Over at Poetix Dominic has an interesting post up responding to Pete’s recent discussion of normativity over at Speculative Heresy. Dominic writes:

The crux here seems to be that “man” is not in himself a normal animal: normative accounts of human being are best taken as descriptions of the commitments we make to ourselves and others as preconditions for various kinds of social being, and the capacity to bear such norms is rather haphazardly instantiated in our animal selfhood.

This split between the normed human being and the ab-normal human animal plays out in Badiou, for example, as a tension between the “de-subjectivising” pull of egoic self-interest and the possibility of constructing a political “subject” which affirms (or “verifies”) egalitarian norms. But there’s a problem here: egoic self-interest is arguably also a normed expression of human being – neo-liberalism explicitly affirms it as a norm, as a precondition for higher forms of social organisation (e.g. those based on competitive markets). The conflict between Badiou’s ethical “good” (tenacity in the construction of truths) and “evil” (de-subjectivation, the saggy victory of the flesh) can be seen as a conflict between rival normative commitments rather than between committed and uncommitted being as such. What Rowan Williams calls the “false anthropology” of neo-liberalism does not merely declare, in social Darwinist fashion, that human beings are intrinsically self-seeking creatures: it also goes to considerable lengths to modify the “soul” of society (its basic normative commitments and symbolic co-ordinates) so that individuals will perceive this to be their true nature and act accordingly.

There’s a good deal more in Dominic’s post, especially with respect to heteronormativity and discussions of heterosexuality coming out of the Christian Right, but I wanted to draw attention to this passage in particular as I think it represents something that is truncated or underdetermined within the framework of critiques of neo-liberal capitalism. While I do not disagree with Rowan William’s thesis that the picture of the human as an intrinsically self-seeking creature constitutes a false anthropology, I have noticed that there is a tendency to treat the core of neo-liberal capitalist ideology as consisting almost entirely of this false anthropology.

read on!

What is missing in this conception of neo-liberal ideology is the legal and normative framework that underlies this way of relating to the world and others. On the one hand, in order for neo-liberal capitalist ideology to get off the ground it requires what what might be called a “pure subject” or a “subject-without-qualities”, not unlike Descartes’ cogito or Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception. At the heart of neo-liberal capitalist ideology (NLCI) is not so much a subject pursuing self-interest, as a legal subject functioning as the substrate of property, commercial obligations and debts, and divorced from social context and conditions of production. If this subject must necessarily be a pure subject or subject without content or particularity of any form, then this is because NLCI must establish the equivalence or identity of all subjects populating the social field. In other words, for this social system to present itself as just– and I am not suggesting that this social system is just, far from it –it must be able to hold 1) that the lowest subject is equivalent to the most privileged and successful subject in both the eyes of the law and how the system functions (i.e., that the lowliness of the low is the result of her failure and is her responsibility), and 2) that distributions of wealth are not systematic effects of social structure and how it is organized, but rather is an effect of the individual industry of agents within the social field. These claims are dependent on the positing of a pure subject or subject-without-qualities as the essence of what social subjects are, ignoring any discourse about fields or milieus of individuation (in Deleuze and Simondon’s sense) out of which subjects emerge or are produced.

Second, for NLCI to function it is necessary that the law have a particular form that governs social relations among agents. While the self-interested or self-seeking nature of neo-liberal subjects is certainly one of the key notes of NLCI, this false anthropology is not, in and of itself, sufficient to establish the NLCI as a (dis)functioning system. Were the system composed only of agents pursuing their self-interest we would not have the NLCI, but rather the state of nature so vividly described by Hobbes and Spinoza. More fundamental than agents pursuing their own self-interest is the normative and legal system that mediates relations between agents in pursuing this self-interest. In its minimal form, this normative and legal system is one that revolves primarily around the attribution of duties and debts. That is, it is a normative and legal system that is particularly focused on the grounds under which contracts are maintained. Just as the subject-without-qualities of NLCI is a subject divorced from milieus of individuation, transcendentalized, and universalized in a false transcendental anthropology, the form of the law as the grounds of contractual obligation and debt is a normative system divorced from any milieu of individuation and premised on a subject-without-qualities whereby the equivalence of all subjects is guaranteed so that the law might effect itself despite the inequality inherent in the functioning of the law at the level of concrete social relations. Likewise, such a structure of legality also underlies the structure of private property. These two features, the form of the law and the subject-without-qualities, are, I believe, the fundamental notes of NLCI, not the picture of social relations defined by the pursuit of self-interest.

When Marx argues that Hegel must be turned on his head or describes Kant as a priest of the State, it is this which Marx is referring to. It was Kant, of course, who theorized the subject-without-content and who transcendentalized the structure of debt and obligation underlying contractual relations in the social field. If Kantian normativity and conceptions of the subject are priestly relations to the State, then this is because it ignores the manner in which these conceptions of normativity and the subject are themselves contingent products of certain modes of production, instead turning these forms of normativity and subjectivity into fetishes (in Marx’s sense) that have effaced their own milieu of individuation in order to effectuate themselves all the more forcefully, unjustly, and insidiously while undermining the possibility of any critique of these structures of normativity by transcendentalizing them and thereby treating them as universal and essential structures of all social relations. Likewise, if Hegel must be turned on his head, then this is because he treats these social relations as issuing from the domain of the ideal, the subject, thought, or spirit, rather than structures of production. In both cases effective modes of critique and engagement are undermined by virtue of these structures being detached in thought from their real conditions of production. This, I think, is part of the reason that a focus on ideology within political theory is such a danger for actual political praxis as it tends to obscure this material base and render it invisible to the theorist, creating the illusion that social organization is merely a matter of ideas, the ideal, or signifiers. It is also the reason I see great promise in something like Vitale’s “mediology” (what I would call onticology) and his networkology as at least these forms of analysis, focusing as they do on material mediations, have hope of getting at the base through which these ideal forms are individuated or come into being.

Christopher Vitale has a couple of excellent posts up over at orbis mediologicus and Networkologies. Orbis mediologicus is the blog for the exciting new media studies program (soon to be offering a master’s degree) at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Networkologies is Christopher Vitale’s personal blog. In “What is Mediology?” over at orbis mediologicus, an account of mediology is outlined that could very easily be the preface of The Democracy of Objects or a précis of key onticological claims and aims. “What is Mediology?” especially, outlines a good deal of just why object-oriented ontology and onticology are developing a critique of correlationism and contemporary Continental philosophy in the way that it is, and why these ontological shifts are important. Moreover, it sheds light on just what onticology is doing at the level of theoretical practice and engagement over and above the abstract meta-theoretical level of pure ontology. “Networkologies– A Mini-Manifesto” discusses the nature of networks, their dynamics, and interactions among objects in a way that nicely meshes with my own account of translation and networks. Both are excellent reads, so check them out.

I’m a bit groggy this morning. Last night my three year old daughter smacked her forehead against the coffee table and we had to take a trip to the emergency room. Seven stitches and five hours later we finally got home around one thirty in the morning and then didn’t get asleep until four or four thirty. I’m amazed at how well she handled everything. She was a real trooper. After the initial shock of all the blood– and boy do heads ever bleed! –she was rather nonchalant about the whole thing, making offhand remarks like “I bumped my head a little! I hit my head on table. Blood was everywhere! Sometimes that happens!” in an amused voice and, while calmly playing before leaving for the ER, “I don’t need to see a doctor and we don’t have any bandaids”. We danced in the hospital room and she charmed all the nurses and doctors. After everything was over she actually didn’t want to leave as she was having so much fun. That’s my girl! What a ham and little attention addict. At any rate, hopefully I’ll make some sense in this post.

Responding to a couple of my posts from earlier this week on translation, Nate over at Un-canny Ontology writes:

What is translation? And why do some things get translated and others do not?

Translation is more than a simple replication. Translation always involves a certain degree of interpretation in which what is inputted is always changed or transformed – from photons of light to complex sugars. Objects translate each other, they change each other without encountering each other directly, which means that objects first and foremost recognize each other.

I am pretty uncomfortable with Nate’s talk of objects “knowing” each other and “recognizing” each other as I think this implies a degree of intentionality (in the phenomenological sense) that only belongs to a subset of objects (humans, many animals, certain computer systems perhaps, social systems), not all objects. In my view, it’s necessary to distinguish between reflexive objects capable of registering their own states and relations to other entities like social systems or cognitive systems, and non-reflexive objects that do not have this characteristic. In other words, where non-reflexive objects are in question it’s important to emphasize that intentionality is not required for translation to take place and be operative in relations between objects.

read on!

Nonetheless, when this qualification is made, I do think Nate is asking a good question. I’m of two minds about this question. On the one hand, my initial thought is that it is not for philosophy to answer how translation takes place in any specific relation between objects. Initially this response might look like a dodge; however, it is premised on a distinction between the sort of thing philosophy does and the sort of thing other disciplines do.

Since I am on a Bhaskar kick lately, this point can be illustrated by analogy to Bhaskar’s ontology. Bhaskar asks the transcendental question “what must the world be like in order for our sciences to be possible?” Among his answers is the thesis that things must be structured and differentiated, they must be capable of acting without us knowing them or being aware of them (his generative mechanisms), they must be capable of acting without producing effects in all cases, they must have powers or capabilities, it must be possible to form more or less closed systems (for experiment to be possible and significant), and in open systems these generative mechanisms must be capable of acting without producing the sorts of effects we encounter when triggering a generative mechanism in the closed system of an experimental setting.

Bhaskar’s thesis is that the world must be this way for our science to be possible and for our practice of experimentation to be intelligible; however, his ontological claims about what the world must be like do not tell us what generative mechanisms actually exist, how they are structured, what powers or capabilities they have, and so on. What generative mechanisms exist is a task for direct inquiry in various disciplines, not something that philosophy can answer a priori. The case is similar with respect to translation. Philosophy can tell us that objects must translate one another when they interact and therefore draw our attention to the differences produced in interaction, but it has nothing of its own to say about what translation machines or mechanisms actually exist and how they are structured. This is the job of inquiry in other disciplines. Thus, for example, it falls to the biologist to investigate how leaves translate light into energy. Likewise, it falls to folks like Nate in the field of rhetoric to investigate how audiences are selectively open to certain speech-performances and how these performances on the part of a rhetor are translated by audiences into something else.

Nonetheless, and this is my second point, we can make some very general ontological claims about what objects must be like for translation to be possible. Hopefully these theses somewhat address Nate’s question. My tendency at present is to think of translation in terms of information theory. This should come as no surprise as the ontic principle is, in many respects, adapted from Bateson’s definition of information as “the difference that makes a difference.” So how should this be understood?

First, the concept of information is to be distinguished from that of noise. Information, as a difference that makes a difference, is something that stands out in contrast to noise. If, for example, a student in an introductory philosophy course has great difficulty reading Derrida’s essay “Differance”, this is not because the text is difficult or poorly written, but because the student, having just come to philosophy for the first time, lacks the background in philosophy that would allow the student to encounter the elements of the text as information. Everything in the essay seems significant and as a result it all becomes noise insofar as nothing can be distinguished in the essay by the student. Information can thus be thought in Gestalt terms as a relation between what leaps into the foreground (information) and what passes into the background (noise).

It’s important to note that for self-reflexive intentional objects like students, this relationship between foreground is a dynamic, not fixed, relation. Not only can these systems evolve such that elements that before were mere noise can take on the status of information, but also relations between foreground and background can shift back and forth, such that something that a moment ago belonged to the domain of noise now comes to the fore as information or a difference that makes a difference.

Second, and of great importance, it should be noted that information and noise are not ontological properties of the world, but are object-specific properties. There is no information “out there” in and of itself. Rather, objects “constitute” information for themselves. The idea that information exists “out there” and not simply for an object constitutes a sort of transcendental illusion within ontology that I’ll have to write about in the future. To put this point differently, information is only information for an object. Likewise, noise is only noise for an object. It is not the world that is disordered or chaotic, but rather the world for an object that is disordered or chaotic. Here I am drawing on the manner in which information is thought by systems theory and autopoietic theory.

Third, objects are only selectively open to other objects in the world. Take the example of sitting at a coffee shop with friends. All sorts of things recede into the background in this situation: the actions of the staff, the conversations of other people, the traffic that could be discerned through the window, the talking head babbling away on the television, the music playing in the background, etc. In this scenario we only share selective relations to the world about us. The rest largely disappears until another shift takes place in relations between foreground and background.

It now becomes possible to say a few very general things about the ontology of translation and what must be the case in order for translation to be possible. First, there must be an ontological distinction between stimuli and information. The term “stimulus” is not the happiest term as it still implies a reference to a receiving object. However, I would like to stipulate this term not as a reference to a receiving object, but rather treat it as a difference transmitted by another object. At any given time there are all sorts of stimuli flying about in the world that are not information for various objects. Thus, for example, at this very moment there are all sorts of radio signals pulsing through the air about me. These signals are real things that are out there. However, for me they scarcely exist and are not information as I have no way of receiving them. In order to receive them I need an additional black box– my nifty new iPhone or my computer –that can function as a mediator allowing me to relate to these stimuli.

Second, if there is a difference between information and stimuli, and if stimuli exist in all sorts of ways without being information, it follows that information is not something that is already out there, but rather is constituted by objects receiving these stimuli. This, I think, approaches Nate’s initial question. For information to be possible, certain things have to be true of objects. On the one hand, it is necessary that objects (generative mechanisms) exist that emit stimuli. On the other hand, objects must have channels and an internal structure (endo-relational structure) that organizes these stimuli into differences that make a difference. Channels are modes of openness to other objects in the world, while endo-relational structure, in part, is the mechanism by which stimuli are transformed into differences that make a difference.

Thus, for example, no matter how much I talk to a rock, I cannot compel that rock to get out of my way. While the sound-waves of my voice might indeed affect the rock in a variety of ways because the rock has channels for receiving differences in this sort of causal way, the rock cannot encounter those sound-waves as speech because it does not possess channels or an endo-relational structure for constituting sound-waves (stimuli) as speech (information) in the manner of other reflexive objects. Likewise, last night I could not heal my daughter’s wound through speech; however, when I function as a psychoanalyst for someone else, it is possible to cure a psychoanalytic symptom through the intervention of speech. The channels and endo-relational structure that constitute openness to different forms of difference are something that must be surveyed in every instance and that cannot be determined by philosophy a priori.

This point can be further illustrated with respect to the periodic table of elements. The periodic table is not simply a summary of what we’ve discovered about the endo-relational structure of various elements, but also, for those who know how to read us, tells the chemist, biologist, and physicist all sorts of things about channels or different possibilities of relation that can take place between elements. On the one hand, each element is a generative mechanism capable of producing a variety of actualities. On the other hand, elements are only capable of selectively relating to one another according to very precise laws and these relations generate new properties or actualizations when they take place.

A couple of further points. Over at the Pinnochio Theory, Shaviro riffs on Nate’s post and my own, writing:

I think that the source of this problem, in Nathan’s account, is the following. He says that ” objects first and foremost recognize each other,” precisely because — here paraphrasing Levi, and also to an extent Graham Harman — “objects translate each other, they change each other without encountering each other directly.” But as I’ve said before, my biggest disagreement with both Levi and Graham is that, for me, objects do encounter each other directly.

There’s a lot more in Steven’s post, but I wanted to zero in on this particular remark as I think it conflates my position with Harman’s. For Harman objects are absolutely independent or withdrawn from one another such that you get the question of how they can enter into relations with one another. Within my proposed ontology, objects do touch one another. What that don’t do is represent one another in the manner of a mirror representing an object. Rather, every relation between objects is a translation and every translation involves transformation. In certain respects, this places me closer to Latour and Whitehead in the sense that I do not place objects behind absolute “firewalls” as Graham does. Where I differ from Latour and Whitehead, is in holding that objects have a being that is not reducible to their relations to other objects (their endo-relational structure), and that the relations objects do entertain to other objects are selective. Where Whitehead and Latour hold that each actual occasion holds a definite relation to every other actual occasion in the entire universe, I hold that 1) objects only share relations to other particular objects and are unrelated to a number of other objects in the universe, and 2) that even if all other objects in the universe were to cease existing a particular object could continue to exist (something that is impossible in Whitehead’s and Latour’s universe). In part I believe this must be the case as inquiry would become impossible were objects to be related to all other objects as it would no longer be possible to form more or less closed systems within which inquiry takes place. Insofar as inquiry clearly does take place it follows that this thesis cannot be true.

My gloss on the “occasional” in Latour is thus somewhat different than Harman’s. Discussing Latour’s reference to occasions in Prince of Networks, Harman writes, “A thing is not separate from its relations [for Latour], and in fact ‘each element is to be defined by its associations and is an event created at the occasion of each of those associations’ (Pandora’s Hope, 165, emphasis added by Harman)” (80). Where Harman reads this as a reference to the philosophical doctrine of occasionalism, I read the reference to occasions in temporal terms as in the case of referring to things like “on this great occasion…” To speak of objects entering into relations with one another in occasions is thus to refer to the selective and limited nature of those relations, along with the fact that objects contingently encounter one another or encounter one another in an aleatory fashion. I would differ from Latour here in hold that it is not the occasion or the relations that make the object the object. The occasions can modify the manner in which the object actualizes itself, but this is quite different from suggesting that the object is its relations.

Despite these ontological differences, Harman and I do arrive at similar conclusions. If I am comfortable talking about objects “withdrawing” from one another then this is because translations that take place within an object always differ from the other object that instigates the translation or provides the input for the process of translation. The other day I came across this comment over at Another Heidegger Blog:

Why do you not address the most obvious problem of why vicar’s (representations) are central to the mechanism of causation between two inanimate objects?

Do you read as coherent that when a baseball hurls into a windshield it must FIRST send a representation of itself INTO the glass, and then it must brush this “vicar” into a state of phenomenenal breakdown, a breakdown which THEN results in the baseball cracking the glass? Does this make any sense to you? Aside from projecting a human caricature of experience and cognition, in what way does this actually seem to reveal how objects interact without human beings?

This is an example of what I would call an uncharitable interpretation of Harman’s position. It is important that we understand just what I have in mind by the “principle of charity”. The principle of charity does not consist in passively endorsing another position or refraining from criticism. Rather, the principle of charity is a necessary condition for philosophical discourse, requiring that we present the positions of other thinkers in the most reasonable and plausible light before proceeding to criticism of that position. Working on the premise that our interlocutor is a reasonable and intelligent person that genuinely wants to get at the truth, explain features of the world, and understand things– a premise that should be granted at the beginning of dialogue and revoked only when proven otherwise –we should ask ourselves, with respect to our interpretations of the positions of others, “is this a position that a reasonable person would endorse or advocate?” If our impression of another’s position is that it is batshit crazy insane, then it is likely we have misinterpreted the other person’s position, not that the author is making the absurd claim. Note, that the claim that a position is reasonable or a position that a rational agent could hold is not equivalent to the claim that the position is true. Of course, it comes as no surprise that this person’s reading of Harman would be so uncharitable, given that he confesses he’s only read of Harman’s theory of causality as developed in his early work presented at the speculative realism conference, and that he has not actually read Tool Being, Guerilla Metaphysics, or Prince of Networks.

The characterization of Harman’s position above is clearly absurd. Harman’s thesis is not that objects must first encounter other objects under the form of a “sensuous vicar” and then relate to them. Nor is it an anthropomorphization of relations between objects. Rather, Harman’s thesis is that objects only relate to one another selectively with respect to particular qualities, never exhaustively in terms of all the qualities that an object might possess or be capable of. Austin over at Complete Lies drives this point home nicely in his recent post on Harman’s theory of vicarious causation:

In Aristotle’s Categories he distinguishes between subjects and predicates. The Greek word for “subject” is hypokeimenon (ὑποκείμενον) meaning “underlying thing.” Essentially, it is that which is predicated but remains beneath the layers of predicates. We can also understand this through substance and accidents. The substance of the thing is that which the accidents adhere to without itself becoming anything fundamentally new. My car is still a car even if I have it painted a new colour for instance. The predicate “silver” does not alter the substance “car” in any substantial way. So there are substances and there are accidents. Great. The chief occasionalist insight to be made here is through the chain of causality. The position is one that says substances don’t touch each other. Let’s use an example. When I have a relationship with a person, there is more to that person than our interactions. Let us assume it is a romantic relationship between lover and beloved. Does this relation exhaust the other’s being? Is it not the case that there is far more to the person than their relation to me? While we would likely share much of our lives with each other, there remains a fundamental gap between the two of us. Don’t we interact on the level of accidents and not substance? When I talk to or touch my girlfriend, there is always more to her than these interactions. This is also the case for my interactions with non-human objects, for instance the relationship I have to the laptop I am writing this on. There are infinite possibilities for relations within a thing, it can interact with practically anything else in the universe in any number of ways, none of which could exhaust its possibilities. This is the point of the fire and cotton example. Cotton can do a lot more than burn, and the fire only engages the cotton on that level and not on the part of the cotton (to use improper language) that could become denim or a Q-Tip. While the fire destroys the cotton, this does not mean it has exhausted those potentialities, it has simply destroyed them.

The point is that there is always more possibilities open to any object than those actualized in any particular relation the object enters into. In many respects, then, Harman’s claim can be understood in counterfactual terms. One of his key points regarding the inexhaustibility of objects pertains to the inexhaustibility of their possible relations. If objects are always in excess of or more than their relations, if they only relate to one another under particular aspects or in terms of “sensuous vicars”, then this is because there is always an excess of other relations they could enter into under different aspects. I hope to expand on this a bit in the near future in terms of the sorts of transcendental illusions generated through the process of translation, giving transcendental illusion not an epistemological grounding restricted to thought or the human-world gap, but an ontological grounding.

One common criticism of Deleuze and DeLanda is that their ontolog(ies) suffer from what might be called “virtualism”. It’s important that some might not consider this a failing and that there is, I believe, a way of interpreting these thinkers so that this problem largely disappears. Roughly, virtualism would consist in treating the virtual as the domain of the “really real” and reducing the actual to mere “epiphenomena” that have but an epiphenomenal “being”. In the language of Roy Bhaskar’s ontology, the virtual can roughly be equated with the domain of “generative mechanisms”, while the actual would consist of events take place as a result of these generative mechanisms. Virtualism would thus treat these generative mechanisms as what are properly real, while the actual events engendered by these generative mechanisms would have a subordinate and lesser status.

The problem with this sort of virtualism is that it fails to observe a particular property of groups known as “closure” as described by mathematical group theory. Roughly, closure is the property of a group such that for a group G, all operations carried out on elements of G– say a, b –are also in G. Thus, for example, if group B consists of the numbers 1 and 2, the conjunction of 1 and 2– 3 –is also a member of the group. This point can be illustrated for material systems with respect to fire. A flame requires all sorts of generative mechanisms involving chemical and atomic reactions that are conditions of fire at the level of the “virtual” with respect to the flame as an actuality or event. However, it does not follow from this that the flame is itself an epiphenomenon or lacking in reality. The flame has all sorts of powers, capacities, are “able-to’s” that cannot be found at the level of the generative mechanisms themselves. Put otherwise, a flame is itself a generative mechanism with respect to other relations.

read on!

It seems to be that the demotion of the actual produced out of the virtual or generative mechanisms is a variant of Bhaskar’s epistemic fallacy. Here issues of epistemology are being conflated with issues of ontology in a slippage that goes unnoticed. In A Realist Theory of Knowledge Bhaskar argues that reality is itself stratified. By this he means that phenomena at one level are themselves based on a lower level of generative mechanisms. However, the phenomena at each level are themselves autonomous domains with their own unique structural properties that, while dependent on the lower level and impossible without the lower level, cannot be deduced from the lower level. Organic life is dependent on chemistry and impossible without chemistry, but it has its own internal generative mechanisms or structures that diverge from those of chemistry and are irreducible to chemistry.

Part of inquiry consists in 1) the discovery of these structures, but also 2) discovering these deeper structures on which these higher order structures are based. Virtualism, however, conflates the aims of inquiry with the nature of being. Put otherwise, it confuses its search for deeper level structures and generative mechanisms with the “epiphenomenalization” of the structure to be accounted for at a higher level. However, the fact that something is dependent on a deeper level structure or set of generative mechanisms does not undermine the emergent reality and generative mechanisms based on these deeper level generative mechanisms. In this connection, the “virtual” should not be understood as a distinct ontological domain apart from the actual, but as a relative term with respect to a domain of the actual. What functions as a “virtuality” for one domain of actuality can, is, in turn, an actuality for another domain of virtuality or generative mechanisms.

I am still experimenting with the diagram below, but as I was teaching the concept of translation in Harman’s Prince of Networks today, I found it to be a useful heuristic device for thematizing just what is new or interesting in Latour’s concept of translation. Scroll past the Scribd diagram for a bit of commentary.

Clearly I have adapted this diagram from Hjelmsleves model of the sign. All of us are familiar with the relation between the signifier and the signified in Saussurean linguistics (to the left). In naive theories of linguistic translation (NTTs), the idea is that the concept remains the same (content), while it is only the signifier (expression) that changes. There are any number of reasons that this concept of translation is mistaken. I outlined some of these shortcomings in a previous post, so I won’t repeat them here. Latour’s concept of translation is broader than that of translation as it applies to linguistics or the transposition of texts from one language to another. The key point to take home from his analysis– and he doesn’t spell these implications out himself –is not so much the fact that a translated text always differs from the text that it translates, but rather that the process of translation produces something new, regardless of whether the relation is between texts in different languages, conscious minds to world, or relations between objects. What Latour wishes to do, I think, is generalize the concept of translation, such that translation is no longer restricted to the domain of language, nor requiring the involvement of living beings of some sort, but rather involves any relations among actants, human or nonhuman, living or material.

Hjelmslev’s key innovation in the domain of linguistics and semiotics was to recognize that both the plane of expression (loosely the signifier) and the plane of content (loosely the signified) have a form and substance that can enter into different relations with one another. Here I am partially basing my analysis of Deleuze and Guattari’s treatment of Hjelmslev’s model of expression and content as developed in “The Geology of Morals” in A Thousand Plateaus. This discussion would require a far more developed analysis than I’m capable of giving at the moment. For those who are interested, it would be worthwhile to refer to DeLanda’s early work on this essay (here and a number of Delanda’s articles, podcasts, and talks can be found here), as well as the first chapter of A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Brian Massumi. While I don’t entirely share the ontological commitments of either of these thinkers, their works nonetheless provide some pointers in the direction I’m thinking.

read on!

Hopefully I’ll have more time to elaborate on the diagram above in the near future (I’m in a rush now), but to understand what’s at stake it’s helpful to take a brief detour through Aristotle’s four causes. I apologize for the inelegance of my diagrams. Hopefully my diagram of Aristotle’s four causes in the upper right hand corner of this paragraph (click to expand) will convey some of the sense of his sorting. The important point to keep in mind here is that Aristotle’s term “cause” (aition) is closer to what we might mean by “reason” than how we think of “causes” today. Each of the four causes is a way of answering the question of what and why a thing is. The efficient cause is therefore that by which something is produced. The material cause is that out of which something is produced. The formal cause is the structure or pattern of a thing. And the final cause is the goal or that for the sake of which something is produced. It will be noted that bisecting the four causes is a dotted line distinguishing what is potential (δύναμις) from what is actual (ἐνέργεια). If the material cause and the efficient cause are associated with potentiality, then this is because matter– for example clay –has the potential to take on many different forms through the agency of an efficient cause. Likewise, if form and finality are associated with actuality, then this is because structure or pattern (the formal cause) indicate that matter has taken on a determinate form, whereas something is actual when it reaches its goal or telos. I take it that these distinctions are well known, so I will not elaborate on them in greater detail here with the proviso that much more can and should be said.

Closely associated with the distinction between matter and form and potentiality and actuality is the distinction between passivity and activity. In a crude version of the Aristotlean schema matter is the passive principle and form is the active principle. Returning to the Saussurean schema of the sign under NTT (the naive theory of translation), the signified as the constancy of meaning is the form or active principle that in-forms the signifier or passive material of expression. This reveals another dimension of form: it is what remains constant or identical in all of its instantiations in matter. The role of matter is simply to take on form, without contributing anything to form beyond the mere instantiation of that form in an existent. Referring to another inelegant diagram in the left above (click to enlarge), we can call this the ontology of “sovereignity”. The sovereign can be anything from a king to a general to a father to God to a boss to a teacher. The sovereign functions as the efficient cause containing the form as an ideational structure (like an architect’s or engineer’s blueprint) that is then imposed on a passive matter. The key point here is that causation is conceived in a unidirectional fashion, passing from the sovereign and his blueprints to the passive matters to be in-formed.

It is now possible to discern the innovation in the adapted Hjelmslevian schema. In the relation between Actant1 and Actant2 there are arrows between the two schemas. These arrows indicate one actant acting upon another actant. It will be noted that both actants possess both a form (structure, pattern) and a substance (a “materiality” broadly construed). As Harman often puts it “there is no such thing as un-form-atted matter. In addition to each actant possessing a form and a matter, each matter contains both a content and an expression. Here content– and I need to say much more about this –can be understood as the other actants that an actant has “appropriated” to constitute itself as an actant, while “expression” can be understood as the manner in which the actant has “actualized” itself qualitatively at a particular point in time. In Harman’s language, content can be understood as the “withdrawn” being of an actant, while expression could be understood as the “sensuous vicar” by which this withdrawn being is expressed for another being. Why, then, the additional dimension of matter for each of these actants? Because in addition to the internal composition of each actant or its content (what I call the endo-consistency of a being which is roughly analogous to Suarez’s “substantial forms”), the being of any actant is infinitely decomposable into other actants or entities. With great caution we can refer to this “matter” as “hyper-chaos”, so long as we note that this hyper-chaos is structured and that its apparent “disorder” is only disorder from the standpoint of the structured being of a particular actant (more on this another time).

The diagram at the beginning of this post requires a great deal more commentary than I can give it here. The shift from the Aristotlean model where we have– at least in thought –pure unformed matter that is completely passive or a sort of “hyletic flux”, thereby requiring in-forming-ing from another actant to my adapted version of Hjelmslev’s model where all actants have both a form (structure, pattern) and a substance (formed matter) initially appears slight. However, if we refer back to Aristotle’s model the significance of this slight shift becomes apparent. If each actant involved in an inter-act-ion has form, then it follows that the actant receiving the action of another actant cannot merely be a passive matter taking on the form of the other actant (the ontology of sovereignity). Rather, because actant2 itself has form, structure, or pattern, it too is an active principle. Yet as an active principle it too must contribute difference. Yet, if this is the case, then it follows that the form of actant3– the outcome produced by the interaction of actant1 and actant2 –cannot merely be the instantiation of the form of actant1, but must instead be a “synthesis” of the forms of actant1 and actant2 producing something new through this inter-act-ion. A task and a critique are here announced at the ontological level. The critique would be a critique of all those vestiges of the ontology of sovereignity where some set of actants is treated as consisting merely of passive materials that take on the form of some other actant. The positive task would be to trace these imbrications of forms in inter-act-ion, investigating the manner in which they produce new forms as a result of the “struggle” between these forms. It now becomes clearly why the alternative ontology is a horizontal, flat, immanent, or networked. No longer can one actant stand apart from the rest imposing a unidirectional, form-bestowing causality on all the others. Rather, the so-called “sovereign” now becomes an actor in a field of actors where causality is bi-directionality and where form is a result of inter-act-ions among actants rather than an identity preserved across chains of inter-act-ions like a signified behind a signified that is in-different to its instantiations in other matters.

The post below can be enlarged by scrolling to the bottom of the post and clicking on the “full page” and “zoom” buttons.

Object-oriented ontology, and to a lesser degree the other orientations of Speculative Realism, have been described as the first internet driven philosophy. Or, to put it differently, they have been described as the first philosophical movement to develop primarily online. On the one hand, there was the Goldsmith’s event that took place back in 2007 that hosted Graham Harman, Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Quentin Meillassoux. It would be interesting to map out the differences between their respective positions using the Greimasian square and I hope to do this for an article I am currently writing for Theory & Event. Collapse played a big role in the dissimenation of this event. However, I have a hard time believing that SR would have taken off in the way that it has without blogs like Speculative Heresy, Accursed Share, Naughtthought, Planomenology, and Fractal Ontology. And then, of course, there was the appearance of Graham Harman in the blogosphere– I kinda persuaded him to start blogging and still feel somewhat guilty about that –with Object-Oriented Ontology. There’s really a whole sociological case study to be written here employing the methodologies of actor-network theory.

In the beginnings, the key players here were Nick Srnicek of Accursed Share and the guys over at Fractal Ontology. Nick and I had been talking for years, ever since the inception of Larval Subjects back in 2006. I was always impressed by his critical acumen, his civility, his ability to remain above the fray and above board, never engaging in ad hominems or speculations about motivations of any sort, his focus on the concrete as far as outcomes, and his general theoretical brilliance. Back in the day, prior to SR, when it was all Deleuze, Lacan, and Badiou, all the time he would ask me some really tough questions. These questions were never attacks, but were issues he was working through as well. Later he would repay me with the tremendous complement of citing a number of my posts in his thesis. Meanwhile, Fractal Ontology suddenly appeared in the web around 2007 or 2008. Suddenly you had these two students, Taylor Adkins and Joseph Weismann translating all this obscure French philosophy that did not make up the canon as it has been appropriated in the United States. At the time Joseph and Taylor were largely Deleuzians, but what made their participation so remarkable was that they were tracking down all these obscure, yet key, Deleuzian references like Simondon, Ruyer, and Lautman, while getting all excited about Laruelle and translating his work as well. This was the first real whiff of Laruelle and I believe it played an important role in drawing attention to the work of Ray Brassier.

read on!

Like inverted amoebas, Accursed Share and Fractal Ontology merged, creating a new blog, Speculative Heresy. Part of the success of these three blogs was the tone they employed in presenting the thought of the Speculative Realists. Fractal Ontology was busily churning out translations, while in their original posts they were developing their own ideas in a non-polemical way, presenting them according to the standard Continental philosophy model that characterized lit theory and Continental philosophy departments during the 90s, SPEP, and the major Continental philosophy journals. These were the days– 2007 and 2008 –where Continental philosophy in the blogosphere was still driven by the SPEP/American university Continental philosophy department model of “figure driven” philosophy where philosophy is driven by commentary on figures rather than problems, questions, and positions that debate amongst these positions. It was the philosophical environment driven by hermeneutics of some sort or another that has driven so many bright minds out of philosophy departments and into other fields in the humanities where thought is not merely a reflection on the tradition. At the same time Nick was churning out all sorts of reviews and posts on the major figures in the SR movement. In particular, there were a number of stellar posts on Harman and Brassier early on. Then along came Naughtthought, Austin of Complete Lies, and Reid of Planomenology. Ben and Austin were busily pushing the ontology of Iain Hamilton Grant, while Reid intensified discussions of Laruelle and, to a lesser degree, Brassier.

Finally Harman appeared in the blogosphere by happenstance. Nick’s work had influenced me tremendously throughout late 2007 and 2008 and got me reading Meillassoux and wondering what all this buzz about SR was about. Still working within the framework of Badiou, Deleuze, Lacan, and Zizek at the time I was trying to fit everything into those framworks. Lit up by Meillassoux’s After Finitude, but aware that I still did not know a whole lot about the other thinkers in the SR movement, I one night got the idea of putting together The Speculative Turn collection; which, at the time, was going to be called Post-Continental Philosophy (Latour quickly shot that one down given his antipathy to “posts”). Originally I conceived the project as a sort of Deleuzian rejoinder to the realists in Great Britain working within the framework of SR and Badiou, where the standard critique of Deleuze at that time was that he was a “vitalist” (this wasn’t functioning as a sophisticated conceptual term but as an unthinking epithet). I knew, however, that I needed help and that Nick new far more about SR than me, so I contacted him to be a co-editor. Our original version of the project was extremely modest. However, as we began contacting people we were overwhelmed by the response. Not only did all the participants at the Goldsmith’s conference express a great deal of interest, but figures like Badiou, Zizek, Latour, Stengers, and so on were extremely interested as well. It seemed that in putting together a collection devoted to Continental Realisms and Materialisms we were hitting on the “real” (in the Lacanian sense) of the contemporary historical moment in the world of theory, or touching at the right thing at the right time. I believe that there are all sorts of things about contemporary technology, economy, and politics that make these themes of realism and materialism the timely thought for Continental philosophy.

The Speculative Turn brought Nick and I directly into contact with Harman. Harman clearly has well defined positions and commitments in his work, but one of the things that’s interesting about his work over and above his own commitments, is that across that work he’s constructed his own “counter-tradition” of philosophy, where suddenly the history of philosophy gets read as containing this minor tradition of object-oriented ontologists of one form or another. While we get familiar names in his work like Heidegger, Husserl, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and so on, we also get all these marginalized names like Ortega y Gasset, Zubiri, Whitehead, Latour, and Suarez. Meanwhile he was making audacious moves like siding with Aristotle and taking the occasionalists seriously. In Zizekian or Hegelian terms it could be said that Harman was “positing his own conditions” in the history of philosophy. He was finding object-oriented ontology as already having existed, while simultaneously giving it its name. Now at the heart of this gesture lies a paradox. For on the one hand, Harman has serious ontological commitments of his own and his own unique form of object-oriented ontology, while on the other hand, Harman holds that object-oriented ontology is broader than his own position. In other words, Harman has simultaneously made a school of thought and is a particular variant of that school of thought.

Here the three main contemporary proponents of object-oriented ontology are Latour, Whitehead, and Harman. Harman argues that both Latour and Whitehead are instances of object-oriented ontologies, while simultaneously critiquing and rejecting their ontologies. Where Whitehead and Latour are both, in Harman’s estimation, ontological relationists in their object-oriented ontology, Harman, in a way that sometimes resembles certain aspects of Badiou, is a non-relationist. At any rate, when I contacted Graham to participate in The Speculative Turn he was enthusiastic and extremely helpful (which is why he became one of the co-editors), and we struck up a very intense email discussion about our respective ontological positions. My encounter with Harman, and it was an encounter in the Deleuzian sense, helped me to focus my thought in a lot of ways, and as a result of that brief two to four weeks where we were mailing back in forth multiple times a day, arguing, critiquing one another, finding common ground, and so on, I came out the other side as an advocate of object-oriented ontology broadly construed. Part of the reason this was possible was due to the counter-tradition Harman had produced that allowed me to simultaneously be my own thinker, not being required to share all of his claims, while participating in that school of thought. Then Harman appeared in the blogosphere which contributed significantly to the intensification of discussions and debates, functioning like a catalyst in a supersaturated solution that generates crystals or a bifurcation point.

Now if I attribute so much to blogs like Accursed Share, Fractal Ontology, and Speculative Heresy, then this is because their blogs functioned as hubs on the internet that mediated between the world of the internet and the outside world. On the one hand, they were rendering all sorts of names, concepts, arguments, and positions available to the internet world. On the other hand, they were spurring discussions in their graduate departments between faculty and students, at conferences, and now in the form of publications. Let’s not forget that Freud’s original crew consisted of between four and six doctors that would meet every Saturday in Freud’s parlor to discuss theory and their cases (off the top of my head I can only remember the names of Adler and Jung, but there were others as well). From this small network and these inconsequential events, though, they created a reorientation of theory and practice that came to span the globe. Those small links led to proliferations, drawing in a number of others who were both opposed to Speculative Realism (always an odd thing to be given that it’s a variety of different positions with only the shared similar of endorsing realism and rejecting the primacy of the human-world correlate) and those who are deeply interested in it in their own work. Suddenly in the last two years, whenever I would go to conferences, everyone was talking about SR, it was on everyone’s lips, and yet no one knew what it was. It was something that had to be responded to, but what was to be responded to was unclear. This was not restricted to the world of philosophy. As a highly interdisciplinary thinker I participate in conferences in a variety of disciplines and I was hearing the same thing across the humanities, cultural theory, and the social sciences.

Of course, the other actor here is not human. When I look back at all that has happened in the last three years I’m struck by how fortuitous or chance driven it’s all been. It really has the form of the “real” or what Lacan, drawing on Aristotle, called “tuche” or “the missed encounter”. Now, the tuche or missed encounter refers to the phenomenological structure of anticipation in our cognition. Tuche is that event that happens when one wasn’t anticipating or expecting it. It can be something like getting in a car accident, winning the lottery, meeting the love of your life, or being hit by lightning. The point is that it didn’t fit the structure of anticipation. And really this has been what SR’s been like. A number of motivated people fortuitously happened to encounter one another and something happened. It could have just as easily not happened. Certainly I was more than happy in my Deleuzian, Badiouian, and Lacanian ways, and I’ve really spent the last years trying to catch up with the changes that have occurred in my thought and trying to build an internally consistent and coherent system along with the arguments for that position.

But the nonhuman actor in all of this has been the internet. Despite the event at Goldsmiths, I do not believe SR would have been possible in 1994 with the explosion of the internet. The academy was simply too powerful and set in its ways focuses on celebrity or figure worship, on commentary and hermeneutics as the primary form of theory, for such a thing to take place. Again, I believe that this is one of the major reasons that so many first rate thinkers have been driven out of philosophy departments in the English speaking world and into other departments in the humanities. The unspoken and unconscious protocols of how philosophy is to be practiced in English speaking philosophy departments are just too constraining for those who are not primarily interested in talking about philosophers, but rather in engaging with problems and the contemporary moment. If the internet made SR possible– perhaps even at the level of the Goldsmith’s event –then this is because it opened a venue or space outside of the hegemony of SPEP that allowed for the emergence of conferences, journals, articles, and books not driven by that celebrity worship industry. I am not making the absurd claim that somehow SR has overturned the predominant ideological and power structures of Continental philosophy as practiced in the English speaking world. Clearly it remains a small and marginal movement. The claim I’m making is that that movement would not have been able to intensify at all had it not been for a medium like the internet. All of this raises questions of how thought comes to be structured differently as a result of media like the internet that are a strange combination of oral culture and written culture and where the book and article as a polished thought holds sway; but also questions of how normativity functions in this space where new collectives are formed, all sorts of riddles about identity emerge, and where there are not established norms to govern interactions. But I’ll save those ruminations for another time.

Pete, over at Philosophy in a Time of Error, has an interesting, albeit brief, post up on Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. Pete writes:

My point on Sartre was simply that I think he explains the pre-evental in a way that I find Adrian Johnston and others (Nick S. has written on this, too, as has Peter Hallward) have all wrestled with in Badiou’s work. Adrian Johnston in his new work points out that Badiou doesn’t really have an account of desire that would be a condition within a given set such that one would act for the event in question. Now, I think one could in a sense use the language of scarcity in Sartre, much derided, as but another way of speaking of lack, and thus I actually think in this way Zizek is more of Sartrean than Badiou, since he sides with Sartre on history, the void of the subject, and a certain freedom at the heart of any given structure. That’s a bit broad, of course, but I figure for a blog post, it’s better to be simplistic and provoke more than subtle and dusty about it. Of course, in Sartre, organizations such as the group in fusion are post-evental, too, and I think Badiou was wrong to stipulate in his move away from Sartre that for him the political was reducible to the historical. And in any case, Badiou never satisfactorally bridges the metapolitical and the situated worlds in Logic of Worlds and Being and Event. It’s a subtraction procedure, to be sure, but in the end I find Sartre tells me more about, say, hunger, than set theory does. That’s simplistic, but again, the first thing one thinks when one reads Badiou is something just this snarky, and I don’t know if that’s really ever answered, except through a lot of steps wind in too many circles up to an air too rarified.

Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason is, I think, one of the most unjustly neglected works in political theory. I’m really not sure why this is or what happened here. There is, of course, the infamous Levi-Strauss review. And the language of the text is barbarous (but what text in Continental philosophy isn’t?). And I’m certainly aware that the work is prized highly by Jameson, Badiou, Bourdieu, and Deleuze and Guattari. Nonetheless, it seems like a text that somehow fell through the cracks, never having the impact or hearing it deserved. With any luck there will be a resurgence of interest in the work.

My love of it has always been because of the manner in which it conceptualizes groups in fusion and the practico-inert. With neo-Marxist theory, especially that coming out of the Althusserian school, I’ve always felt that there’s too little focus on group formation and too much emphasis on critical breaks and whatnot. I’m not sure how social structures are to be changed without flourishing group formations or the formation of subject-groups. But if you begin paying attention to questions of group formation, then all sorts of questions arise as to how groups are formed and maintain themselves. I don’t see these questions really being posed at all in contemporary theory. As a result, what you get is a critique of reigning social conditions, how capital functions, ideology, and whatnot, but you don’t really get much in the way of an account of praxis as to how these “structures” might be changed. This is, in part, exactly what Sartre is trying to do in The Critique of Dialectical Reason. While he certainly develops a critique of the contemporary world, his mode of analysis is squarely focused on questions of praxis or how group formations (what he calls “subject-groups”, think Marx’s thesis that the proletariat is the “subject”) come into being and take of the force of transforming “structures”. This is a very different sort of question than the critical question or the question of ideology. Deleuze and Guattari try to complete this project in Anti-Oedipus, yet their nods at Sartre and his subject-groups are far too impressionistic to really provide much in the way of a well developed theory of praxis.

Mikhail sent me the following post in email, giving me permission to post it if I so desire. I think it gets at a number of important differences and assumptions, so it might be of general interest to others. Following Mikhail’s post you will find my reply. I hope others interested in the realism/anti-realism debate and OOO take the time to read through the post as I think some key points are made here, as well as some arguments potentially central the epistemological grounds of OOO and why the “speculation” of OOO is not simply “making things up”. Basically I rehearse Roy Bhaskar’s argument for transcendental realism, trying to show why I think that epistemological questions can’t properly be resolved without robust realist ontological claims. However, there’s an important caveat here. While I’m strongly inclined to endorse the form of Bhaskar’s transcendental argument for ontological realism, I am more circumspect about the ontological claims he is making. In other words, it is possible to endorse much of the reasoning that leads Bhaskar to the conclusion that we can know something of mind-independent objects that exist regardless of whether anyone knows them, while rejecting the specifics of this ontology on the grounds that it is inadequate.

I think this particular exchange is not about SR/OOO/OOP or anything that has been discussed so far, it’s an old philosophical issue and this is why I think it is important to address as it seems to underlie
many of the disagreements. I’d like to begin with some very basic issues before going any further. You write:

“In my view this position undermines the possibility of any fallibilism so we’re left without the means of determining why we should choose one theory over another.”

This is important. Now just because a position undermines a certain possibility does not mean that it is wrong, just that it is inconvenient. I hope we agree on that. Therefore, say, if skepticism has a good argument, we cannot simply say that if we accept that argument we will be deprived of certain possibilities. I take your observation to mean more than just an expression of preference – if we cannot have an access to the world, we cannot have a true theory of it, because it’s neither true not false and cannot be shown to be
either true or false. I agree.

Now let’s slow down here a bit and see what’s going on. As you say, this is not a real point of disagreement, it’s just a statement and it has consequences. This is going to be very primitive not because I’m being condescending, but because I found of late that most of the disagreements seem to be about very small things we overlook because we think of ourselves (I mean myself primarily) as having long overcome these problems. It seems to me that you are affirming a kind of duality: there’s a level of the world and there’s a level of the mind (the theory of that world) – am I correct in reading you this way? An immanent “inside” and a transcendent “outside” – of course, as we both know from Descartes/Kant, we need a
“third” level, a point from which one can compare the two – the world and its theoretical description – and declare it to be adequate. Let’s reject Descartes’ solution and forget about God or anything that’s
truly “outside” and stick with Kantian types of solution that places that “third” on some transcendental level.

read on!

Actually, I don’t even want to name names here as it is bound to cause friction in terms of how we
read this or that philosopher. Let’s just say that there must be a third point from which we can compare the world and its theory – do we agree on this point? If we don’t, I’d like to hear your take on this.
If we do, then the obvious question is not that of realism/anti-realism, that is to say, not whether the world is out there and can/cannot be known, but whether if it is accessible, then what of it is accessible and how do we know that what we access is part of the world and not part of our own mind. That is to say, I’m
realist if realism is a simple postulation that the world is out there (barely anyone I know isn’t a realist in this sense). The issue at hand is the possibility of the only true theoretical representation of that world which I claim is impossible and you seem to claim is possible. Can we begin here for now?

Let’s me say a quick aside about epistemology/ontology. I think I see your point about collapsing the two, even though I don’t think I could ever be accused of doing it, but of course that’s my perspective. If I
understand the issue here, epistemology preceding ontology annoys you because of its certain counterfactual or counterintuitive move to ask questions of the conditions of possibility of something that seems to be very much there and possible. In a sense, it’s a stepping back from what we are doing while the task is precisely to stay in that what is being thought – stepping out, even if for a couple of epistemological
questions, ruins the effort. At this point, I’m willing to set the epistemological questions aside – that is to say, although my above observations seem to suggest that I’m interested in “knowing how you
know” if your theory corresponds to the real world, I’m asking the question not from a transcendental epistemological position (“let’s take a break and look into the knowing apparatus before we do
anything”), or some sort of methodological position, but from a simple procedural point of view. That is to say, I affirm that we never really are “outside” of anything, but are always “inside” both mind
and world, if you will (this, of course, makes any outside/inside distinction collapse, it’s all immanent).

If epistemological questions are preparatory questions, I’m willing to set them aside and affirm
that since we are already in the world and already have all sorts of theories about it, and we cannot leave it to ask epistemological questions (although we don’t necessarily have to, at least according
to Kant), we must proceed with questions of ontology. At least this is how I’m reading your complaints about epistemology/ontology. This is just as aside, if we disagree here as well, it might slow down the
discussion even more which is fine with me, I’m on Thanksgiving break.

I appreciate the effort Mikhail made in this email. I’m extremely tired as I only got two hours of sleep last night, so hopefully I’ll make some sense in my response.

I do not feel that I’ve ignored the basic issues as Mikhail suggests, but rather have carefully worked through these issues. Above Mikhail proposes a model of mind-world relations drawing on the spatial figures of the inside and the outside. His premise is that our minds are characterized by interiority or “inside-ness” and the world is outside. In my terminology, the mind is here treated as immediate, while our relationship to the world is mediated. Put differently, the relationship of mind to itself is here treated as immanent, while the world is treated as transcendent. From this it follows that we can only have access and certainty about our minds, never about the world. The question of knowledge becomes that of how we can get out of our “bubble”.

Much of my book, Difference and Givenness, is devoted to contesting this model of mind, though not in the way one might expect. This is particularly the case with chapter 7. My thesis is not that we have immediate access to the world, but rather that our access to ourselves is itself mediated. In other words, we no more have a direct relationship to our own minds than we have to the objects of the world. Put differently yet again, we are transcendent to ourselves. I won’t here rehearse all the arguments for this claim, but merely reiterate it to point out that I do not share the first premise Mikhail proposes.

If it is true that our relationship to ourselves is mediated or that we don’t have direct or incorrigible access to our own minds, it follows as a consequence that there is no reason to claim privileged access to our relationship to our own minds over our access to objects. In other words, the epistemological problem of access is not restricted to that of how we can have access to the world, but arises in exactly the same way with respect to the question of how we can have access to ourselves.

Mikhail seems to hold the view that I reject epistemology or do not raise epistemological questions. I do not think this is true. My thesis is rather different: we cannot have an adequate epistemology without making ontological considerations. Here my argument, following Bhaskar, is transcendental and is driven by an examination of the actual practices involved in knowing the world. Following good Kantian transcendental methodology, the question here is “what must the world be like for knowledge to be possible?” The question here is a transcendental question insofar as it seeks after conditions that would render our knowledge praxis intelligible. However, it differs from Kant’s transcendental idealism in that where Kant asks “what must our minds be like for synthetic a priori propositions to be possible”, this position asks what the world must be like for knowledge to be possible. In other words, it is a question about ontology, not our minds. The thesis is that an adequate epistemology requires an answer to certain ontological questions.

Like Kant’s transcendental arguments, it begins from the premise that we do have knowledge of certain things in the world and independent of mind. For Kant it was an uncontroversial fact that mathematics and Newtonian physics are instances of knowledge. The question then became that of determining what mind must be like for this form of knowledge to be possible. It differs from Kant in that it asks what the world must be like for this knowledge to be possible. In the domain of the sciences, a question closely related to this is the question of why the practice of experimentation in the sciences is necessary.

Now the move I am making, following Bhaskar (wish I could claim credit for these arguments), is controversial so it requires some justification. We are entitled to ask “Why is it necessary to make this move through ontology to answer the knowledge question of epistemology? Doesn’t this simply beg the question by claiming to know before we’ve answered the epistemological question?”

Here is the reason why I believe this move is justified. In outlining certain points about Kant and Hume I am not trying to patronize Mikhail or suggest he is unfamiliar with these things, but to trace out the line of thought. It is necessary to backtrack a bit through the history of philosophy to see the problem. Hume tried to reduce questions of being to questions of sensation or experience. Everything had to be traced back to experience. For Hume causality is just a constant conjunction of sensations. Kant shared Hume’s premise that there is no knowledge apart from sensibility, but noted that sensibility alone could never give us the idea of necessity. Paraphrasing Kant’s famous statement, “while it is true that all knowledge begins with experience, and that knowledge is impossible apart from experience, it does not follow that all knowledge arises from experience.” If we want to understand why experience or sensation alone is inadequate for grounding the relations of necessity asserted in causal judgments, we need only look at the logic of the lower portion of Aristotle’s square of opposition. Quite frankly I’m shocked that it took nearly two thousand years after Aristotle developed the square of opposition for philosophy to arrive at Hume’s skeptical conclusions.

From the observation that sensation alone cannot ground relations of necessity in causality, and that experience is all we have to go on, he inferred that the idea of necessity comes not from sensibility but is contributed by mind. Like Hume, Kant holds that causality is a constant conjunction of sensations. Unlike Hume, he argues that minds contributes the category of causal necessity that links these sensations. The thesis that judgments of causality are judgments about the constant conjunction of sensations is positivism.

Here’s the problem: The concept of causality and knowledge producing practices become incoherent if causality is understood as a constant conjunction of sensations. This for three main reasons:

First, outside of astronomy we very seldom encounter a constant conjunction of sense-events, yet we still hold that causal relations are functioning in the world unobserved. Sex, for example, doesn’t inevitably lead to conception, but without sex (setting aside artificial insemination) conception cannot take place. Antibiotics don’t inevitably get rid of an infection, but we still hold that antibiotics have the power to kill infections. If we take seriously the thesis that causal claims are constant conjunctions of sense-events we would be forced to reject the thesis that sex, antibiotics, and many things besides have causal powers.

Second, many events are constantly conjoined in experience, but we hold that they do not possess a causal relation to one another. I get up before the sun rises and make a cup of coffee for myself. The sun then rises. Why am I not led to the conclusion that making coffee causes the sun to rise? It might be argued that I do not assert a causal relation here “because there have been occasions where you haven’t made coffee before the sun rises, yet the sun still rose.” However, returning to our first problem with positivism or the thesis that causality is a constant conjunction of sense-events, we see this doesn’t work. Why? Because the failure of a consequent to occur after the antecedent occurs is not grounds for rejecting a causal relation. The antibiotic is taken (antecedent) and the sickness does not go away. Yet we do not, on these grounds, arrive at the conclusion that there is no relation between the antecedent and the consequent. In short, the positivist theory of causal relations doesn’t allow us to distinguish genuinely related sense-events from unrelated conjunctions of sense-events. This is true even under the Kantian model.

Third, the thesis that causal statements are simply constant conjunctions of sensations does not explain why scientific experimentation is necessary. If causality is a constant conjunction of sensations then the idea of engaging in experiments in a controlled and isolated setting makes little or no sense. What would be gained from such a strange activity?

Bhaskar’s thesis is that the problem with the empiricist thesis is that it conflates causality with sense-experience, when in fact, the two are very different things. Recall the first argument: it is possible for antecedents to occur without the consequent occurring, yet for there to still be a causal relationship between the two terms. What is being said here? In our practice we are saying that the causal mechanism is independent of 1) whether or not we experience its consequent, and 2) whether or not the consequent takes place as an event in nature.

In other words, we have three terms: The causal mechanism, natural events that may or may not be experienced by anyone, and experiences. The sense-data empiricist tries to collapse the first two into the third. The problem is that if we do this we are unable to explain 1) how it is possible for something to exercise its causal powers without producing the accompanying natural event, and 2) how it is possible for something to exercise its causal powers without us experiencing it. In other words, this model, according to Bhaskar, fails to distinguish the real, the actual, and the empirical, instead trying to collapse the other two into the third.

Here we can finally return to the question “why is scientific experimentation necessary?” Bhaskar’s answer to this question spins on a distinction between open and closed systems. According to Bhaskar, if it is possible for 1) an antecedent to be triggered without being actualized in a natural event, or 2) an antecedent to be actualized in experience without producing the consequent event, then this is because most causal mechanisms function in open systems where other causal factors intervene, overdetermining the event. As a result, the other causal factors prevent the causal mechanism from actualizing itself in a natural event or an experience for an observer. This is the reason, contends Bhaskar, that it is necessary to engage in experimental activity. Experiment creates a closed, artificial system allowing the inquirer to trigger the causal mechanism to determine what consequent it produces without the intervention of other causal mechanisms.

So returning to Bhaskar’s question “what must the world be like for knowledge to be possible?” we now have a thumbnail sketch of an answer to this question. First, it is necessary to distinguish between the real, the actual, and the sensed. Second, it is necessary to distinguish between causal mechanisms, natural events, and sense-events. Third it is necessary to distinguish between open and closed systems. The ontological dimension of Bhaskar’s epistemological problem lies in the transcendental claim that the condition under which science is possible is the existence of causal mechanisms that can function or act without producing a corresponding natural event or consequent. It is only on these grounds, argues Bhaskar, that 1) our engagement in scientific experimentation, and 2) our claim that certain entities like antibiotics have causal powers even when they fail to successfully cure illness are intelligible or coherent. Experiment creates a controlled and isolated environment in which causal mechanisms can be triggered without the interference of other causal mechanisms. When or if these mechanisms are found they are then accorded the status of “transfactuality”, which is to say they are treated as functioning in the ordinary world of open systems even when they do not actualize themselves in an event.

These are specifically ontological claims about the nature of the world, not epistemological claims about how we come to know the world. Without these ontological claims, argues Bhaskar, we can’t render our epistemology intelligible.

Before wrapping this up there are two crucial points to be made:

First, the ontological claim that causal mechanisms exist and that it is possible for causal mechanisms to act without being actualized in a natural event makes no claim as to what causal mechanisms exist. In addition to the existence of these causal mechanisms, Bhaskar argues that these mechanisms must be differentiated, structured, and stratefied (more on that another time). Finally, he argues (and this gives Harman fits because he’s an actualist, I’m not sure where I shake down on this issue though I tend towards potentialism) that these causal mechanisms must have powers (capacities, “able-to-do’s”) that can go unactualized. The discovery of what causal mechanisms exist, their differentiation, their structure, and their stratification is the responsibility not of philosophy, but of actual experimental inquiry. All the transcendental argument purports to demonstrate is that causal mechanisms exist (because knowledge exists) and that these causal mechanisms are mind-independent and continue to function regardless of whether any human perceives them.

Second, within the domain of experimental inquiry the claim that such and such an entity is a causal mechanism is not infallible. It can turn out that subsequent inquiry shows that such and such a claim that “x is a causal mechanism” was, in fact, mistaken. All the transcendental realist is committed to is that causal mechanisms exist and can function without being actualized in natural events. He is not committed to the claim that specific knowledge-claims about causal mechanisms are infallible or that we have direct access to these mechanisms. Getting at the causal mechanisms is, for Bhaskar, hard work. It requires the laborious construction of closed systems that allow for the causal mechanism to be triggered, producing both a natural event and a sensible event independent of intervening causal mechanisms in open systems where the contribution of the causal mechanism being sought is ordinary disguised or mute in its functioning.

Here I think we get at one of the central failings of traditional epistemologies. For whatever reason they begin from the premise of a passive observer that simply has sensations that it links in some way or another. What is missing in this intellectualist model of knowledge acquisition is the work it takes to produce salient experience. Basically, what is missed is the crucial role that the fact that we are embodied (and therefore ourselves causal agents), that we act on the world, that we use instruments to trigger these mechanisms, and that we carefully build closed systems to trigger events. But here’s the central point: We strive to create closed systems that allow us to trigger the causal mechanisms we’re searching for, but no system is entirely closed and subsequent experimental inquiry might reveal that there were intervening causal mechanisms that led us to misinterpret the triggers. In other words, Bhaskar’s position is fallibilist, allowing for the possibility of error.

Alright, that’s enough for now. What do you all think? I’m still working through Bhaskar’s arguments myself, but I confess I find them deeply appealing and convincing.

Difficulty sleeping again tonight despite being exhausted. In my half-wakeful fog I came across this link discussing Speculative Realism in my dashboard. It has been interesting watching how discussions of SR and OOO have developed in the last year. As I recall, and I’m paraphrasing here, somewhere Žižek says that first new ideas are rejected as nonsense and gimmicks, then they are taken seriously and engaged at the critical level, and finally it is declared that they were always obvious and that this is what the tradition was saying all along. Of course, this final stage is a sort of transcendental illusion produced by the fact that the tradition is like a hologram that appears differently depending on the frame through which it is viewed, coupled with the fact that antecedents, analogies, and parallels can always be found between the present and the past. And finally, of course, no philosophical thought occurs in a vacuum, but rather all thinkers draw on the tradition and other influences. The reduction to the obvious and what’s been said all along is the ignoble fate that all new forms of thought must suffer, but at least the concepts get through and modify that tradition.

Among the most vocal critics of SR and OOO here in the blogosphere, I’ve noticed that they haven’t actually read the actual works of the actual participants at the Goldsmith’s conference or that they have read very little of these works. This is sometimes explicitly stated and at other times implicit in the charges being made. At the very least, had these works actually been read it would put an end to the question “but what is SR!” as it would become clear that SR is a genus with different species where those different species are fighting philosophical battles amongst themselves tooth and nail, like categories of Rationalism, Empiricism, and German Idealism where you had tooth and nail battles between Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, and Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, and Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel respectively. I’m not quite sure why this is such a difficult point to get. Nor am I sure how it is possible to make the charge that there are not arguments for the various positions when the actual works have not been read. It seems that philosophers who previously understood that you first have to read works before critiquing them and that you first have to understand the concepts proposed by a philosophy before rejecting them have decided to rely on ordinary language connotations of terms and received conceptions of tradition inherited from a training dominated by anti-realism, to understand a position.

But this is not what I find most interesting about these very vocal critics (VVC’s). What I find most interesting, and I confess gratifying, is the odd obsession with SR and OOO among these vocal critics. On certain blogs we encounter post after post devoted to OOO. Often these posts have between thirty and one hundred comments! Moreover, throughout the theory blogosphere these critics reiterate their charges against, primarily, OOO: “It’s a gimmick!” “It’s all advertising!” (some might call “advertising” argument and the attempt to persuade others, but never mind). “It’s shameless self-promotion!” “It mirrors the inflation of capitalism!” (a personal favorite of mine as the thought is never entertained that perhaps the positions are articulating the right thing at the right time in our historical moment or, as Lacan would say, “hitting the real”). “It’s neoliberal ideology that mirrors the expansion of capitalism!” (I’m interested in how this radical theorist proposes to bring about his social revolution without getting others on board with his political vision). “It hates humans!” (nevermind that perhaps OOO holds that we must discuss the nonhuman to properly address the problems of the social, political, and the human). “It wants to psychoanalyze hummus!” (that was a really good one. apparently the author didn’t get the memo that objects are different, have different structures and properties, and must be related to in different ways). “It’s incoherent and makes no sense!” “It’s hardly worth our time!” “It’s all just poetry and metaphor!” The thing that tickles my funny bone about the VVC’s is that they seem to be against things on general principle: “I don’t know what it is, but damn it, it’s new fangled and I don’t like it! Gimme my old silent films any day! Talkies just can’t capture that level of meaning or expressiveness, that level of art! Society is collapsing, I tell you!” (shakes cane).

read on!

What is interesting here is the amount of time and emotional energy invested in something that suffers from all these flaws, that is incoherent, that is irrelevant, and that has nothing of interest to say. Now that is remarkable! One would think that were a school of philosophy to possess these characteristics folks wouldn’t waste their time writing so much about it and obsessing about the figures involved in that movement. After all, we don’t sit around writing post after post and comment after comment about astrology and faith healing; but to listen to these VVC’s, OOO and SR is the equivalent of faith healing and astrology. Curious. One would expect silence were a philosophy truly a crackpot body of thought.

If I’m gratified by this, then this is because at least OOO and SR is defining the terms of debate. Here I confess I’m indebted to Erving Goffman’s theory of framing. By all lights it appears that OOO and SR are framing the debates. And as I reckon, if SR and OOO are framing the debates, even when our claims are not endorsed we still prevail because we’re defining the terms or coordinates of the discussion rather than being defined by the frames of our VVC’s. As Deleuze might have put it in Nietzsche & Philosophy, the VVC’s become mere epiphenomena, or negative reflections of affirmative differences. And as a result of framing the debate the concepts and categories seep in regardless, even if the labels aren’t endorsed. In other words, those that frame the debate are the active forces the define the field. And, along Marxist lines, the affirmative differences are the motor of history.

All of this reminds me of my first encounters with Derrida at The Ohio State University as an undergrad. Ohio State, of course, is Anglo-American in its dominant philosophical orientation with a strong history of philosophy program. Suddenly “Derrida” was on everyone’s lips. No one had actually read Derrida, but nonetheless Derrida was the threat that had to be responded to. Like a black hole or a strange attractor, Derrida’s radical anti-realism had become The Danger(tm). Eventually folks began to read Derrida and he both became the darling of the theory community and people said “oh, that’s all he was saying?” Prior to that, however, Derrida was a four letter word, a noun rather than a proper name, that functioned as the worst thing a person could be. Imagine the ire when Davidson, Quine, and Derrida were compared favorably with one another as having a number of overlaps! How dare they! What folly is this!

In the meantime, the second stage in the third stage of new emerging philosophical movements has begun to emerge as well. Here we see claims like “but the German Idealists were claiming this all along!” Didn’t Kripke already develop this? Wasn’t Whitehead already saying these things (another clear indication of not reading the relevant works)? And so on. Where it occurs I take that as a good sign as it is indicative of familiar hermeneutic horizons with something unfamiliar.

Who knows, perhaps at some point we’ll actually reach the second stage of new ideas in this discussion, where folks actually decided to read the relevant works, practice their fine hermeneutic skills borne of years of training in the art of commentary, and actually begin to accurately represent concepts, positions, and above all, arguments, as well as the normative issues that motivate these recent trends in philosophy. That will be a welcome day. I don’t know that SR and OOO will ever become positions that pass to the stage of “obviousness”, where people say “everyone knew these things all along!”, but the trendlines of the discussions so far are at least hopeful. If the VVC’s don’t come to accept these positions, certainly their heated rhetoric will attract the attention of enough theorists and graduate students who get curious enough to dig into what all the scandal is about. So thank you VVC’s!