Larval Subjects .

Jacob Russell has written a very nice response to my post on Margaret’s Pepper Principle, translating this principle into the domain of aesthetics. The money quote comes at the end:

From my earlier POST (a chapter in my novel-in-progress, Ari Figue’s Cat, I wrote (with some alterations)

Until the first word is written everything is possible. … We may, of course, erase as we write, circling back to a new starting point–speaking to ourselves, as it were, but that all comes to an end the moment the page is read, and in truth, even the freedom of erasure and revision is an illusion. Every word added to the next forecloses an infinite array of possibilities.

If you set out to tell a story you quickly find that you cannot go just anywhere. The more you write the more the words take charge, reducing the writer to a mere instrument playing out theme and variation over sets of ever more determinate patterns, and yet, it is seldom clear what those patterns are.

Busily translating (viva la difference!) from ontology to the aesthetics of process: all the elements of memory, association, ideas and language that we work into a written form are like the grains and eyes in the piece of wood. Like whitling the head of a duck, writing a novel is a process of negotion with the material at hand and every act, each engagement with that material translates both material and our intention. When reading and interpreting a literary work, it is useless to appeal to the author’s intention, not because we have no access to the author’s mind and are limited to the text–but because the author’s intentions have been in a continuous process of translation along with the writing as it evolves. What existed in the beginning, and at every point to the completion of the work, is a continuum of difference that moves both forward and back. We cannot get there from here without changing both here and there.

This has actually been a pet project of mine for a long time and is one of the key themes of my book, Difference and Givenness. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze calls for a new transcendental aesthetic that would be capable of overcoming the split between aesthetics as the doctrine of sensibility or what can be sensed and aesthetics as the theory of artistic production. The first form of aesthetics might be traced back to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason where the transcendental aesthetic refers to the a priori forms of sensibility or intuition defining, as it were, the frame within which any object must be encountered or experienced. The mind imposes the forms of space and time upon objects, giving them sensible structure or form. Consequently, as Kant brilliantly argues, space and time come not from the world itself, but are rather imposed by mind on the objects of the world. Were this not the case, Kant argues, we would be unable to explain how geometry and arithmetic are possible. Here Kant is assuming that mathematics is based on intuition or pure sensibility. It is important to note that this is an exceedingly controversial thesis in the philosophy of mathematics and a thesis that is strongly challenged by the subsequent development of new forms of mathematics that appear to be unintuitable by humans. At any rate, why doesn’t Kant think we’d be unable to account for mathematics were we not to suppose that time and space are forms of intuition mind imposes on the world? Simply put, we would not be able to explain why the truths of mathematics, truths we can reach through thought alone, 1) hold for all times and places despite the finite limitations of our ability to verify this, and 2) apply to the objects of intuition themselves. This latter point, I think, is the far more profound and challenging argument. That is, why is it that something that we merely think again and again happens to also apply to physical objects in the world? This simple observation is one of the more convincing arguments for Kant’s transcendental idealism.

read on!
(more…)

Dominic has written a very nice post entitled “Who’s Counting?”, on how, precisely, Badiou’s operation of the count-as-one in the formation of consistent multiplicities is to be understood. I confess that for me this is a central question with respect to Badiou’s ontology that I feel has received scant treatment. I’m fine with the notion that it isn’t a mathematician that is performing this operation, I just wish to have a more robust account of just what these operations are and how they’re performed. While Badiou has certainly gone further in this direction in Logiques des mondes with his account of “the transcendental”, the whole thing still remains deeply mysterious to me. My worry is that Badiou still remains tied to a sort of human-centered idealism. While Badiou proclaims that he’s a materialist, whenever he begins to discuss structure, the transcendental, etc., it seems as if he’s only talking about social structures. Indeed, in one of his interviews (I’ll have to dig up the link), Badiou actually credits Foucault with being the thinker of the encyclopedia, which he equates with structure. There seems to be little room here for an object-oriented ontology that declares the reality of objects regardless of whether or not humans exist. Moreover, similar problems emerge with respect to his repeated insistence that being and thought are identical. I simply don’t see how one can call their thought realist or materialist if they also claim the identity of being and thinking.

Towards the end of his stellar post, Dominic references me (alongside Peter Hallward! I’m flattered, though I’m sure he’s only making a blogosphere reference in my case!),

Various people, notably Peter Hallward and Levi Bryant, have complained that Badiou’s set-theoretic ontology doesn’t do justice to the relationality of the world, a complaint that slightly baffles me as it certainly does accommodate such beings as pre-orders, equivalence relations, topological spaces, groups, lattices, sheaves…but it’s true that they are all given as second-order effects of presentation, particular kinds of unitary structure that the operation of the count can unfold. If the primacy of relationality is your thing, then this subordination of relation to composition will presumably not please you; but I’m not sure that I understand the wider stakes of the argument, which seems to lie at the heart of the differend between Badiou and Deleuze.

First, let me emphasize just how much I love Badiou. Part of my militance against Badiou in certain posts arises from the anxiety of influence. I read Badiou for the first time towards the end of my dissertation work. I had read his Manifesto for Philosophy a year or so earlier, but it hadn’t left much of an impression of me because I simply wasn’t able to hear or understand what he was claiming. However, when I came across The Clamor of Being, all of this changed. Here was a work that was engaging Deleuze as a philosopher, brilliantly and carefully. This led me to the Ethics, which in turn led me to hone my French skills enough so I could read Being and Event prior to its translation. This was a period of great excitement for me. Badiou dared to say “truth”. He dared to give arguments. Just like the title of Hallward’s famous edited collection, it felt as if it was possible, after Badiou, to think again. Indeed, this feeling was only confirmed by Hallward’s own study of Badiou along with his many articles. Where prior to Badiou we had a series of philosophical tribes, each engaged in their own dusty commentaries of master figures, Badiou’s ontology demanded argument. He was making substantial claims and suddenly, like the lifting of a cloud, it was possible once again to engage in something other than commentary, something other than “buggering philosophers to create a monstrous offspring”. Once again it had become possible to engage positions and worry over their claims. Hallward’s study of Badiou did precisely this wonderfully. I feel in certain ways as if Badiou cured me of a particular institutional form through which philosophy was being done. Those were happy days. Each page was filled with a sort of excitement that provoked you to learn entirely new things like set theory and where you didn’t feel as if the aim of philosophy was simply to comment on the texts of the tradition. Suddenly an entire way of doing philosophy seemed as if it had passed and was but a bad dream.

I think Dominic is right in what he says about Badiou and relation, however, perhaps an absence of relation isn’t the most precise way of describing the problem. I can’t speak for Peter, but for me the problem with Badiou’s ontology lies in its abstraction. It is not so much his position on relation that is at issue, but rather the manner in which the domain of the ontic seems to be diminished or to disappear in Badiou’s thought. Now to be clear, the issue here isn’t one of mathematics being “abstract”. That’s not the problem. I had already approached Deleuze via his engagement with differential calculus and found Badiou’s celebration of mathematics a welcome move in a world of Continental philosophy dominated by mathophobia and German romanticism. For me, rather, the issue is the manner in which the world of entities seems to disappear in Badiou’s ontologies, relegated to a place of unimportance. In my view, unless we roll up our sleeves and get down in the world of beings, of the ontic, and how they’re put together, how they’re assembled, there’s little hope for any sort of change. What interested me most in Badiou’s ontology, paradoxically, is what seems to interest people least in his philosophy: his discussions of situations as harboring infinite multiplicities and his discussions of how these situations are structured. I can’t help but feel that his account of the event is based on a false problem that arises from structuralist residues within his thought that lead to the question of how it is possible to escape overdetermination through structure. For me the theory of the event and the subject is the least interesting aspect of his thought, though I do find his notion of truth-procedures interesting because here, at least, we seem to have a very rudimentary engagement with the ontic. Badiou is improving with Logiques des mondes. Here, at least, we get some engagement with the ontic in his account of intensities. But still it strikes me as vastly underdetermined.

My dear gray friend (it really is glorious long hair, and I’m generally staunchly opposed to long hair on men, but he’s one of the few gents that can pull it off with style and gravitas) Jerry the Anthropologist has evoked Margaret’s Pepper Principle in the course of a discussion pertaining to the Hegemonic Fallacy. Although I have referenced this anecdote often here on the blog, I have never devoted a post to it, so here goes.

Jerry writes,

Every semester I begin every class by bringing in two peppers: a bell pepper and the pepper closest to a west African pepper. Long ago (in 1961 0r 1962) my mother, Margaret was asked to plant bell peppers in Kaduna, northern Nigeria by the US Department of Agriculture. The first fruiting led to sweet bell peppers just as you might expect. The second fruiting of the same plants produced very very hot peppers just like all the peppers for some considerable distance around. So something in the environment and something in the underlying system conjoined to produce something I call FORM. I take this to be a general principle pertaining to everything we can observe including ourselves.

When Jerry asked me if I had referenced Margaret’s Pepper Principle here on the blog, I mistakenly took him to be referring to the proper name “Margaret Pepper” (I’m not all here today, being a bit under the weather). I’ve often referenced Margaret’s Pepper Principle here on the blog and it’s actually a foundational principle of my own metaphysics. On the one hand, it is an excellent example of what I’ve been calling “Latour’s Principle”, which states that there is no transportation without translation. The Ontic Principle states that there is no difference that does not make a difference. In the case of Margaret’s Pepper Principle, perhaps the difference in question would be the DNA of the peppers. As the DNA unfolds in a new generation of peppers, it transports itself in the production of the pepper cells. However, this transportation requires translation of the material with which it works. Cells do not erupt in the world ex nihilo, but rather must draw on the body of the earth and sky about them, translating these materials in turn into a new configuration. Just as the carpenter carving a piece of work cannot simply impose the form he has in mind on the wood, but must take into account the grain of the wood, its knots, its density, its dryness or dampness, etc., the seeds brought by Jerry’s mother have to navigate the environment or field within which they’re planted.

Read on
(more…)

Okay, I just can’t resist after watching a documentary on this story this evening. Check out the bizarre story of Jan Hendrik Schön who, for a while, was a rock star in the field of condensed particle physics. After it was discovered by accident that a number of his papers, including one in Nature, were based on fabricated data, he was sent packing from both his job and the world of science. I breathlessly anticipate Sokal’s next book revealing how the world of condensed particle physics is based on a series of incoherent sophistries and denouncing Nature as a second rate academic rag with no scholarly standards.

Okay, that’s not happening. However, next time some reactionary academic trots out the whole Sokal affair on you because you happen to appreciate some French or German thinkers, be sure to have the name Schön and the journal Nature quick on your lips. Oh, and incidentally, no, it was not the peer review panel of Nature that discovered the fabrication, but independent scientists who noticed that two of Schön’s papers had exactly the same graphs for very different experiments. This is not, of course, to impugn Nature, but rather the ridiculousness of Sokal’s so-called hoax. And yes, I am a bit bitter about having to deal with assholes who cite Sokal’s book without knowing a damned thing about the philosophers they’re talking about.

Bryan, over at the marvelous Velvet Howler, weighs in on my response to Mikhail, remarking that,

I want to give Dr. Sinthome as much credit as is due to him, but if his main point in regards to the hegemonic fallacy is that reductionism is bad, what’s the point of the hegemonic fallacy and all of the abstract talk of objects? To an extent I agree with Mikhael that LS’s metaphysics obscures the fact that what he seems to be saying isn’t, at the core, all that interesting. If I could crudely summarize, it seems that LS’s point is this: the Ontic principle (“there is no difference that does not make a difference”) does not intend to describes Kantian Things-in-themselves (which would simply be a return to traditional metaphysics), but seeks to overcome the nature/culture divide that characterizes Modernist thinking by asserting (1) the horizontal nature of difference and (2) the “deconstruction” of objects.

In the case of these two points, the first involves the destruction of structure or hierarchy. This is another way of simply restating the hegemonic fallacy: no difference can attain a metaphysical status wherein it determines other differences (Sinthome gives Latour’s example of the Bible and the “savages”). The second point involves a critique of Kant, who, despite his attempt at limiting metaphysics to the scope of the (transcendental) conditions of possibility, nevertheless describes what is outside of consciousness (or what is for-us) as “objects,” which presupposes a modicum of organization that is itself rendered “metaphysical” under Sinthome’s “speculative realist” terms (and the same, for Sinthome, seems to be true of intuitions, but ultimately what I find disappointing about Sinthome’s reading of Kant is that it is simply boring)

There are few charges more damning or upsetting than the charge that one’s thoughts are boring or uninteresting. I truly hope this isn’t the case. At the moment there are a lot of moving parts to what I’m trying to do and there’s a lot of work left to be done. The Ontic Principle is only a starting point. First, in response to Bryan, the aim of the hegemonic fallacy is not simply to overcome the nature/culture divide. In formulating the Hegemonic Fallacy, I was first responding to some remarks that I had received on my blog and in email that seemed to suggest that people were assuming that, in affirming an object-oriented philosophy, I was simply opting for nature over culture or the physical world over the cultural world. The first aim of my post on the Hegemonic Fallacy was simply to dispel that notion.

read on!
(more…)

Written with his characteristic brilliance, incisiveness, wit, and analytic acumen, Shaviro has a fantastic post discussing Graham’s object-oriented philosophy and his own positions emerging out of Whitehead, Kant, and Deleuze. Seriously, read this post. Shaviro, much to my ire, nicely puts his finger on what I’m gropingly trying to articulate. Bastard!

Kvond, in a way I find unrecognizable to the central claims of Graham’s thought, levels a series of criticisms against Graham’s object-oriented philosophy (here, here, and here). It is difficult to see how Graham can be guilty of the sort of optical fallacy Kvond attributes to him when Graham’s objects are infinitely withdrawn or vacuum packed. Kvond also riffs on Reid’s post responding to my version of object-oriented philosophy.

Mikhail over at Perverse Egalitarianism takes me to task for not providing arguments, introduces the Downer Principle to defend philosophical tradition, and compliments me for at least making poetic pronouncements.

Mikhail, over at Perverse Egalitarianism, has had enough regard for me to write a rather snarky post responding to the posts I’ve been developing around the Ontic Principle. Since I consider Mikhail a friend, I’ll choose to ignore his snarkiness, assuming that it arises out of a place of befuddlement rather than hostility, and instead take this as an opportunity to further clarify some of the claims I’m making. Mikhail begins by remarking that,

In a series of posts, Larval Subjects is trying to articulate a sort of new philosophical approach that, he argues, is necessary to consider. Since posting a comment is usually a matter of an immediate reaction, at least for me, it is easier for me to tackle an issue or two in a form of a post. Alright, let’s start from the end of the story, a post called Hegemonic Fallacy. It opens with a rather strange sentence:

The danger faced by any object-oriented philosophy, especially in its beginnings, is that readers will conclude that the aim is to speak of things as they are in themselves, independent of any humans, thereby denying all that is human.

What is this a “danger”? The readers are in danger, I am assuming, of making their assessment of this “object-oriented philosophy” in terms of old philosophical habit of separating the in-itself from for-us. Actually, it seems as though it is the danger for the new philosophical position, not so much the readers, the danger that from the very beginning it will have to address the issues of already-posed philosophical problems. I don’t see how this is a danger at all or even a problem – why shouldn’t a “traditional view” expect, in fact, demand explanation of any “newcomer”?

Mikhail is right that I could have made this point more clearly. What I was targeting in my post entitled “The Hegemonic Fallacy” was variants of the nature/culture, science/culture, objective/subjective, and fact/value divide that often characterizes Modernity. For those who work implicitly within these categories, it is often assumed that if one rejects one side of these dichotomies then they must be affirming the other. If, for example, you reject subjectivity you must be endorsing objectivity. If you reject culture you must be endorsing nature or science.

read on!
(more…)

Since Graham has announced it, I might as well announce it here as well. I have finally begun reading Latour’s Irreductions, which is a short little treatise that can be found in the second part of The Pasteurization of France. About a year ago I finally got around to reading Latour’s Reassembling the Social. At that time I thought I was simply taking up a pleasant diversion from serious theory during the Summer, occupying my mind with something different for a time, by picking up something outside my usual neighborhood of thinkers. However, as dramatic as it sounds, Reassembling the Social had a dramatic and fundamental impact on nearly everything I believed about both the nature of the world and the social, both helping me to articulate things I had been groping towards before and challenging me to give up deeply cherished assumptions and ways of posing problems. I continue to be haunted by that book to this day, hounded by its declarations and challenges, and anguished by a number of the familiar coordinates it has required me to gradually sacrifice. I am still digesting this book to this day.

Irreductions promises to provide a similar challenge. Those loosely familiar with Latour will immediately think of “science studies” and elaborate discussions of the interconnection of actors of all sorts, ranging from natural entities like genes, discourses, ozone holes, signs, collectives, etc. In picking up a book such as Science in Action, We Have Never Been Modern, or The Pasteurization of France, your first thought might be “all of this is very interesting, but it is restricted to the domain of science studies or the sociology of science. While fascinating, this really doesn’t connect to my own research.” Texts like Reassembling the Social and Irreductions are different. Both are philosophical treatises. Reassembling the Social is not simply an introduction to Actor-Network Theory, but presents an entirely new conception of the social that includes both humans and non-humans building the social through various alliances and assemblages. The motto of Reassembling the Social is that “the social does not explain, but must be explained.” Think about that for a moment and you will see that it fundamentally displaces a number of questions in social and political theory, all of which presuppose the social as a sort of substance that explains rather than as something to be explained.

It is difficult to describe Irreductions as anything other than a metaphysical treatise. What Latour presents here is an entire ontology that heroically affirms that nothing can be reduced to anything else, nor that anything is irreducible to anything else. Rather, the universe becomes populated by trials of strength where actors, human and inhuman, vie with one another, striving to enlist allies to advance their own aims. Written in a style that simultaneously recalls Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Leibniz’s Monadology, Nietzsche’s Gay Science, and Epictetus and Epicurus, it unfolds as a series of gnomic propositions ambiguous in their sense, but also ripe with all sorts of realist implications. As Graham observes in his marvelous Prince of Networks, Latour claims that this short treatise is a sort of master-key or ground of all his subsequent thought. It is also a work that resonates deeply with Whitehead, Stengers, Nietzsche, and Deleuze and Guattari. I have had others tell me that they find “no there there” with Latour and actor-network theory– no doubt grumbling about the descriptivism of actor-network studies –but I simply don’t see how understanding of objects and the social cannot come away transformed after reading these works. I suppose I am doing my part here for Latour’s trial of strength, trying to enlist others to read these amazing works so that I might have someone else to discuss them with.

The danger faced by any object-oriented philosophy, especially in its beginnings, is that readers will conclude that the aim is to speak of things as they are in themselves, independent of any humans, thereby denying all that is human. Those prone to dialectical thought will conclude that where the last three hundred years of philosophy have been characterized by philosophies of access or correlationism in one form or another, whether that form be Kant’s transcendental idealism, linguistic idealism, phenomenological givenness, or social constructivism, those advocating an object-oriented ontology are by contrast shifting to the domain of objects and are now eradicating all culture, society, language, and subjectivity. In other words, we are here faced with the old choice between nature and culture.

Here the interminable, inexhaustible, objections will begin. “But it is still you, a subject, a human being, talking about objects! How do you propose to overcome the manner in which your mind gives form and structure to the world?” “Yet you are thrown into a tradition, determined by categories of culture, language, and society! How can you talk of a world independent of humans, tradition, culture, language, and society?” On and on it will go. We are given the alternative of either living inside a submarine known as mind, tradition, language, culture, or society, where we only ever encounter the world through the mediation of our “sonar machines” (i.e., in a way that fails to represent them as they are, or of directly touching objects either themselves. We are given the stark alternative of mind or world, culture or nature, language or object.

Yet this stark alternative misconstrues the entire problem. The issue is not one of escaping the human, culture, or language to touch the world as it is in itself. It is not a question of shifting from one form of difference, culture or mind, to another form of difference, the objects themselves. Or, put differently, it is not a question of an alternative between Lucretius or Derrida. What object-oriented philosophy opposes is not culture, society, or mind, but rather those metaphysics– and they are metaphysics –that declare that one difference makes all the difference. Were object oriented philosophy to reject language as in the case of Lacan, for example, and shift entirely to Lucretian atoms, this move would be equally egregious from the standpoint of the Ontic and Ontological Principles. For here we would simply be replacing one difference that makes all the difference (language), with another difference that makes all the difference (atoms). I call this reduction of difference to one difference that makes all the difference or one difference that makes the most important difference, the hegemonic fallacy. The hegemonic fallacy can occur in more or less extensive forms. Thus, in the case of those theologies where everything is dependent on God as in the case of Leibniz or Spinoza, we have a rather extreme form of the hegemonic fallacy. By contrast, the relationship between form and matter as conceived by Aristotle or categories and intuitions as conceived by Kant are both less extensive forms of the hegemonic fallacy insofar as matter and intuition still contribute some difference, but in a less important way with respect to form and the categories.

Read on
(more…)

Nick over at Accursed Share has a terrific post up about realist and ontology. He takes me to task for my Principle of Irreduction, but, as I remark in his comments, I don’t think the Principle of Reduction says what he thinks it says.

Jon at Post-Hegemony rifs on Nick’s post, expressing some concerns about the Speculative Realist thesis that ontology isn’t inherently political. Incidentally, Jon, I agree with your observation that agency is not the burning question of political theory. Rather, I see the question as one of how it’s possible to form collective assemblages, which I suspect are related to what you’re getting at with multitudes. Can’t wait for your book!

Over at the OOP, Graham responds to some of my worries about his vacuum packed objects, and also responds to Reid’s post on object-oriented philosophy (here, here and here). I do not yet have a rejoinder to Graham’s critique of my position, but I suspect part of the dispute arises from my position that the minimal unit of an object is not the object itself, but the objectile-field relation. For me an object is always attached to a world, which is not, of course, the same is claim that an object is its relations. Graham also has a very nice list of ways in which people sucker punch objects. This sentence alone makes it worth the read.