Over at Being’s Poem my friend Daniel has a very generous and thoughtful response to my response to his review of The Democracy of Objects. Let me emphasize that Daniel and I are good friends. Whenever we get together we have a great time with each other. One of the highlights of my trip to Liverpool for the Thinking the Absolute conference was his surprise appearance. We’ve even talked about visiting his home in Peru together. Our discussions might get heated on occasion, but they are always lively and productive. Daniel makes me think and since, as Artaud mentioned, the most difficult thing in the world is to find ways to manage to think, I find this valuable and am grateful for it. Matters are no different in this discussion.
First, let me reiterate that I find little to disagree with in the defense of epistemological realism Daniel presents in his review. This is a point I’ve made frequently in discussions with the epistemological realists I’ve encountered. I don’t disagree with you. I don’t see myself going off and investing large amounts of my time in the work of thinkers like Sellars, Brandom, or Burge, but this is quite different than claiming that I think their claims are mistaken or false. I’m grateful that others are doing this work so I don’t have to. In other words, I think it’s possible for there to be distributions of labor in philosophy and theory.
Daniel’s critique of my claims about epistemology in the first chapter of The Democracy of Objects is particularly valuable, because it helps me to clarify my own aims better. The first chapter is designed to accomplish three things: 1) provide grounds for why we are entitled to speak of entities independent of humans (an epistemological project), 2) carry out a critique of correlationism, and 3) unfold the basic structure of objects (or what I’m now calling machines) that will be the object of investigation for the rest of the book. Daniel nicely shows that there are all sorts of other resources we can pull on to accomplish this first task. He also shows that in my critique of correlationism I tend to conflate epistemology with correlationism, mistakenly suggesting that epistemological projects ineluctably lead to anti-realist positions. I think he’s right in that criticism.
The more I’ve reflected on matters since the writing of The Democracy of Objects, the more I’ve come to feel that my target is not so much correlationism, nor anti-realism, as anthropocentrism. I see my work as attempting to carry out an intervention in fields like cultural studies, critical theory, and social and political thought, where I find certain forms of anthropocentrism to be rife. Here it’s important to be careful, as there are many different types of anthropocentrism. There are, for example, theological anthropocentrisms that treat humans as the crown of creation. We don’t find many of these in those domains of inquiry. There is, by contrast, the far more pervasive anthropocentrism that consists in focus on a single relation, the relation between humans and the world and, in particular, how humans represent the world.
Read on!
Throughout what I will loosely call the “critical theories”, we get a strong investigative focus on how humans represent the world and analysis of beliefs, norms, language, text, signs, and so on. For instance, you might get the anthropocentric ethnographer restricting his analysis of the Kaluhli to their beliefs about the world and norms. Note that the ethnographer’s analysis of Kaluhli beliefs and norms is not concerned with the truth or falsity of these beliefs and whether those norms are right or wrong. He’s just looking to understand the “worldhood of their world”, or the way in which they represent their world. That ethnographer can simultaneously hold both that the Kaluhli believe these things (for example, that it is a particular spirit that causes plants to grow) and that this belief is a false or mistaken representation of the world. It just happens that evaluating the veracity of these claims is not the project that the ethnographer is engaged in.
The anthropocentrism of this kind of ethnographer lies in the focus on Kaluhli beliefs and norms, in how they represent the world. It is likely that the ethnographer is neither a subjective idealist nor an absolute idealist, believing that there are all sorts of things that exist independent of humans that are entirely real. Rather, the anthropocentrism of such an ethnographer lies in his focus on representations.
It is this focus, I think, that I’m trying to target. The first and crucial point I want to note, is that I don’t think the ethnographer is mistaken in the claims he makes about Kaluhli beliefs and norms. Similarly, I don’t think Daniel is mistaken in the claims that he makes about epistemology. Second, I don’t think discussion of the human-world relation is unimportant, should be excluded, or should be ignored. What I am objecting to is a largely exclusive focus on one relation– the human-world relation –to the detriment of a host of other factors that I believe play a crucial role in why our social assemblages take the form they take.
A non-anthropocentric social theory would not consist in excluding humans or in ceasing to talk about how humans represent the world around them, but in expanding the what can be analyzed and investigated to nonhumans as well. I am not alone in this sort of project. It is a project shared by materialist historians like Braudel, assemblage theorists like DeLanda, vibrant materialists like Jane Bennett, new materialist feminists like Stacy Alaimo, actor-network theorists like Latour, etc. The thesis is very simple: our social world takes the form it takes not simply because of the beliefs and norms that influence how we relate to the world, but also because of the technologies, infrastructure, animals, microorganisms, material resources, etc., that we share the world with. I’m trying to do my small part in drawing attention to these other things. I think this is an important project because if it’s true that social relations don’t take the form they take simply by virtue of the things we collectively believe and the norms we advocate, if it is true that material nonhumans play a significant role in social relations, then producing social change will not simply be a matter of changing beliefs, but will also necessarily involve intervening in material structures. However if we’re to intervene in those material structures, we first need to develop an attentiveness to them and awareness of them.
My hostility towards epistemology– whether of the realist or anti-realist variety –would therefore lie in the way in which it reinforces this anthropocentric focus on humans and their beliefs, norms, representations, texts, signs, language, etc. Again, it wouldn’t be a matter of saying that the epistemologist is wrong, but that he’s confusing the issue being discussed. To see my point, compare how Daniel and I might discuss agricultural practices in the 15th century. Since we’re discussing a remote period in history, Daniel might ask how the historian knows that this was the way in which agriculture was practiced in the 15th century. He might broaden the question to an investigation of the conditions and limits of any historical knowledge whatsover.
That’s a commendable project, but a very different sort of project than the one I’m engaged in. When I talk about agricultural projects in the 15th century, what interests me is how agriculture impacted the form social assemblages took. I would be interested in questions such as how the properties of the grains cultivated, coupled with existing agricultural technologies, influenced how people lived their lives annually. For example, we might find that the absence of fertilizers, pesticides, and various harvesting and planting technologies rendered agriculture so labor intensive that people were not free to develop themselves in other ways. Likewise, I would be interested in the way in which agricultural production impacted the size that cities and populations could reach. After all, a population needs food in order to sustain itself. I would be interested in how the life of populations, individuals, and cities becomes tied to the rhythms of food production and technologies of food preservation in such a milieu. I would be interested in how the diet of this period affects human development. I would be interested in how climatic changes such as the little ice age, and things such as drought and crop pestilences might correlate with various forms of social unrest.
These are just a very different set of questions than the types of questions Daniel is asking. I am not asking how we represent these things, nor how the people of this period represented these things. I am not asking whether or not these are true realities or what is really real. I am asking, among other things, what role these things played in the form society took at this period, what political structure it might have had, and whatever turmoil it might have experienced. My basic thesis, you might say, is that the world is a sticky place, that networks are sticky things, and that often we find ourselves trapped in less than ideal social assemblages because of these material agents. If we wish to have better more ideal social assemblages, then you better know something about these material assemblages so you can intervene in them in such a way as to unstick life.
Now at this point, one might legitimately ask “aren’t you here concerned with a human-world relation?” Yes, of course, I’m particularly interested in how these things impact human life. Yet this is quite different than the sort of anthropocentric human-world relation I’m trying to move past. Rather than focusing on questions of whether or not the peoples of the 15th century had an accurate knowledge of agriculture, or what their discourses about agriculture might have been, I’m temporarily bracketing those questions, to focus on what real differences the properties of grains, production technologies, travel technologies, climate, storage technologies, natural events, etc., had in organizing social relations in this particular way. Here compare the sort of analysis we get in Tim Morton’s brilliant earlier book The Poetics of Spice with the sort of analysis we get in Braudel’s Civilization and Capitalism. In Morton’s book, we get an analysis of how spice is represented in romantic literature and how this led to the development of certain capitalist and consumerist subjectivities. I’m certain that Morton believes in the real existence of spice. It just so happens that his analysis here is focused on how the people of the romantic period represented spice and what sort of subjectivity this generated. By contrast, Braudel is not investigating how people of a particular period represented agriculture, but rather how the real material properties of organic bodies, climate conditions, geographic distance and proximity, and existing technologies contributed to social relations in particular ways. They are two very different sets of questions. An ideal analysis would include both— which is more than any one person could handle –and would investigate the properties of both what Deleuze and Guattari call the “plane of content” (bodies/things affecting and being affected by one another) and the “plane of expression” (how the semiosphere or field of representation functions and is organized in a particular milieu). In addition to this, it would investigate how these two planes interact with one another. If these days I’ve been focusing on the plane of content, then this is because I think that critical theory of the last few decades has tended to emphasize the plane of expression and currently finds itself faced with a set of frustrating questions as to why certain forms of social change aren’t taking place despite adequate critiques of reigning ideologies or systems of representation. Again, it is not a question of abandoning these critiques, but of exploring some other factors that likely contribute to the eternal return of the same at the material level.
At this point I can here Daniel saying “but don’t you have to represent these things to engage in such analyses?” Sure! Whoever said otherwise? Here I recall Zizek’s joke about Butler. Zizek recounts a situation where a person who says “this is a coffee cup” being confronted with a Butlerian who corrects him saying “your claim is inaccurate! this is a coffee cup from a western, 20th century, european standpoint, within a particular set of institutions and structure of power!” To this, Zizek responds that all of that is presupposed in the statement “this is a coffee cup.” Now I would disagree with Zizek in his apparent suggestion that it’s worthless to point out the structure of the perspective from which we speak, but he does make a good point. Often things are presupposed in discourses and practices. Isn’t this what Brandom points out to us in his account of reasoning? I certainly presuppose that I can refer to the world. How I’m able to do this, however, is not a project I’m engaged in because I’m trying to talk about these other things. I’m glad, however, that there are other people such as Daniel that are engaged in this project. I just wish they’d show a bit more charity and recognize that it’s okay for people to engage in projects different than their own and that these projects don’t have to be mutually incompatible.
Larval Subjects . 
September 6, 2012 at 6:00 pm
That’s just it. The moral case for non-anthropocentrism is far stronger than for the contrary — even from the point of view of a self-interested human!
Anthropocentrism isn’t just bad for the trees, birds and algae that, through no fault of their own, have to share the planet with us — it’s bad for us humans too. It’s a narcissistic ignorance that stops us from really taking care of ourselves. Or, if you like, genuine humanism needs to be non-anthropocentric.
It’s like growing up: to become an adult you have to take responsibility not only for yourself but for others too — and you do this not just to be nice, you do it because that’s the only way anyone will do anything for you. Becoming an adult means engaging in a web of interdependence and breaking from the wonderful but naive narcissism of childhood.
So it is with the anthropocentric myopia. It seems as though it’s the most human, most moral of mindsets but actually it’s naive, a distraction. Children lucky enough to have caring parents don’t have to worry about how the care of themselves presupposes their care of others. Humans aren’t so lucky — God’s dead, after all.
September 6, 2012 at 6:36 pm
I think the key issue is to not do away with anthropomorphism, but instead radicalise it into many ‘morphisms’ so to speak. Trying to formulate a ‘view from nowhere’ is impossible in OOO, seeing as reality is composed of morphisms, each one making some degree of translated sense through their own twisted operations. OOO is a radicalised view from somewhere, or perhaps something.
September 6, 2012 at 7:06 pm
Phillip’s comment is bang on! Rob Zombie says it correctly: we need to become more human than human! To be better humans we have to develop the kind of embodied-sentience that is capable of sensing and coding all those realities and agencies that come before, below and within us. With this expanded sphere of consideration (cosmocentric cognition) will we be able to sustainably find our way in the wild world things and forces.
I know you prefer the term onto-cartography Levi, but I see the kinds of projects you decribe above as ontography proper – and exactly the kind of thinking our species requires. As you point out interventions and practical projects require that we meet the complexity of situations with adequately complex models of how those situations work. Any intervention that does not consult such “maps” can’t hope to adequately navigate the territory. I’ll have more to say about this over at my blog soon.
A few comments about anthropology and ethnography however: first, ethnographic projects focusing on representations are certainly dominant in the field, and especially in the 80s and 90s, but should not be taken as representative (no pun intended) of ethnography as a whole. There has certainly been strains of more materialist thinking and analysis in the history of anthropology. For example see the work done by Leslie White (cultural evolution), Julian Steward (cultural ecology), Marvin Harris (cultural materialism), Andrew P. Vayda and all the contemporary ecological and environmental anthropologists.
As one of the most relevant examples I would point you to the work of Roy Rappaport, whose 1968 publication, Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People, is an thoroughly ecological account of ritual among the Tsembaga Maring of New Guinea. This book one of the most influential and most cited works which focuses on human and nonhuman relations. Rappaport is known for his distinction between “cognized models,” and “operational models”. The cognized model according to Rappaport is the “model of the environment conceived by the people who act in it,” whereas the operational model is one “which the anthropologist constructs through observation and measurement of empirical entities, events and material relationships” (Wolf 1999: 19).
Most significantly, at least for this discussion, Rappaport believed “culture sometimes serves their own components, such as economic or political institutions, at the expense of men and ecosystems [such that]…. Cultural adaptations, like all adaptations, can perhaps and usually do become maladaptive” (source).
My own work has always been about attempts to integrate the ‘cognized’ and ‘operational’ into a matrix of pragmatic concern, and to think about how the relationships and components of assemblages on all scales intra-act to generate particular adaptive and/or maladaptive milieus and expressions. That is to say, when working in the public sphere to recommend interventions and enact change (as I get paid to do) it is very helpful to take as wide and deep and as reflexive a view as possible. Such a view, then, requires a concerted effort to appreciate the role nonhumans play in each context, without ignoring representation and human action and intentionality. Such should be the goal of anthropology. And, of course, all this is easier typed than done.
September 6, 2012 at 7:50 pm
Yikes! I didn’t at all intend to imply that anthropicentric ethnographies are representative of all ethnography! I just chose the example of ethnography because it allowed me to get into discussions of representatively oriented models of analysis without getting wrapped up in discussion of whether these representations are true or false (the ethnographer isn’t occupied with that kind of question).
I get the sense that the realist epistemologists are really wrapped up in questions of how we distinguish true and false representations. They want some set of criteria that would allow them to say these representations are false and these representations are true; that would allow them, for example, to debunk intelligent design theory. Their project seems to be one of establishing that science, for example, is the representation of reality as it truly is.
That’s just not a project I’m overly interested in. To be sure, like anyone else I don’t want us to have false theories of the world like intelligent design. Sure. But mostly I’m just interested in drawing attention to these commonly neglected material agencies. I just feel like we’re engaged in entirely different projects and aren’t hearing each other.
Someone on facebook made a remark that really expresses how we’re not hearing each other. He said something like “so you think science doesn’t do a good enough job discussing the properties of corn and ozone holes and thereby needs supplementation by MOO?” Clearly this person can only imagine discussions about realism as discussions about who has better access to reality (in this case, the philosopher or the scientist?). That’s not at all the sort of question I’m asking. What I propose isn’t designed to challenge the scientist’s work. I think they do a great job uncovering the powers of corn and ozone holes. My project isn’t one of providing criteria for the best, most accurate, representations. My project consists in drawing attention to the role materiality plays in our lives and social assemblages and how systems of meaning and things are intertwined with one another.
Thanks for drawing attention to this dissident attention in ethnography!
September 6, 2012 at 10:23 pm
I get your point. Such is the plight of the post-post-modern ontographer…
I do think epistemological issues are relevant however. The first task of any cartography is to determine the tools to be used and the scales to be considered. So figuring out ‘how’ to trace the features of any terrain is important. How do we know what we purport to know? What lenses color our demarcations and representations of the territory – composed of all those humans and nonhumans we want to draw attention to? These are serious questions at the heart of a reflexive methodology. We can’t just skip over these issues and start talking up content prior to context. Certainly some objects and assemblages don’t require epistemic justification (because a bomb landing on Bagdad has its own effects outside of our codings), but if our self-appointed task is to provide thick descriptions and accurate analysis of bombs, cities, military operations, corporations, resources, cancer cells, kittens and karate movies, and how they might hang together, then we better be careful about the cognitive framings we use to investigate and represent them.
My answer to these questions is decidedly technical and methodological in that various ecologies of knowing and expressing enact different sets of knowledge (representing) viz. different sets of material practices. So the kinds of onto-stories we are inevitably going to tell are generated through whatever current ‘mangle’ (Pickering) of technologies and discourses we are enmeshed in. And thinking through the implications of how primate brains, telescopes, computers, measuring devices, and the like combine to produce knowledge is an essential practical and reflexive activity.
Of course I’m not telling you something you don’t already know Levi. And I think this is done in your work through an engagement with Bhaskar’s work. All I want to suggest is that even though I agree that epistemological and ontographic ‘work’ asks different questions they cannot be completely compartmentalized.
Hence my recent return to phenomenology. Questions of ‘access’, I believe, can be worked through with reference to Husserl’s later work, Merleay-Ponty and a certain reading of Michel Henry’s ‘radical’ materialist phenomenology. Thought (episteme) is an excretion (projection) of sentient action, grounded in affect and perception, and undeniably interwoven into/out of the flesh of this world.
Regardless, my point is that ontography (with traditional cartography being a sub-field) can only move forward in conjunction with epistemological reflexivity.
September 7, 2012 at 9:27 am
Come to think of it, isn’t Mitt Romney’s recent ‘joke’ the logical conclusion, politically and ethically, of anthropocentrism?
“President Obama promised to slow the rise of the oceans and to heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family”
Yeah, ‘cos, I mean, f**k the planet, right? Who needs it?!
September 7, 2012 at 2:58 pm
to build on michael’s comments a bit the desire and the means to expand our interests/sense-abilities to be more inclusive must work on and via human-being(s) , be a kind of sublimation/cultivation, and our work-products should always bear a maker’s mark to remind us of how they are man-ufactured so that we don’t confuse our project-ions with the things themselves, get caught up in the tyranny of the means, or forget that we speak about not for the trees, to cultivate an ethics/ars of, a capacity for, reflexive as-if/experimental commitments. To paraphrase Rorty we don’t need new priests but rather new poets.
September 8, 2012 at 11:54 am
[…] But while Merrifield’s article throws down the requisite names – Kafka, Marx, Orwell – to try and motivate an understanding of both our own scope of actions and our affective relationship to the social systems of which we are a part, in the end it doesn’t seem to me to get it done. His main suggestion is that we try to theorize about how the ‘flows of revolt’ operate because there are flows of commodity chains, and the political systems that support them, going on around us. But then, rather than point towards an alternative, he suggests we have been stripped totally bare of guideposts for action. His words are that we live naked lives. That seems a bit of a stretch, if not an outright refusal to acknowledge that human life is embedded in some remarkable and resilient ecological relationships with other humans, non-humans and larger biophysical systems. And this is to say nothing of the relationships between other things that have nothing to do with us at all. In a recent post at Larval Subjects, Levi Bryant takes aim at this underlying anthropocentrism. […]
September 9, 2012 at 11:20 pm
Any chance you could post the lecture you did on art, “Matter of Contradiction”? I have listened to it, over at Harman’s blog, and it’s excellent. Am tempted to type it up, so that I can highlight sections and share with colleagues in the fine art and performance art field who are wrestling/re-discovering the powers and limits of the Work, from what i woukd call a more Spec Realist then expressivist mode…I.e the exploded view, the contingent arrangement, the awkward and weird problems of relations which don’t quite fit, and then suddenly become something else altogether, etc etc…
September 10, 2012 at 3:45 pm
In many ways you seem to be returning to a pluralistic perspectivism approach, one that decenters the dogmatism of the one true view of reality in preference to multiple views dealing with differing objects (machines) and how they impact each other inclusively, as well as how material things constrain what can and cannot be done. A sort of dialectical interplay of competing strategies that each has its own truth to tell us. I agree with what Harman recently said in his new book on Lovecraft: “There is no reason to thing that any philosophical statement has an inherently closer relationship with reality than its opposite, since reality is not made of statements (14).”
September 10, 2012 at 3:47 pm
Sorry should have been: think instead of thing in the above statement!
September 10, 2012 at 6:17 pm
Thanks And! You’ll find it posted below on the blog.
September 11, 2012 at 12:52 am
Craig,
You think there is no reason to think some accounts of reality are better than others? That seems hasty. Reality might not be made of statements but it certainly includes them. Hominid speech-acts have a perforative aspect that includes more or less reliable information about a very practical world. There are immanant criteria (praxis) for considering the voracity of statements within communities of interlocutors. Tell me, is the onto-story creationism offers just as ‘inherently close’ to reality as modern scientific narratives?
Harman derides conceptuality for not being able to accomplish what it never was evolved to do (e.g. access “total” realities). Corporeal encounters take place beyond epistemic activity. That’s the openness Negarestani and Ben Woodard talk about – thats whatI call ontological vulnerability.
September 11, 2012 at 4:27 pm
Craig, I am enjoying Harman’s Lovecraft book, too. I confront a paradox in the idea that no philosophical statement is inherently closer or further away from reality because, if reality is not made of propositions, surely this proposition is inherently closer to reality than its opposite. But here the thesis of the indirect appears, vicariousness, and I think you do have to say that some propositions indirectly mediate reality, or a dimension of reality, and some simply do not (“these women are witches,” for instance, alludes to a void, not an object).
September 11, 2012 at 4:29 pm
Or, rather, since all propositions, like all relations, are simply exterior, you have to say that some target a reality and some target a void where a reality is thought to be. Success or coherence or causality is a matter of indirect trajectory and not linear closing of distance.
September 11, 2012 at 4:35 pm
Also I agree with you that these theses demand, except in limit cases, a tolerance of “pluralistic perspectivism.” Nice alliteration, too. I’ve written this on your blog, too, but I will say it again here: your posts are always fun to read and informative. You’re a great addition to the SR universe.