As time has passed, I’ve become increasingly hesitant about using the term “correlationism”. For those new to Speculative Realism, it all began with a critique of correlationism. Coined by Quentin Meillassoux, “correlationism” denotes “the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other” (After Finitude, 5). While there’s very little resemblance between the philosophies of Ray Brassier, Ian Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and Quentin Meillassoux, all have shared the common feature of critiquing correlationism and of attempting to think what the being of being is without thought or as posited by our intentionality.
My hesitation with the term has arisen from witnessing how the term has evolved in these discussions since 2007. Two things in particular have bothered me about the use of the term. First, I increasingly see mere evocation of the term used as a way of arguing against other positions. “X is correlationist, therefore x is mistaken.” This isn’t really an argument, but rather just a way of dismissing through a label. Second, I increasingly see it implied that correlationism is a taboo or fallacy to be avoided in all circumstances. If, in SR circles, you point out, for example, that a color blind person processes electro-magnetic waves in a particular way, you’re likely to hear someone decry such a remark as correlationist. The problem is that I don’t see any other way of understanding and analyzing phenomena such as this. The way in which my best friend’s father experiences electro-magnetic waves is different than how I experience electro-magnetic waves, and our ways of encountering electro-magnetic waves are different than how cats and mantis shrimp experience electro-magnetic waves.
Is this correlationism? I don’t know. Correlationism is the thesis that we only ever have access to the relation between thought (or experience or language) and being, never one of the terms considered apart from one another. Something very different seems to be asserted in the examples of vision above. First, it is noted that something like electro-magnetic waves exist regardless of whether any entity registers them at all. In other words, in making such a claim I am endorsing the existence of something independent of thought. I can’t see or experience infrared light without the use of some sort of technology, but my lack of access to these sorts of electro-magnetic waves doesn’t undermine the fact that those waves exist. Second, I am making the claim that other entities such as my best friend’s father, mantis shrimp, and dogs access electro-magnetic waves in different ways. It’s not possible to make such a claim without having some access to other entities independent of how I access the world. Can I ever experience the world the way a mantis shrimp experiences the world? Of course not. However, through my knowledge of optics, electro-magnetic waves, its reactions to the environment about it, and so on, I can make all sorts of fallible inferences about what mantis shrimp have access to.
read on!
Sometimes I think my position is better described as “pan-correlationism” rather than as “realism”. “Pan-correlationism” is the thesis that everything is an “observer” or that all things have access to the world in particular ways. Put in Deleuzo-Spinozist terms, it would be the thesis that every entity is affected and affects other entities in its own way. The way in which rocks have access to the world about them and act upon the world around them is different than how trees affect and are affected by the world, as well as from how corporations, governments, octopi, persons, and tiger sharks are affected by and affect the world. In some respects, “monad” is a better term for how I think about entities than “object”. Leibniz said that every monad is a point of view on the entire universe from a particular perspective. Leibniz was saying that monads are observers. Observing how observers observe is what really interests me.
If Speculative Realism was such a wake up call for me, it’s because it made me realize how my critical and philosophical perspective was thoroughly anthropocentric. I spent a lot of time thinking about how humans encounter the world around them, and how different cultures and gendered subjects have access to the world. The problem with this orientation was two-fold: First, there was the traditional antihumanist problem. What do we mean when we speak of the human? Can we really speak univocally about the human? Don’t people of different genders, different classes, academics, autistics, construction workers, and so on access the world in different ways? Don’t we access the world differently as a function of the technologies we use as extensions of our bodies? Post-structuralist thought had already made me aware of these issues. Second, there was the posthumanist problem. What sorts of access to do access, wombats, institutions, stars, shrubberies, and so on have to the world about them?
Speculative realism, along with the discovery of new materialist feminism and actor-network theory, was a sort of wake up call for me. It wasn’t so much a rejection of my postmodern and post-structuralist roots, as a radicalization of those roots. It made me realize how anthropocentric, how humanistic, my post-structuralism was, by introducing me to a world pervaded by nonhuman observers or monads in addition to human monads. I realized that while I had taken the antihumanist turn by refusing the thesis that there’s a “universal” human, my theory was still occupied with examining what the world is for us, how we signify it, how we make use of it. SR made me realize that we are beings among other beings, caught up in a drama that far exceeds us, that we aren’t the center of the universe, and that if we are to understand the world we need to attempt to observe how other observers observe.
If the term “realism” is problematic, then this is because it suggests that the project is epistemological or one of deciding which form of access to the world is the true way the world is. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me to decide whether the mantis shrimp, my best friend’s father, or the cat have truer access to the world. They have different access to the world. Nonetheless, the term “realism” is still indispensable for two reasons. First, it is necessary to retain a realism of observers or monads. The mantis shrimp can’t be reduced to my access to the mantis shrimp, but is an observer that exists in its own right. The mantis shrimp is irreducible to what it is for me or anyone else. Second, and this is really the same point, electro-magnetic waves are irreducible to how various beings have access to them. Electro-magnetic waves would exist just fine if there weren’t any sentient monads to transform them into various visual experiences (what Harman calls “sensible objects”) or to know about them. Recognizing that different monads access the world in different ways is quite different than saying everything is true. In this regard, some variant of representational realism is required as well. To be sure, the Vikings thought that lightning occurred when the god Odin struck his hammer– and our theories of lightning might turn out to be mistaken as well –but lightning can’t be reduced to whatever some group of people happen to say about it. There is a reality to lightning and some theories of lightning will be true and others false.
March 12, 2013 at 8:42 pm
Great post. A couple thoughts of a speculative nature: When the anthropocentric lens is dropped it does seem to me to open up possibilities. For instance all biology is life, but that does not mean all life is biology. What if awareness is like the other forces of nature, not emergent, but inherent throughout like strong and weal nuclear force.One other thought, Although I see a correlation between running out in a busy highway and laying down flat blindfolded at night in black clothes and probable harm as correlative, that’s enough for me. We just have to settle for our best guess based on limited vision and inductive reason sometimes as far as I can see.
March 12, 2013 at 9:44 pm
“Put in Deleuzo-Spinozist terms,” is it then not also that rocks, shrimps and dahlias have other ideas and think their own thoughts? That each correlates or performs a correlation between being and thought? And that each in reflecting on the relation enters into a determination (of being)? So that, finally, correlationism belongs to representation?
March 12, 2013 at 9:46 pm
Simon,
“Affect” in Deleuze and Spinoza simply refers to the capacity for things to causally interact with one another. It doesn’t entail conscious experience or thought, both of which are restricted to higher organisms. Rocks are only open to the world in certain ways and can only act on the world in certain ways, but it doesn’t follow from this that they feel things or have thoughts.
March 12, 2013 at 9:53 pm
I don’t know if thought belongs to conscious experience in Deleuze. He asks, What is consciousness after all, if not language? Is thought restricted to language?
March 12, 2013 at 10:07 pm
“In some respects, “monad” is a better term for how I think about entities than “object”.”
I’ve always had trouble with the term “object” in Harmon’s sense of hermetic self-enclosure. It’s given me a great deal of trouble with OOO, as you can imagine. Of the things I’ve read of OOO adherents, your Democracy of Objects, and this blog in general, has helped me get past my reactionary aversion to that. Since, I’ve found that there’s so much in OOO that’s beautifully well-tailored to, well (and I grin to use the term) its object.
So just a thank you, and perhaps not a helpful comment.
March 12, 2013 at 10:07 pm
Sometimes Deleuze talks like all being is thought. That’s what I argued in Difference and Givenness. I don’t think thought is restricted to language, personally. I also think that Deleuze is wrong to argue that all being is thought or consciousness, but that’s me.
March 12, 2013 at 10:25 pm
interesting. I greatly admire Difference and Givenness, particularly for the clarity of its narration of the paradoxes of time in Deleuze-Bergson. Deleuze has Spinoza say – or the other way around – thought reflects being. But I am interested in the way thought determines being, visiting ideas on things, and thinking this way neither as a matter of language, anthropocentrically, nor as correlation. The latter, in Meillassoux, it seems to me is limited to the determinate and represented. Although, Sjoerd van Tuinen argues After Finitude’s true target is the principle of sufficient reason.
March 12, 2013 at 10:28 pm
of course I should have said, the ways thought determines being, and, thinking these ways neither as a matter of language, etc.
March 13, 2013 at 1:06 am
Reblogged this on The (Dis)Loyal Opposition to Modernity:.
March 13, 2013 at 5:14 am
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March 13, 2013 at 7:01 am
strange in a way that so much has been written on the being of being…Gilson, Heidegger, and now Harman. But with ‘withdrawal’ there isn’t much to say! We know the ‘accidents’ of things it seems but not there proper being. And how could we…
Remembered this from Guattari:
‘The ‘for-itself’ and the ‘for-others’ stop being the privilege of humanity; they crystallise everywhere that machinic interfaces engender disparity…’ (chaosmosis, p.109, 1995)). It would be nice if some 000 writers (not you) remembered their nearest precursors
March 13, 2013 at 7:54 pm
Interesting also that Prof Harman claims that OOO is not a Kantianism because it goes ‘beyond’ Kant in treating relations between objects (or things – It really should be ‘thing oriented ontology’ – objects are things as known). It is claimed that Kant only deals with human-thing relations…
Anyway, this may be true of the critical period, but in his pre-critical period as cosmologist Kant advanced many physical outlooks ahead of his epoch. E. g., about the motion and constitution of the system of fixed stars; the nebulary formation of stellar and planetary structures and
their primitive resolution into ihren
elementarischen Grundstoff; the origin, composition, and rotation of Saturn’s rings and the conditions for their stability; the discoincidence of the Moon’s centres of gravity and of figure; the physical constitution of comets, the slowdown of Earth’s rotation under tidal drag, the theory of winds, the “law” of Dove etc…
In the posthumous writings we even find Kant positing the Ich denke (‘ego cogito”) as the physical æther!
But the fundamental problem is ascribing intentional (sensuous) objects to non-empsyched beings. Or rather,
adopting, of necessity, some version of panpsychism….
March 13, 2013 at 10:36 pm
‘But by far the most significant fact in connection with Kant as a scientific thinker is his forestallment of Darwinism, and indeed of the doctrine of Evolution in its broadest form, as the following passages will show: “The union of so many species of animals,” says Kant, “in a certain common schema . . . seeming to form their basis, where remarkable simplicity of outline seems capable—by the shortening of one and the lengthening of another, the compression of this and the development of that part—of bringing forth so great a variety of species, allows us, at least, a faint ray of hope that something may be explained here on that principle of the mechanism of Nature, without which there could be no such thing as natural science at all. This analogy of forms, which, in spite of all their diversity, seem to be generated from a common origin, strengthens the supposition of a real relationship between them, in their production from an original parent form, by the progressive approach of one species to another, from that in which the principle of purpose seems most exhibited, namely, from the man, to the polyp, and from this again to the moss and lichen, and finally to the lowest phase of nature known to us—to inorganic matter—from which, together with its forces, the whole technique of nature seems derivable according to mechanical laws—that technique of nature, to us so incomprehensible in organised beings, that we believe ourselves obliged to assume a distinct principle for its explanation”* (Kritik der Urtheilskraft, ed. Kirchmann, p. 299). And again, “He (the naturalist) may allow the earth—itself arisen from chaotic conditions—to have given birth originally to beings of a less perfect form, these again to others, which have developed themselves in a manner more adapted to their habitat, and their mutual relations [natural selection?], till this mother-earth—herself becoming rigid—has limited her births to definite species, incapable of further modifications; and thus their variety has remained as it was at the end of the operation of her formative productivity.” Further on, Kant speaks of the possibility of “certain water-animals developing by degrees into marsh-animals, and these, again, after some generations, into land-animals.” History can point to few more distinct premonitions of a great truth than is contained in the foregoing and many other passages of similar import. It must be remembered that while these views were laid before the world in 1780, Erasmus Darwin’s ‘Zoonomia, or the laws of organic life,’ did not appear till, at the earliest, 1794, so that Kant’s utterances actually preceded those of the father of so-called Darwinism, the grandfather of Charles Darwin himself.’
http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=361&chapter=54840&layout=html&Itemid=27
March 14, 2013 at 8:30 pm
It’s nice that Kant becomes here a kind of science fiction writer.
Isn’t the enmeshed thought? rather than the problem of a panpsychism, a universal affectivity, or affection.
March 15, 2013 at 12:11 am
I think Paul takes Harman a bit too literally here. I think all Graham is saying is that objects can only be affected in certain ways and this differs from entity to entity.
March 15, 2013 at 8:46 pm
Yes, correction, Prof Harman prefers the term ‘polypsychism’ – ‘the roster of experiencing entities must indeed balloon beyond all previous limits (TQO, 122).
It’s the term ‘experiencing’ that might be an issue….to say that anything that relates indirectly to something else (e.g., fire to cotton) is a ‘sensuous experience’ is not much clearer than claiming objects do not encounter others ‘as’ objects. The concept of ‘experience’ becomes completely devoid of its meaning…Without psyches there is no ‘experience’ – there is transeunt causality.
‘These other organisms are constituted
purely in the hylozoic hiatus and operate in a purely reactive way:
they are unable to inaugurate innovative causal series semoviently, that is
to say with decisions. In addition, they cannot bring to an end an outer
causal series and know its last effect as a sensory intonation of existential
being. As mentioned, the ontic consistency of gnoseological apprehension or
knowledge requires a break in the efficient causal series, and these unempsyched
animals are entirely constituted in the hylozoic hiatus where all efficient
causality is unbrokenly transeunt. These animals lack any intrinsically
unbarterable element, and thus any knowledge inasmuch as experience: in
these animal species having an Aristotelian soul but not circumstancing an
existentiality, their “knowledge” is mere information, gnoseologically uncharacterized – and only metaphorically called “knowledge” by external observers
interested in keeping Aristotelian homogeneity for the biological series.’ (Crocco, Palindrome).
‘Therefore, the emplacement of circumstanced existentialities in nature is found whenever a break affects some efficient causal chain. The last link of this chain phenomenizes as the reaction of a self-knowing being, a reaction that becomes
gnoseologically apprehended but lacks causal efficiency to further its preceding causal series. One aptitude excludes the other, both being discrete capabilities featured by efficient causa-tion. As empirically found, outer causal efficiency can work out intonative re-actions in psychisms, but it cannot cause psychisms to be affected in such a way as to instrumentally transmit the outer efficiency. Minds do not behave as billiard balls. Any causal consequence from this outer efficiency is thus to be a new causal string semoviently originated by the causal efficiency of the same self-knowing being that did the gnoseological apprehension, and se-lected it as causal antecedent rather than deselecting it, or else adjusted it contextually to posit it as causal antecedent. Such events do not happen in the hylozoic hiatus, where all of the causal series continue (i.e., all causal ef-ficiency is transeunt, matter-energy is conserved over effects) but, in trade, there is no gnoseological apprehension.’ (Szirko, Effects of Relativistic Motions in the Brain and their physiological relevance).
March 16, 2013 at 12:23 am
Or in other words ‘experience’ has been reduced to indirect relation…fire ‘experiences’ cotton…
May 17, 2013 at 6:49 pm
[…] this month, Levi had a post discussing his reservations regarding the term correlationism. His concern, as I understand it, is […]