Larval Subjects .

N.Pepperell has begun posting chapter drafts of her long awaited thesis on Marx over at Rough Theory. The work that she’s doing is well worth the read and promises to new light on a number of competing approaches to social and political theory. Might we not get an actor-network version of Marx… Including the hyphen and suitably responsive to Braudel? I look forward to watching the text unfold. I do, however, have one gripe. I cannot find a “thesis workshop” tab in her categories section, so it is difficult to follow the order of the text. NP, add a tag stat!

Behold the Abstinence Clown (beginning around 2:50)! It’s a good thing congressional democrats agreed to take family planning money out of the stimulus bill while our tax dollars continue to go to these hip and highly effective prevention programs.

Graham has a couple of terrific posts up that are well worth the read. The first outlines elements of his appropriation of occasional causation in the context of his discussions with Latour. I am still trying to get my head around this concept of causation and confess that Graham outlines precisely my objection:

The problem I note in Prince of Networks is that if neutrons can’t touch politics without Joliot acting as a mediator, it’s unclear why Joliot should be able to touch either politics or neutrons. Wouldn’t he need mediators to touch either of these things too? And so on, in an “Achilles and the Tortoise” sort of problem. That’s why I think the only solution is to say that the sensual medium where intentional objects obviously bump up against one another is the only place where real objects can interact. But Latour allows for no duality between real and intentional objects, so the solution can’t work in his model. (Note: sometimes people say that Latour’s Joliot point is meant only as sociology of science, not as metaphysics. But Latour presents himself as a metaphysician, and in fact makes use of rather subtle metaphysical principles, and hence deserves to be judged as a metaphysician.)

That is, if entities can only interact via the mediation of some third term, why don’t we find ourselves falling into an infinite regress (which isn’t necessarily bad)? Hopefully Graham will give a more detailed response to this criticism in the future, or direct me to where he has already responded to this problem if, indeed, it is a problem.

Graham’s other post suggests that, in light of recent comments, I am falling back into my corrupt Deleuzian-Bergsonian roots. Graham concludes that while I come perilously close to positing a pre-individual realm in opposition to individual entities out of which individual entities would emerge,

There’s still a taste of individual objects in Levi’s post. He’s not saying, as many do, that there’s some unarticulated pre-individual realm prior to the actual. He still seems to be letting individual chestnuts and donkeys do all the work in the world (three cheers for that!), and simply wants to make them into trajectories across time. The “withdrawal” is not instantaneous for him as for me, but is a kind of principle lying above the sequence of shapes by which the chestnuts and donkeys appear from one moment to the next. Instead of “time as a moving image of eternity,” it’s more like “time as a moving image of instantaneity.

Hopefully this is true. My language is still in a great deal of flux and I am struggling to articulate things in a coherent and intelligible way. My points about time and duration are not designed to claim that entities emerge from some pre-individual state– though I think it is certainly true that entities come-to-be –but that there is something at the heart of beings that is on the order of a struggle to exist in a particular way. In my recent post on the ugly word “onticology” (a term chosen as more a way of thumbing my nose at ontology than anything else), I added the term enlistment in describing the dynamics of object-iles. As assemblages object-iles must enlist other entities or other assemblages so as to be or continue existing. Oxygen atoms perpetually exchange their electrons with other atoms. The cells of my body must constantly convert other matter into material to (re)produce themselves. Cells in my body can enter into struggles with one another as in the case of sickness or cancerous growths where a virus enlists cells to (re)produce itself. Likewise, in a society members of the group must be enlisted so that the society might (re)produce itself in time. These processes of enlistment must also maintain the enlisted over time. That is, in a social setting all sorts of work (translation) must take place to perpetuate the group relations. All of these are issues that pertain to time, but here time and temporalization arises from the interactions among object-iles and consists of interactions and struggles among individual entities.

[UPDATE]: Graham responds to issues pertaining to infinite regress here and here. As I suggested in the original post, it’s worth noting that infinite regress is not necessary a terrible thing within the context of speculative realism. In seeking to break with correlationism and philosophies of access, contemporary metaphysics has been characterized by a renewed thinking of the infinite. Where philosophies of access are characterized in one form or another by a restriction to finitude, these new ontologies affirm the infinite and the thinkability of the infinite. This can be seen quite clearly in the thought of Deleuze, Badiou, and Meillassoux. Graham reflects this orientation in his conception of objects as infinitely decomposable assemblages. Here is perhaps one of his deepest tensions with his philosophical master, Heidegger.

As a result of recommendations from both Nick (in his thesis) and Graham, I have been reading Roy Bhaskar’s remarkable Realist Theory of Science over the last couple of weeks. I am still trying to fully understand Bhaskar’s position and arguments, so if I misconstrue it in what follows I would greatly appreciate the input and clarification of those more familiar with his work. Bhaskar attempts to develop a position he refers to as “transcendental realism”, where it is argued that the entities and mechanisms discovered by science are not simply beings as they are for us or beings in terms of our access to these beings, but rather where these mechanisms or beings exist as they are regardless of human access to them. In a manner very similar to Meillassoux’s argument from the “Arche-Fossil”, Bhaskar argues that the intelligibility of science requires that mechanisms or entities discovered by science must be thought as belonging to a world without humans. In other words, according to Bhaskar, the existence of objects that are as they are independent of humans is a transcendental condition for the possibility of science. Just as Kant argued that we cannot account for how synthetic a priori judgments are possible unless we begin from the thesis that the mind imposes a priori forms of intuition and categories of the understanding on the manifold of sensibility, Bhaskar argues that objects completely independent of humans are a necessary condition for the intelligibility of scientific practice.

Bhaskar’s thesis is thus three-fold: First, Bhaskar is committed to the thesis that objects exist completely independent of humans. So far, with this first thesis, Bhaskar does not depart from the tradition of epistemological correlationism. The linguistic, social, or cognitive correlationist does not deny the existence of independent objects, only that we can have any direct or non-discursively mediated access to these objects. As Bhaskar sums up the correlationist argument,

…it might be objected that the very idea of a world without men is unintelligible because the conditions under which it is true would make its being conceived impossible. But I can think of a world without men; and I can think of a world without myself. No-one can truly say ‘I do not exist’ but that does not mean that ‘I do not exist’ is unintelligible; or that it cannot be meaningfully (sic.), just because it cannot be truly said. (47)

The epistemic correlationist holds that while it is true that a world without men exists, and while it is possible to think this world, it is impossible for us to know this world because our relationship to the world is always mediated by the concepts, language, history, or social constructs that we bring to bear on the world. As a consequence, we can only ever say what the world is for-us, not what the world is in-itself or for-itself independent of us. It is here that Bhaskar parts ways with the correlationist. For Bhaskar, we can come to know the world as it is in itself, as it is without humans, and not simply as it is for-us as mediated by human concepts, language, history, or social institutions. Bhaskar will call this form of knowing science. Moreover, he will argue that science is unintelligible if we do not being from these premise, and will go so far as to refer to the correlationist argument as a fallacy, where it is held that questions of ontology can be reduced to questions of epistemology.

read on!
(more…)