The other day a friend of mine who’s read the manuscript for Onto-Cartography and I were talking, and he expressed surprise about the claims I make about materialism there. Paraphrasing, given my claims about materialism, it would follow that I don’t think that things such as fictions, souls, Gods, and so on are real. Why? Because I would hold that nothing outside the material and natural world exists.
Well, my friend is right. I don’t think that anything outside the natural and material world exists. This is what I mean when I say that “being is flat”. I think this is what I’ve always said, though I might not have expressed it very clearly in the past. For me, all there is is the natural and material world. Gods might exist– Lucretius and Epicurus believe they do –but if they do they are material entities subject to all the same constraints and limitations pertaining to causality and the transfer of information that all other beings are. Jesus can turn water into wine– just as anyone else can –but he has to go through the same time-consuming activity of crushing the grapes, adding yeast, and allowing them to ferment (unless he has a molecular assembler). If a god exists, it might be able to see a lot, but not because it is omnipresent, but because it has a technologically superior means of discerning events around the universe, not unlike the satellite technologies used by meteorologists.
read on!
So what do I mean when I say audacious things like “fictions are real”? I just mean that fictions, like any other units of information, are real signals that circulate around the world and that therefore, qua information, are capable of producing real effects. If I say that Twilight is something real, I am not suggesting that Bella somewhere exists and has unrequited and unconsummated panting love with vampires and werewolves. I’m saying that there is a physical thing in the universe– the Twilight novels and films –that produce real effects. Saying this is no more radical than what Peirce said about the nature of symbols (right). When speaking of symbols rather than icons and indexes, Peirce said that there is no necessary relation between “representamens” or “sign-vehicles” (the medium through which a sign is conveyed), “interpretants”, and entities out there in the world. In Saussurean terms, we can have signifier/signified relations that lack any referent (e.g., Eldorado). Nonetheless, signifiers and sign-vehicles are material entities that circulate throughout the world, and both therefore are capable of producing real effects on other material entities in the world. That doesn’t mean they have a referent. It just means that the signifiers and sign-vehicles are something. Semiotics and semiology 101.
As a consequence, there are certain things I believe are valuable. First, I endorse the project of debunking developed during both the Enlightenment and critical theory. I think it’s valuable and important to show that superstitions are mistaken (e.g., I like those that debunk ghosts and possession), and I think it’s important to show that there is no referent for certain things (e.g., race). My gripe with critique isn’t that we shouldn’t practice it, but that it’s a very limited form of politics and that power takes a number of forms that aren’t discursive in character. Mea culpa, though. If there’s one thing I reject in my article entitled “The Ontic Principle” though, it was my defense of Latour’s “principle of irreduction”. I regret this for two reasons: first, I regret it because I think that every explanation– including Latour’s actor-network explanations –is a form of reduction. And second, I regret it because, inverting Freud’s famous quote about cigars, sometimes pimped up trucks and assault rifles really are about penis size (a reduction). If you doubt this, spend some time on conservative blogs and read what they say whenever the issue of feminism and the decline of marriage comes up. You’ll be reducing pretty quickly, I imagine. At the time I wrote that article, I only endorsed Latour because he authorized reductions so long as the reducer demonstrates the series of mediations between something like, say, pick-up trucks with big wheels and V-12 engines and male sexual insecurity. In Irreductions, Latour shows that you have to show the mediations and praises Freud’s analysis of the “dream-work” as an example of such a demonstration. Sadly, remarks about the principle of irreduction suffered a reduction where this principle was taken to mean that everything is real and nothing can ever be reduced to anything else. I think that’s bullshit, but I like the hermeneutics of suspicion… I just think it’s limited.
Second, I just can’t agree with Whitehead regarding things like rainbows and the beauty of sunsets. Oh sure, I think these things are real enough because they involve the properties of light coupled with brains. Yet readers of The Democracy of Objects will recall that I draw a distinction between “exo-qualities” and “endo-qualities”. An endo-quality is a quality that resides in the thing itself. It’s there regardless of whether or not anything relates to it. An exo-quality, by contrast, is something that only emerges in a relation between two or more entities. Well I think qualities like the beauty of sunsets and the qualities of rainbows are exo-qualities: they only arise in relations. Take away neurological systems with particular biological (and cultural) imperatives, and there are no beautiful sunsets. There are just waves of electro-magnatism proliferating throughout the world. Take away organisms capable of perceiving colors and there are no rainbows. These things are real in the sense that there are real material events taking place in the relationship between electro-magnetic waves and organic (or technological) nervous systems, but they aren’t real in the sense that they are independent entities. In my view, these things can’t exist or take place without their relata. They need their terms for these things to be possible. They aren’t qualities of the things themselves.
So I’ll conclude by being a bit smarmy. If you’re looking for solace in my flat ontology for your superstitions and ideologies, you’ll need to look elsewhere. I’ll follow you halfway in recognizing that your superstitions and fictions produce real effects, but I won’t follow you– unless you can show that there’s compelling reason for me to think otherwise within a naturalistic framework –in the thesis that there’s a real referent to what these signifiers or sign-vehicles denote. Until I’m shown that there’s good and compelling reasons to believe that something violates the basic laws of physics pertaining to time and space– as, for example, claims about omnipotence and omniscience do –I just see no reason to seriously entertain such claims. At this point folks like to talk about quantum entanglement, but these laws just don’t pertain to aggregate substances where the issue is one of times of transport between entities. In the meantime, I believe that debunking is an important component– though not an exclusive one –of both political thought and genuine philosophy.
Larval Subjects . 
February 14, 2013 at 5:46 am
You mentioned Twilight in the context of materialism. You really did.
February 14, 2013 at 6:40 am
I’d be curious how you might situate Meillassoux here, with respect to “absolute” contingency — and in particular the possibility of God’s futural existence.
I’m also quite struck by this Arthur C. Clarke-esque conceptual persona of the techno-God. Is this not a kind of tragic figure of singularity? (Divinity and techne indistinguishable…)
One immediate question that occurs might center around the meaning or sense of the project of knowledge, as distinct from the narrow/localized ambit of thought projected by computability/technology.
I’m also curious about this “fictive status of fictions”. It is certainly true that vampires aren’t real; and that the semiological universe of reference in which they are situation nevertheless exist, if only as signals.
However, don’t we also have unsettling instances where ostensible “historical” events didn’t “really” occur, where events have been simulated, as it were, from whole cloth? I guess really just curious how you might see yourself in relation to Baudrillard’s analysis of the phenomena of precession of simulacra.
February 14, 2013 at 12:05 pm
“I just can’t agree with Whitehead regarding things like rainbows and the beauty of sunsets. Oh sure, I think these things are real enough because they involve the properties of light coupled with brains. … I draw a distinction between “exo-qualities” and “endo-qualities”. An endo-quality is a quality that resides in the thing itself. It’s there regardless of whether or not anything relates to it. An exo-quality, by contrast, is something that only emerges in a relation between two or more entities.”
Interesting stuff! Forgive me my rambling:
Isn’t ‘light + rain + brain’ an object itself? Sure, they’re objects individually and the rainbow qua aesthetic object only exists by their becoming related but, in Whitehead’s terms, doesn’t this combination of things forms a unique actual occasion? In your terms doesn’t it form an object, emergent from and irreducible to its component parts? From the perspective of the rain droplets the rainbow may be merely exorelated as it is an event that the rain constitutes by entering into relationships with other things without exhausting the rain’s own specificity. However, from the perspective of the rainbow qua aesthetic event *itself* the rain droplets are endo-related because they are *part* of the event.
The fact that this event requires a brain is, therefore, neither here nor there — it also requires a body, water, air, sun, particular atmospheric conditions, etc. Rainbows aren’t real in the *same way* that rain drops are real — this is certainly true. But this is a perspectival question since you could equally say that, from the perspective of an oxygen atom, the water molecule that it constitutes along with two hydrogen atoms isn’t ‘real’ in the same way as the atoms themselves. The water molecule isn’t ‘real, out there’ because without the oxygen atoms there would be no molecule. Similarly, the rainbow isn’t ‘real, out there’ because without the perceiving brain there is no rainbow, only water in air forming a prism that diffracts light.
If there is a difference between these two examples it is because you have introduced a distinction between cognitive apprehension and other kinds of relations — not an indefensible argument but one that must be made carefully.
So, beauty isn’t a property of the droplets or the lightwaves or even these things together but we can definitely say that it *is* a property of the rainbow. Beauty *is* a property of the rainbow so long as we accept that the rainbow is constituted by perceiving beings as well as rain, light, etc. — that it is not an object perceived by a subject but *an object that includes a subject*. The rainbow is not beautiful unless it includes a mind that perceives it as such but that doesn’t mean that beauty is not a property of the rainbow itself, that beauty is confined to the mind. It just means that it is contingent upon the precise constitution of the aesthetic event.
I’m just thinking ‘out loud’ now but we could say that two people looking at the ‘same’ rainbow won’t experience beauty in the same way, therefore beauty is only in their minds. But Whitehead could just say ‘well, they’re not looking at the same rainbows, then’. They’re looking at the same droplets and light rays, perhaps, but not the same rainbows. So, rainbows are subjective, as is their beauty, but they are subjective in the sense that they include *one and only one perceiving subject*. They are *not* a subjective apprehension of an external objective reality as this would mean perceiving subjects transcending objective reality, all looking out on the same, singular reality but experiencing it severally. But they *are* a singularly subjective apprehension in the sense that these aesthetic events — the rainbow qua beautiful thing — can only include *one* perceiving subject. When two or more people look at the ‘same’ rainbow they are experiencing two different events that merely share some constituent parts.
So, it’s not a case of several subjects perceiving a singular reality but several aesthetic events involving an overlapping plurality. This makes sense to me but it clearly requires a category of ‘subject’ distinct from other kinds of objects because there are many objects within a rainbow — billions of water droplets, innumerable lightwaves, etc. — but, for it to be a ‘subjective experience’ in the manner I described, it can contain only one subject. Add another subject and you have two aesthetic events.
Although perhaps we are not trapped in our individual subjectivity. Perhaps if we talk about, write about, paint about our experiences of beauty and if we share the same cognitive and aesthetic preconditions with other subjects then we can share experiences of beauty. Perhaps through social, artistic processes we can draw our experiences together and perhaps we can meaningfully talk about multi-subject aesthetic events. But those subjects would have to be drawn together by other conditions beyond the isolated events themselves. We’d have to be drawing in further mediators, as it were.
Anyway, on Latour’s principle of irreduction, people seem to forget what he actually says:
“1.1.1 Nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything
else.
• I will call this the ‘principle of irreducibility’, but it is a prince
that does not govern since that would be a self-contradiction”
That’s his first principle in its entirety and each part of it is significant. People often fixate on the ‘irreducible’ part and think that the principle is all about everything being unique and sui generis and nothing being articulable in terms of anything else. I recall Ray Brassier in his review of Irreductions being most upset at how Latour said, first, that everything was irreducible but then proceeded to reduce everything — even science, the horror! — to his own terms. He didn’t realise that this is actually Latour’s entire point! — that the only way of understanding and perhaps even existing in the world is via an infralanguage (or something similar) that articulates other things in its own terms, thus reducing and rendering articulable what may be irreducible in its entirety but is not entirely irreducible. (But then I don’t think Brassier even really tried to understand that book — his intention was damnation, not fair reading.) Latour later calls this process ‘formatting’ and it’s really the core of his whole philosophy.
Anyway, I’m all for unflattening the ontology. Flattening it is just a first, critical step taken to erase all the fallacious distinctions that others have made in error. Ultimately, having reduced everything to a single type, one must be able to make categorical distinctions within that typology. Perhaps subjectivity can be suitably rearticulated in the manner I described above, or some other way.
February 14, 2013 at 3:13 pm
Hey Philip,
In my view, we only get a new object out of a relation when new powers or capacities are generated that aren’t there in the parts taken alone. For example, a molecule of H2O is a distinct entity because it has powers that can’t be found in either hydrogen or oxygen. Likewise with an assemblage composed of a man, a horse, stirrups, and a lance. In both of these instances, there’s a capacity to act on other entities that isn’t there in the parts prior to that relation. I don’t think a cat perceiving a rainbow generates any new powers.
February 14, 2013 at 11:16 pm
Amazing blog post! I really enjoyed reading this piece. Warmly, Eilif
February 14, 2013 at 11:17 pm
Reblogged this on Eilif Verney-Elliott and commented:
Levi Bryant’s Funny & Insightful Post
February 15, 2013 at 1:15 am
Excellent summary, thanks, however I would argue that both positions are (symmetrically) true: ANT / OOO are nothing if not very provocative language games. What interests me most about Latour’s early work is his notion of the both/and: both reduction and its opposite can be considered to be in play at one and the same time: ie at one and the same time the macro and micro can be valid models (anyone who has worked in education can tell you that if they are being honest!). One of the answers to solipsism is to argue that, even if the universe is a product of mind, nevertheless that product is sophisticated enough to present itself as if it were absolutely concrete and material – so in a sense hybrids of mind and material can be discounted, as per irreductionism. Yes, nothing can be reduced to anything else, and yes, everything is always already reduced. Arguing that ‘nothing exists outside the natural and material world’ can be valid at the same time as arguing that the natural and material world are constructs. Anything less is to belittle the sheer sophistication of the construct / real.
February 15, 2013 at 4:28 am
even in a material world there is a diff btwn beings that initiate causal series a novo (agency or semovience) and ones that react to or continue them (transeunt causality). But it is certainly the case that nature only exists in the physical instant (plank). technically said nature vacates itself outside of actuality….
Only empsyched beings are both causal sinks and causal sources. thermostats and slime moulds are cartesian automatal :)
February 15, 2013 at 12:40 pm
Second, I just can’t agree with Whitehead regarding things like rainbows and the beauty of sunsets
Dr Sinthome YOU AND AESTHETICS is like trying to marry grandmas with frogs, as we say in Serbia. First off, only terminal color blindness can explain your taste in brown shirts. Second of all, Larval Subjects is the single most aesthetically uninteresting blog in the post-Continentosphere – it’s the kind of a military green I wouldn’t even wear in the military. And finally, the manner in which you are unaware of your own good looks, explains it all.
Now it’s true that non-aesthetics can be an aesthetic all its own. But I wouldn’t throw around easy conclusions about Whitehead’s aesthetics if I were you.
Now I’m going to tell Shaviro what you just said.
February 15, 2013 at 12:43 pm
About that oversized blue mug and the wonders it does for your marketing…it’s something like an art director’s nightmare.
February 15, 2013 at 1:39 pm
[…] at Circling Squares, Phillip has a nice response to Levi’s recent post on flat ontology, and I find a lot of valuable ideas in both posts in spite of the disagreement between them. I […]
February 15, 2013 at 9:07 pm
Shaviro basically said that he loves you BUT when it comes to Whitehead, you’re thick as dew on Dixie.
February 15, 2013 at 9:28 pm
Of course that should have read ‘Planck’ Instant. What is strangely interesting is what happens inside the instant where time does not course…” That
time elapses only to situations is extremely important because we causally
efficient circumstanced existentialities do not exist à la Minkowski – that is,
along intervals – but inside the situational intransformativity of the physical
instant’s actuality, which is where all our memories, projects, and interval minding
actions are ontologically crammed.’ (Mario Crocco).
February 16, 2013 at 1:37 am
Well I think qualities like the beauty of sunsets and the qualities of rainbows are exo-qualities: they only arise in relations.
Yeah and a seven course meal is a possum and a six pack.
How do you know they’re exo- as opposed to endo- qualities? And why can’t they be both endo- and exo-?
Why must beauty be sacrifised to your obsession?
.
February 16, 2013 at 6:57 am
just for the record it would be a mistake to think that everything is locatable in space – space is derivative and being produced as we speak…
‘As mentioned, the secondary nature of this space
is observed in the formation of fresh space in the middle of preexisting extensions
of such space, a process now thought to occur everywhere: time course in macroscopic scales as well as extramental space are thus a secondary
offshoot of more basic physical determinations. In both of them, causation
is exerted in intransformativity – that is, “locally” and within the interval-
like “thin” actuality of nature. It is nothing out of the ordinary, then,
that some basic determinations do not find their way into features of spatial
extramentality and so appear as unlocalizable.’ (Crocco).
February 16, 2013 at 12:09 pm
Dejan,
I’m not sacrificing beauty, I’m just saying that it’s not something out there in the world itself. I’ve noticed that some of the things the dogs I grew up with appeared to find beautiful were not at all beautiful for hairless chimps like us. Minimally, the color of sunsets require a certain neurology and physical perceptual system to exist. The electro-magnetic waves are out there, but color isn’t. Proof of this is that there are other critters that can’t see such colors at all, while there are others like the mantis shrimp that can see electro-magnetic waves we can’t see at all. The way we experience these things isn’t in the things themselves.
February 16, 2013 at 7:44 pm
Dr Sinthome,
There’s PLENTY of other animals who react to beauty, e.g. the blue bird of paradise doing her mating ritual. Maybe the configuration of the sunset isn’t there for every species, but there’s so many other beautiful configurations that do exist for other species. HOW ELSE DO CATS SEDUCE US INTO LOVIN’ THEM AND FEEDING THEM IF NOT BY THEIR BEUATY? With so much beauty in the world, it’s MORE logical to assume that beauty is endo-, instead of exo.
I demand better proof of the thesis.
February 17, 2013 at 12:21 am
But Dejan! That’s the point: cats dogs and humans experience beauty differently.
February 17, 2013 at 5:19 pm
Dr Sinthome I hear you clucking but I can’t find your nest.
How is the fact that cats and dogs experience beauty differenty evidence for the thesis that beauty is extrinsic? Is there an INEVITABLE formal logic linking these two ideas? Why wouldn’t beauty be simultaneously extrinsic and intrinsic, so that even as the way we perceive color isn’t in the thing, color can still be intrinsic to the thing.
You’re trying to subsume everything under your obsessive either-or clause!
Shaviro reiterated that you’re as independent as a hog on ice when it comes to Whitehead, and he told me to remind you that even though mass and size also need a certain perceptive calibration, we still experience them as INTRINSIC.
February 17, 2013 at 8:11 pm
I’m wondering if this ‘thesis’ would mean that there is no intrinsic (endo) value without ‘neurological systems” to bring it forth in relation….! For example the intrinsic value of an empysched living creature.
I think it was Uexkull who wrote about the fly crawling across a painting by Rembrandt, which for the fly, is not a painting by Rembrandt… :)
‘a 7 course meal is a possum and a 6 pack’ I haven’t heard that one before…sounds ozzieish
February 17, 2013 at 11:30 pm
And it’s not like you have the instrument to measure a dog’s aesthetic experience; what if for example he experiences AS BEAUTIFUL some completely other property of the rainbow, eg the amplitude, or the quality of air? It’s not like you can claim objectivity on account of differences in various observer’s reports. Shortly, I don’t understand where the objectivity comes from here.
February 18, 2013 at 1:40 am
‘a 7 course meal is a possum and a 6 pack’
It’s a Texan expression, Paul, ”He’s so country he thinks a seven course meal is a possum and a six pack”. I researched those carefully so that I can communicate more empathically with the Narcissistic Cat.
February 18, 2013 at 9:26 am
I luv it! Even went there once – back in the day (early 8o’s). I didn’t know there were possums in texas…but why -not they’re all over s. america. Here they’re dead on the road every day. Just watched ‘The life of David Gale’. Funny to see Kevin spacey lecturing on Lacan!!!!!!!!!!!:)
the average univ biologist would argue that animals (other than human) are practically automata. Bird ‘morningsong’ would be just a kind of automatic reaction….
An interesting thought experiment – what would the ‘world’ look like without observers? whereof one cannot speak….thereof one …
Eliminate the observer and its not just ‘dark’ – there is nothing observable…?
g’nite yuall
February 18, 2013 at 4:50 pm
[…] post was stimulated by Levi Bryant's recent post entitled I Guess My Ontology Ain't So Flat. I wrote a series of preliminary responses to that thread on a related 4-year-old Ktismatics post […]
February 18, 2013 at 6:00 pm
I think it would make your position even more clear if you talked about how you would see the existence of a fiction without external artifacts. For example, let’s say you made up a religion in your head and told no-one of it. In what way do you see its deities as real, given no holy books, movies or films.
This kind of situation, I think, gets to the heart of what anti-materialists see as the problem with the reality of “signs”.
February 18, 2013 at 6:13 pm
Asher,
I’m not sure I follow. A brain is still a material medium.
February 18, 2013 at 6:21 pm
I should also add that there’s no case in which I see the deities as real. That would be to confuse a signifier/signified relation with its referent.
February 18, 2013 at 6:36 pm
Shouldn’t have said “signs” — loaded term. I didn’t mean “deities”, but rather the specific deities you made up in your head – Rapskallion and Schenecteky, say – the uncommunicated equivalent of Bella and her beaus.
By saying, “a brain is a material medium”, do you mean that, in terms of considering the reality of things, a book and a brain do essentially the same thing?
February 18, 2013 at 8:06 pm
Hey Paul, we’ve howdied but we ain’t shook yet. I’m Dr. Sinthome’s Lacanian pervert analyst since 2006. So this ain’t my first rodeo. Now you probably know every transferrential relationship is fraught with ambivalences. Dr Sinthome often thinks the sun come up just to hear him crow. And he’s got a ten-gallon mouth. But generally it’s a handsome cat and one of my favorite clients.
February 18, 2013 at 9:09 pm
Asher,
Exactly. Media differ amongst themselves and will produce different effects depending on the medium in question, but brains are one sort of vehicle for semiotic entities. Brains, of course, can do things that books can’t do.
February 18, 2013 at 9:28 pm
Levi – That’s great. I think the clarifications you make in this post are important ones, and the “smarmy” message a necessary one. It seems to me that it’s easier than you might think to misunderstand some of your ideas (although D.O. gave me a much better grasp).
February 19, 2013 at 9:44 pm
Hey ‘center of parody’ I was a bit shocked by your website. It’s v. confronting – all those bodies and things. Levi is a wonderful chap but may have some materialist issues…all materialisms:
”
The gist of materialism is fungibility. It consists in resorting to some paste, whether an eidetic, sensual, action-like, aethereal or condensate ‘material’, any portion of which may be indifferently taken to form realities.
Like in banks money articulates accounts, idealist materialism articulates ideas into persons while materialist materialism articulates less-subtle materials to the same effect. And likewise amiss.
Materialism is thus established once anybody takes anything to work as a material –namely, not mattering which portion of it is being taken — to build further realities. In particular, minds.
Why doed the mere taking any resource as indifferently partitionable incurs in materialism? Does it perchance not matter if the resource posited as fungible is one (or a special combination) of essences, quidditates, Bose-Einstein condensates, atoms or dust? No, it does not matter.
So it is, because, beyond any coarseness or subtleness of what is posited to work as a material, what is neglected is the irrepeatability of the singular result. Therefore, building a wall with bricks and mortar, and building a text with concepts and expressions, legitimately may be described materialistically, as an ‘in-formative alteration’. But such materialistic description is ilegitimate to depict psychisms in full, because albeit Herbert and Mariela may ‘share’ some noema –say, ‘the’ sensation of a lazuline blue — never each of us will avail of the noema actually availed by the other. Because we are finite, this is so. (Mariela Szirko, NEGLECT FOR CADACUALTEZ INSTALLS MATERIALISM:
HERBERT, NOT MARIELA, IS MATERIALIST
Karl Jaspers Forum, posted 20 July 1999
‘Cadacualtez, the intrinsic unbarterability, unrepeatability, incommunicability, and singularity of every existential being, thus manifests as the ontic determination, in nature, of every event of a finite observer’s finding herself experiencing in a circumstance rather than, instead, in another. Natural science finds psychisms that neither self-posit to exist nor self-circumstance to eclose. As their circumstancing is a constitutive contingency for finite observers, its unbarterability makes such event one and the same, even if iterated observationally over the years – one never being shifted or teleported to other bodily circumstances. As a matter of observation, each real observer in nature cannot derive its own place from the physical regularities forming its other empirical findings; less, to account for why the availabilities compounding his or her mental world do not become available to another person.’
A person’s physical antecedents or ‘boundary conditions’ cannot determine who will be the one that avails itself of this brain rather than that of the cat next door.
‘Every psyche or portion of consciousness is found to be primarily an unconnected, and unmergeable, eclosion or “pop-out” of “existential finitude.” Although rare, the word “eclosion” will nevertheless be stressed in this article. Like the eclosion or “pop-out” of microphysical particles in the indeterminacy-ruled scenarios depicted by quantum field theory, also psyches are found to eclose, namely not to “emerge” from some specifying circumstances but rather to “pop out” from undefinable conditions. The phrase “existential finitude” denotes for natural scientists every reality able to sense and move a portion of nature while altering herself by sedimenting those causal involvements away from temporality – this refers to an “instant” and not a time sequence. The designation “away from temporality” thus means “not on a time course but inside the instant,” specifying where such reality occurs and simultaneizes the sedimented sequences (“memories”) of her reactions to her causal interactions. This is why any reality that knows itself ought to possess memory, being erroneous the Aeschylus-Plato theory imagining brain-engraved memory traces or never found “engrams” : since nature vacates itself outside actuality and consequently every thing in nature, including each mind, exists only within the physical instant, the preservation of memories is an effect due to the absence of time course rather than the presence of brain engrams
February 20, 2013 at 8:15 pm
oh, and another non sequitur.
Guattari’s ‘Schizoanalytic Cartographies’ is now out and about –
Beware, not light reading. I actually thought some of it was imposs to translate….Might interest a number of this blog’s readers…would be interested to know what you think of it levi……
February 20, 2013 at 10:34 pm
Generally I find Guattari thinks too quickly for me (slow down and explain yourself Felix!). Can his argument be followed without becoming a slave to his text?
February 21, 2013 at 6:02 am
try and see…I’m sure someone like yourself with a v. good knowledge of lacan will find something of interest
February 22, 2013 at 9:52 pm
and I can’t believe G is more complex than Lacan!
Btw, i am not a disciple of Guattari. But there are some interesting essays in that book –
I like ‘Cracks in the Street’ (orig. cracks in the state of the text) given to the MLA in 86.
‘In response to the invitation to your conference, I had suggested calling my paper “The existentialising functions of discourse.” But after having crossed the Atlantic this proposition became “Cracks in the text of the State.” Already that gives us quite a lot to think about! Subsequently, it was explained to me that for a meeting placing itself under the auspices of an organisation devoted to literature, it would be a good idea to stick to the idea of the text. OK! But it nonetheless remains that when I speak of discourse, it is only incidentally a question of text or even of language. Discourse, discursivity is for me first of all a trajectory, the wandering of Lenz, for example, reconstituted by Büchner in the profound life of forms, the encounter with the soul of rocks, metals, water, plants… Or the immobile peregrination that grasping a zen garden consists of, to the point that, achieving the total presence of Satori, it is closed to any communication. Or, indeed, even an autistic child’s fascination with the slow formation of a drop of water, the endlessly reiterated falling of which he greets with the same explosion of joy and jouissance (in Ce gamin-là, the film Renaud Victor devoted to the experiments of Fernand Deligny).’
‘ So, I’m ok with the title “Cracks in the text” that was suggested to me and with the diverse modalities of textual discontinuity that your letter of invitation enumerated: gaps, ruptures, interstices, slippages, margins, crises, liminal periods, peripheries, frames, silences…OK to all that, on condition, though, that it is not taken as a pretext to definitively silence the other forms of discursivity that persist in inhabiting our world!
March 2, 2013 at 4:53 pm
Junior philosopher here Levi, but I’ve incorporated some of The Ontic Principle and Democracy of Objects into my dissertation and I’m very interested in your work. I’m currently grappling with irreduction and philosophies of access (or perhaps technologies of access) and I was curious about this passage:
“If a god exists, it might be able to see a lot, but not because it is omnipresent, but because it has a technologically superior means of discerning events around the universe, not unlike the satellite technologies used by meteorologists.”
My first, rather naive question is: Does this being with its ‘technologically superior’ tools not suggest a greater degree of access to ‘real’ events? In my work I’m trying to understand and ultimately deny the privileged access we often attach to our media and so I’m not trying to nitpick your word choice; I know what you mean here but I think it reflects a stance that I cannot reconcile with my understanding of OOO.
In part, because the notion of a top-down, satellite perspective seems, in some ways, to place a human bias behind this ‘superior’ perspective as we find visual representations of landscapes to contain more information for us than for, say, a dog. My point being, regardless of their irreducible nature, technologies are always already reductions to a privileged human position (at least in the way we use and discuss them). By saying ‘if a god exists, it must be a technologically enhanced god’ seems to port ontotheology onto technology, in a sort of deus ex machina that enables us to privilege the machine when, in fact, all it has done is enhance the human bias. In other words, technology anthropomorphizes so that we can continue to anthropocentrize but without the nagging guilt associated with relying too heavily on our embodied senses.
As a follow up question, if ontology is flat (which I accept) then don’t we have to categorize based solely on difference rather than superior/inferior? Certain differences can still be more efficacious but in such cases they are always relative/reducible to the bias of that object towards which that difference makes a difference.
I’m not sure that makes a whole lot of sense and I’m fully prepared to be told how naive that sounds but given my research, I wondered if you’d have time to enlighten me. Thanks!
March 3, 2013 at 11:32 am
Object-oriented ontology is an obnoxious oxymoron for there are no ontological-objects for there are no objects anyway so we must object to object-oriented ontology which is an objectification and reification of being and beings in the world and out the world for there are no objects both in the world and out the world just as there are no things in the world and out the world yet is human-lack in the lack in understanding in the lack of understanding the world as a whole that makes man objectify being making being into a thinging in to an object forgetting that an amethyst has being as air has being as water has being as a human has being but the radical difference of beings makes men divide beings into a taxonomic classification of catalogued objects
Object-oriented ontologists are akin to school boys who like stamp-collecting or train-spotting acting as boy-scout colonialist-imperialist pioneers pillaging the world of beings and turning them into objects to be collected and collated and catalogued through the anally retentive administration of taxonomy in order to control and name and masturbate all over their memorabilia and ephemerality of named objects forgetting that there are no finite-objects only beings of infinite becoming that cannot be ‘objectified’ that cannot be ‘objects’ because to be is necessarily not ‘object’ for what they nominate as an ‘object’ is the naming that is the forgetting of being for to name is to forget being for the name kills the being so we must now kill the name ‘object’
In reality there are no objects for out reality there are no objects for reality knows nothing of obpothetical objects for reality needs nothings of hypothetical objects for what is object is an optical oblusion ablusion illusion of reality that objectifies that reality there that reality in there that reality out there that is alien to objectification to objectation so we must object to using the obsurd obstration object and in our body we know no object as out our body we know no object and we desire no object and no object desires us just as we now know that there is no subject and no subject of desire or desire of a subject so we must stop being so subjected to subjectivity and subjecthood as well as objectivity and objecthood for there are no objects no subjects
In the vicinity of the artwork we are aware that there are no artobjects for the work of art is not an object of art for art announces that there are no objects in the world and no subjects in the world for the artwork awakens an answer within without us to being in the world where there is no time and no space just being art being by art being by art working for in the vacant-vicinity of the artwork we are close to the near by in being next to nothing being an arting awaring that there are no objects and no subjects in our world in our being in our art for our world is not an object for our being is not an object for our art is not an object thus art is the concealment of the there not there revealing to our being there not there that there are no objects in the world
An artwork as utterly unique and original ordains itself afresh free from objectification ordaining itself as being objectless initiating itself into the world as a being and not as a hypothetical object by just being a being as it stands before you stripping you of your synthetic subjectivity for art is the real in realising that there are no objects in the world and no subjects in the world for art announces a world without objects and a world without subjects so making an obtuse object oriented ontology as an absolute impossibility of objects ever even existing for this that there then them those these implies absolute separation severing into a taxonomic classification of beings and non-beings that are all actually all in one being one in all the same being one
It is essential to artworks that they be beings by being in their own right as autonomous beings unmade by human beings but mediated and filtered through human beings whom are the tool-beings tooling-arting being-near-by-there but not actually made-there by the tool-being alone for tool-being is merely an antenna-aerial that art-forms filtering-forming arting thereing but non-humans are not doing art because non-humans have no lack that is have no need to do art even if one were to idly and inanely speculate that a fly may land on a wet canvas and have a walk around making-marks but those marks are merely accidents that may or may not make the artwork more interesting or more boring but the fly is disinterested in making a work of art
Initially every artwork is initiated and instigated as Identical with itself and knows nothing of outer externalised iedntities and knows nothing of objects and knows nothing of subjects for the artwork is being-in-itself that has its own infinite origin its own finite origin being the finite of the infinite and the infinite of the finite for what makes art eternal is its finity within infinity and its infinity within finity being both in time and out of time all the time which is why the human-being secretly hold a grudge and a malice towards the artwork knowing that the artwork will survive them for the artwork is aware of existing as a life before birth of existing as a life after death whilst the human-being knows-nothing of existing before birth or of existing after death
In being in the world I am aware that a chair is not a chair when there is no one sitting there but a chair becomes a chair when a being is sitting there in the world there a chair becoming a being there and a chair becomes what they wrongly nominate as an object if someone is sitting there or not sitting there but the chair is not an object but a being after a human being is sitting in the chair igniting the being in the chair being there where being is the chairing a human being chairing and the chair being becomes one with the human being when the human being becomes caring for the chairing when sitting in the chair bringing being to the chair being there chairing there the human there the chair there where the chair there is chairing being human being
Objectless ontology observes that there are no object oriented ontologies for there are no non-human objects only non-human alien abjects and animal abjects that exist exogenously as abjected alien ontologies as abjected animal ontologies and object oriented ontologies still elevate the human-being above the alien-being and the animal-being and the world-being by being a superior and special species above aliens and animals by being a humanist philosophy despite its non-human turn as a non-human humanism reducing the human-being to other non-beings so object oriented ontology ontologises so-called objects with an equal opportunities ontology where so-called objects are catalogued as all equal and that everything exists equally
If objects really existed in real life in the real world then they would take on ontologies that would be utterly unique and amazing and astonishing by their awesome altarity and diffuse difference and begin to question our own obtuse ontologies which lack the understanding and the knowing of other beings and nonbeings yet object oriented ontology fetishises beings and nonbeings as anesthetized and neutralised objects to be catalogued in the clinical calculating disinterestedness of object-fetishism and object-fetishism is object-fascism for object oriented ontology is fascism to its inner most core as a fascist object fetish oriented ontology with its reactionary and regressive fascistic fetishism of objectifying everything as a neutralizing and levelling
Being an alien I am unaware that there are things or objects as aliens do not know of distinctions of differences of demarcations of separations since there is nothing after one so there can be no-objects and not even one object because one is not an object because one is not a unit for one is the being-alling where there are no numbers and so for the alien-beings there are no-objects and no-things but for the human-beings lacking higher alien intelligence they still have this fascistic fetishisation with
severing and splitting and cataloguing and curating wounding-the-worlding as if the world was an operating theatre where what was one was violently operated upon and all the internal organs were wrenched out dissected and named then blood drained
March 4, 2013 at 2:02 am
Thank you, Alex. Your positions articulated here certainly express a profound openness to becoming.