Throughout the variant strains of Object-Oriented Philosophy and Speculative Realism, one common thread has been the rejection of the thesis that ontology implies a politics. This can be seen, for example, in Badiou where the event is understood as what is other than being-qua-being. Graham is absolutely insistent on the thesis that ontology does not imply a politics, arguing that questions of ontology should be engaged for their own sake. Nick, of The Accursed Share, wrote a very nice post arguing for the separation of ontology and politics. Continuing this theme, Reid, over at Planomenology, has today written a great post discussing the politics he sees emerging from the non-relation of the real and philosophy:
Here I must be clear. I think that as long as we take ‘non-relation’ as simply meaning ‘no relation’ or ‘not related’, we are missing the point. The non-relation of the Real to politics is one in which the Real is wholly absent from any intelligibility for politics, in which it is indecipherable or opaque for politics. Any political thought encounters the Real in the mode of not knowing what the Real wants. Now of course, this points to an implicit element of fantasy (in the strict Lacanian sense) that is structurally necessary for politics, one in which political thinkers impute such a desire to the Real, even though the Real is without will, and in fact, wholly indifferent to politics.
Nonetheless, the Real is still the ultimate determining factor of political reality. How? When I say that it is indifferent, I mean it is indifferent to any given political position, project or goal – it has no will for any political position, even though politics are minimally determined by this ‘Other’s desire’. Every politics that claims to be the true or right politics must also claim that its desire, its will or plan, is also that which ‘the Real wants’, that its ‘good’ is in fact the Good. Politics cannot cope with the indifference of the Real, and so must attempt to ‘narrativize’ its opacity by imputing to it some political truth.
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For my part, I am not entirely certain what the issue is here. The argument seems directed at something like Platonic thought where a particular form of politics is held to follow from ontology, or, more properly, that which is otherwise than being and beyond all being, while simultaneously serving as the condition of being (i.e., the Good). Such a view of the relationship between ontology and politics probably also arises from certain theological ontologies, where God dictates and demands certain relations among his creatures.
I both see and share Graham’s point that a particular ontology does not entail a politics where these theological dimension is absent. Thus, a relational ontology won’t deliver us to either a leftist or a rightist politics, because there can be both leftist and rightist forms of relation. Insofar, as for my part, I adopt the principle that anything that makes a difference both is and is real, it strikes me as an inevitable conclusion that politics is both a matter of the real and is a form of being. In other words, I am unclear as to why being or the real must be understood as something completely independent of the human. This is not to say, for me, that all beings are related to the human. No. But, in my ontology, humans and relations between humans and non-humans are counted among those things that are real or belong to being. Such an ontology holds 1) that there is nothing particularly special or privileged about the human-world relation, and 2) that there are both objects and relations among objects completely unrelated to the human. What perplexes me is why a realist ontology is required to make the move of claiming that being as such is completely unrelated to the human. This strikes me as a dual world ontology where one form of being is really real and the rest is simply appearances that are not. If this is the case, then the question becomes not that of how we attain the real, but rather how various politics construct or build their polis, their values, the bodies that populate this polis, and so on.
Larval Subjects . 
January 25, 2009 at 9:13 pm
I think it’s the theme of extinction, as pursued so tenaciously by Ray Brassier, that lends particular urgency to the demand that “being as such” or “the real” be thought of as separate from all relation to the human.
Because the human is something that comes into being and passes away, it is subject to genetic (and apoptopic) conditions which are exterior to and insubordinable by its powers of relation (its ability to enter into relation with things, relate them to itself, philosophise about them and so on). In order to think these conditions, it is necessary to be able to think that which is specifically non-relatable to the human: that which enters into no relation with the human, but by which it is determined “in the last instance”.
An interesting move here would be to apply this to other existents – after all, humanity isn’t the only thing that hasn’t existed since the dawn of time, or that will one day wholly cease to exist. What if the particular manner in which all existents withdrew from relation with other existents had to do with their genetic and apoptopic conditions – their being-towards-death, to coin a phrase?
January 25, 2009 at 11:08 pm
Levi writes: ” Graham is absolutely insistent on the thesis that ontology does not imply a politics, arguing that questions of ontology should be engaged for their own sake.”
Kvond: I find it fairly curious, if not outright an ironic self-contradiction, that Graham asserts an apolitical status for his (or any ontology), while he uses the phrase “a democracy of objects” more than a dozen times in his Prince of Networks, presumably with implicit praise, to describe the ontology Latour presents. Latour whom he also characterizes as a “philosopher of democracy”.
I’m all for democracy as a valuable pursuit, but the idea that one can present an ontology of a “democracy of objects” (as the way that things REALLY are) without it taking on political or sociological criticism (an examination perhaps of the way that it imports a certain Capitalist/Cartesian notion of a Subject in isolation), seems a bit much. Rather it seems that Graham’s ontology of objects is radically political, with political conceptions running right down to its most essential conceptions.
January 26, 2009 at 12:19 am
Levi,
I’ve been meaning to point this out in a post I’m working on, but since I’m not sure when it’ll get done, I’ll just point it out it here:
“What perplexes me is why a realist ontology is required to make the move of claiming that being as such is completely unrelated to the human. This strikes me as a dual world ontology where one form of being is really real and the rest is simply appearances that are not.”
Laruelle will argue that the real is One, and that philosophy’s distinction between itself and the real is only operative for philosophy itself. So it’s not really a dual ontology; it only appears so from the transcendent perspective of philosophy. This is why the notion of unilateralization is so key for Laruelle (and Brassier) since it’s the operation that lets the real subsist as One while still retaining the relational structure of philosophy. That being said, from what I’ve been reading of your comments on Laruelle, you’re definitely on the right track (and he’s still pretty mysterious to me in certain aspects).
Dominic,
Really interesting way of phrasing Brassier’s project! You articulated what I’ve been struggling to get at for a while now. I particularly like this thought experiment:
“An interesting move here would be to apply this to other existents – after all, humanity isn’t the only thing that hasn’t existed since the dawn of time, or that will one day wholly cease to exist. What if the particular manner in which all existents withdrew from relation with other existents had to do with their genetic and apoptopic conditions – their being-towards-death, to coin a phrase?”
January 26, 2009 at 12:57 am
Ditto on Nick’s comment @ Dominic. What I worry about is the implicit idea that what comes-to-be and passes-away seems to be treated as less real than what abides throughout time. So the thesis seems to be that because humans pass-away or will at some point cease to exist, the questions of ontology must be posed without consideration of the human. But what if, in this equation, we plug in species, ecosystems, planets, galaxies, etc. All of these are things that come into being and pass away as well, after all. This, incidentally, is part of my problem with essentialism. Essentialist thinking often seems to lead to a place where anything that has a temporal becoming is granted a derivative place. Yet it seems to me that even in nature we have something like “local being” governed by its own internal logos, rather than laws of nature that hold for all times and places. Thus, for example, an ecosystem has its own internal laws or dynamics for this organization of matter, as is also the case with weather patterns. The fact that these things come to be and passes away makes them no less real.
That said, I understand where Brassier is coming from. Yet nonetheless it seems a bit like hyperbole to me (which isn’t necessarily bad). What is being groped for, I think, is not the thesis that being is completely independent of humans, but rather that being and thought are not identical to one another. That allows room for counting thought and the human among the entities belong to being, while also acknowledging that there are both beings that have nothing to do with the thought or the human, and that would exist were there no humans. Hopefully that makes some sense.
January 26, 2009 at 1:05 am
The point I’m getting at, and I think the same goes for Laurelle, is not that there are two worlds, one human and one non-human, and so on. It is not that there is a false, phenomenal world related to humanity, and then a true noumenal world unrelated to humanity.
The point is that the Real is radically non-relational, not related to anything, human or not. But again, this does not imply a separate, non-relational world. The Real as without-relation does not, strictly speaking, exist, because the dyad of existence/non-existence is already an intra-worldly determination; a world is a horizon of existentiality or relationality.
In this way, we can easily claim that a large part of the world is not related to humanity and that it nevertheless exists, but this is still a determination of thought, and dependent upon a philosophical decision according to which the Real is submitted to the existential dyad. This is why for Laurelle, a world is always a Thought World.
The point is that the Real as radically foreclosed to such decision, as indifferent to conceptual predication that separates existence from non-existence, phenomenon from noumenon, etc, has no positive sense of Being or existing itself. It does not constitute a separate world.
Rather, the Real as vision-in-one is, in-the-last-instance, identical to this world, with all of its human and non-human regions. The difference lies in that the Real as foreclosed is, as it were, an operation to which we submit these philosophical decisions and determinations, suspending their efficacy or sufficiency, making them only relatively autonomous, dependent upon that which they, in constituting themselves, must omit, abolish, exclude. The Real is nothing more than this foreclosure, this gap within philosophical decisions that the latter must cover up or fill in.
So there is only one world, the one determined as such through philosophical decision. The Real is simply the name or symbol for the insufficiency of this decision to that which it seeks to determine, and the operation that suspends philosophy’s pretensions to sufficiency or exhaustive determination.
I can’t remember who (Alexei maybe?), but someone has raised the problem, in relation to object-oriented philosophy, of how we can talk about a world without humans without ‘getting out of our skin’ so to speak. Non-philosophy is the answer to this problem, not by pretending to get us out of this skin, or contenting itself in imagining this world without really experiencing it, but by claiming that the Real as radically immanent or lived-in-One is precisely such an experience, one that has the effect of suspending the self-suffiency of ontological discourse without negating or supplanting it.
Does that make sense?
January 26, 2009 at 1:26 am
Apologies, in checking more closely it seems that I overstated the case. Graham uses the phrase “democracy of objects” or“democracy of actors” (or a close equivalent),nearly a dozen times in Prince of Networks.
January 26, 2009 at 1:34 am
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January 26, 2009 at 1:46 am
Larval Subjects: “Yet it seems to me that even in nature we have something like “local being” governed by its own internal logos, rather than laws of nature that hold for all times and places. Thus, for example, an ecosystem has its own internal laws or dynamics for this organization of matter, as is also the case with weather patterns.”
Kvond: Of all things I would think that weather patterns would suggest that the wider the modeling, the greater the depth data, the more accurate the prediction. Indeed a monsoon in Japan might cause (be related to) a draught in the sub Sahara. As for ecosystems, the frog population in your backyard may be rather affected by areosol emissions in China, over time. Even though there are energy mimimums which give the impression of local autonomies. At least from your examples, the local Logos certainly does seem to be sensitive to non-local Logoi.
I can imagine that the relative autonomies can be characterized by a certain recursive, non-equilibrium structure (in the way that a hurricane can seem to have a local logos), but the state of this logos, its characteristics seem to be immanent to the conditions in which it is expressed.
January 26, 2009 at 1:57 am
Reid,
I guess my point is– and once again I don’t know much of Laruelle so I can only go by what I’ve read of him and by those using him –is that his thought seems to generate a two-world ontology and reproduce the very problem in philosophy he’s denouncing. On the one hand we have philosophy that divides the world into the transcendental and the faktum, while on the other hand, we get non-philosophy that thinks a Real radically indifferent to any philosophy. Yet in doing this– if I’ve understood the arguments correctly —non-philosophy has posited a distinction between appearance and reality. Philosophy (the activity of dividing the transcendental and the faktum) becomes appearance, and non-philosophy becomes access to reality. Moreover, non-philosophy appears to be philosophy insofar as it takes philosophy as its object of investigation, exploring the split between the transcendental and the faktum.
January 26, 2009 at 2:10 am
Sure, Kvon, that’s not my point though. Laws of physics are generalizable over all of the universe. The manner in which gravity functions here is the same as gravity functions in the most remote regions of the universe. By contrast, the regularities governing a particular ecosystem, say the Amazon, cannot be generalized to all ecosystems, but are unique to that system. That is, an ecosystem is an assemblage with its own internal organization. However, assemblages interact with other assemblages, which is why areosol emissions can also have a profound impact on an ecosystem by undermining or destroying key actors within its network.
My point is that if you want to understand an ecosystem you have to get your hands dirty and see how the objectiles belonging to that system function together producing their own regularities (or what I would call logoi, as opposed to logos). This would be one reason why I am often hostile to essentialisms. Alexei made the claim about art that we can speak of art without speaking of its history, etc. We can imagine him saying the same thing about society. But societies are like ecosystems, where logoi at work in a social assemblage aren’t generalizable across social assemblages.
In a rather ridiculous moment, someone suggested that speculative theory was somehow responsible for the holocaust, the atrocities of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Stalin, etc; claiming that the speculative realists and object-oriented philosophers might become guilty of these things in the future. In a way I somewhat agree with the thesis that a certain form of theorizing played a role in these things, but these things were products of this sort of essentialist thinking that failed to analyze the unique organization of various social assemblages logoi, instead assuming the existence of a social essence (logos) across all social assemblages. This, then, authorized policies based on an abstract conception of the social that required no close analysis of “social ecosystems”, that had a cascade of consequences causing all sorts of problems at the level of distribution and production, but also authorizing the eradication of those elements at “odds” with the abstract notion of the social. In other words, I would claim that it wasn’t an absence of “normative considerations” that led to these phenomena– generally I think we’re on pretty weak ground anyway if we’re trying to avoid atrocity through the “normative” or abstract moral laws… good luck with that one –but rather it was precisely a hyper-normative perspective that led to these phenomena, i.e., a normative conception of the social based on an ideal essence of what it is, allowing us to ignore all elements of how the social is actually put together, how it actually works, and its specificity for that particular social-assemblage.
Anyway, no disagreement from me on your broader point that assemblages interact and inter-relate.
January 26, 2009 at 2:48 am
Non-philosophy does not distinguish between appearance and reality, but rather supplements philosophy with a figure of the Real that does not distinguish itself from appearance, or better, from the world in which the appearance/reality dyad is operative. Non-philosophy is not really a field or discipline opposed to or separate from philosophy, but is rather like a prosthetic attachment for philosophy. So it doesn’t really make sense to say non-philosophy posits philosophy as mere appearance, giving itself access to reality in the meantime. Philosophy is characterized by claiming access to reality, whereas non-philosophy claims, basically, that philosophy will never get all the way there, that it is minimally determined by an exclusion of the Real itself.
I don’t really get what you mean by non-philosophy itself being philosophical. Non-philosophy doesn’t explore the split between the transcendental and the empirical, but rather supplements such investigations by claiming the Real itself is radically indifferent to these distributions, and that it moreover does not divide itself up this way, but is radically in-One.
Anyway, I don’t really care to persuade you. The point of non-philosophy is not to critique or refute philosophy, but to act upon philosophy so as to draw from it potentials to which it doesn’t have access on its own. I’m going to post more on this soon. Anyway, I really just want you to keep doing what you’re doing, and pushing it further, because I think you’re onto a unique and powerful ontology here. And I’d like to keep supplementing it with non-philosophy, if I may, to see what the two thoughts are capable of together.
January 26, 2009 at 4:24 am
Hi Reid,
I’m just trying to understand what Laruelle’s non-philosophy is claiming, that’s all.
To me this sounds a lot like a distinction between appearance and reality. On the one hand, you have philosophy as the domain of appearances by virtue of the way in which it splits reality, while on the other hand, you get non-philosophy as the domain of reality by virtue of its ability to think a real that doesn’t distinguish itself from appearances or where the reality/appearance split isn’t operative. That is, this split between philosophy and non-philosophy ends up sounding a lot like the very split non-philosophy is denouncing in philosophy; hence my assertion that non-philosophy sounds philosophical in exactly the sense that it claims philosophy is philosophical.
I was probably unclear when I stated something along these lines. Everything I’ve so far read about Laruelle indicates that one of the primary tasks of non-philosophy is to investigate how philosophies make the split between the transcendental and the empirical. That is, non-philosophy takes, as its object and matter of investigation, philosophy.
January 26, 2009 at 3:27 pm
I guess I’d just recommend to read more Laurelle. Again I insist that non-philosophy does not claim access to the real reality, as opposed to philosophy’s access to illusory appearance. Maybe a reference to Lacan will help clarify matters, although Laurelle would likely reject this analogy, at least without some modification:
Philosophy involves a masculine structure, by which all of being is submitted to the philosophical decision as such, as conceived by philosophy, while there is at least (the) One that cannot be submitted to this decision, and that is the Real itself, wholly separate from our thought of it or concept of it. To recall my reference to Dominic’s post, even if our concept of the real exhausts it, completely represents it, there is nonetheless the minimal remainder of null being.
Non-philosophy involves a feminine structure, by claiming that no, there is nothing apart from the philosophical decision, it does exhaust reality, but nonetheless, it is still not complete or sufficient to itself, and this inner incompletion of philosophy is named ‘the Real’ or ‘vision-in-One’, which has the function of suspending the efficacy of the ‘law’ of philosophy.
January 28, 2009 at 4:13 pm
Levi: “My point is that if you want to understand an ecosystem you have to get your hands dirty and see how the objectiles belonging to that system function together producing their own regularities (or what I would call logoi, as opposed to logos). This would be one reason why I am often hostile to essentialisms. Alexei made the claim about art that we can speak of art without speaking of its history, etc.”
Kvon: Hmmm. I certainly can see the point of understanding the history of local logoi, so to speak, but can’t tell how this is dis-enabled by “essentialism” at least of the Spinozist sort. For instance, the problem of reducing Van Gogh to its concept content is the problem of drawing too fine a boundary, too narrow a vector unto the richness of what that piece of matter is doing (the differences that are producing it, and the differences that it is making). When we understand the painting in terms of the richer forces involved, we understand (appreciate) it better, it seems. But none of this is foreclosed by at least a Spinozist essentialism. Spinoza’s essences in a certain sense are no different than Latour’s actors. The only difference is that they allow a structure onto which causal explanation can adhere. That is, understanding Van Gogh’s painting through its local history is nothing more than understanding it through its causes (which are quite plentiful). But understanding does not stop there, locally, it bleeds out. The painting becomes a suture point for threads that extend quite far, both in terms of caused producing and causes produced. At least that is the way that it seems.One approaches the essence of something through its conatus, its strivings, in a very Latourian picture.
If you mean something else by locality, for instance the kind of “organizational closure” that Autopoietic theory speaks of, the way that local (perhaps semiotic) laws seem to expresses a recursive dimension of either a local ecosystem, or organism, or Legal System, I can certainly see that. As a matter of practicality one cannot deduce the function of a protein in an amoeba from the Laws of Thermal Dynamics.
Levi: “In a way I somewhat agree with the thesis that a certain form of theorizing played a role in these things, but these things were products of this sort of essentialist thinking that failed to analyze the unique organization of various social assemblages logoi, instead assuming the existence of a social essence (logos) across all social assemblages. This, then, authorized policies based on an abstract conception of the social that required no close analysis of “social ecosystems”, that had a cascade of consequences causing all sorts of problems at the level of distribution and production, but also authorizing the eradication of those elements at “odds” with the abstract notion of the social.”
Kvond: But is this really the case that the local logoi were not adequately consulted, examined or analyzed, or that the large scale theory was not well formed? One cannot tell if predictions will be accurate when the model is a vast oversimplification. Check out the recent discoveries about Global Dimming [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming ]. It seems that all of the worries about Global warming were quite true, but there was a countervailing effect brought about through the reflective properties of some of these pollutants. If we clean up, so scientists are now saying, only one band of polutants, we will not only fail to slow Global Warming, we will excellerate it! The wide scale model simply was not rich enough, though what it described was generally accurate. Now, if you want to access local temperatures, or by metaphor, local political consequences of theorizations, indeed topography and history have to be taken in account. But let’s put it this way, if one can identify problematic theorization (theorization that in the past has lead to destructive consequences), then at the very least one becomes on guard when that mode of thinking is on the rise again. To vastly oversimplify it, if a room is filled with gasoline fumes, it is not enough to say, “We can’t worry about it because there is no obvious local ingnition source”. If there is a form (or a family resemblance) of certain kinds of thinking that has helped produce political disasters, one becomes watchful. Then again, there is a tendency to essentialize thoughts, persons, theories, in an emotional sense. These are “bad” or “dangerous” or even “evil”. This is as mindless as essentializing fire because it burns things, hurts when you put your hand in it, etc. A room full of gasoline fumes is essentially the combustion engine.
Levi: “In other words, I would claim that it wasn’t an absence of “normative considerations” that led to these phenomena– generally I think we’re on pretty weak ground anyway if we’re trying to avoid atrocity through the “normative” or abstract moral laws… good luck with that one –but rather it was precisely a hyper-normative perspective that led to these phenomena, i.e., a normative conception of the social based on an ideal essence of what it is, allowing us to ignore all elements of how the social is actually put together, how it actually works, and its specificity for that particular social-assemblage.”
Kvond: I like this point a great deal, I am getting a better sense of what you mean by “essence”. But the richness that is foreclosed by such essentialization (which is really an oversimplification), is not just local logoi richness, but also vetors of broad influence, huge “ecosystem” patterns which are not of one conceptual kind. In a sense though, to say that it was not the lack of normatives but the “hyper-normativity” is also to essentialize (simply) on a very broad scale. I’m not saying that looking for the apparent contradiction of non-normative and hyper-normative is a useful stick to measure by, but let’s follow your greater advice and think about how there is more to it than this. Non-/hyper- normative factors can also play out as a stage in productive and socially redeemable strutures, in fact may often do. The criticism of the Form of Speculative Realism simply draws our attention to the possibilities of a mode of thinking, it seems, not its essential badness (no matter the motivations of its critics).
I for one have crticized the implicit Cartesian Self/Object dyad that is buried at the heart of Graham’s objects-in-tension vision of the world. The import of this humanist cornerstone is for me a sign of the retardation of its post-human project. The Capitalist, Judeo-Christian “soul” which gave birth to object orientation defintions of consciousness, are not “bad” per se, or even dangerous, but only tendency producing. I question whether a post-humanist project should be built out of humanist cloth, no matter how many cuts, folds and seems you make. At the very least this genetic tendency in the thought should be acknowledged. But I can’t say that Graham’s focus on objects is essentially bad or even incorrect. I would only say that given this stated goals, his theorization would be better served by other theoretical assumptions (for instance some form of panpsychism). There is tendency in that mode of thinking, and I suspect that if it is recognized, then it is up to the theorizer to explain just why in this case, in these local onto-polical circumstances, this tendency is not imported into fruition (a human tension with one’s own imagined subjectivity, through its ontologization into neutrality, broadcast across so many imagined objects), much as Nietzsche imports and naturalizes his valuation by ontologizing the Will to Power in all things: I am but an expression of Nature, that is my right.