Larval Subjects .

There was a time when philosophers used to write treatises on friendship.  One translation of the “philia” of “philosophy” is friendship.  Aristotle devotes two chapters of the Nichomachean Ethics to friendship.  Friendship is a key concept in Epicureanism; so much so that a life without friendship is not a life that’s not worth living.  Just imagine the loneliness of the protagonist in Cast Away.  It is not a lover that he imagines on the Island, but Wilson that allows him to go on.  I won’t write a treatise on friendship here– though I believe it is an essential concept in philosophy; both friendship to the concept and friendship to the other –but a few things do come to mind as to why friendship is so crucial.  There is, of course, the obvious dimension of friendship, especially in our alienated time where it seems that all relationships of sociality have collapsed:  The world is a little less lonely, a little less dark, in friendship.  In our alienated times, friendship is a space against the darkness and the nothingness; a space where there is a little bit of light.

We often speak of friendship as a certain sort of closeness or proximity, but it seems to me that the best friendships are those of distance or difference.  A friendship where one heard only what is the same as oneself would be rather stale.  “Malkovich!  Malkovich!  Malkovich!”  No.  A good friendship cracks your world, so that you discover the earth.  A good friendship is one in which you have an encounter with alterity, difference, distance…  That your world is not all that there is, that there is difference.  Around that sand of difference, something accretes or comes into being that was unanticipated.  A friendship is a repetition of difference, not the same.  It produces something that neither could have expected out of that difference.  It is an accretion-point where something else comes into being; a swirling vortex that generates an aleatory pattern.

And in friendship you find out who you yourself are.  Every subject is ex-centric, decentered, other to itself.  In the alterity of friendship, across that distance, you discover the values or teloi that animated you, that you didn’t even know were you, as a result of that difference or distance that somehow you surmount through dialogue and laughter and tears.  Who was I?  I never knew until I encountered the strangeness of my friends!  And in encountering that strangeness of my friends I encountered the strangeness of myself; that what I took as obvious and for granted was itself a distance or a new continent or extraterrestrial.  I came to myself through this encounter with alterity, through this distance, through this difference and could only know what it was across distance.

Of myself, this I know:  that without dialogue, which is another name for difference, I am unable to think and that my thought unfolds in the dimension of friendship or that difference with others with whom I talk.  I come to know that even in my soliloquies, I am talking with an-other in friendship or across a difference.

Taking a brief break from marking, as I grade student essays I find myself thinking dark, unfair things:  bad writers are bad people.  Before explaining just why this thought occurs to me (and I think I’m wrong to think this) it’s first important to clarify just what I mean by “bad writing”.  I’m not talking about incomplete and awkward sentences, nor am I talking about poor spelling and bad organization.  These things are instances of bad writing, of course, but they are not the sort of bad writing I’m talking about.

Rather, the sort of bad writing I’m talking about might be described as solipsistic writing.  It is a form of writing that fails to consider its audience or what it’s audience would need to know in order to understand what the writer is talking about.  Such writing just jumps into the topic without telling the reader what the topic is– e.g., it simply proceeds to answer the question of the essay prompt without introducing the question being discussed –it provides no context, fails to define terms, provides no examples to illustrate concepts and points, and fails to provide supporting reasons (that a stranger from another very different culture could share) for controversial claims.  The bad writer in this sense is the person that assumes their audience is just like them (or forgets that they have an audience at all) and assumes that their audience has all the “knowledge” that they have.  The bad writer, in short, is a solipsist.

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In his by measures, sublime, bizarre, amusing and profound Circus Philosophicus (perhaps the most amusing and accessible introduction to Graham’s thought published yet), Graham writes the following of yours truly:

Even a friendly critic of my philosophy such as Levi Bryant (you know of his blog and his struggles with ignorant trolls) rejects this asymmetry, though he concedes that nothing exists but translation. In agreement with Latour’s philosophy, Bryant contends that no thing makes contact with another without transforming it. Yet he still holds that my theory of withdrawn objects and vicarious causation is too extreme. As I see it, what Bryant and Latour both miss is that translation is also a starting point, not just a result. That is to say, the point is not that fire makes easy contact with cotton, or a horse with a meadow, and that they then translate or distort these entities in accordance with their own perspectives. This would imply an initial direct contact, with a sort of indirect translation then pasted on as a supplement. Instead, I claim that even the initial contact between two entities is only the contact of a real entity with a translated or phenomenal one. (49 – 50)

Perhaps no element of Graham’s thought has been more maligned than his doctrine of vicarious causation. Indeed, of all of Graham’s concepts, his concept of vicarious causation has been the most difficult for me to accept. Nonetheless, I was surprised when I read this passage as, a few months ago, Graham wrote me with great excitement after reading the MS for The Democracy of Objects, exclaiming that I do, in fact, endorse a variant of his account of vicarious causation. And indeed, after reading Graham’s discussion of vicarious causation, I’m hard put to see where we diverge or differ from one another.

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The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve been surprised to discover that there’s a profound overlap between OOO and the ethical thought of Levinas. At its core, OOO is, I believe, an ontology of radical alterity. Every object is an absolute alterity with respect to every other object. This, I believe, is the key meaning of Harman’s concept of withdrawal and vicarious causation. It is also the meaning of Morton’s concept of objects as strange strangers. The difference here would be that where Levinas’ thought indexes the withdrawal of the Other to other humans and the divine, OOO indexes this infinite excess to all objects. When I get back to Texas it looks like I’ll have to go back to Levinas and determine how well this thesis works (I suspect this will also involve a foray into Lingis as well). Graham already does a lot of this work in Guerrilla Metaphysics, however there his focus is primarily on the elemental.

When situated in terms of Levinas, I think we get a better sense of what OOO targets in both correlationism and perspectivism (perspectivism being a form of correlationism). Recalling the famous scene from Being John Malkovich, I have coined the term “Malkovichism” in The Democracy of Objects.

Malkovichism consists in the erasure of alterity, such the being of other objects is reduced to being a mere vehicle for perspective, meanings, human intentions, etc. The being of objects is reduced to what it is for-us. As I argued in my post last night, this move tends to be premised on a faux belief that somehow recognizing this perspectivism will lead us to be more tolerant of otherness. As Graham observes in his fine response to Vitale today:

The main problem the object-oriented approach faces is, I believe, a cultural one. People are so used to thinking of autonomous reality as being a tool of bad essentialism, oppressive patriarchy, bland traditional school philosophy, and boring rich heterosexual white people, and so used to thinking instead of process and relation as being the flower of liberation, creativity, experiment and diversity, that they instinctively react against any theory involving anything that has reality in its own right. But you have to fight those prejudices.

The paradox is that perspectivism, far from increasing diversity, creativity, and experimentation seems to produce precisely the reverse. Why? Because with the perspectivist ideology one has the answer to everything– “well that’s just a perspective!” –and therefore renders itself immune to any encounter with alterity. It is only where the alterior is treated as the alterior, where it is treated as having autonomous existence of its own, that the object can be seen as the ruin of all categorizations, identifications, significations, meanings, intentions, perspectives, etc., insofar as it exceeds any of these translations. It is with this recognition of the object as the alien, the strange stranger, the Other that respect for objects can begin, i.e., that we begin to get real diversity rather than a Malkovichism that reduces all otherness to what it is for a perspective. Moreover, creativity can only begin to occur where one opens himself to the otherness of the other, passing through alien mediums that force us to become other than what we are and that allow for aleatory adventures of signification, craft, and meaning where all relations between pre-established models and subordinated matters are called into question.

Vitale has written a post responding to my last post. I think more or less agree with Vitale that we’re finally reaching the nub of our disagreement. My mind is mush after a long day, so hopefully I’ll make some sense in my responses. Vitale begins by writing:

Truth: I don’t believe in it, and it seems he does. A philosopher who doesn’t believe in Truth?! Well of course! Ok, I believe in one truth, namely, that there is no truth. For Meillassoux, this is radical finitude, and this is precisely what Badiou desribes as his faith in ‘the void’, which is included in every multiple, that which safeguards the infinite potential of thought, symbolized as ∅, his riff on the Lacanian Real.

Here I deeply disagree with Vitale’s reading of Meillassoux and Badiou. I think this is an especially deep misreading of Meillassoux. First, Meillassoux is not defending the concept of finitude, but critiquing and rejecting it. The title of the book is, after all, After Finitude. Second, when Meillassoux makes that claim that being is radically contingent, he is making a claim about being itself. It is not that being is radically contingent to us, it is that being, regardless of whether we exist or not, is contingent or characterized by hyperchaos. Moreover, all of Meillassoux’s thought unfolds in response to a critique of correlationism. One variant of correlationism is the perspectivism that Vitale defends. Meillassoux, by contrast, wishes to think the in itself, i.e., the absolute or that which isn’t merely a matter of perspective. All of this requires a commitment to truth in one form or another. In a number of respects, this is what all the debates between the realists and the anti-realists have been about.

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Skholiast has an especially rich and nice post up riffing on my post about Rote Theory and Practice. He really gets right to the core of the issue. Perhaps I’ve just had it driven into me by my background in Lacanian psychoanalysis, but for me the ultimate normative imperative regulating my thought is “Listen and look!” I’m not suggesting I always live up to this, but it is the ideal that governs nearly every discussion of ethics and politics I participate in. In this regard, I have a visceral reaction to any theoretical framework that I sense is merely subsumptive, placing phenomena under pre-existing ossified categories rather than opening itself to being surprised by phenomena. Needless to say, listening and looking is not equivalent to merely “hearing” auditory vibrations or receiving wavelengths of light. Listening and looking is incredibly hard and requires overcoming Malkovichism:

Again, I am not suggesting that I live up to this ideal. It is not without reason that Freud said psychoanalysis is among the impossible professions. But that makes it no less a theoretical ideal.

Over at Networkologies Vitale has a post up discussing his network ethics. I won’t get into Vitale’s network ethics here, but I did want to make a few remarks about his characterization of flat ontology. Vitale writes:

In his recent reply to my post on SR and Politics, I argue that Levi’s argument that the pressure on SR and OOO to talk about race over frogs is misguided is itself problematic. But I don’t say WHY I think this is the case.

At first it might seem obvious: people are more important than frogs, and racism radically effects people’s lives. Of course, I just assumed that people are more important than frogs. But with OOO and SR, this seemingly simple anthopocentric gesture becomes problematic. If OOO works to put all objects on the same level, why are people more important than frogs? Isn’t this precisely the sort of thinking we’re working to get rid of? Isn’t the whole point of the Latour litanies that its important to view neoplatonism and flowers as being on fundamentally the same ontological level?

Of course, then the question becomes why. Why is it so important to us to make ontology and flat? Why do we want so badly to move beyond our Cartesian and Kantian heritage? Ok, we want to secularize our philosophy, get rid of the residual religiosity in us. Or at least, that would SEEM to be the reason. Ultimately, Deleuze’s desire for a flat ontology is that he follows on Nietzsche’s desire for a non-otherwordly philosophy. And values. The push for a this worldly philosophy was originally supposed to be about ethics, right? I wonder, is that still why a flat ontology and lack of transcendence is important to us all?

I think Vitale somewhat misses the point of the example of the biologist protesting that OOO doesn’t discuss frogs in my last post. The point is not that frogs and people are of equal concerns to ethical thought. In fact, the point is not about ethics at all. The point is that there are distinct domains and levels of inquiry that have their own degree of specificity. This is why I situated the point about frogs in the context of a discussion of what ontology investigates.

Flat ontology is not a normative or ethical claim. When flat ontology places objects on equal footing the point is not that all beings are to be treated equally in the political or ethical sense, but rather that there is no one being that overdetermines all the rest. Flat ontology and flat ethics are two very different things. In fact, I’m not entirely sure a flat ethics can even exist. For me, the ethical implications of OOO are still unclear and there’s a massive amount of work to be done. Somewhere in Process and Reality (if someone can find the reference, please, please, please give me the page number!) Whitehead observes that all life lives from death. Insofar as living objects are “dissapative systems” that function “far from equilibrium”, they require inputs of energy from other sources to maintain a particular local manifestation. And this necessarily involves the death of other things.

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