We really differ very little from the so-called pre-moderns. This is above all the case with our social sciences and in many of the orientations of philosophical thought. When encountering phenomena such as lightning or a terrible storm, the early Greek might have evoked Zeus or Neptune. When seeking to explain some sort of social phenomenon, we evoke things like “social forces”, “power”, “ideology”, “structures”, etc. When seeking to account for some form of thought or knowledge, we evoke things like “categories”, “reason”, “intuition”, and so on. In both cases we believe that we have explained something, but all we’ve really done is provide a short hand name for the phenomenon we wish to understand. In naming it we believe that we have somehow accounted for it. These names are our Greek Gods. What we have here is what Hegel called “tautological ground”:
Five year old: “Why do the planets move about the Sun and objects fall to the Earth?”
Parent: “Because of gravity!”
Child: “What is gravity?”
Parent: “The manner in which planets move about the sun and things fall to the earth.”
Child: (discouraged expression)
This sort of practice sticks out to me with special clarity when I reflect back upon my days among Lacanians. If there was one sort of question that was off limits, it was questions pertaining to ontogeny or development. Ontogeny, the Lacanians declared, was always necessarily off limits because it was inherently “mythological”, retrojecting the very thing it seeks to ground back into origins. Such was the argument. One wonders whether the vehemence with which they denounced questions of ontogeny wasn’t more a defense formation than anything else.
read on!
We would do better to perpetually start from the standpoint of entropy in our posing of questions about the social, the political, the nature of mind, intersubjectivity, etc. In French Continental circles it is fashionable today to ask “how is change possible?” However, it is not change that should astonish us. What should astonish us when we contemplate social orders and minds is that they are ordered at all. There is no hardwiring that links neurons together in a particular way and no two brains are identical– indeed, one and the same brain is constantly rewriting its synapses –yet somehow we manage to cognize the world in very similar ways. In principle, humans could behave, group, and interact in an infinite number of ways, yet by and large we stop at stop lights and go when these lights turn green. The real mystery is how systems that are, by right, capable of such high entropy nonetheless manifest such low entropy. The real mystery is how a person manages to maintain something like a “character”, “self”, or personal identity over time with such shifting synapses and where memory is not an indelible trace but a reconstruction in the present. The real mystery is how a social organization manages to remain more or less ordered or low in entropy across time, rather than shifting perpetually like gas particles in an chaotic fashion.
The point of posing these questions in terms of high and low entropy is not to maintain a reactionary stance where we seek to maintain reigning orders, but rather to direct our attention to the right sorts of questions so as to cease evoking Zeus to explain what we set out to explain. That is, such a shift moves us away from a merely descriptive approach to the world that confuses names with grounds or explanations of phenomena, to a real chance of uncovering genuine grounds. It helps us to avoid falling into tautological modes of explanation.
Perhaps one of the greatest achievements of Western philosophy and science has been the so-called “locality hypothesis”. The locality hypothesis, articulated nicely in Lucretius’ axiom that “nothing can come from nothing”, is roughly the thesis that things must touch or interact to affect one another. Although this hypothesis has now been called into question in the highly specific and strange(!) case of quantum entanglement where particles at very great distances appear to immediately influence one another in a way that exceeds the speed of light (thereby excluding the possibility of any information exchange), this hypothesis has been extremely fruitful in shedding light on the workings of the world. If the locality hypothesis is kept firmly in mind, it significantly changes the way you conceive of the world about you. For example, where before it might not have ever occurred to you to consider how vision is possible, you now wonder what might allow you to see something over there, here. There must be some interaction with your eyes and the object you see, but what is that interaction? The transfer of photons of light, of course. Yet now you see that what you see as simultaneous to you is not, in fact, simultaneous as light takes time to travel. The world becomes a very strange place when the locality hypothesis is kept in mind.
The problem with explanations of social phenomena through things like “social forces”, “power”, “social structures”, “ideology”, etc., is that it black boxes the entropy reducing mechanisms, the local interactions, that are the very things to be explained. In moving in an overly hasty fashion to explanation it believes itself to have explained what it sought to understand when instead it has simply given a name to the phenomenon. As a result, it denies itself an insight into all those small little local interactions through which something like social structure emerges, foreclosing the means to change the forms of social organization it would like to change.
Larval Subjects . 
April 30, 2009 at 10:27 pm
Levi: “We really differ very little from the so-called pre-moderns. This is above all the case with our social sciences and in many of the orientations of philosophical thought. When encountering phenomena such as lightning or a terrible storm, the early Greek might have evoked Zeus or Neptune. When seeking to explain some sort of social phenomenon, we evoke things like “social forces”, “power”, “ideology”, “structures”, etc. When seeking to account for some form of thought or knowledge, we evoke things like “categories”, “reason”, “intuition”, and so on.”
It brings to mind what Quine wrote,
“[ … ] As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries — not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. Let me interject that for my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer’s gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience. [ … ]”
Two Dogmas of Empiricism
April 30, 2009 at 10:43 pm
What an excellent post. I’ve been struggling to articulate many of these points to myself recently…
Simply “naming” systems or phenomena does not solve problems, nor does it shed light on how these things work/function. On the contrary, it all too often leads to the foreclosure of thought, and of the possibility of future inquiry into causes. (It’s the end of what Aristotle et al called “wonder”.)
Then again, I don’t want to empty out the world of political significations or any stable meanings whatsoever. But let’s never stop wondering about how things actually work.
April 30, 2009 at 11:32 pm
Thanks Anodyn,
I definitely don’t want to empty the social world of stable meaning or political significations either, but simply want to understand how the social produces and reproduces itself across time. In this connection, I think we need to take great care to recognize that when we refer to things like “social structures” we’re talking about models and descriptions, not grounds or explanations. If we treat these models as being real entities or forces, we end up asking the wrong sorts of questions and fall into either a political pessimism where we feel powerless to change anything because we’ve convinced ourselves that we’re simply props or vehicles of “structure”, effects of structure”, or where we propose solutions such as those we find in Badiou or Zizek where change requires an event and a specific sort of subject because we’ve reified structure in a particular way and require a “hole” in structure from which change might be effected.
May 1, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Levi: ” If we treat these models as being real entities or forces, we end up asking the wrong sorts of questions…”
Kvond: I am curious how you rectify this with your recent appeals to actors, where if I follow you, just about anything can be an “actor”. Are you saying that something like (literally, the phrase)”social forces” is a broadbrush and merely a description, but “working class” (as a social force) is not? Or, “ideology” is not an actor, but “Late Capitalist Corporatism ideology” is an actor? At what desicive point does a theory description stop describing actors and start describing the conditions under which actors can be defined?
May 1, 2009 at 3:46 pm
Kvond,
That’s a really good (and tough!) question. In my view, we have to ask “in what respect or capacity is something an actor?” Something like “social forces” or “working classes” are actors in the sense that they function as signs for other actors that rhetorically function to translate and consolidate networks in a particular way. Latour makes this point nicely in We Have Never Been Modern when he observes that actors in during the French Revolution would have never acted in a particular way had they not understood themselves as engaged in a revolution. That is, the idea of revolution functioned as an actor among these other actors (the persons involved in the event).
May 1, 2009 at 3:54 pm
Levi: ” Latour makes this point nicely in We Have Never Been Modern when he observes that actors in during the French Revolution would have never acted in a particular way had they not understood themselves as engaged in a revolution.”
Kvond: Hmmm.But this does not seem to be the same thing as saying that the ‘working class” (or some other sociological force) is an actor. I mean, cannot some conglomeration of human beings become an “actor” without the people themselves realizing that this is who and what they are “doing”?
Let us say “Oprah’s Television Audience” becomes an actor in the last election. Yes, they realize they they watch Opera, and yes, they may even realize that they have become recognized as a body by the media, but her influence, and their effects are not reducible to this cognition. The cognition may strengthen the force of the actor, but “Oprah’s Television Audience” is an actor in commerce (booksales) all the time, without such arealization. Do not sociology and economics discover all kinds of “objects” of this kind, all the time?
May 1, 2009 at 4:55 pm
Kvond,
This gets to the heart of the issue. Latour’s answer would be no. For any actor that exists, that actor must be constructed, the links must be made, the mediations must take place, the translations must occur. The actor-network theorist’s question would thus be that of where and how the “Oprah’s Television Audience” actor is constructed. In this case, this particular actor would probably be something like “Soccer Mom’s” or “Nascar Dad’s” where this new actor is constructed by the media, think tanks, political consultants etc. Recalling the principle that there is no transportation without translation, this particular actor now has to interact with those other actors that watch Oprah’s show or that attend Nascar events. That is, the generalizations made in the media construction need to proliferate out among the actors this construction purports to describe. Since there is, by the Ontic Principle, no difference that does not make a difference, these other actors do not simply accept this “descriptor” but themselves contribute their own difference. From an ANT perspective, “working class” would not be reified as an entity but would be treated as an actor in its own right. The actor-network-theorist would then examine the way in which this new actor, “working class” proliferates among other actors through pamplets, political rallies, books, radio broadcasts, etc., and how these other actors translate the difference of the working class signifier. The ANT point would be that the connections have to be made or generated throughout the social field.
May 1, 2009 at 5:00 pm
Levi,
I don’t understand how being constructed as an actor is the equivalent of “understood themselves as engaged in”. I mean, bridges and viruses are “actors” and certainly don’t have to “see themselves engaged in”. I still don’t see how the “social forces” you are ruling out aren’t actors.
May 1, 2009 at 5:04 pm
Kvond,
When I say “social forces are not actors” I am talking about social forces in their referential dimension as concepts. In terms of the reference or denotation of these concepts there is no such thing as “social forces”. However, as a signifier or sign, the “social force” does function as an actor for the social scientists that use it and for those other actors that conceive themselves as being caught up in social forces.
May 1, 2009 at 5:09 pm
So in the same way, viruses “as concepts” are not actors? I’m still not getting it. I mean “ideology” is taken to be a real thing, and not jsut a concept.
May 1, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Viruses themselves are actors and the concept of virus is an actor among scientists and the public (just look at what’s going on right now with the swine flu). It is certainly true that many theorists take ideology to be a real thing and not just a concept. The ANT theorist is interested in how actors come to think of themselves, the world, and the “social” in terms of ideology. In other words, the ANT theorist would argue that denotatively ideology denotes nothing real. However, the signifier “ideology” is an actor in the social field as it produces differences in all sorts of other actors when they adopt a relationship to it. When you compare “ideology” with viruses, you’re comparing apples and oranges. As I said in my first response, the question to be asked is “an actor in what respect or capacity”. For the ANT theorists you always need to be able to show the links and connections in a network. In the case of viruses the links and connections by which they act or produce differences can be readily shown. The problem with ideology, by contrast, from an ANT theoretical perspective is that it black-boxes the real links and “enti-fies” something that is not an entity.
May 1, 2009 at 5:19 pm
Maybe the point will be clearer if we refer to something other than ideology or social forces. Suppose we jump back in time to Salem, MA and the witch trials. Perhaps cow milk sours. The actors in this network evoke witches to explain this event. Denotatively witches don’t exist. But nonetheless, this signifier itself becomes an actor that has all sorts of ramifications for the women of Salem and its citizens. The signifier and the theory is an actor, even though it denotes nothing. The ANT theorist thinks that “entities” like “ideology”, “social forces”, “structures”, etc., are like witches.
May 1, 2009 at 5:20 pm
[…] Entropy and Locality […]
May 1, 2009 at 5:25 pm
And how do we distinguish between an “entity” in a theory that denotes nothing, and one that denotes something? Does the signifier “Mexican Swine Flu” denote something, or not?
Why would “Late Capitalist Ideology” not exist (other than as a signifer in a theory)?
May 1, 2009 at 5:34 pm
Levi: “The ANT theorist thinks that “entities” like “ideology”, “social forces”, “structures”, etc., are like witches.”
Kvond: Why would they not be more like “baseball players”?
May 1, 2009 at 5:37 pm
You have to follow the differences, the networks, and look at where the differences are being produced. When you ask “why would “Late Capitalist Ideology” not exist (other than as a signifier in a theory)” you are not reading me carefully. This signifier circulates powerfully among those that either seek to debunk it or those that view the world through this lens, producing all sorts of differences in their actions. The question “does the signifier ‘Mexican Swine Flu’ denote something or not?” is far too broad and abstract. Sure, there is a virus that exists known as the Mexican Swine Flu that produces real differences in the bodies of people. This virus can only be transported in particular ways. However, in addition to the virus itself, there is also the discourse and narratives surrounding the swine flu, that acts in an entirely different way and that is transported throughout the world in an entirely different way. This latter actor is what proliferates through media images, newspaper articles, discussions between people, etc.. It is what leads to the mobilization of all sorts of doctors and scientists, the closing of entire school systems, the decline in attendance at sporting events, concerts, and flights, etc. This latter actor is not the virus itself but the discourses, images, etc. and how they act upon persons such as you and I. For someone one has no media access whatsoever this latter actor does not exist.
May 1, 2009 at 5:41 pm
Because baseball players exist. I think what you’re missing is that we need to be capable of following the connections between actors. Ideology it is an occult explanation of relations between people. The ANT theorist will focus on the relations between the people. Ideology doesn’t do anything or act in any way. It is shorthand for real actions between real people, just as a “structure” is shorthand for actions among people.
May 1, 2009 at 5:51 pm
Levi: “When you ask “why would “Late Capitalist Ideology” not exist (other than as a signifier in a theory)” you are not reading me carefully. This signifier circulates powerfully among those that either seek to debunk it or those that view the world through this lens, producing all sorts of differences in their actions.”
Kvond: Levi, I know you don’t mean it, but you have this habit, and it is a terrible habit that quickly corrodes discussion, of accusing your questioner of some kind of (moral) intellectual ineptitude. Any questions that persist end up being “you are not reading me closely”. Perhaps I am not, or perhaps you are not paying as much attention to what you are saying. That is what questions are for, to clear things up.
Now, when I ask you why “late capitalist ideology” does not exist, I am not being willful here, but simply following up on your analogy. “Ideology” is like “witches”, you say, and bluntly, witches do not denotatively exist:
Levi: “The actors in this network evoke witches to explain this event. Denotatively witches don’t exist.”
So, when I ask, why does “Late Capitalist ideology” not exist, I am asking, why does it not exist denotatively, exactly as you claimed witches do not exist.
For a (lay) theorizer in Salem MA, witches indeed did denotatively exist.
Perhaps if you clear up what it means to denotatively exist I’ll be able to see what you mean.
So when you say, in regards to viruses and their media names
“This latter actor [Mexian Swine Flu] is not the virus itself but the discourses, images, etc. and how they act upon persons such as you and I. For someone one has no media access whatsoever this latter actor does not exist.”
this latter actor, I assume you mean DOES denote something that exists (something different than witches and ideology you claim.) There are flu symptoms, there is an actor flu. What separates out for you theory actors that denote “something that exists” and those that do not?
May 1, 2009 at 5:52 pm
Levi: “Because baseball players exist. I think what you’re missing is that we need to be capable of following the connections between actors”
Kvond: And for Salem MA, witches existed.
May 1, 2009 at 6:05 pm
Sorry, I did not intend to accuse you of a moral or intellectual ineptitude.
Maybe I can make the point about “Late Capitalist Ideology” more clearly by reference to Saussurian linguistics so you can see what I’m claiming. Saussure begins by making a perfectly reasonable methodological distinction between diachrony and synchrony. To study language, he claims, we must set aside diachrony and examine the synchronous structure of oppositional relations between phonemes, etc as an ideal system. The synchronous system of language becomes a theoretical modeling, an idealization of language, that allows us to investigate how language is structured. However, once this distinction is made, the linguistic structure gets reified and treated as an entity in its own right, such that this structure is seen as acting or doing something. Where before only diachrony existed or various linguistic performances, now we’re told that there’s this other entity, synchronic structure, that overdetermines the rest. The theoretical model comes to be treated as an entity in its own right. Late Modernist Capitalism is something similar to linguistic structure. We turn it into an entity and begin talking about it doing something in much the same way that we might talk about a “university” doing something. But Late Modernist Capitalism is just a modeling and idealization of millions of actions among people interacting with one another, not an entity in its own right. But because we’ve reified this shorthand, we begin to ignore all of these interactions such that they become entirely invisible.
May 1, 2009 at 6:06 pm
Yes, the belief in witches was an actor in the Salem situation. That’s what I said.
May 1, 2009 at 6:07 pm
For instance,
Does “gravity” exist denotiavely as an actor?
Does the “devil” denotatively exist as an actor?
Does “Gross National Product” denotatively exist as an actor?
When is a description merely “occult”?
May 1, 2009 at 6:10 pm
Levi: “Yes, the belief in witches was an actor in the Salem situation. That’s what I said.”
Kvond: I’m not talking about the belief. I’m talking about the reality of the actor that the theory describes. Witches literally existed, they were the real denotative actors to the description witches, in Salem.
Or, are you saying that merely the “belief in baseball players” is what exists now, when you say “baseball players exist”.
May 1, 2009 at 6:15 pm
We’re using the term “real” in a different way:
“Real for them” is not a locution or expression I understand. Anyway, thanks for the discussion. I’ve made all the points I can and care to make and would just be repeating myself from here on out.
May 1, 2009 at 6:20 pm
I appreciate you begging off because certainly my questions can seem frustrating and/or repetative. I will only say that you have not for me resolved the difference between true and false belief when discussing theoretical posits. I can’t see why “capitalist ideology” would be an occult posit, with no existing denotative entity for a cultural theorist. I like the post all the same.
May 1, 2009 at 6:50 pm
Sorry, I mised your comment #20, just to finish it off,
Levi: “The theoretical model comes to be treated as an entity in its own right. Late Modernist Capitalism is something similar to linguistic structure.”
Kvond: I do like your comparisons, but you have compared Late Capitalist Ideology to both “linguistic structure” and “witches”. These are very different sorts of things.
In general, what I sense you are trying to say is that there is a difference between “objects” and their conditions. And when theory is about the conditions of objects, it is wrong to (inordinately) take these conditions as having the same reality as objects themselves. Perhaps it is wrong for me to assume this, but this is the direction I am seeing. There is a tendency in such thinking to think that we are seeing the object behind (all) objects. I’m not sure if this is a mistake or a strength of such thinking, but the effects can be very powerful.
May 1, 2009 at 6:56 pm
Kvond,
That’s because I’m not talking about true and false belief.
May 1, 2009 at 7:17 pm
Levi: “That’s because I’m not talking about true and false belief.”
Kvond: I don’t know what else the claim that witches do not denotatively exist, but only exist as beliefs (and their consequences), but that baseball players do exist would imply.
True belief: Baseball players exist. (Your claim.)
False belief: Witches exist. (The Salem MA claim.)
Until what you mean by “denotatively exists” is made clear, this what it seems to boil down to.
May 1, 2009 at 10:35 pm
[…] (how they arrive at this latter conclusion, I do not know). As I observed in my last post, the locality hypothesis lies at the heart of all our science. The thesis here is that objects must directly interact in […]
May 2, 2009 at 5:09 am
“Sure, there is a virus that exists known as the Mexican Swine Flu that produces real differences in the bodies of people…However, in addition to the virus itself, there is also the discourse and narratives surrounding the swine flu, that acts in an entirely different way and that is transported throughout the world in an entirely different way.”
I haven’t read Latour’s book in a very long time, so this may be a foolish question. But doesn’t the idea of the “hybrid” suggest that this is the sort of distinction that cannot be cleanly made? Or are you intentionally departing from Latour here? Or am I just mistaken about what he says?
May 2, 2009 at 1:44 pm
Frank,
No, he doesn’t think these distinctions can be cleanly made, but also wouldn’t agree with the suggestion that a virus is “just” a manifestation of discourse.
May 2, 2009 at 4:07 pm
Yeah, I get that, but that seems like a different point entirely. Your point seems to be that there ARE things that are “just” manifestations of discourse, like “late capitalist ideology,” and then there are things that are real, and have a discursive supplement that acts “in an entirely different way.” On the other hand, as I recall the book, I would interpret a “quasi-object” or a hybrid as something that is neither purely natural nor discursive, nor just a purely natural and a purely discursive thing grafted onto one another, in which case the dualism of nature/culture would be just as transparent and pronounced.
May 2, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Frank,
No, I don’t go all the way with Latour in his understanding of hybrids and quasi-objects.
May 2, 2009 at 4:44 pm
Frank,
Also, I didn’t claim that “late capitalist ideology” isn’t real, but that it is real in a highly specific respect. But no, I don’t go all the way with Latour. For example, when he claims somewhere that it is anachronistic to talk about the Bubonic Plague during the Middle Ages as being caused by a bacteria I think this is absurd and a moment where he’s falling on the side of the cultural side of the two worlds that he so carefully tries to take apart.
May 2, 2009 at 5:36 pm
Yes, I think I understood what your were saying with “late capitalist ideology.” Thanks for clarifying about Latour.
May 28, 2009 at 5:11 pm
[…] through the ongoing activities of their elements. It was this that I tried to get at in my post Entropy and Locality, where I attempted to make the case that the concept of entropy should play a central role in our […]