35 am
Hi Bryant,
I’m the participant on Tim’s blog and would like to take up your invitation to a debate. Posted my response here…
http://untiedthreads.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/deleuze-and-psychosis-response-to-laval.html
Will.
May 13, 2012 at 4:55 pm
I’m enjoying the buildup of psychoanalytical and psychological terminology in philosophical issues, so far we seem to have got to:
“The world is made of ignorant unstable narcissists, but if we ignore the prohibition of incest, we can become sufficiently psychotic to enter into an inhuman frame of mind”
We need to put D&G’s ideas on schizophrenia and masochism in there fast! Zizek’s compulsion to repeat and fundamental break wouldn’t go amiss either..
May 14, 2012 at 7:04 pm
Levi,
I am sorry to frustrate you but I can say its not one sided. I am always conscious that this is your site and I am never unaware that I owe you for stimulating me and affording me – and everyone else — an opportunity to discuss these issues and watch your intelligence and knowledge. This site is a boon to me. However, I often do not understand you in your responses to me to be on the same channel. Take this instance.
You asked me a question, I was giving my ideas, but a good part of your apparent quandary was: “Are you really suggesting that I believe I can know any other person or thing independent of relating to them? ” Well, no. My response was not about you directly at all. I try to read and remember your stuff but it forms a small part of my reading. I raised Simondon because I thought that would be a set of ideas we shared.
Your response to me immediately starts talking about things as if they were a concept we share when it is exactly the concept I wish to place in question. I do not believe in things as other than convenient misrepresentations of relations that is to say of relations of a certain order. Perhaps, this is part of the reason you find me opaque other than my resident failures of expression and clarity.
I try to play on your terms as I value your thought and wish to respect your endeavor. However, I think I disagree with your model in fairly basic ways. I consider that potential disagree me very productive for me and I am unhappy when it seems — as here — to be less so – maybe far less so — for you. Your structure is so well elaborated that you can — as here — say “have not I said X. Y. and Z” and usually (I fear) with a bit of a dig but one that comes — as I understand it — from your frustration at having to repeat yourself and having not (by this nut “dan”) having been understood. I sympathize and so sometimes spend a month or more lurking, but I regret to say I am not yet a convert nor should you care unless you think a concept has value.
It of course occurs to me that what I say is just dumb and ignorant but I am obstinate enough to want to have that conviction rather than to just be told (I have problems with authority). Further, you have — very laudably — set up your perimeter defense with books, and I cannot write you one in reply especially here on-line. So let me just frustrate you some more with three one liners about the points you make with zero expectation that they will be adequate.
1. I am not fully happy with your concept of “local manifestation” to the degree I understand it because (I have no time to review your stuff so maybe these are all in error again): these are manifestations of things and I do not think things are, manifestation seems to me more drawn from a vocabulary of emanation with what that implies, I do not think I understand “local” or distant as you do (yours seems more Cartesian and clear), I do not believe intensity allows distance, etc.
2. “Powers of acting” — again you say “objects” so I would balk but these I thought were Spinoza like — like a conatus of affects (Affectio and Affectus) which find there place for him too in a concept that seems object oriented. We would be much better if you got out Ockham’s razor and just had these powers without objects as bearers of powers that to me seem only intended to inhibit the flow.
3. “Experimental epistemology” well I am not Feyerabend but even more than the guys you favor — e.g. Stengers, Latour, etc. — I do not think experimentalism is innocent but is in the business, literally, of producing objects for consumption. I do not think it is an accident that the military industrial complex is scientific.
So sorry, more of my glop.
May 14, 2012 at 8:26 pm
Dan,
Crucial to everything I do and at the foundation of my commitment to objects is the simple phenomenological intuition that objects move from place to place. For example, I walk from my living room that is air conditioned to my back patio that is not. It is this basic intuition that leads me to reject the primacy of relations over terms. It is not that I’m not interested in relations– it’s pretty much all I’m interested in –it’s that I don’t think talk of relations is illuminating until we factor in the unity of an object and its capability of movement. Responding to your first numbered point, this is the point of my concept of local manifestation. Local manifestation is designed to account for what happens to an object once it moves, thereby changing its relations. This change in relations is why local manifestations are local. When I was sitting in my living room the hair on my arms was prickled because of the relations I then entertained with respect to my air conditioning and my clothing. This prickling of the skin is a manifestation that takes place under specific local conditions. When I came outside my skin began to swell from the heat and my body began to sweat. Again, this occurrence is a result of the local environment in which my body currently exists. As you can see, all that’s being thought here are relations, but these relations are shifting and changing giving rise to different ways in which the entity manifests yourself.
In your second point you make a rather strange connection between my thought and Descartes, and an even stranger claim about Spinoza. You suggest that Spinoza does away with objects, instead retaining only powers or affects. Yet as Spinoza clearly argues, powers or affects are powers or affects of bodies. “Body” is Spinoza’s word for “object”. Were Spinoza not to argue for the existence of units, bodies, or objects, he would be unable to account for how powers manifest themselves differently under shifting circumstances as they move about in the world. While I disagree with Spinoza’s thesis that only one substance exists and that everything is a predicate of that one substance, I do not reject Spinoza’s claims about conatus, affects, and bodies. Indeed, I’ve specifically argued for such a conception of entities in print in a variety of places.
In your third point I think you misconstrue what experimentalist epistemology is about. You seem to equate it with science, which the thesis is much broader than that. Experimentalism is a theory of learning, inquiry, and knowledge that argues that knowing is less a matter of representing and cognizing than of acting. If references to Dewey don’t float your boat, I’m just as happy to reference Merleau-Ponty’s account of the body in motion. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology explores the way in which the acting body leads to the phenomenological disclosure of the world. It is by acting on things in an embodied way that we come to discover the property and nature of a thing. My daughter learns the properties of blocks by playing with them and seeing what arrangements are and are not possible for these blocks. We learn the nature of other persons by speaking with them and seeing how they respond or by acting in response to them and seeing how they respond in response to our actions. In the scientific setting we discover the properties and powers of various things by acting on them by mixing them with other things, seeing how they behave in different environments, and so on. In each of these cases, both terms involved in the interaction are modified and led to manifest themselves differently. My daughter, for example, does not simply learn about properties like mass and gravity when playing with her blocks, but also develops new muscle and cognitive habits that lead her to act differently in the world. As I argue in the first chapter of The Democracy of Objects, we cannot reduce beings to this relation. There would be little point in creating a controlled setting in a scientific experiment if there weren’t something already there to be discovered. Moreover, we wouldn’t be able to create controlled settings at all were it not possible to sever entities from some relations and introduce them into other relations.
I very much share your concerns about commodification and domination, but I think you’re cutting too crudely and broadly by attributing such things to science and a belief in objects. First, as authors like Jared Diamond show in books like Collapse, we find, again and again, brutal domination and exploitation of nature among cultures that have no practice resembling that of modern science. This, for example, was the fate of Easter Island, where the peoples of that island transformed a lush tropical rain forest into a barren desert. Second, science produces as many resources for fighting these things as it does in contributing to these things. Without a knowledge of chemistry, atoms and atomic decay, the behavior of gases, the behavior of electro-magnetism, work done in biology, metereology, etc., we would have no means of understanding climate change, much less fighting it, for example. Likewise, without satellites, computers, and weather measuring devices placed all throughout the world we wouldn’t even know these things are taking place because we wouldn’t be able to create the perspective and measurements required to discern these patterns. Claiming that is is somehow science alone that produces these things and that therefore we should reject science and experiment cuts out the branch upon which we are sitting.
May 14, 2012 at 10:15 pm
Relations among relations
I likely grow tiresome, so I will be very brief. Of course, I do not accept “the simple phenomenological intuition that objects move from place to place.” Relations change: relations among relations change. These differences are manifest in senses of difference that nowhere are dependent on objects. You quickly illustrate with narratives, and I have no doubt that narratives depend on nouns and that these are useful in the reductions that cause the sense of objecthood aided by the relative slowness of solids and the tendency to venerate one or two variable at a time. So this intuition leads you “to reject the primacy of relations over terms.” But this statement seems to bring in terms as if they were “objects of thought in themselves.” While I have lots of problems with Saussure, I read the “only differences” clause to mean there are no terms per se but only relations we term terms. Still briefer on the numbers. 1. You say: “Local manifestation is designed to account for what happens to an object once it moves, thereby changing its relations.” All relations are dynamic all the time. Differencing is the state of affairs: it does not wait or depend on an object’s particular opportunities. Everything that is related to an object may change and to different degrees and at different velocities as all the relations change. How local these are depends of the nature of the linkage between the variables of the relations. Many of these — I think you like to point out — are limited by time (C?) and I do not know how far a neighborhood extends. If I am tied by an inelastic rope to another a mile away, that relation may be more consequential to me than the relations at hand: in that regard nearness is not of the spatial grid but of the relations that function together (what I meant in the regard to Descartes geometry). 2. Somehow I managed to make you think the opposite of what I intended. I said “a conatus of affects (Affectio and Affectus) which find there [sic] place for him too in a concept that seems object oriented.” So, while he is quite rich and strange I was suggesting that Spinoza is closer to your side ” object oriented.” So secretly, we agree here and differ only about whether thinking of “bodies” is necessary. 3. Yes blocks are manufactured to have certain relations to humans and their already extant relational dispositions and one can discover permutations and combinations within these reductive relations. They are produced with reduction in mind. Science – even in its broadest meaning having to do with knowing – tends to manufacture blocks that are purified of the variabilities and richness of becoming in the world generally. Which sciences and in which combinations are applicable to say a jungle? All of them in all ways? The parsing of this infinity so it will cooperate with the production of knowledge is — hmmmm — hopelessly reductionist. So- once again – I agree with you, man’s desire to know things rather than to flow with the complexity of relations — to dictate and not listen — takes place outside the modern version of science. However, I do not think, “science produces as many resources for fighting these things as it does in contributing to these things.” We can scramble eggs and not unscramble them. Our reductionism has screwed it up beyond repair and continues to make it worse. Science is not the branch we are sitting on: it is the hubris that excuses our destruction of a planet that never belonged to us.
May 15, 2012 at 1:27 am
Dan,
You articulate a nice theory, but theory alone is not enough. The question is that of whether you can account for concrete phenomena in the world. This is why, in my discussions, I’m always moving between concrete instances and theoretical concepts. Those instances aren’t just examples to illustrate a concept, but are things to be explained. The concepts are doing that explanatory work and are subject to revision in light of further concrete instances. Thus, for example, my discussion of the prickling skin of my arm and the swelling skin of my arm isn’t evoked simply to illustrate the concepts of local manifestation and powers or virtual proper being. Rather, those concepts are evoked to explain how my body can undergo those transformations while remaining my body. Phenomenologically this body remains mine, legally this body is treated as mine, socially this body is treated as mine (my daughter treats me as her dad across time), and ontologically that body seems to endure through time. In defining entities as equivalent to their relations to other things, your relationism seems to undermine this, for if it’s true that entities 1) are their relations, and 2) that relations change, then it follows that every change in relations is a distinct entity. This is, I believe, an untenable position for a number of reasons that I’ve outlined to you in our discussions and in my various blog posts and publications over the years.
It’s not that I don’t understand your position; it’s similar to a position that I myself once advocated. It’s that I don’t think that position is capable of accounting for a variety of things in the world that I’ve tried to outline. In my view, if you’re going to successfully defend this position, repeating it won’t do the job. You need to go through the world and explain things like what’s taking place in the scientific setting, how it’s possible for things to break with relations and enter new relations while being nothing but relations, how we’re to differentially account for things like personal identity, the identity if animals, and the identity of groups and institutions across time, and so on. I haven’t seen you do anything remotely like that work in our discussions– indeed, you’ve endlessly repeated theses or assertions while ignoring the concrete altogether, seemingly oblivious to the idea that there are phenomena to be accounted for –and do not see how the theoretical framework you defend can account for the sorts of things I’m calling for.
Before closing out this comment, there’s one final crucial point. In evoking the endurance of entities I’ll suspect you’ll claim, as in the case of Harman, that there’s some sort of stable and enduring identity or essence beneath entities. This seemed to be the gist of your charge that when I talk about rocks I’m guilty of some sort of Platonism. I don’t posit any such enduring substratum and this is why I spend so much time talking about entropy, processes, and systems. For me endurance and identity are the results of ongoing activities in bodies, not an underlying substratum. In each moment entities need to engage in activities, processes, or operations to continue existing and if this fails they dissolve into entropy or are destroyed. My identity as Levi is not something given, but is the result of all sorts of activities on the part of my body, thought, and affectivity. So it is, I argue, with all bodies or entities. With any luck I’ll soon have an article developing this thesis in terms of Derrida’s concepts of differance and arche-writing entitled “The Time of the Object”. This was the theme of my talk at the Claremont conference last year.
May 15, 2012 at 2:48 am
Dan,
And just one further point, normative claims don’t refute ontological claims. In a previous post you seemed to attempt rejecting scientific experimental practice on the grounds that “it is at the foundation of the military industrial complex and commodification”. I’m not sure what to think of this. What you say might be true, but it has no bearing on whether or not scientific methodologies discover true things about being and the nature of existence. All you minimally establish with such an argument– and I gave reason to think that science provides as many revolutionary and emancipatory potentials as oppressive ones –is that science often gets co-opted. That doesn’t somehow make the experimental setting and its findings false. To say otherwise is to make a lazy argument that thinks we can reject things because they don’t agree with our values. Hey, I’m pissed that I don’t have a better position than the one I have but that doesn’t change the fact that the academic market works in certain ways. My value judgments about what are just and unjust don’t legislate what is true and false and what is and is not. You can do better.
May 15, 2012 at 5:32 pm
I agree in principle with both your charges: that I have not given much concrete evidence and that values do not refute “facts.” I also agree that my brief notes here are flawed and superficial. I would like to defend myself better but for now this has been an aside from what I think of as my main work and I am not sure I have the moxie to do the task anyway. My intuition is however that the way you raise the questions seems to fall within the episteme of proof and truth which is normative but it’s certainly possible that this is front loaded, like Popper’s falsification, in a way that prefigures the “concrete” and the “true.” To me, a particular propositional requirement may be a constitutive presupposition that disallows exactly the complexity I think is at work. How – for instance – would I prove that an environs not constituted by a protocol was too dynamic and complex to be scientifically scripted? Must I do that scientifically? Could I not be allowed something like a proof by negation: that science that claims explanatory power never has and seems even theoretically to never be able to encounter an unconstrained environs? That is not satisfying, I know. At the end of “The Animal that Therefore I am,” Derrida begins to talk about the dominant picture of the human as presented through the apophantic attitude. We present the world to ourselves through an “as such.” This, to me, is at the root of your criticisms and requirements, and it certainly is not an unreasonable one as reason has that character. However, one might think of a “proof by intensity.” This seems an oxymoron to rationality or a stupid appeal to sentiment, etc. and I am sure from that measure, that metric, it is. However, its measure is the presence of its felt relation: it cannot be “objective” as that has a prerequisite of exactly the non-affective.
Since I view everything as turbulence and that phenomenon is intractable to science and ubiquitous in nature, your requirement is not without its difficulties. I have never said — and never could as Nietzsche could not — that science is false (I accuse it of egregious and inapplicable simplifications which its own history ably demonstrate) since that is the shadow of entity I do not admit.
However, I do not think the implication that I confuse values and facts is all one sided. N’s truth and lie suggests that judgment cannot be value free as objectivity is constituted by a moral conjuncture not a matter of fact per se. Facts as such do not precede their constitutive practices of individuation. So I did not think I was confusing my values and truth but science is.
As to your employment position, I agree with your affect and think it forms a valid “judgment” on your situation. The academy is filled with those who lack your intelligence, creativity, production, lucidity, and vibrance but who possess a “better” position. Would a more statistical case make that assertion to more effect? I would be honored to have you as a colleague and while I would not be adequate to the dialectic you find virtually here with others my friend – Warren Montag who, BTW, in part helped train the H. Sharp you mention – would be a good foil. I think Occidental College is losing someone – a Hegelian — but if they do not relace him with adjuncts — the default response to a vacancy — perhaps you will apply: they have talked of doing more with associate appointments. IAC, I hope you know that my sometime disagreement comes from admiration and respect.
dan
May 22, 2012 at 1:46 pm
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