There’s an interesting post over at Dailykos today on misconceptions about quantum mechanics, pseudo-science, and confusions about the role played by human activity in quantum phenomena. From the post:

This is the one quantum-mechanical property that’s relevant to this discussion, which is that in quantum mechanics, things can exist in several states at once. (called a superposition) Objects don’t have definite locations; rather they’re ’smeared out’ over space. The lighter they are, and the faster they move, the more ’smeared out’ they can be. (those who’ve read about QM before know I’m referring to the famous Uncertainty Principle)

But if a measurement is carried out on the object, it will have a certain value. Which is part of the ‘weirdness’. QM cannot predict what value will be measured, but it can predict the probability of all the possible measurement results. It can predict the average of a large number of measurements. For instance, the electron of a hydrogen atom is most likely to be 53 picometers away from the nucleus. But a single measurement could give any result from zero to infinity.

Heavier, bigger, things on the other hand, get less and less ’smeared out’, and you end up with the ‘classical’ situation, where things assume definite values for their location and speed and other things.

Chopra (and many, many others) misinterprets what ‘measurement’ means here, assuming that it has something to do with human activity, drawing not only the erroneous conclusion that human (or sentient) perception is what’s meant by ‘measurement’, but indeed that things don’t even exist if they’re not being ‘measured’. Stating: “In fact, everything you are looking at right now depends upon you to exist.”

This is a basic misconception which has been debunked repeatedly (no doubt several times a week on physics newsgroups and message boards). Quantum mechanical measurements have nothing to do with ‘measurement’ per se, and especially not with human activity. It’s also at the basis of the Schrödinger’s cat ‘paradox’, as well as many of the early confusion about quantum mechanics.

In short, it’s a process known as decoherence. It’s not fully understood yet (although a lot of progress has been made since the early days and early confusion of QM). Decoherence is the process whereby quantum systems go from a superposition of different states to a single, definite state, through interactions with their environment. It’s ‘locked’ into this state because there’s an increase in entropy (disorder) associated with that change, making it irreversible (2nd law). It’s not fully understood yet, but it certainly doesn’t resemble the Berkleyian idea Chopra seems to have adopted.

A number of these claims have been advanced in the realism/anti-realism debates, as well as some of the debates between object-oriented ontologists and other speculative realists, so the post is worth a read. The author’s understanding seems to support something like object-oriented ontology in my view.

Oh man, I’m a sucker for diagrams of any sort. Here’s a sample from Graham’s next book:

It’s extremely cruel to provide a sample of an alluring and enigmatic diagram without providing a commentary on what it does or how it works.

UPDATE: Harman provides a brief commentary on how he’s thinking about his diagrams here. I’ll have to think through this more, but my initial impression is that this is really exciting stuff. I confess that his theory of vicarious causation and his analysis of the four-fold are the aspects of his ontology that have left me most scratching my head. Just the first of the ten diagrams and the brief gloss on it already shed a lot of light on the latter (for me anyway) and are highly suggestive with respect to the former. In the post Harman writes:

The danger with diagrammatic systems of this sort, when new, is that you’re always within a few inches of looking like a goof or a crank cooking up homebrewed philosophical systems in the basements and attics of the internet. What you have to do to avoid that impression is keep on reminding the reader of the absolutely compelling considerations that lead gradually to a model of this sort. It is the (for now) end result of many years of reflection, and I’m already becoming more comfortable playing with it and getting new results out of it.

Perhaps it’s just my Lacanian and Badouian ways, but I tend to think that formalization is a mark of the real. Lacan liked to say that it is only through formalization that we manage to grasp a bit of the real. I emphasize the “bit” because the Lacanian thesis, like the object-oriented thesis, is that we never entirely, completely, or transparently grasp the real.

This reference allows me to make a nice ontological self-reflexive point about Graham’s diagrams. One of Harman’s core claims is that objects withdraw from one another or never directly encounter one another. This is the Kantian moment in Harman’s ontology. Where Kant holds that we never have direct access to the thing-in-itself, emphasizing the relationship between mind and thing-in-itself, Harman generalizes this thesis to all relations between things, regardless of whether or not humans are involved. This is precisely why Harman’s ontology, despite being an ontological realism is also an epistemological anti-realism. In my own ontology, I refer to this general feature of things with the concept of “translation”. As Gadamer (and Quine) taught us, every translation is a transformation. When I re-situate something from a source-language into an object-language in the process of translating it, the object-language does not leave the original unchanged but produces something new. Finnegan’s Wake is not the same book in French that it is in English. This, incidentally, is the reason that we’ll always need new translations of great texts. Like Harman, I generalize this feature of translation as it pertains to language to all objects, viewing all interactions between objects as forms of translation where one thing transforms the differences it receives from another thing. I thus arrive at a very similar conclusion regarding the thing-in-itself. The grounds of the Kantian hypothesis about the inaccessibility of the in-itself are not to be located in epistemology, but are ontological features of any relations between things, regardless of whether minds are involved or not. The point then I’m trying to make about diagrams is that they are ways of “alluring” or evoking the real. They are mechanisms of, in my vernacular, translation that bring some bit of the real into relief or coax it out of its hiding.

One of the central theses of psychoanalysis is that the manner in which we interpret others says more about the structure of our own desire than the desire of the other person we’re interpreting. I am not sure one even has to be an advocate of psychoanalytic theory to endorse this thesis. Given that we don’t have access to the minds of other people our attributions of motives to others must proceed by analogy to ourselves, such that we attribute motives to others based on what motivates us. It is with this thesis in mind that I’ve found myself amused by a certain claim that has been floating about the blogosphere lately. Here the thesis is that I and a few others are forming relationships with other academics such as Harman simply for the sake of promoting our own academic careers. In other words, the suggestion is that I do not blog as much as I do for the reason that I’m genuinely engaged with the things I blog about, nor because I genuinely appreciate the philosophical positions of folks like Harman, but because somehow these relationships will advance my academic career.

This is a truly peculiar and baffling thesis. First a little reality check. I am a Continentalist. If there is one thing Continentalists almost viscerally despise, it is any form of realism. Whenever the signifier “realism” is evoked, one of the first charges you hear is “naive positivism!” or “reductivism!” If one is truly looking to land a plum position in a Continental philosophy department, hanging your hat on the peg of “speculative realism” is hardly a wise strategy for doing so. Similarly, it would be no exaggeration to say that Continental philosophy departments are dominated by Heideggerians and phenomenologists. Harman’s work, as admirable as it is, has generated a tremendous amount of hostility from Heideggerians and phenomenologists as a sort of sacrilege. Working on the premise that job committees in Continental departments are very likely to have at least one scholar representing this movement, one is certainly not doing themselves any favors by siding with object-oriented ontology. Additionally, Latour’s work is often looked down upon in philosophy departments as either a relativistic postmodernism as depicted by Sokal, or as that of a second string French thinker trailing far behind big daddies like Derrida and Deleuze. One certainly isn’t doing oneself any favors by taking Latour seriously.

Second, the way to advance yourself in your career is to publish in the most prestigious journals and with the most prestigious presses. You don’t exactly do yourself any favors publishing in obscure journals that aren’t recognized as the primo journals in your field, nor do you do yourself many favors by publishing with currently unknown presses as I will soon be doing with The Democracy of Objects. Moreover, for the non-established academic the simple fact of blogging, I think, can be a black mark against you. On the one hand, blogging remains suspect for many old school academics. This is especially true in philosophy where attitudes tend to be somewhat provincial and luddite in character. In addition to this, blogging leaves a long trail of comments where your less than stellar moments, your poorly thought out ideas, your weird ticks and passions, etc., are there for everyone to see.

No, if anything, hanging one’s hat on the peg of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology looks more like an act of career masochism than a way of advancing your career. I am not holding my breath for DePaul, Villanova, Penn State, Memphis, etc., to come knocking on my door. If I do these things things then this is because I am passionate about philosophy and ideas and believe there is genuine merit and importance in these positions. What is intriguing is an interpretive frame that suggests that advancing one’s career is the most likely and most plausible motivation for writing a good deal or interacting with other thinkers. This is especially absurd when said writing is on a blog rather than in publications in prestigious peer reviewed journals that count on your CV. Such an interpretation seems to say more about one’s own relationship to philosophy and writing than the motivations of others. I also find myself surprised that folks who were patronizingly and insultingly criticizing others for “beating up” on a “poor defenseless grad student” are suddenly beating up on a grad student who has taken the initiative to start an academic journal. Then again, these things never make sense.

I’m very pleased to announce that Paul Ennis has founded a new open access peer reviewed journal devoted to object-oriented ontology. From Another Heidegger Blog:

EDIT: Thanks to the Open Humanities Alliance ‘Speculations’ has moved from an idea to a fully operational online peer-reviewed open-access blog. This means we can move toward stage 2: submissions.

Looks like we’ll have an OOO journal (online and open access) in the coming months.
I think I’ve managed to wrangle some submissions from Ian, Levi and Graham. Now if you don’t want this to be some kind of OOO love-in you best get writing those critical responses to OOO. If you do e-mail and let me know. I’ll be mailing most of this blog’s readers anyway hassling them for submissions. You might as well just give in and send me a possible paper.

Provisional title: ‘Speculations’
(I’m stressing the word provisional here…)

Okay, I have to admit that my buddy Peter over at Philosophy in a time of Error has irritated the hell out of me with his last two substantial posts responding to me (the post on Derrida and tonight’s post responding to my remarks on the principle of parity). I suppose this is a good thing as it motivates me to expand on my remarks, but damn it, I’m still irritated (no doubt because I’m still up at 2:30 marking papers!). Anyway, in response to my post on parity Peter writes (quoting in full; hopefully he won’t mind):

Anodyne Lite writes:

For example, strict social constructionists and anti-realist humanists accuse realists of valorizing science and cry “No Master Narratives!” when findings from science are invoked to support a viewpoint, while they themselves then go on to posit some other, alternative narrative that gets valorized and does all the heavy lifting in their epistemology (be it politics, the social, the “human”, language, etc.)

This is said by Larval Subjects to represent the fallacy of “special pleading” (I suppose with the cry, it’s somewhat literal). LS then cites Latour, and that’s all well and good. But I—-blame me!—-haven’t even heard the words “master” and “narrative” since I put together a panel six years ago on 25th anniversary of Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition—-a book that Lyotard in retrospect didn’t like because of the effect it had—-and before that, I can’t even remember. I raise this because working on certain figures, you get to see this sort of reaction too often, and I don’t want to see this go into the next decade.

read on!

Who, pray tell, is crying this? I smell hay from the straw man here, little more. And while I’m at it, I might as well say that this is not all it takes to knock over Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard and similarly lumped people. For example, it’s easy enough to find someone who wrote something rather silly and then somehow say it’s the influence of one of these three. Analytics have done this for some time. (Recent attacks on Arendt because of Heidegger have a similar wiff.) But just to take the first and most supposedly “social constructivist” of these three: First, in Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault spends some time going through the problems of “social construction” and suggests its something akin to a childish fantasy. I’m not going to reproduce his argument here, but if you’re going to suggest that social constructivism is bad, then fine. But if this is meant to hit others who never argued for such a thing, then that’s another. Foucault, for example, doesn’t argue against science, even when he’s talking about power/knowledge. What is he saying? Well, that science is not neutral, that its produced within a given field of power, and that what it seeks out is not somehow just in some rarified field outside societal power. That’s hardly controversial: it’s saying that if one looks at the history of psychology, one sees the importation of societal power structures, and then one sees those exported back to the society at large, with certain effects (the circuit of this, obviously, is more complicated in Foucault…). Does anyone deny this? Maybe the intricacies of Foucault’s account, but simply this? Does anyone deny, for example, that what interests scientists is part of what gets funding, what interests the society at large, and thus changes over a given time? Does anyone deny this, namely that’s there’s a relation between the two? Science funding obviously shapes what science finds and, for example, it’s obvious that the people in the Middles Ages did not invent the telescope because they were morons, but because the need and desire for such a thing never occurred.

And, frankly, I think given the history of which we are all aware, perhaps some pause should be taken before founding concepts on scientific research: political, sociological, and otherwise. As for onticology, the point is to find a way through the thicket of the social, the linguistic, etc., to speak to the “black box” of the real, taking account of the results of science, without thinking that pointing out what comes up frequently in phil of science discussions is somehow the result of painfully obtuse, whining “social constructivists.”

Besides, what is done in SR I take it is not performing a “grand narrative,” which would erase all the differences in terms of an ontotheology. That’s what I like about LS’s work.

I’ll set aside the unfair jab at Anodyne Lite as I take it she was evoking an example to illustrate a general principle or point, not making a diagnosis of the state of contemporary continental theory. In the remainder of his post I think Peter basically misses the point. If Foucault was giving the rather moderate (and obvious!) version of science Peter is talking about here, I’d have no objection. I suppose I’m left to wonder where in Foucault the other side speaks. For example, where in Foucault do we hear of genetics, biology, neurology, neurochemistry, etc., contributing something to these social organizations in a way that complicates power and discourse? Where is this made a central focus of his analyses? Can someone refer me to these passages? Can someone refer me to those passages where nonhuman objects are genuine actors and contributors and not simply props or vehicles for power and discourse? Having read a great deal of Foucault– and admiring him deeply –I can’t say I’ve come across these passages.

The case is similar with Lacan, my major point of reference. Having read the 28 years of his seminars as well as the Ecrits and assorted other articles, not to mention more of the secondary lit on his thought– clinical and theory-camp –than I care to remember, I can’t say where entities outside the symbolic such as bodies, genes, neurons, stars, etc., play a role in his thought? Can you imagine, for example, Foucault or Lacan talking about the importance of the amygdala as something more than an effect of power or discourse?

Now hopefully my readers won’t get me wrong. My point isn’t that brain neurons, the amygdala, and genes are real whereas power and discourse aren’t. My point is rather more subtle than that, I hope. My point is that in our privileged field of theories these things aren’t treated as genuine actors in their own right, but are reduced to mere vehicles for power and discourse.

The point of onticology and object-oriented philosophy more broadly is to develop a more sophisticated constructivism. Towards the beginning of Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern he asks something like “is it our [the actor-network-theorists] fault that the networks we study are simultaneously real or natural, narrated, and have stakes with respect to power?” The “simultaneously” is the key word here. The question any theory should ask itself is “is my theory capable of thinking the “simultaneously” without reducing any one of these domains to the other?” That, I believe, is the measure. What we need, in my view, is a form of thought that is able to take that “simultaneously” seriously.

For example, can your theory simultaneously approach the H1N1 virus as a physical biological entity, a semiotic text to be deconstructed, a stake in all sorts of fields of biopower and whatever other form of power you might like, a node in a network of technology, and a player in economic and political relations? If not, I believe there is something wrong with your theory. Note, I said something wrong, not that the theory should be abandoned.

Whitehead famously said that the failings of a philosophy do not generally lie in bad arguments or in making claims that are outrightly false, but in overstatement. One of the most important lessons I ever learned was from the mathematician Spencer-Brown, who attempted to show how arithmetic arises from a particular activity of drawing distinctions. The first proposition of Spencer-Brown’s Law of Forms is an imperative: “First draw a distinction!” Spencer-Brown’s thesis is that our ability to indicate something in the world is first dependent on the drawing of a distinction that bifurcates the world into what is excluded and what is included. Spencer-Brown’s “cross” or mark of distinction, depicted to the left above, distinguishes a this (what falls under the mark) from everything else.

Now the key here is that the distinction that functions as the “condition of possibility” for indication is self-referential. It precedes the indication of something in the world, it is what allows something to be indicated in the world, but it disappears in the act of indicating something in the world. We can say that the distinction qua distinction is the blind spot at work in any claim about the world or indication of something in the world. So here’s the point. When I make power the object of my investigation, I am implicitly first drawing a distinct that allows me to indicate the effects of power. When I make the semiotic the object of my investigation, I am first drawing a distinction that allows me to indicate the semiotic. When I make the social an object of my investigation… Well you get the idea. The problem is not with indicating power, the semiotic, or the social. No. The problem is with forgetting that this is based on a distinction and that the world is always more complex than the distinctions we draw.

Object-oriented ontology, I believe, tries to think this multiplicity or network of actors without reducing one to the other. It takes seriously the biological status of the H1N1 virus, that it is a physical entity, that it can make people sick, that it can kill people. It also takes seriously signifiers, power, economics, and so on. It wants to trace these networks in what Ian Bogost has so nicely referred to as an “alien phenomenology” or a phenomenology that is not restricted to the centrality of the human and obsessed with the human-world gap. In reading Peter’s recent posts I get the sense that he believes I’m somehow dismissing thinkers like Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, and etc. But that’s not the point or the aim at all. In my view, there’s something worth preserving in all these thinkers. They just need to be rescued from overstatement and reminded of the distinctions they make to open their field of inquiry. I invite Peter to think of my position on the model of weaving. Yes, literally, weaving. When I criticize something in Lacan this is akin to say “this thread alone is not sufficient, how is it woven with these other threads.” The point isn’t to reject the thread but to think its relationship with these other threads.

Tomorrow our college will be hosting noted neuropsychologist Jonah Lehrer for a series of round-tables in which I will be participating. Lehrer has a number of interesting things to say, especially about the neurological and biological dimensions of our moral reasoning. Tomorrow, when I speak to Lehrer, I will be critiquing him on the grounds of parity as well, not because he’s mistaken about the amygdala and the role it plays in our moral decision making, but because he fails to recognize the dimension that the signifier, power, social relations, etc., play in giving form to the responses of that amygdala. When Peter reads me he should take seriously this notion of parity or the “=” sign and its reversibility. He seems to think I’m rejecting things when instead I’m trying to think the intersection of three circles like a Venn diagram such that we’re forced to modify the claims of each circle while retaining elements of each in a beautiful plaited braid that finally puts its money where its mouth is in thinking difference or how differences are contributed.

I wanted to draw attention to a fallacy that Anodyne Lite mentions in relation to one of my recent posts on epistemology and realism. The “special pleading fallacy” roughly consists in submitting something else to a particular form of critique without applying what I call the “principle of parity” or the “principle of reversibility” to one’s own theoretical concepts. As defined by Merriam-Webster’s:

Main Entry: 1par·i·ty
Pronunciation: \ˈper-ə-tē, ˈpa-rə-\
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural par·i·ties
Etymology: Latin paritas, from par equal
Date: 1608

1 : the quality or state of being equal or equivalent
2 a : equivalence of a commodity price expressed in one currency to its price expressed in another b : equality of purchasing power established by law between different kinds of money at a given ratio
3 : an equivalence between farmers’ current purchasing power and their purchasing power at a selected base period maintained by government support of agricultural commodity prices
4 a : the property of an integer with respect to being odd or even b (1) : the state of being odd or even used as the basis of a method of detecting errors in binary-coded data (2) : parity bit
5 : the property of oddness or evenness of a quantum mechanical function
6 : the symmetry of behavior in an interaction of a physical entity (as a subatomic particle) with that of its mirror image

Here, of course, the principle of parity refers to the first sense of the term, referring to the equality of critical procedures or the manner in which a critical procedure or strategy of critique should be applied to the position itself.

read on!

I take it that Anodyne is getting at something like the principle of parity with respect to the special pleading fallacy. As Anodyne so nicely describes it:

…the “special pleading” fallacy… is a lesser known fallacy wherein one category/thing/object is allowed to operate without having the same rules applied to it that are being applied to every other category/thing/object in question. For example, strict social constructionists and anti-realist humanists accuse realists of valorizing science and cry “No Master Narratives!” when findings from science are invoked to support a viewpoint, while they themselves then go on to posit some other, alternative narrative that gets valorized and does all the heavy lifting in their epistemology (be it politics, the social, the “human”, language, etc.)

I would say that one of the great masters of diagnosing the special pleading fallacy at work is Latour. A good deal of his critique of sociology consists in showing how standard social-constructivist sociology fails to practice critical parity with respect to its own concepts. Thus, for example, in We Have Never Been Modern Latour applauds the sociologists Schaffir and Shapin for applying social critique to the experimental science of Boyle, revealing the manner in which Boyle’s experiments are bound up with extra-experimental issues such as politics and how he invents a new form of “rhetoric” (nonhuman objects that speak before an audience of “respected gentlemen”). What Schaffir and Shapin so nicely show is the manner in which the vacuum pump had to proliferate itself throughout Europe through a sort of epidemiology, being repeated again and again, built again and again, as a sort of cocktail party trick that gradually overturned the ether theory of space in favor of the vacuum theory of space. Facts aren’t just there when the experimental setting discloses them once, but have to replicate themselves throughout a community of “respected gentlemen” that attest to them and gradually endorse them. However, Latour then goes on to criticize Schaffer and Shapin for siding with Hobbes’ model of social force as defining the essence of human-world relations.

The problem here is that concepts like force, power, language, signs, the social, and minds are not themselves subjected to constructivist critique. Here it’s important to be careful with the term “constructivism” as philosophers like Latour and Stengers deploy it. Their constructivism is not a social constructivism, but rather has more to do with the work and materials involved in building something. As I have argued elsewhere on this blog, Latour’s constructivism and “trials of strength” are closer to what goes into building a good bridge than what social theory and a good deal of structuralist and post-structuralist continental thought refers to as “social constructivism”.

The problem with thinkers like Schaffin and Shapin is that they bring all of their critical notions to bear on naive concepts of objects, naive epistemological realism, the impartiality or neutrality of the experimental setting, but concepts like force, language, signs, minds, power, and the social are not subjected to a similar critique. As a result, concepts like force, power, language, signs, minds, power, and the social become something akin to Molière’s famous virtus dormativa, giving the appearance of explaining something without explaining anything at all. You ask me “why does wine make me sleepy?” With great assurance and authority I respond “because of its virtus dormativa!” What have I really said? I’ve said wine makes you sleepy because of its sleepy making power.

The case is similar with gravity. Someone asks “why do things fall?” or “why do the planets revolve around the sun?” and Herr Professor responds with great assurance and authority “because of gravity!” It looks like we’ve been given an explanation because we’ve been given a new word, but really all we’ve been given is a synonym for “the power that makes things fall and the power that makes planets revolve around the sun.” We have not been given an explanation. And this, by the way, is why physicists are today looking for the elusive Higgs Particle. This form of explanation is what Hegel called “tautological ground”. Tautological ground has the appearance of explaining something when, in reality, merely rephrasing the thing to be explained in other terms. If, nonetheless, tautological ground is crucial to the dialectic of inquiry, then this is because it at least marks the place or site where an explanation is needed.

We are told that force, power, language, minds, and the social are able to do these marvelous things, without being told how they are able to do these things. As such, force, power, language, minds, and the social are instances of a virtus dormativa. Our critical resources are not turned towards these entities, explaining how they are able to overdetermine everything else. But here’s the kicker, when our critical resources are turned towards these concepts we very quickly discover that these entities, as employed in social thought, are very much occult. Just as we discover that the sovereign has no intrinsic special power (virtus dormativa) that gives him his power over his subjects, but constantly has to negotiate, monitor, and maintain alliances with all sorts of other actors to maintain his power, just as we discover that the sovereign is tremendously weak and vulnerable in being beholden to his subjects for his power, so too do we discover that these occult entities have to negotiate all sorts of other actors in the world, human and nonhuman, to effectuate themselves in these ways. What these social constructivist theories fail to explain is how power is built, how signs proliferate, how language spreads, and how force acts. In recognizing this a number of theoretical problems disappear like the fog of an upsetting nightmare or an early morning mist that hadn’t caused the world to disappear after all. The measure of any critique is whether or not it reflexively applies its own critique to itself and despite all the talk of reflexivity in high theory I don’t see that this has been a very common practice.

I’ve received a number of emails asking me why I deleted this post and asking that I re-post it. I guess my thoughts on the matter were that “meta” discussions of how people communicate with one another, how they should communicate with one another, norms of civility, and trolls, gray vampires, and minotaurs have the paradoxical effect of generating more conflict, not less. Luhmann makes this point in his later sociological work, observing that when social discourses turn to discussions of norms conflicts in social systems tend to quickly ensue. However, since others have asked for the post, I here re-post it without further ado.

Riffing on Graham’s remarks about critique in the ordinary language sense of the term, I will say that I have become especially critical of those who participate online without revealing their true name or identity to the public. The standard argument is that a person’s true name and identity shouldn’t matter and we should just focus on the content of arguments and positions. I don’t see it this way at all. The person who does not make their identity public risks nothing through their engagement with others. They can be the biggest asshole in the world, spout the most ridiculous absurdities, engage in the most trollish, vampirish, or minotaurish behaviors without having to suffer any real world consequences for how they’ve participated or engaged with others. This isn’t true for the rest of us who have either a) left enough clues for anyone enterprising enough to discover who we are, or b) who participate with full disclosure of who we are. In these cases our engagement online can significantly impact our careers and future career opportunities. We have to live with the “paper trail” that our interactions produce and which we cannot erase or control. We can have others post our name whenever they might like, thereby drawing Google their way or have to deal with what we write. At the very least, as a condition for critique in the ordinary language sense of the term it should be conditional that the person leveling the critique themselves risk something and be accountable for their critique with respect to their own genuine philosophical engagement. The person being criticized should be able to say x (not the screen name, but the person’s true proper name) argued y and y should be tied to that person. Absent this, I’m not really sure how any discussion is really possible.

On these grounds, I’ve reached the point of simply ignoring comments from assholes, trolls, grey vampires, and minotaurs who do not publicly reveal their identity. As I see it, if they’re not making a real existential risk with their public engagement then there’s no reason for me to allow my blog to be a platform for their remarks. Why? I’m the one taking all the risk and they lose nothing. They are not avowing their position or dealing with the consequences of their utterances. Because they have not entered into discussion publicly and in good faith, they have nothing to lose but I have a lot to lose by entertaining such folks and interacting with them. No doubt I’ll be accused of hypocrisy here as there was a time where I carefully strove to hide my identity. However, even then I made enough comments about my book, conferences I was participating in, and articles I was publishing for any enterprising person doing a search on me to discover who I am. And indeed others did post my name, link to me with my name, and so on such that in certain instances I asked them to delete it.

read on!

As I see it there are one of two possibilities with anonymous bloggers: either a) they make a respectful and productive contribution to discussion while remaining anonymous, or b) they should immediately be excluded from blog discussion if they participate anonymously while behaving in boorish or assholish fashion because they risk nothing and are not genuinely copping to a position that commits them in future engagements. I also believe that other blogs should vigilantly exclude the participation of those who have participated elsewhere in this fashion for the same reason. The closest we have to anything like reputation and credibility here is how others have behaved in this medium. This is especially the case for those who participate anonymously. If a blogger has a history of behaving in this way they shouldn’t be given a platform on other blogs as they are undermining the norms of discourse through their actions. I simply see no other means for maintaining equity in blog discussions or engagements. Since, presumably, we all here advocate some version of equity as a norm of discourse, it follows that anonymous bloggers should be, in some form or another, accountable for their engagements. Isn’t this the core of a Kantian-style deontological argument?

In this connection, I have to give a number of the graduate students that participate online with full disclosure of who they are props for their courage. The academic rat race is already competitive enough– the only equivalents I can think of are the NFL draft or getting a good gig in Hollywood –without having an online “paper trail” following one about. The point here is not that we shouldn’t have a paper trail, but that we should be attentive to the sort of paper trail that we leave. The grad students that publicly reveal who they are really have spine because their engagement online will impact their subsequent career in the form of publishing opportunities, presentation opportunities, and project opportunities with the gatekeepers that happen to witness their meritorious or not so meritorious interactions online, as well as the word of mouth that gets around in the small world of academia when names come up. That behavior will either increase or diminish those job, publication, presentation, and project opportunities, and those decisions will be made through a combination of the merit of the work that folks produce online and offline (publications, presentations) even when being assholish, and the good or bad blood generated as a result of various interactions, their civility, their generosity, their respectfulness, and openness to fair discussion. Potential positions do Google you when you reach the final round for job interviews, and one of the key questions they do ask is whether this person is a colleague they would like to have for the rest of their lives. The academic world is much smaller than our general six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon (I’d say it’s three or four degrees of separation in these networks) and that’s worth remembering. In short, online engagements become a part of a person’s formal or informal CV insofar as potential positions do Google you.

Zizek somewhere argues that the net, far from making us sovereign creators of our own selves, instead hystericizes us, making us perpetually wonder who we are, what others want, and how others see us. In the full contact world of academic blogging I’m not so sure that this hystericization is such a bad thing professionally. What does really perplex me is those graduate students who do have something to lose that nonetheless congregate with the assholes that do not fully disclose who they are. These folks are allowing others to risk their careers and work when the others with whom they congregate are neither risking nor losing anything. It’s a rather odd dynamic. It’s a bit like participating at a KKK rally without wearing a hood. You get smeared with all the stigma of the KKK, damaged in all sorts of ways for participating in that behavior, while those wearing the hood lose nothing (unless their shoes can readily be seen). While clearly you should have never been participating in the KKK rally to begin with– you should have been smart enough to recognize why this behavior is obscene from the start –it’s particularly idiotic, should you choose to participate in that rally, to attend without a hood. And yes, I’m aware I violated Godwin’s law, but if the shoe fits…

Whenever the concept of memes comes up it seems that people get really incensed. I’m baffled by this reaction. What is it about this concept that gets folks so worked up? I certainly understand the point that meme theory is underdeveloped, but this is a call for theoretical elaboration and development, not outright rejection. I get the sense that memes get some worked up for one of two reasons. On the one hand, I sometimes sense that hostility to the concept of memes is really driven by disciplinary territory disputes. Here you have the upstarts like Dawkins and Dennett come along, spout the word “memes”, and suddenly everyone yahoo that knows nothing about social theory or the broad and deep discipline of semiotics gets all excited. I wonder whether there isn’t a little of resentment and envy at work here. On the other hand, I get the sense that some associate memes with socio- and psychobiology (more on this in a moment).

From the standpoint of object-oriented ontology, I find meme theory extremely attractive precisely because meme theory treats memes as real objects or actors in the world. Here, more specifically, are the reasons that I find memes attractive:

1) Far from falling into vulgar socio- and psychobiology, meme theory allows us to tell a far more complex story about human beings and behavior. The central thesis of meme theory is that at some point in human biological history a new type of replicator emerged in contrast to gene replicators. Genes are replicators in the sense that they are units of some sort that get copied or replicated through reproduction. Under Dawkin’s formulation, at least, the “aim” of genes is not the advantage of the organism, but to get themselves copied through reproduction. In this respect, genes construct vehicles (bodies, organisms) as strategies for getting themselves replicated.

Just as we do not act primarily for the welfare of our cars but use cars for our own aims, genes aren’t primarily “interested” in the welfare of bodies or organisms. This comes out with special clarity in the case of the preying mantis, but also my favorite animal, the octopus. In the case of the preying mantis, of course, the female devours the male preying mantis’s head after mating with him. In contributing half his genes the male has done his work. His sole value after mating consists in contributing nutrients to the impregnated preying mantis. Moreover, were the male to go his happy way after mating he might mate with other females, generating dangerous competitors to the offspring of his first mate. Cruel world. The case is similar with the octopus. After the female octopus is impregnated she finds a well protected cave or pipe and lays her eggs around the mouth of the cave opening. For the next few weeks after laying her eggs she never again leaves the cave, but rather spends all of her time jetting water over the egg sacks hanging from the cave opening and cleaning the eggs with her tentacles. Once the eggs hatch the female octopus is free to leave the cave, but at this point she is so weakened from lack of food (she hasn’t hunted during this whole time) and is very quickly, and somewhat ironically, devoured by the fish and crabs that she previously feasted upon. Once again, the genes of the female octopus were not acting on her behalf, but rather she was a vehicle or strategy for getting her genes replicated. When that replication is complete her job is done. Cruel world.

read on!

With the emergence of memes a new replicator enters the world, very different from genes. Memes or cultural ideas, symbols, and practices, are like genes in that they aim to get themselves replicated, however as unique replicators they do not act at the behest of genes. In other words, we now get what could be called a “conflict of the replicators”. Genes can struggle with memes. Memes can struggle with genes. Memes and genes can collaborate with one another. However, like all alliances, a collaboration of memes and genes is a temporary strategy to advance the replication of genes and the replication of the memes that can be dissolved when this relationship no longer advances one or the other. It is even feasible that memes, at some point, could dispense with genes altogether if they find new and more effective ways to replicate themselves, no longer requiring organic bodies like brains to be passed along. This, for example, is what is depicted in films like Terminator or The Matrix where the machines (and machines are memes) have been liberated from human bodies and strive to replicate themselves apart from humans.

The key point is that with memes new relationships to the world and biology emerge. Thus when a soldier dies in battle while storming the beach at Normandy, this soldier has died so that certain memes might be replicated, not for the sake of his genes. When someone practices abstinence before marriage, they are acting on behalf of memes, not genes. These new objects or actors, memes, fundamentally change how we relate to ourselves, our biology, and memes. Indeed, in a theorization worthy of Lacan or Freud, Dennett compares memes to foreign and alien entities that come to infest our brains, creating persons, where persons are what emerge as a sort of conflict between our biology or genes and these units of culture. It is not difficult to discern something akin to Lacan’s parasitic and alien signifiers that so transform our relation to our bodies and the world in this concept of memes.

The problem with so much socio- and psychobiology is that it is greedily reductive. Not only do these explanations all too often seek a biological explanation of every and any human behavior, but these sorts of explanations also often make an illicit move from the “is” to the “ought”, jumping from the observation that because our genes promote a certain behavior we ought to engage in that sort of behavior. The silliness of this argument can be discerned when we talk about things like poor eyesight. Does anyone dispute that because some people are near-sighted they ought not correct their vision through a memetic technology like eyeglasses, contacts, or corrective surgery? Because memes are autonomous replicators, they introduce all sorts of things into human behavior that cannot be reduced to biology or given a biological explanation. In short, the concept of memes curbs the worst excesses of socio- and psychobiology while nonetheless allowing us to think the intersection of biology and these units of cultural meaning without rejecting one or the other as so often happens in positions driven by the nature/culture divide (i.e., where we’re required to choose either nature or culture, rather than thinking the complex relations between these terms in a collective).

2. Memes, by adding the mechanism of natural selection to the mix, give us the means to think cultural evolution or the invention of new memes. For a number of years I was obsessed with semiotics and semiology, as well as structural linguistics. One thing I always had difficulty understanding– and it’s a tremendously important issue for me –is how change takes place in systems of signs or in structures of signifiers. I simply never encountered what I took to be a plausible account of why change takes place in culture or language. Meme theory provides a nice working hypothesis for the genesis of change by introducing the concept of natural selection. It’s worth remembering that natural selection is a relational concept involving a relation between random variations, units, heredity, and an environment. You need these four elements for the algorithms of natural selection to get off the ground. Thus, for example, random variation produces certain differences. Some of these differences are advantageous and enhance the possibilities of surviving long enough to get reproduced, while others are not. The advantage is determined by a relation to an environment. Thus, having white hair is an advantage for a bear in an arctic environment with lots of snow, but probably isn’t much of an advantage in a Brazilian rain forest. It is less likely that the gene for white hair would be passed on in the rain forest because prey would more easily see the bear, would be more likely to run away, the bear would thus get less food and would therefore be less healthy and likely to mate. Just the reverse in an arctic environment. The point is that what counts as an advantageous difference is relational or a function of the relation between the organism and its environment.

The problem with structuralist linguistics, for example, is that it brackets anything outside of language when analyzing language and therefore is denied any sort of mechanism that could explain either 1) where random variations in language come from, and 2) how different variations are selected for. Meme theory does not have this problem. Recall that for memes, like genes, the “aim” is not the welfare of the person using or thinking the meme, but rather the replication of itself. Some memes are downright detrimental to us, but get replicated nonetheless for whatever reason. Other memes are irritating and don’t really have any use, but are very good at getting replicated. Here I think of Bobby McFerrin’s song Don’t Worry, Be Happy:

Back when this song was first released I remember that my first reaction was a sense of euphoric pleasure that was then accompanied by a sort of horror or profound irritation. Why? Despite being “catchy” (note the word “catchy”), once you heard the song a couple of times you just couldn’t get the damned thing out of your head. You were infected with it and found it running through your mind over and over again, trapping you in its grip. McFerrin’s song was an exceptionally good replicator, highly adept at getting itself copied and passed on. But why?

There are more or less four relevant environments that play a role in the selective processes of memes. First, so far, of course, the primary environment of memes is the brain. To date, the successful reproduction of a meme requires that the meme be consistent with the “architecture” of the brain. If certain memes are particularly “catchy”, then this is because they have evolved in such a way that they are congenial to the structure of the brain. Something about the rhythm of McFerrin’s song stimulates pleasure and memory aspects of the brain. Beer brands and cars often use sex to sell their product, stimulating the hypothalamus and whatnot. Nationalism is a pernicious meme that uses narcissism, resentment, and our desire for superiority to get itself replicated. My three year old daughter has entire Dr. Seuss stories like Green Eggs and Ham memorized. No doubt the reason these memes or stories have lodged themselves so deeply in her mind has to do with their rhythmic, poetic quality and their plot structure. It is easier to remember something with a rhythm than a complex geometrical proof, and it is easier to remember something with a plot and characters than all the details of Husserl’s Logical Investigation. In this respect, we can think of memes as strategies for seducing brains. Some memes get themselves replicated by being useful for the organisms that host them. Others get themselves replicated by playing on the architecture of our brains in rhythmic and imagistic terms. Yet others get themselves replicated by playing on our worst characteristics such as envy, hatred, narcissism, and so on.

Notice that the principle of parity or reversibility works here as well. It is not simply that memes must adapt to the brain as an environment, but it is highly likely that in the 200,000 years or so that homo sapiens have been around our biology has, in fact, been modified as a result of memes. Insofar as memes are selective pressures in the environment of genes, it is likely that some genes are better fitted to life with memes than others. Here a word about “adaptation” is in order. When Van Haute, in his study of Lacan’s “Subversion of the Subject” and 5th and 6th seminar entitles his book Against Adaptation, he seems to be working on the premise that adaptation means “well fitted to an environment”. This ignores the fact that 1) environments are ever shifting, and 2) that organisms are strategies (wagers) for navigating a particular environment premised on the stability of how time is structured. The point here is that no organism is entirely fitted to its environment and that every relationship between an organism and its environment is fraught. This is especially the case with the relationship between genes and memes. This relationship is hardly peaceful or congenial, is riven by conflict and competition, and is always an uneasy alliance. In emphasizing that memes are autonomous replicators in their own right, in undermining the socio- and psychobiological thesis that everything we do is at the behest of our genes or biology, meme theory sheds light on this fraught relationship in a way, I believe, that any Lacanian can wholeheartedly endorse. It really doesn’t take much work to port Lacanian psychoanalysis into meme theory or meme theory into Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Brains also play a significant role in the random variations undergone by memes. Where genes tend to more or less maintain their structure across time, brains have the curious ability to combine memes in a sort of alchemy or chemism that produces changes very quickly. Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake or Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland combines units of language in all sorts of surprising ways that create entirely new terms or memes. Upon encountering spray perfume bottles the inventor of the fuel injected engine gets the bright idea of using a mechanism similar to the perfume spray bottle to spray gasoline in a controlled manner, and so on. Consequently, like the game of telephone, the meme undergoes greater or lesser variations with each exchange.

But brains alone are not the sole environment of memes. Technology, which is itself a meme, plays a crucial role in which memes have an advantage and which memes do not. It is difficult, for example, for memes like physics, chemistry, philosophy, high order mathematics, and so on to get a foothold in a culture that lacks writing. Here we get at what McLuhan might have had in mind when he declared that “the medium is the message”. The medium– in this case the technology through which memes are transmitted –plays an important role in what memes have a real chance of getting passed on and what memes have a highly diminished chance of getting passed on. It is very difficult to keep a dialogue like Plato’s Sophist or a series of lectures like Aristotle’s Metaphysics in ones mind, but not at all daunting to memorize all of the Illiad. For most of us the idea of memorizing all the details of Euclid’s Elements or Newton’s Principia is unthinkable. Consequently, the technology by which memes are transmitted is not simply a passive tool or vehicle but actually changes selection pressures on memes or units of culture meaning. Not only can technologies intensify the rate at which memes are transmitted in the case of having good highways allowing people to travel and therefore exchange memes or in the case of the internet, but the medium itself contributes to the sorts of memes that are possible or not possible. For example, contemporary computers are today rendering forms of mathematics possible that were unthinkable prior to the advent of the computer.

Third, the natural environment is also a selective mechanism. Thus if a group of people live in an extremely remote area of the world such as Southwest Alaska, it is likely that “memetic drift” or change will be very slow. In a large city with lots of ports, memetic drift is highly accelerated.

Finally fourth, just as organisms are selective pressures for other organisms, other memes are selective pressures for new memes. Memes belong to the environment of other memes. Thus memes can form vast symbiotic webs of interdependency like natural ecosystems where memes rely on one another in systems or networks to persist. This is the case with interdependencies of various technologies, or the manner in which our current world is largely structured by the dynamics of capital which reaches into every aspect of our lives, structuring it in a variety of highly durable ways. Similarly, the memes of one semiotic ecosystem or semiosphere can create a highly inhospitable place for other memes just as the Brazilian rain forest isn’t particularly hospitable for the polar bear. This would be the case with the memes for socialism in the United States. And indeed, among the various symbiots that inhabit the semiosphere, there are all sorts of forms of “meme warfare” where certain networks of memes strive to neutralize other networks of memes.

3. Meme theory renders memes “geographical”. In its emphasis on replication, copying, or iteration meme theory draws attention to the epidemiology of memes through a population of brains. Just as you can’t run Word for Windows on your Atari, people need to be hosts for memes in order to have certain ideas, engage in certain practices, and so on. Let us call the error of ignoring memetic epidemiology “The Bush Administration Fallacy”. The Bush administration had the idea that everyone innately and naturally has certain ideas and that it is sufficient simply to remove certain obstacles to actualize these ideas in a population. But like the Atari that can’t run Word for Windows, it is very difficult for populations of people to enact certain practices if they don’t have certain memes.

Generally when we think of meaning we think of it as something that doesn’t have a geography or that isn’t located in time and space. No doubt this error emerges as a result of certain confusions surrounding the iterability of memes giving the illusion that memes aren’t localized in space and time. But insofar as memes must spread, insofar as they must be copied, memes have a geography or a geographical distribution which is, in principle, mappable. Indeed, this is part of what the ethnographer does implicitly when she does field work, investigating the unique practices, technologies, laws, morals, cosmologies, economies, etc., of a particular group of people.

By de-emphasizing– but by no means dismissing or ignoring –the content of memes and drawing attention to the geographical distribution of memes, memetic theory suggests an ethics of repetition. You might think that you have no new ideas, that you are simply repeating what others are saying, and perhaps you are. But in refusing to repeat because you have nothing new to say you are forgetting the dimension of epidemiology or the spread of memes throughout a population. While you might have nothing new to say you can nonetheless play a role in the spread of ideas and practices worth fighting for and sharing. Moreover, as I have already suggested, memes have a strange alchemy that leads them to combine in surprising ways with other memes when they enter your brain and the brains of other people. So repeat a little. Value repetition a bit more. Transmit.

Over at Object-Oriented Philosophy Harman has an interesting post up critiquing critique. As Harman writes:

A more general thought… It continues to surprise me that some people really think that merely negating someone else’s position is a productive way to hold discussions.

Imagine the following scenario: you’re reading a book, and you find something that you think is wrong. You feel moved to write to the author about it. How do you go about this?

Option A would be to write to them and say: “You’re completely wrong. I disagree.” (And by the way, I do get letters like this, as do many authors.) But where the hell does the discussion go from there? What are you going to say back to them? “No, I’m right.”

Now, we all do read things from time to time that are just utterly false, and that need to be called out. (Such as Klausmeyer’s comment, or Carlin Romano’s true hatchet job on Heidegger in a recent issue of the Chronicle.) But barring those sorts of situations, which are relatively rare, if you’re moved to engage in some sort of critical exchange with a person, it’s probably because you find something of value in their position.

Quite right. Somewhere or other Deleuze talks about how he felt absolutely compelled to flee conversation and I think it was precisely for the sorts of reasons Harman here outlines. Generally “critique” in the sense that Harman is using it places all positions on a flat plane as if they are equivalent or dealing with the same problems and then proceeds to adopt a position and criticize the other position from that standpoint. The problem with this approach to “philosophy” (this model of critique isn’t really philosophical at all), is that it fails to first understand the position which it is critiquing.

However, while I here agree with Harman’s critique of critique, I do feel compelled to flag the point that the term “critique” is used in a variety of senses in philosophy. Harman, of course, is aware of this, yet I nonetheless feel it is important to clarify this point as I think there’s a lot of confusion as to what, precisely, is being rejected when some in the SR camp reject the model of critique in philosophy.

read on!

While the ordinary language connotation of the term “critique” means pointing out the logical, factual, or aesthetic flaws of a particular claim, position, or artistic object, in philosophy, from the late 18th century on, the term “critique” and “being critical” takes on a very different meaning. It was Kant, of course, that invented this newfangled notion of “critique”, though I would argue that it is already there, clearly discernible, in Hume (especially in his Enquiry). There “critique” does not so much signify pointing out flaws in a position as investigating the conditions under which particular structures of experience or cognition are possible. Kant’s (or Hume’s) whizbang contribution to philosophy– and I believe it is an enduring contribution –was to argue that philosophy should not investigate objects but our cognition of objects. When Kant speaks of “conditions of possibility” what he is really getting at is what our minds or cognition contribute to our structuration of experience.

Now what is really crucial in Kant’s proposal is not so much his emphasis on cognition or mind (this is merely a content), but rather the form of his argument. In my view, an argument is “critical” (in the Kantian sense) if it investigates the relationship and structure under which a particular form of experience is possible. Thus, for example, Marx’s historical materialism is a critical approach to the world not because it points out flaws in arguments, factual errors, or aesthetic shortcomings, nor because it investigates the mode by which we cognize objects (as in the case of Kant or Hume), but because it investigates the manner in which forms of production are the condition for the possibility of certain normative systems, legal systems, governmental or political systems, and ideologies (incidentally, this is one reason why I find it bizarre to see certain intellectuals who would like to call themselves Marxists focusing on normativity as an a priori). Similarly, if Levi-Strauss is a “critical” philosopher, this is because he shows how certain ethnographic phenomena are dependent upon certain structures of thought and language (the famous structures). If Derrida is a critical philosopher, then this is not because he shows how “the conditions of possibility are also the conditions of impossibility” (though he shows this too), but more fundamentally because he shows how “things” like differance, arche-writing, trace, etc., are conditions for manifestation or phenomenality or texts. Foucault is a critical philosopher because he shows how power and discourse are conditions for the regimes of the visible and articulable within a punctualized historical framework. And, of course, the phenomenologists are critical philosophers as they show how a particular phenomena is dependent on a constitution and giving through intuition (though contemporary phenomenology has moved far beyond these beginnings).

If I believe it is so important to emphasize this signification of the concept of “critique” then this is because all sorts of confusion is caused when we conflate the ordinary language meaning of critique and the precise philosophical concept of critique. When, for example, one reads a philosopher rejecting critique this risks being interpreted or understood as the call to reject the analysis of arguments, the accuracy of factual claims, and so on. Why someone would be led to this conclusion I’m not sure, as it’s a rather absurd or bizarre interpretation of what a philosopher is calling for when they reject the model of critique, but I often get the sense that this is what others think when they hear the term critique. If such an interpretation of such calls is uncharitable, then this is because what philosopher would seriously defend the practice of making false claims or bad arguments?

No, a call to reject the model of critique is instead a call to reject the form of the Kantian argument whereby philosophy is to investigate the relationship between a subject and an object, our mode of cognition of objects, as if our access to objects were exhaustive of what objects are. Here the argument would be that this mode of philosophizing conflates two distinct questions: the question of our access to objects and the question of what objects are. There are all sorts of problems with this conflation– and I’ll outline a number of them in The Democracy of Objects –but in the meantime I cannot recommend highly enough Roy Bhaskar’s A Realist Philosophy of Science which, in many respects, is a foundational text for speculative realist ontology. If the anti-realists are really serious about their positions, if they’re really serious about being “critical” in the ordinary language sense of the term, then they’ll take the time to actually read through Bhaskar’s arguments and work through them. In the absence of such a challenging encounter, I cannot but feel that the so called “critical philosophers” (in the precise philosophical sense of the term) are simply repeating a dogma (in the worst possible sense of the term) of the last 300 years of philosophy, rather than really advancing a critical argument.

I find myself in a rather peculiar position with respect to the concept of critique. On the one hand, I reject the model of critique that treats the social, economics, minds, language, power, etc., as the condition of objects. All of these arguments, I believe, confuse the means by which we gain access to objects with what objects are. In my usual unfair argument– but when have the anti-realists ever been fair to the realists? or as a commentator here put it, what realist has ever truly advocated the naive epistemology the anti-realists attribute to them? –it’s as if somehow, for the anti-realists, leaning against a tree (a relation) makes a tree what it is. People seem to think that because a lot of things about atoms were discovered as a result of the infamous Manhattan project that somehow these political dimensions make these truths about atoms what they are. I suspect the citizens of Hiroshima beg to differ where this sort of social constructivism is concerned. Nonetheless, I still find myself advocating a critical or transcendental position in that my view is that objects– and I genuinely mean mind-independent objects not mere constructions or models –are the only way we can render our debates about texts, political institutions, economics, scientific paradigms, linguistics, etc., intelligible. In other words, mind-independent objects that act and do things regardless of whether any human is about to know them, or experience them are, I believe, the condition under which all of these inquiries are possible. If this were not the case, why bother listening to our friends, lovers, and enemies, why bother doing lab work, why bother doing case studies, why bother with ethnographic forays?

The time has come for my posts here to become far less frequent. I really need to get cracking on The Democracy of Objects: An Essay in Object-Oriented Ontology and believe that the major contours of my position are outlined and ready to be worked through in written detail. At present this is what the general structure of the book, chapter by chapter, looks like. It will, of course, change as I work through it in more detail. So without further ado:

The Democracy of Objects: An Essay in Object-Oriented Ontology

Projected Table of Contents

1. Introduction– What is the relation between relations and relata? The relation between relations and relata as a key problem in contemporary epistemology and ontology as a result of the anti-realist turn which argues that philosophy should interrogate our mode of cognition of objects rather than objects themselves (i.e., our relation to objects); The problem with relational conceptions of being; realism as a four letter word, the difference between realist epistemology, anti-realist epistemology, anti-realist ontology, and realist ontology; not your daddy’s realism; a respectful nod to Lee Braver; outline of the book.

2. Copernican Revolutions– What is humanism?; A diagnosis of the Ptolemaic orientation of contemporary philosophy; the call for a true Copernican ontology, arguments for a transcendental realism; the difference between transcendental realism, empirical realism, and transcendental idealism; the problem with epistemological and ontological relationism. Here I will rework a number of Bhaskar’s arguments for realist ontology while distinguishing my ontology and, more broadly, object-oriented ontology from Bhaskar’s position. In addition to this I’ll probably take up some of Harman’s critique of the arguments of transcendental idealism as well. What is a transcendental argument? Transcendental realism and transcendental idealism; blackboxes. Surprise.

Part I: The Onticological Analytic– Doctrine of the Endo-Relational Structure of Objects

Preface– The question of what must belong to beings or objects by right (quid juris) in order to render our praxis or relation to the world intelligible, i.e., the need for an analytic of objects in isolation from their relations. The difference between a knowledge of objects, questions of access to objects, and a philosophical ontology of objects. Why ontological questions are not exhausted by epistemological inquiries or questions of access.

3. The Principles of Onticology– The Categorical Scheme: Whitehead and the idea of a categorical scheme, the principles of onticology (the ontic principle, the principle of translation, the principle of irreduction, etc) along with their deduction.

Intermezzo– The ontological grounds of anti-realist epistemology (follows directly from the principles of chapter 3). How anti-realist epistemology nonetheless leads to a realist ontology of objects.

4. Spectral Objects– The Endo-Relational Structure of Objects: Here I try to rehabilitate a version of substantial forms and distinguish the proper being of objects from material or physical being. A critique of Locke’s and Kant’s critique of substance. Roughly this is where I treat the being of objects as systems of notes composed of attractors in a phase space. This allows me to articulate the relationship between substance and qualities as well as what persists in objects changing across time.

Intermission– Platonic Reminiscences: For a pluralist ontology, i.e., the domain of being is broader than the domain of natural or material objects. The role that time has played in our conception of what counts as real; Plato’s ontological levels in the divided line and how these grades of reality map on to temporal determinations ranging from the eternal and unmediated to the fleeting and mediated; the problems with equating being with eduring; in defense of “artificial” (i.e., produced) objects and their autonomy.

5. Strange Mereologies: Basically the arguments I’ve been making about mereological relations of parts to wholes, objects containing other objects, the independence of objects from one another, the meaning of the term “independence”, and the necessity of this sort of mereology; a friendly response to Shaviro on becoming.

Part II: The Onticological Dialectic: Doctrine of Exo-Relations Between Objects

Preface– The question of how, in light of the arguments and analysis of Part I, we must conceive relations among objects; the idea of ontological dialectic; Kant’s transcendental dialectic; objects are independent of their relations but this does not entail that objects do not enter into relations, nor that through entering into relations objects are not affected in a variety of ways.

6. The World is Flat: The case for flat or immanent ontology that refuses overmining and undermining explanations (against both reductivism and anti-reductivism); a single plane of being ranging from the least powerful or consequential to the most powerful and consequential in which signs and minds have no less a status to the real than stars and planets and where stars, planets, DNA, etc., are not reduced to minds.

7. Objects of Interpretation: Latour’s thesis that all objects interpret one another, not just humans interpreting the world about them or texts interpreting texts; the theory of translation among split or withdrawn objects; Doctrine of black boxes; the “withdrawal” of objects. Basically an account of what happens when objects interact with one another and how no object is a vehicle for other objects in-forming another object through a transparent, frictionless medium; entropy and work; the problem of ports and firewalls or how do objects communicate?; the doctrine of selectivity or “not all objects communicate!”

Intermezzo 2 Remarks about anti-realist epistemologies again and ontological confirmation of these positions; critique of their excesses and detrimental impact on inquiry. Why anti-realist epistemology nonetheless requires a realist ontology.

8. Networks, Assemblages, and Categories: (I need a better title here) The distinction between an object and a network of objects (the question of when we shift from separated objects to a new object); dependency relations between networks where objects nonetheless remain independent; and the theory of categories I’ve developed in terms of Lacanian discourse theory and Badiou’s understanding of categories; networks as dynamic and ongoing systems. Note on where both Badiou and Lacan go wrong in reducing objects to their categorical or dialectical relations.

Conclusion: The end of nature and culture; implications for epistemology; keeping track of work; asking better questions, the end of narcissism and the affirmation of the wound; the re-construction of the history of ontology with realism as its guiding clue.