In response to The Politics of Epistemology, Evan remarks,

Very interesting. On the point of bringing up “Circulating Reference,” (which I have not had the pleasure to read) I was wondering if you might say more on how there comes about “really great stuff that is both realist and constructivist.” I’m working on a project that has to do with constructivism from a Hegelian perspective, but obviously, that, in some way shape or form, is going to involve absolute idealist constructivist.

Before proceeding to respond to this question, it is first necessary to forestall any confusion surrounding the term “construction” as used by thinkers like Latour, Stengers, Oyama, and Deleuze. Within our current theoretical climate the first thing that tends to come to mind when we hear the term “constructivism” is social constructivism. To say that something is constructed, in this theoretical framework, is to deny its reality, treating it as made up not of real things, but of social phenomena like language, power, signs (under an anthropocentric construal), or social forces. For example, if we say that gender is “constructed”, this generally signifies that gender is not natural. The “natural” here refers to the innate, inborn, or essential, as opposed to the acquired, learned, and artificial.

When Latour, Stengers, Oyama, and Deleuze refer to “constructivism”, they are not referring to constructivism in this sense. If this is the case, then it is above all because they reject the nature/society distinction that underlies this way of talking about the world. If, for example, Latour is led to replace the word “society” with “collectivity” and define sociology as the “study of associations”, then this is because Latour thinks it is impossible to draw a clean distinction between the social and the natural. Nonhuman actors always belong to human associations, and human associations would be impossible without these actors. On these grounds it is impossible to draw a clean distinction between a social on the one hand that would be exclusively composed of the human and human phenomena, and the natural on the other hand that would be purely natural and without any human admixture. The human is always bound up with these non-human actors.

read on!

Consequently, when Latour, Deleuze, and Stengers refer to “construction”, they are referring to how collectives of nonhuman and nonhuman actors and human actors and nonhuman actors are assembled. Here we are unable to draw a distinction between the artificial and the natural as the natural is no longer understood as the inborn and innate. Plutonium is constructed in the sense that it nowhere appears in nature of its own accord but rather has to be put together in the laboratory, but it is nonetheless entirely real. Plutonium is not a mere ephemeral simulacrum consisting of signs and signifiers, but it is also not something that occurs in nature independent of human intervention and activities. It is a construction laboriously put together under certain conditions.

At the beginning of Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari argue that the unconscious is not a theatre, but rather a factory.

The fact is, from the mmoment that we are placed within the framework of Oedipus– from the mmoment that we are measured in terms of Oedipus –the cards are stacked against us, and the only real relationship, that of production, has been done away with. The great discovery of psychoanalysis was that of the production of desire, of the productions of the unconscious. But once Oedipus entered the picture, this discovery was soon buried beneath a new brand of idealism: a classical theatre was substituted for the units of production of the unconscious; and an unconscious that was capable of nothing but expressing itself– in myth, tragedy, dreams –was substituted for the productive unconscious. (24)

Under the model of the unconscious as a theatre all elements of the unconscious become masked representations of something else. “That despotic man in your dream is your father, the woman laying on her back with her legs spread, your mother.” Everything becomes a matter of disguised mimesis, where all products of the unconscious are understood in terms of displaced and condensed resemblances to this “ur-drama” that is played out infinitely in the life of a subject. By contrast, where the unconscious is understood in terms of production, it can no longer be said that the productions of the unconscious are copies of some primordial ur-drama, but rather they are genuine creations that have no ultimate referent or ground.

In the domain of philosophical epistemology it could be said that questions of knowledge have been dominated by a similar model of knowledge as a representational theatre. As Latour writes at the end of “Circulating Reference”,

This whole tired question of the correspondence between words and world stems from a simple confusion between epistemology and the history of art. We have taken science for realist painting, imagining that it is made an exact copy of the world. The sciences do something else entirely– paintings too for that matter. Through successive stages they ling us to an aligned, transformed, constructed world. We forfeit resemblances, in this model, but there is compensation: by pointing with our index fingers to features of an entry printed in an atlas, we can, through a series of uniformly discontinuous transformations, link ourselves to Boa Vista. (78 – 9)

Philosophical epistemology begins from a stark opposition between words (or, alternatively mental representations) on the one hand, and world, on the other hand. Like the King’s soldiers, it then wonders how it is possible to put these two sundered halves together again. It is not difficult to see how it might be possible to cook up a theory of reference for propositions such as “the cat is on the mat”, but what could adequation between word and “thing” possibly mean for propositions like “the savanna is advancing on the jungle” or “the jungle is advancing on the Savannah”? What would a mental representation or mimesis between idea and world be in such a case? What are the inscrutable markers we find in our mental representation that establish such a correspondence? What resemblance is there between this proposition or statement and the world that it depicts? Posed in this way the question seems irresolvable as we either remain a “mind-in-a-vat” with no access to anything save our own mental representations (and therefore without the means of distinguishing the marks of the true from the false in our representations), or, equivalently, a “speaker-in-a-vat” with no means of distinguishing the marks that distinguish the true and the false in our propositions.

The whole problem, Latour contends, lies in the fact that philosophers always begin too late. Hegel famously proclaimed that the Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk. By this Hegel meant that philosophical knowledge only occurs after a process has completed itself. In a sense very different from that intended by Hegel, we might say that this is the cardinal transcendental illusion haunting philosophical epistemology. Philosophy always begins with an exemplar of what counts as knowledge. Here I am not referring to philosophy’s theory of knowledge, but rather as its privileged example of what counts as genuine knowledge: Geometry for Plato, Euclid’s Elements and Newton’s Principia for Kant, mathematics for Descartes, etc. As Laruelle might say, this examplar constitutes the empirical “datum” upon which philosophical epistemology leans in the development of its theory of knowledge. “Given that Newtonian mechanics is uncontroversially true, what must be the nature of knowledge such that we are able to know this is a true representation of reality?”

The entire problem emerges because philosophy begins with its “knowledge-datum” as it appears at dusk, but does so without being aware that it is doing so. In other words, beginning with the product of knowledge labor as inscribed in a text such as the Principia or the Elements, philosophy then proceeds to inquire into how the propositions that compose this product resemble or mimic true reality such that they are adequate to that reality. As a result it finds itself plunged into irresolvable difficulties because, of course, reality shares no resemblance to either these mental representations or these propositions. In other words, when conceiving knowledge as a mimetic adequation between mind and world, word and world, we very quickly encounter an unsurpassable gap between the two. What possible resemblance is there between a chemical equation and the transformation that takes place in a beaker in the laboratory? The two could not be more unlike.

Latour’s modest and admirably naive proposal is for us to follow the practice of the scientist in the laboratory. Reference, contends Latour, is not a memesis or adequatio between word and thing, but rather “…the quality of the chain of transformation [and] the viability of its circulation” (310). In order to illustrate this thesis, Latour follows the laboratory work of four scientists in Boa Vista consisting of two pedologists (scientists who study subsoil), a geographer, and a botanist. Their laboratory is not a white sanitary room filled with instruments, but rather the savanna and the jungle itself.

The question they are attempting to resolve is that of whether or not the savanna is advancing on the jungle or whether the jungle is advancing on the savanna. Because there are disciplinary differences between the scientists, this question does not admit of straightforward resolution. The botonist notes the strange presence of certain trees inside the forest that botany has learned only grow on the savanna. This indicates that the forest is advancing and engulfing these trees. However, the pedologists believe that this cannot be the case as one of the central truths of pedology is that soil goes from clay to sand, not sand to clay. In order for the forest to be advancing it would be necessary for sandy soil (savanna) to be transformed into clay (forest), but that violates the known laws of pedology. How is the issue to be resolved? What adequation will decide this issue? “[H]ow do we pack the world into words?”

I cannot give a detailed discussion of Latour’s fifty page photo-account of the activity of these four scientists in resolving this issue (I strongly recommend reading the essay), so I will attempt to gesture at what Latour has in mind by “circulating reference” and his thesis that reference is not an act of memesis. When Latour describes reference not as an adequation or a resemblance between word and thing but as a series of transformations [in my language "translations"], he is referring to the manner in which facts must be constructed in order to become capable of speaking. One cannot simply begin by gazing at the forest and the savanna in order to decide these issues, for the forest and the savanna containing a bewildering array of differences that exceed the powers of human cognition and memory, and because while, ontologically, all these differences make a difference, not all of these differences are relevant to the issue at hand. One of the key epistemological issues then consists of the problem of how to localize those differences that make a difference with respect to the question or problem at hand.

As a consequence, it is necessary to prepare the object studied so that certain differences might come into relief. For the scientists this begins with the study of satellite maps and maps made previously by the botanist in the group to determine the “lay of the land”. Out in the field or the actual laboratory site where the savanna and the forest meet, the scientists divide up the region with graphs and mark the trees with numbered metal tags. In this way it becomes possible to accurately measure the movement of the forest and the savanna with respect to one another, a task that would be otherwise impossible without such technologies. Soil and plant samples are taken from the region, their locations carefully recorded and these samples carefully preserved. This decontextualization allows for an entirely new approach to these entities. Where their contextualization in the forest and savanna reveals little information, their dislocation from their context now allows the scientists to become “Levi-Straussian” back at their laboratory, shifting the various plant samples about, for example, in a combinatorial not unlike those used by Levi-Strauss in the study of myth, discovering isomorphisms, analogies, and relations that would have been invisible in the forest itself. The soil samples are not themselves raw data, but are compared against color cards conventionally used throughout the scientific world as well as the world of interior design. This allows the differences in soil color, often very difficult to register by the naked eye, to be assigned a numerical value that is revelatory of other properties contained in the soil. These numerical values can, in turn, reveal patterns when placed on a table or in a diagram. A similar process takes place in testing the consistency of the soil– is it more like clay or sand in this particular region –that is far more qualitative in character. Likewise, the soil samples are sent off to labs where their mineral and organic content is examined.

This “gridding” of the forest and the savanna, coupled with the assignment of numerical values to the plant, geographical, and soil samples now allows for yet another translation or transformation. Our first transformation was that of the bewildering differential complexity of the forest and savanna in space and time, to the coordinate grids that both striate the area into a Cartesian coordinate system through which change can be plotted and the assignment of numerical values or names to the different fauna and soils. This “data” is now transformed into charts, diagrams, and tables. From these charts, diagrams, and tables patterns can be inferred which lead to yet another transformation into the commentary that accompanies the data in the published articles and theses. The results are surprising. It appears that, contrary to the assumptions of the pedologists, the forest is indeed advancing on the savanna. Sand is being transformed into clay. But how is this possible given the pedological truth that we always move from clay to sand, not sand to clay? The early findings suggest that biological factors in the form of worms and microbacteria play a key role in the production of soil. The worms are creating clay that allow for the advance of the forest. Pedology is potentially transformed by this encounter with a remote bit of forest and savanna in the Amazon.

What establishes the possibility of reference, then, is not a resemblance between the proposition and the forest-savanna, not an isomorphism between word and thing, but a series of transformations or translations between the final propositions and the forest-savanna upon which one can circulate back and forth from final propositions to initial research and back again. There is no resemblance between each ordered transformation and that which it transforms, but we can pass from one stage of the transformation to the next… Especially since the data is carefully preserved at each stage. As Latour remarks,

The philosophy of language makes it seem as if there exist two distjointed spheres separated by a unique and radical gap that must be reduced through the search for correspondence, for reference, between words and world. While following the expedition to Boa Vista, I arrived at a quite different solution. Knowledge, it seems, does not reside in the face-to-face confrontation of a mind with an object, any more than reference designates a thing by means of a sentence verified by that thing. On the contrary, at every stage we have recognized a common operator, which belongs to matter at one end, to form at the other, and which is separated from the stage that follows it by a gap that no resemblance could fill. The operators are linked in a series that passes across the difference between things and words, and that redistributes these two obsolete fixtures of the philosophy of language: the earth becomes a cardboard cube, words become paper, colors become numbers and so forth.

An essential property of this chain is that it must remain reversible. The succession of stages must be traceable, allowing for travel in both directions. If the chain is interrupted at any point, it ceases to transport truth– ceases, that is, to reproduce, to construct, to trace, and to conduct it. The word “reference” designates the quality of the chain int is entirety, and no longer adequatio rei et intellectus. Truth-value circulates here like electricity through a wire, so long as this circuit is not interrupted. (69)

A key point not to be missed is that the equation of philosophical epistemology– “mind representing world” –is woefully inadequate to describe the production of this chain of reference. Rather, what we instead encounter is a whole series of mobilized actors ranging from the scientists themselves to the forest and the savanna to the string and metal tags used to grid the region to the color cards against which the soil is compared to the numbers assigned to the plant and soil samples to the satellites used to image the region to the diagrams and paper upon which the “data” are organized, and so on. At any point in this series of translations or tranformations something can fail or go wrong, impeding the circulation of reference from one translation to another. Truth is produced in a factory, but certainly not a factory in which humans impress form on poor passive matter as an absolute sovereign might issue orders. Were this the case, how could the worms and microbacteria so surprise the botanists and pedologists? Rather, the factory of truth is a factory where human and non-human actors alike conspire, form alliances, struggle with one another, and all the rest. These facts are certainly constructed– what else could be the case given the formation of the grids, the assignment of numbers, the compilation of tables and all the rest –but they are no less real for all that. Let us not begin with the product in our epistemological questions, but with the process through which that product is produced. Perhaps in this way we might learn to ask more interesting and timely questions, not to mention more relevant questions where philosophy might actually have something to offer the world.

I never expected to wake up to this this morning. Read through the entire post to get to the bits about Larval Subjects.

In response to my post on Object-Oriented Realism, the always interesting Nikki of prosthetics writes,

so nicely laid out, levi, from the positivist accusation onward. in response i have a very naive question, but one that i can’t wrap my head around with OOP, perhaps you have spelled this out elsewhere and if so, just let me know where and i’ll read it… so this issue is this: object-oriented philosophy, in its terminology as well as in its moves, seems to imply a subject oriented toward objects/object relations. yet i know it is precisely subjectivity that is (thankfully) under reconfiguration in OOP. yet even if/as we follow latour in the practice of actor-network tracing, there is always a sociologist behind the pen, behind the keyboard. the objects and object networks being traced are traced not from a place of removal but from one of the actors (as latour does clarify)… and it seems to me that this still leaves OOP mired in subject as ground. is this a fair reading of what is operative, have you answered this endlessly elsewhere? any and either way, looking forward to your response…

Rather that providing an answer to this question, perhaps the better move is to call into question the question itself. If I understand the issue Nikki is raising properly, then the question is that of how it is possible to have an object-oriented realism when, as in the example of the sociologist, it is nonetheless the sociologist that is tracing all these associations or relations among nonhuman objects. The problem then becomes that talk of objects ends up seeming ineradicably subjective.

In his charming essay “Do You Believe in Reality?” in Pandora’s Hope, Latour recounts an encounter with a Brazilian scientist who posed a similar question to him at a private lunch. Voice quivering and hushed, the scientist asked “do you believe in reality?” Latour was flummoxed with the question in that it had never occurred to him that reality was something a person might not believe in, but also because, as he and his science studies colleagues understood it, the entire accomplishment of their research was to account for the realism of the sciences.

read on!

While unapologetically affirming his realism in this essay, Latour’s strategy in responding to the troubled scientist is not to explain how we can have access to reality, but rather to analyze how we reached a point where it became possible to even ask this sort of question. In other words, what framework of thought allows such a question to be posed? Latour’s strategy, in short, is to investigate what sort of desire might motivate the epistemological question. What is it that leads philosophers to raise questions of knowledge? After all, in our day to day lives, both in the laboratory and in our ordinary dealings with the world, we seem to get along just fine without sophisticated epistemologies. Lest I be misunderstood, when I suggest that the laboratory scientist gets by just fine without a sophisticated epistemology, the emphasis here is on the word sophisticated. To be sure, the laboratory scientist raises all sorts of issues about the reliability of data, bias, double blind testing, etc., etc., etc.

Yet what we don’t find among the laboratory scientists is a pervasive anxiety that their mind might be thoroughly separated from the world. We do, however, find this pervasive anxiety among philosophers. Whether this anxiety be of the Cartesian “mind-in-a-vat” sort or the more contemporary worries that we might be so thoroughly trapped in language or history that never the world will we touch, this sort of fear and concern seems omnipresent in philosophy. How did we get to this place? After all, when someone in day to day life presents a bum argument or observation, we seem to do just fine in showing that the evidence doesn’t support this particular conclusion or correcting ourselves, yet in philosophy fear of error becomes so inflated that we seem to think that it calls into question the entire world. This is all very odd.

Given that rough and ready epistemology seems to do the job, we can ask what motive lies behind the hyper-epistemologies we find in philosophy. What is it that philosophers are looking for in their epistemological inquiries and why do they get so worked up about these particular questions? Latour traces the epistemological fetish back to Plato’s allegory of the cave and reads the history of philosophical epistemology as a series of variations on these theme and the desires that lie behind it. Far from being an innocent and simple question about how it is possible for mind to have a true representation of the world, Latour instead sees philosophical epistemology as deeply bound up in issues of a political nature.

We are all familiar with Plato’s allegory of the cave. On the one hand we have the prisoners who have been trapped in the cave shadows for their entire existence. The pass their days watching images appear and disappear on the cave wall and debating amongst one another as to which image will appear next. At one point, one of the prisoners escapes, ascends out of the cave, witnesses true reality, and returns to inform the unruly mob (the demos) of the truth that he now possesses. Of course, this philosopher-scientist should rule because he and he alone has possession of the unassailable truth… Of that truth that silences all debate.

In the allegory of the cave Latour discerns a philosophical horror of the unruly mob and a desire to find an unassailable point of purchase that would silence the endless debates of this unruly mob. Thus, on the one hand, you have the social (the unruly mob) that is the source of all confusion and falsehood, and on the other hand you have the world of truth that has the power to silence all dispute and debate. Like a Daimon, the philosopher-scientist has the unique power of traveling between these two world, the world of the social that endlessly speaks without ever producing any truth and the world of the truth that never speaks but is the source of all that is true.

The project of philosophical epistemology is then a purification of this second world from the first, maintaining it in its unassailable muteness, so that there might be something that always possesses the power of silencing the unruly mob. This, Latour thinks, is the real desire behind the philosophical quest for certainty, the project of critique, and the question of knowledge. First, the world of truth must be carefully purified and separated from corruption by the social. Second, it is necessary to maintain some point of leverage from which the unruly mob can always be silenced. These two aims are accomplished through a careful purification of the two worlds– the social world and the true world –so that they never touch one another. It is for this reason that we arrive at a picture of the real as a transcendent beyond– as in the case of Meillassoux’s model of the real as that which is anterior and beyond –that is thoroughly separated from anything mental or social. The philosopher-scientist is then that Daimon that has the power to make the mute truth speak and that can travel between the two worlds. In Descartes, this two world model takes the form of a world defined purely by its mathematical structure and a subject reduced to the pure gaze without knowing whether any of its perceptual data are veridical. Of course, when pitched in these terms the problem of knowledge is impossible to resolve without “skyhooks” (Descartes’ God as guarantor of rational truth, for example) as we are so thoroughly separated from true reality for fear that we would contaminate the true world where alone resides the power of silencing the rabble.

Latour’s strategy lies in affirming the rights of the unruly mob or the rabble. Where philosophical epistemology strives to purify the two worlds so that the world of truth might avoid any and all contamination from the social, instead Latour plunges us into the social world of associations. However, this collective is not a collective composed of only human actors and their debates, but rather is a collective composed of assocations of nonhumans with nonhumans and nonhumans with humans. The only form of association that is precluded is the exclusive association of humans with humans. In other words, all human associations are already plunged into endless relations with nonhumans and these relations are necessary for any human relations whatsoever. It is through these endless debates among actors forming collectives– and actors are always both human and nonhuman –that truth comes to be produced. Where philosophical epistemology dreams of a silver bullet that would silence all debate, the object-oriented realist wants to increase the number of debates and uncertainties. Where philosophical epistemology wants to purify the two worlds of one another, formulating either a pure social world or a pure objective world, object-oriented ontology wants to multiply relations and assocations among human and nonhuman actors. Where philosophical epistemology aims at absolute certainty, object-oriented ontology argues for local certainties and the multiplication of uncertainties.

However, perhaps the most important point is that we are always-already among things or objects in such a way that there can be no question of mind, language, the social, or the cultural somehow forming a shadow world that shares no relationship to the world. Yes, indeed the sociologist traces all sorts of associations between nonhuman and human actors in his investigations, but if he is not a sociologist that spends all his time in his office he finds that the actors he traces always have their say in matters as well. The square peg won’t fit in the round hole, and in our engagement with nonhuman and human actors other than ourselves, we find that while we would often like to present hegemonic theories that would place everything in square holes the pegs whether human or nonhuman often have their own say in these matters. I think this marks a significant difference between ontology and epistemology as understood by Object-Oriented Realism. Ontologically we can make all sorts of claims about what must be true of objects in principle regardless of whether humans are related to them. Epistemologically, however, OOP, I think, advocates a rather pragmatic epistemology that recognizes that our knowledge of particular things is hard-won and always partial, and that there are many things that are completely impossible for us to know. Probably a disappointing answer, but hopefully a start. I need to develop more about the nature of collectives with regard to these issues.

Adam Miller, author of Badiou, Marion, and Saint Paul: Immanent Grace, has been developing an account of grace within the framework of Badiou and Jean-Luc Marion. More recently he has been situating his account in terms of some of my own work and the work of Latour. One of the things I find particularly interesting about his project is that he argues that this account of grace holds regardless of whether one holds a theistic conception of God and even if one is an atheist. Read more over at The Church and Postmodern Culture here, here, here, and here.

Aching teeth, constant sneezing. Throat ragged and sore. Coughing. Headache. Underwater ears and a bulbous head perhaps ready to burst and spill forth popcorn. Skin raked over by steel wool. Swollen eyes. A sense of the surreal, with all stimuli seeming strangely nightmarish and exaggerated. A futile cry of rage: “damn you microbes!” Hopefully it’s just allergies.

I have really enjoyed the appearance of media and technology studies folk, psychologists, sociologists, ecologists, critical animal studies theorists, anthropologists, rhetoricians, and all the rest as discussions surrounding Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology have intensified online in the last few months. I think this suggests that there is something highly productive in Object-Oriented approaches for these other lines of inquiry. Given that I think one of the roles of philosophy is to think the present or to provide conceptual tools that help us to better think the present and comprehend our time, I find this to be a heartening sign. Responding to remarks I made in another post, Scu of the blog criticalanimalstudies writes:

It seems to me this rejection of anthropocentrism is also the starting point for critical animal studies (And I should add I find Bryant’s formulation elegant. Philosophy can always use more elegant formulations.), even if (most) CAS heads in some very different directions than (most) SR after this rejection of anthropocentric ontology. I think one of the ways to understand this difference is by examining another common opposition that Bryant posits for SR:

On the other hand, I think all of those in the speculative realist camp are deeply exhausted by styles of philosophy that begin from the standpoint of critique (in the Kantian sense), the phenomenological analysis of experience, hermeneutics, and textual analysis. There’s a sense that these approaches to philosophy, as powerful and valuable as they are, have exhausted their possibilities and are standing in the way of engaging with the sorts of questions demanded by our contemporary moment. For example, its difficult to imagine something less relevant than phenomenology, hermeneutics, semiotics, or deconstructive textual analysis to the sorts of issues posed by the ecological crisis. Ecology just requires a very different set of conceptual tools. Moreover, we are living in the midst of one of the most remarkable periods in scientific and mathematical development and invention, yet we have a group of philosophers continuing to pretend that the Greeks said it all and that philosophy largely ended at the beginning of the 19th century. It is also simply bizarre to think that these developments are adequately thematized through the resources of textual analysis or semiotics. We need to become a bit more pre-critical again, I think, to adequately discuss these sorts of issues.

I am, in many ways, very sympathetic to this argument. In many ways also in strong agreement (this odd obsession with Greek as origin, and origin as the authentic and true seems relatively useless to me). But if we replace ecology with the systematic exploitation of animals (and of course, recognizing that the exploitation there is deeply implicated in the present ecological crisis), I doubt highly that “phenomenology, hermeneutics, semiotics, or deconstructive textual analysis” have exhausted themselves in changing the status of the animal. Not only have phenomenological moments with nonhuman animals been crucial for many people changing their views regarding animal exploitation, but it seems that humanism and speciesism are strongly powerful in maintaining the systematic exploitation of animals. If we are to change things, I feel that confronting how this humanism and speciesism is maintained from their roots to their present formulation is a necessary move, which means critique is a necessary tool for CAS. This critical element needs to be centered not just on political and philosophical texts, but also on present media and scientific texts. At the same time, I agree we need to pay more attention to some of the present movements in current scientific discourses. Indeed, CAS is also interesting as a philosophical movement because of its strong interest in things like current evolutionary discourses, primatology, cognitive ethology, etc. (And indeed, one of the few major continental philosophers that seemed to be particularly interested in these things was Derrida).

One of the criticisms I have often heard of SR is that it is a vulgar positivism and scientism. At least, this is the sort of criticism others are telling me in email that they’re hearing from their professors and colleagues. “Why,” the criticism runs, “would you want to bother with that naive and vulgar positivism?” No doubt this impression arises from the term “realism” itself, which is so often assumed to denote a world independent of all social and mental “contamination”. Given how hard thinkers have struggled for the last two hundred years to reveal the role that cognition, language, signs, power, and the social play in structuring reality, realism, as understood in this way, cannot but appear to be a sort of regression.

read on!

However, it seems to me that Object-Oriented Realism differs markedly from this sort of realism. A sense of this can already be found in Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern. In this text, Latour is at pains to problematize the two-world model that undergirds modernity. As Latour writes,

The hypothesis of this essay is that the word ‘modern’ designates two sets of entirely different practicesx which must remain distinct if they are to remain effective, but have recently begun to be confused. The first set of practices, by ‘translation’, creates mixtures between entirely new types of beings, hybrids of nature and culture. The second, by ‘purification’ creates two entirely distinct ontological zones: that of human beings on the one hand; that of nonhumans on the other. (10 – 11)

Both traditional realism and anti-realism share this model of purification as their root assumption. Thus the traditional realist strives to purify the world of the human so as to “reach the things themselves” as they are independent of the human. In its extreme forms it attempts to reduce the human to the mechanics of this purified world. Likewise, the anti-realist emphasizes the dimension of the human in the form of mind, language, the social, or power, either denying a world independent of correlation altogether or emphasizing that such a world can never be known or touched.

As Latour observes, the modernist stance offers us three strategies– naturalization, socialization, and deconstruction –which are always to be kept strictly separate from one another. If one adopts the semiological approach of deconstruction, then, the story runs, we must drop socialization and naturalization as we are restricted to texts and the play of signifiers. If one adopts the stance of naturalization as in the case of evolutionary psychology or neurology, then we must drop socialization and deconstruction, as it is genes and wiring that are explanatory. If one adopts the stance of socialization as do the Marxists and Foucaultians, perhaps, then we must drop naturalization and deconstruction as it is social relations that are ultimately explanatory.

By contrast, Object-Oriented Realism attempts to deploy all of these strategies at once, and to do so it deploys the concept of “object” or “actor” (terms that are used synonymously). If it is led in this direction, then this is because it recognizes that networks are hybrids of all these elements. An actor or an object is thus an all purpose word that refers equally to humans, signs, physical objects, literary characters, and all the rest. It is a motley realism that places all of these agencies on equal ontological footing. Latour illustrates this difference in a series of criticisms he imagines addressed to him from those falling into one of the three camps of naturalization, socialization, and deconstruction. Thus,

…the critics imagine that we are talking about science and technology. Since these are marginal topics, or at best manifestations of pure instrumental and calculating thought, people who are interested in politics or in souls feel justified in paying no attention. Yet this research does not deal with nature or knowledge, with things-in-themselves, but with the way all these things are tied to our collectives and to subjects. We are talking not about instrumental thought but about the very substance of our societies. (3 – 4)

In other words, the stance of socialization is truncated or inadequate because it ignores the manner in which nonhuman actors in our collectives– technology, natural objects, resources, etc. –are the very fabric of the social; that the social cannot maintain itself or be formed at all without these actors and that these actors are not simple “vehicles” of concepts, signifiers, or power. The evaporation of Lake Tanganyika in East Africa is not simply a discourse, the vehicle of signifiers, an object categorized by mind, but acts on other objects to create very different social relations.

When this is observed, another critic chimes in:

‘But then surely you’re talking about politics? You’re simply reducing scientific truth to mere political interests, and technical efficiency to mere strategical manoeuvres?’ Here is the second misunderstanding. If the facts do not occupy the simultaneously marginal and sacred place our worship has reserved for them, then it seems that they are immediately reduced to pure local contingency and sterile machinations. Yet science studies are talking not about social contexts and interests of power, but about their involvement with collectives and objects. (4)

As Latour will say a bit further on, “[t]he ozone hole is too social and too narrated to be truly natural; the strategy of industrial firms and heads of state is too full of chemical reactions to be reduced to power and interest; the discourse of the ecosphere is too real and too social to boil down to meaning effects. Is it our fault if the networks are simultaneously real, like nature, narrated, like discourse, and collective, like society” (6)? Finally, another critic pipes up,

‘But if you are not talking about things-in-themselves or about humans-among-themselves, then you must be talking just about discourse, representation, language, texts, rhetorics.’ This is the third misunderstanding. It is true that those who bracket off the external referent– the nature of things — and the speaker –the pragmatic or social context –can talk only about meaning effects and language games. Yet when MacKenzie examines the evolution of inertial guidance systems, he is talking about arrangements that can kill us all… When I describe Pasteur’s domestication of microbes, I am mobilizing nineteenth-century society, not just the semiotics of a great man’s texts; when I describe the invention-discovery of brain peptides, I am really talking about the peptides themselves, not simply their representation in Professor Guillemin’s labortory. Yet rhetoric, textual strategies, writing, staging, semiotics– all these are really at stake, but in a new form that has a simultaneous impact on the nature of things and on the social context, while it is not reducible to the one or the other. (5)

When I criticize hermeneutics, deconstruction, phenomenology, or semiotics, this is not in the name of consigning them to the dustbin of history, but of rejecting the hegemonic role one or the other of these positions plays in the analysis of our world. It is not that we should cease doing phenomenology, deconstruction, semiotics, or hermeneutics, but that we should cease believing that all other actors can be reduced to one or the other of the actors or objects privileged by these various orientations. In short, it is about tracking the differences produced by each of these types of actors and how these actors enter into networks or assemblages with one another forming a particular type of network.

Yes, there should be some empirical and experimental research here, but at any rate I came across this article on male bisexuality over at anodynelite’s blog. Anodyne also references a study on female bisexuality. Two of the things I’ve found frustrating with the Queer movement in the United States are first the quickness with which it has been willing to latch on to genetic accounts of homosexuality. I think this is problematic because it still pathologizes homosexuality by treating it as a genetic aberration (designer babies anyone?), and because sexual engagement should be no one’s damned business anyway. In other words, the point shouldn’t be that “it can’t be helped” because of genetics, but rather that it shouldn’t fucking matter one way or another. Second, I’ve been bothered by the essentialization of sexual identity where sexual orientation becomes an innate and essential predicate of a person’s being. I’ve always been partial to Freud’s “polymorphous perversity” where there is no innate sexual orientation. I think the ethnography supports this account of sexual orientation as well, given the wide variety of common practices we find throughout history and the world.

Scu of criticalanimal studies makes a really great observation in response to my post on nested objects and politics:

“Political engagement can be thought as engagement in which objects at a smaller level of scale attempt to engage an object at a higher level of scale with the aim of pushing that object at a larger level of scale into a different basin of attraction. The issue here is one of how individuals that compose a larger scale object can act on that object without simply reinforcing its existing basin of attraction.”

I guess part of the question is one of engagement. Not sure what you mean by that term, but I also think that folks who don’t exactly fit the term engagement are pretty interesting (and here I mean people who propose exit/exodus as a major political tool). As Deleuze and Parnet put it, “Nothing is more active than fleeing!”

“The second problem is that even where a new sub-multiple or object is formed through an alliance, and even where this object is intense enough to push the larger scale multiple of which it is a part into a new basin of attraction, this new basin of attraction is itself highly unpredictable.”

Of course. This fits in with what Stengers has shown as a difference between a demonstration and an experiment (I expect you know the difference, but if not: a demonstration is when you do something that you are fairly sure you know what the outcome will be. An experiment entails doing something that you know carries with it a risk of something completely weird happening. Galileo dropping a hammer and a feather is a demonstration, the first time we set off a nuclear bomb was an experiment). Politics, as opposed to policy, is always an experiment. Also, there is always something about a revolutionary action that exceeds instrumentality (whatever problems I have about Negri and his work aside, his book Insurgencies is really excellent on this point). This is sort of like a quotation from Gramsci that I can’t find right this second, but it goes something like this: Communism is the only movement that is fighting for a society that it cannot envision. (That’s way off from what he said, but you get the point).

I have nothing more to add. This pretty much says it all.

Responding to my post about my own academic career, Ben writes:

I was struck but what you wrote as I am beginning the process of applying to phd programs here in the states and find myself constantly frustrated by the options (you mention two of ‘continental friendly’ programs and I would add New Mexico as well) and have been lately considered whether it is worth it to go into philosophy at all in the states.

Part of me wants to just flee across the ocean where the rest of me thinks it is long over due that continental philosophy have proper homes (or a proper home) in the states and that something like black mountain college/egs needs to be made here – a theory camp if not a real school.

Sorry I am mostly rambling – I guess my question is – is it even possible to get into well respected (but always analytic) programs in the US with continental credentials and, if so, like you partially suggest, is it impossible to teach what one likes in the high ivory towers?

I really like Ben’s idea about starting something like the equivalent of EGS here in the United States. This is something that theorists from a variety of disciplines should be talking about and something that should seriously be implemented. I have even been considering going after a second PhD at EGS not only for the opportunity to work with theorists and artists of such stature, but as a motivation to write another book. Although an outsider, I think I have enough background in media theory and technologies to have something of interest to say on these issues.

With respect to the academic job market, I think it’s worth emphasizing that a lot of what I wrote in my post is really my own personal symptoms and insecurities. I think there are a lot more possibilities out there than I suggest, and that in my own case I often create artificial barriers where they don’t exist. Lacan often observed that neurotics tend to manufacture barriers against jouissance as a way of sustaining their desire. Moreover, one of the ways in which neurosis functions is through the frustration of the Other’s desire. This is certainly the case in my own psychic economy. Throughout high school, undergrad, and graduate school, I had to do things in a very indirect fashion. Thus, in high school I skipped so much schooling that the state actually attempted to bring charges against me for truancy. What the state didn’t know was that I spent my days at the local coffee shop reading history, mathematics, literature, and philosophy. Fortunately, given that I had reached a point where I was performing very well in school, the teachers and administration came to my defense and said “leave him alone, this works for him.” Basically I had home schooled myself.

As an undergrad I had to read texts for my philosophy courses– I took 116 hours of philosophy at Ohio State –a quarter in advance because it was constitutively impossible for me to read assigned texts during the actual quarter. The situation was similar in graduate school. In other words, I had to trick myself into doing the work. The reason for this, I think, was that I simply cannot tolerate what I perceive as an order issuing from the Other. If I am told that I am required to do something, I simply shut down and dig in my heels. This tic is so pervasive for me that I even have difficulty filling out forms.

From a psychoanalytic point of view this would be a way of frustrating the desire of the Other, but also a refusal of the Other’s jouissance or a refusal to be enjoyed by the Other. However, while this is an unconscious strategy for frustrating the Other’s desire and refusing to be an object of jouissance, it’s also worthwhile to note that this is a way of stealing jouissance from the Other. To do one’s schoolwork at the local coffee shop or read texts other than the assigned text during the semester is a sort of theft of an illicit enjoyment. It’s a delight in doing what you believe you’re not supposed to be doing. In this regard, I wonder if the way in which I portray academia isn’t a variant of a fantasy structure organized around the theft of jouissance. If I tell myself that academia only recognizes commentary, that there’s no place for the sort of work that I would like to do, then I can gratify myself by stealing something from academia or believing that I am stealing something. In other words, there’s a way in which I need this sort of impediment to get off in the way that I do. I often wonder if the sort of depression I experienced after the publication of Difference and Givenness wasn’t precisely the result of the manner in which its publication and its warm reception challenged my unconscious fantasy structure and economy of jouissance. I experienced a sort of subjective destitution and sense of the surreal or uncanny after the book was finally released. No doubt this is part of the reason for my antipathy towards the book.

Here I think it’s important to note counter-examples. Adrian Johnston, for example, has found a way to do what he wants to do within the current framework of philosophy as practiced in the United States. Who would have thought it would be possible to do serious work on Zizek, Lacan, and German Idealism and land a position in a graduate program? DeLanda is really a total outsider, but has found a way to do what he wants to do. Harman has made himself a place as well. It’s also worth citing the example of Jameson. Who would have thought it would have been possible to do the sort of Marxist literary criticism in the milieu he was working in? Finally, I have been able to publish a good deal on the sorts of things that interest me despite the belief that there is no place for my work. My point is that we have to make a place for ourselves within the institutions that exist. We also get an opportunity in the long run to change those institutions through collaborative activity, the formation of alliances, the production of journals, conferences, etc. Get involved, get to know people, put yourself out there and publicly develop your thought and you have a good chance of getting somewhere. Each generation of thinkers remakes the institutions within which they were trained. It’s your job to do that.

The always intrepid Ian Bogost responds to yesterday’s Speculative Realism Roundup, remarking that,

Just for kicks, a possible objection to my own claim that the digital comfort of SR is an accident of timing more than a property of its positions:

As this very post illustrates, one of the demands of effective networked discourse is speed; online exchanges happen quickly or they disappear, lost in the noise of novelty. Another is tentativeness. One must be comfortable putting forward thoughts in gestation, in transition, knowing that they will shift and revise over time.

One might say that both speed and tentativeness are unappealing demands for both the analytic and continental traditions, the former thanks to its affinity for the precision of logic and mathematics, the latter thanks to its affinity for of discourse and language. Both efforts strive for a sort of perfect rendering of things, whether as friction-free Wittgensteinian proof or an exquisitely baroque Derridean lyric.

Is it possible that among SR advocates, whatever inner sense finds a rejection of correlationism appealing also makes no qualms about the rapid, experimental outpouring of possible notions given form in logic and language? Writing is still serious business for the speculative realist, to be sure, but so is the tea that steeps, the trousers that wrinkle, or — for that matter — the keyboard keys that depress while such writing takes place.

I really don’t have much to say in response to Ian’s thought here beyond free associations. One of the things I’ve noticed among many of my colleagues in recent years is a sort of outright hostility to the internet, text messaging, etc. The lament always has the form “these kids today…” and spirals into a diatribe about how they are unable to read, how they lack a knowledge of history, science, and are unable to write etc., etc., etc. I am always a bit shocked when I hear these diatribes, while nonetheless sympathizing with them on the writing end (grading these essays can be a miserable experience), because these diatribes are coming from the same folks that are intimately familiar with Plato’s Phaedrus. In other words, they sounds remarkably like Plato’s critique of the evils of writing. Thinkers like Walter Ong with his Orality and Literacy and Friedrich Kittler with his Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, have, of course, introduced us to the thesis that communications technologies are not simply tools that leave the content of communication unaffected, but rather have a morphogenetic effect on the nature of that communication as well as cognitive structure. McLuhan makes similar observations in The Gutenburg Galaxy, and thinkers such as Simondon and more recently Stiegler in Time and Technics call into question the notion of τέχνη simply taking on form from human beings. Indeed, Marx had already observed the manner in which the factory had a morphogenetic effect on human bodies, generating a new type of subjectivity.

Simply put, the thesis would run that the person individuated within an oral culture thinks and experiences the world differently than a person individuated within a textual culture. Here there would be different structures of embodiment, cognition, affectivity, and so on. Likewise, it takes no great leap to conclude that perhaps similar differences emerge with respect to digital cultures. In this respect, it wouldn’t be that students are “stupid”, but rather that given this milieu of individuation, they have a different sort of cognitive, affective, and embodied relationship to the world. While this different structure makes reading Spinoza’s Ethics with them tough going as the Ethics requires a very different sort of cognitive temporality than the affective temporality prominent in our current visual and digital culture which is more rhizomatic and associative than deductive, it does not entail that these new forms of subjectivity are somehow less skilled or intelligent. Indeed, it is possible that the sort of affective-temporal structures of text-based structure are actually an impediment to thriving in visual-digital culture as they require a “keeping time” that simply is not available in the zipping technological space Ian alludes to. Rather than the mathematician or the scholar pouring over a text or problem for years or decades, the model of visual-digital culture is something closer to Jackie Chan who, like Charlie Chaplin, is able to make use of whatever environment he is thrown into at the time.

The new technologies thus pose all sorts of questions about the nature of contemporary discourse, thought, dialogue, affectivity, subjectivity, and interpersonal relations. Will we reach a point where we find reading a book every bit as difficult as reciting all of Homer’s Illiad? Yet here again, I think we find a case where correlationism comes up woefully short in providing us with the sorts of conceptual tools to explain the sort of world we live in. In its focus on the mind-world correlate, in its focus on how mind actively gives form to the world, it has a very difficult time theorizing how these sorts of milieus give form to various forms of embodiment, affectivity, temporality, subjectivity, and all the rest. Similarly, it is not clear that correlationist approaches have much of significance to say with respect to technology beyond reactionary, luddite platitudes about how it is corrupting us (perhaps, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s here). As Stiegler and Simondon argue, technology has taken on a sort of autonomy of its own, evolving and developing at its own pace and with respect to its own internal logic, in a way that can no longer be properly theorized in terms of human aims and intentions. In the absence of a clear understanding of that autonomy and its dynamics it’s very difficult to develop strategies for responding to this new world.