In a generous response to my post “Realism Through the Eyes of Anti-Realism“, Lee Braver writes:
Your discussion of translation is very intriguing and, when applied to mind-world interactions, it does sound a death knell for passive correspondence. This seems to be a version of Kant’s position–our mind’s activity (A5) in organizing experience rules out capturing (R2) the way the world is independently of our experience of it (R1). Then the question becomes, what sense can we attribute to the existence of this independent world (R1) if it remains forever closed off to us. Even the bits and pieces are heavily constructed and interpreted. I take your response to be something like, the existence and nature of an object consists in its interactions with other entities, something like some of Nietzsche’s musings on WTP, and this includes the mind, so that what an entity coughs up in our interactions with it is part of its very nature. Is that right? Of course, if an entity is the totality of its interactions (a la Leibniz), then it isn’t truly independent of us, since interactions with our minds make up 1 of its essential properties. Also, how do we differentiate between accurate/true/illuminating bits and pieces and false/misleading ones? Why go to all the trouble of setting up experiments if my mundane interactions with a thing are just as valid and real? But maybe I haven’t got your idea at all. BTW, Joseph Rouse is also really good on the construction of artificial environments in science.
This is an important and deeply challenging question that I am still working through myself. A couple of points are worth noting here. As I have articulated it, Latour’s Principle states that there is not transportation without translation. This is to say, there is never a transport of a difference from one entity to another entity where the target entity functions merely as a vehicle for the difference from the source entity. The first point to note with the Anti-Realist project would thus be that Anti-Realist positions consistently violate this principle. Here we get a curious inverted mirror between Anti-Realism and Realism. Where Braver rightfully criticizes a certain variant of realist positions for treating the mind as a passive locus (R5) that merely reflects the world as it is (what I would call “naive realism”), Anti-Realism falls into a similar positing of passivity, but with respect to the object. For the Naive Realist the relationship between world and mind, object and subject, is uni-directional and uni-lateral, such that the object does all the “work” and the mind merely receives and registers the object. Similarly, for the Anti-Realist, the relation between mind and world, subject and object, is uni-directional and uni-lateral, such that the object, now, is a passive vehicle of the mind’s synthetic activity, contributing nothing of its own beyond the manner in which it “affects” the mind providing it with matter for intuition.
In other words, for Anti-Realism the mind is not “translated” by the object and for Naive Realism the object is not “translated” by the mind. In both cases, these claims are based on certain assumptions about the nature of identity. In the case of Naive Realism, identity is placed “in” the object (R3), such that the object is exactly what it is and knowledge consists in discovering or reflecting this identity. Knowledge cannot change this identity in any way as to do so would be to distort the nature of the object. Identity-in-the-object is thus a sort of inert and unchanging identity. We are supposed to get to the object as it is beyond any of its shifting changes. We find a similar thesis with respect to identity asserted by the Anti-Realist position. Where it is the object that remains the same in the case of the Naive Realist position, it is the mind that remains the same in the Anti-Realist position. The mind does not become something other in its encounter with the object, but the object does become something other in its encounter with the mind.
read on!
However, given what we have come to know through neurology and developmental psychology, is this a tenable hypothesis? If neurology has demonstrated anything, it has demonstrated the untenability of functional accounts of mind (the modern heir of Kantianism in cognitive psychology). Brain research has shown that we find nothing like “hard wiring” or “computer programs” among the synapses of the brain. Rather, what we find is an account of brain where concepts and categories are emergent products that take place over the course of development and throughout life. This process is not a self-enclosed process within the brain, but rather is a bi-lateral, bi-directional process that takes place between brain and world. World “interprets” brain to the same degree that brain interprets world. Take the example of my grandfather, a crusty old man that spent his life at sea engineering bridges for the state of New Jersey. Were my grandfather to approach you from across a room for the very first time, you would notice that he has a very peculiar gait. This gait is the result of spending the vast majority of his life on tug boats, barges, boats, etc. His body, his walk, is literally “petrified” waves. He became what he was as a result of his encounter with the sea. Here his nervous system did not impose a set of categories, intentions, language, etc., on the waves of the sea, but rather the boats, the waves, the sea air and wind, etc., imposed itself on his body. He became what he is through this encounter with the other.
As a consequence, we cannot really say where objects or mind begin or end. We don’t have one domain, mind, and another domain world, but rather only bi-directional relations between mind and world. The problem with Naive Realism is that it places all activity and identity on one side, the object, and the problem with Anti-Realism is that it places all activity on the other side, the mind. In both cases, the claims are based on certain ontological assumptions about the nature of identity as it pertains to identity and objects.
All of this changes when we shift our notion of identity to one based on dynamic interaction. Here “properties” of an object are not predicates that intertly reside in the object, but are rather features that come-to-be through dynamic interaction with the world. Based on a reading of a certain moment in Hegel’s thought, I proposed such an account of objects (Existent(s))– what I call “ob-ject-iles” –a couple years ago before encountering Graham or his work, but which, I think, resonates nicely with his account of vicarious causation. There my focus was on Hegel’s critique of the Kantian thing-in-itself and his account of Existence in the Science of Logic and the Encyclopedia Logic. The aim here wasn’t to follow Hegel in his own project, but to liberate a particular concept of the object where the qualities or properties of an object are not elements that reside inertly in the object, but which, rather, are “drawn forth” from the object in its dynamic interactions with objects. Objects then come to be conceived as dynamic interactions that reveal or disclose their nature in and through their encounter with a field composed of other objects.
Much to my surprise, I later discovered that this account of objects as object-iles or vectors of activity resonates deeply with the branch of mathematics known as Category Theory. As described by Badiou in his essay, “Group, Category, Subject”,
In category theory, the initial data are particularly meager. We merely dispose of undifferentiated objects (in fact, simple letters deprived of any interiority) and of “arrows” (or morphisms) “going” from one object to another. Basically the only material we have is oriented relations. A linkage (the arrow) has its source in one object and target in another.
Granted, the aim is ultimately for the “objects” to become mathematical structures and the “arrows” the connection between these structures. But the purely logical initial grasping renders the determination of an object’s sense entirely extrinsic or position. It all depends on what we can learn from the arrows going toward that object (whose object is the target), or of those coming from it (whose object is the source). An object is but the marking of a network of actions [my emphasis], a cluster of connections. (Briefings on Existence, 145)
Objects, then, are not to be conceived as inert points possessing properties, but rather as relational activities in relation to other objects. Things get really interesting with respect to how this modifies our understanding of identity. As Badiou remarks a bit further on,
What is interesting is the following: the categorical definition of group G makes G appear as the set of different ways in which object-letter G is identical to itself.
We have seen how identity in categorical thought is fundamentally isomorphism. Since all of the arrows of a group G are ismorphisms, each of these arrows registers an identity of G to itself. Accordingly, two different arrows represent the difference between two self-identities.
This means that the real purpose of a group is to set the plurality of identity [my emphasis]. Now we hold the principle for thought of this concepts ubiquity.
Among the different ways of being identical to oneself, there is “inert” identity, that is, the null action id(G) [my emphasis]. What a group indicates is that this identity is but the degree zero of identity, its immobile figure and at rest. The other arrows of the group are dynamic identities. They are the active ways of being identical to oneself. They show that what vouces for the One of entity G, over and above its empty literal fixity is the plurality of its internal connections through which it produces isomorphism and, thus, the multiple ways of manifesting its own identity [my emphasis].
The more you have different arrows, the more the letter G proves to be the name of a dense entity, a complex network of differentiated identities.
At this point we ought to evoke Plato’s Sophist, and the five supreme genera of all intelligibility. Being, pure Being and purely empty Being, is letter G, which is but the literal index of the One-that-is. Rest is id(G), inert identity to oneself as the stopping-point of all action. Movement is the arrows, noninert isomorphisms plaiting G in the active manifestation of its identity. Last in Plato’s list is the dialectic of the Same and the Other, which is made explicit in the difference of arrows. For this difference, in terms of difference, vouches for the Other. But this Other is also only the differentiating work of the Same because every “other,” being an ismorphism, is nonetheless a figure of the Same. (149)
The great mistake lies in the supposition that the being of the object is to be found in this inert identity– id(G) –rather than in the plurality of ways in which identify manifests itself in relation to other objects. It is precisely when the object is in act that we discover what the object is. When the object is inert it becomes akin to the meditative “omm” manifesting nothing. Badiou makes this point a bit more clearly by way of reference to Freud and Lacan:
It is now high time to say that the group works as a matheme for a thought on the Subject. It is formally adequate to what Freud and, later, Lacan attempted to record as its fleeing identity.
In the beginning, there is but a letter if we maintain that a proper name is the position of a letter-signifier in the Subject economy. As such the proper name is empty; it says nothing. The Subject presents itself instead as a plait consisting of the active figures of its identity. It is the signifying articulations wherein desire is presented, that is, the differentiated pieces of information of the initial letter wherein the same-subject ek-sists from the plurality-other of its identifications. The psychoanalytic cure is akin to unfolding the strands of the plait. It is the possibility of considering not the identity of inertia– which is only the null index of the proper name –, but of otherness itself, the plural and intertwined arrowing of immanent isomorphisms. (150 -1)
This plural network of identifications is not a betrayal or ruin of the subject’s identity, but is that identity. It is the means by which the subject discovers what it is.
At this point I return to Lee’s original remark:
Of course, if an entity is the totality of its interactions (a la Leibniz), then it isn’t truly independent of us, since interactions with our minds make up 1 of its essential properties. Also, how do we differentiate between accurate/true/illuminating bits and pieces and false/misleading ones? Why go to all the trouble of setting up experiments if my mundane interactions with a thing are just as valid and real?
It would seem that the situation is now even worse, for as I argued above we cannot determine where mind begins and ends, where object begins and ends. However, one of the first points to note is that the object is not the totality of its interactions or relations. This would return us to the uniqueness thesis (R3) that conceives the object as a static point defined by relations in a spatialized sense. Objects are not relations and interactions, but are relating and interacting. That is, we must think of objects as verbs, not nouns. As such, they can enter into and break away from particular relations and interactions. Why go to the trouble to set up all these experiments? Well if it is true that there is no difference that does not make a difference, the whole point of an experiment is to provoke difference. That is, by isolating the object under certain conditions and setting it into interactions with other objects, we begin to discover the differences that lurk within the object. Part of what we attempt to isolate in the experimental setting is precisely our interaction with the object. An electron microscope allows us to discern an object under conditions that far exceed our own perceptual structures. In manifesting the object in this way it calls into question our lived world and how it is organized. A radio telescope generates an entirely new sensibility that discloses stars in very different ways. In each case, what is being discovered are “inhuman” differences, or differences that differ from the differences towards which we are attuned through our own particular organization.
Larval Subjects . 
May 17, 2009 at 4:19 am
“We don’t have one domain, mind, and another domain world, but rather only bi-directional relations between mind and world.”
I’d add that “mind” in that statement is only given prominence due to the perspective from which you’re answering the question. It’s all world. Body and brain are entities in the world and “mind” is an emergent property of one of those entities. It’s our conceptual curse to always have to split things in two in order to have one part look at the other.
One possibly worthwhile thread in the question of how we know what’s accurate and what’s misleading is the idea that the brain (mind) is structured by its interaction with other objects, and so it will tend to act in world-like ways. Another thread is to ask to what extent survival relies on accuracy.
I haven’t found a position on any list that doesn’t force you to pick one weakly supported principle or another to start with. This isn’t a problem unique to realism. So some realists will pick the principle of consistency, which at least is supported by the fact that the alternative is a chaotic world.
May 17, 2009 at 5:05 am
One of Lee’s points was this: “Of course, if an entity is the totality of its interactions (a la Leibniz), then it isn’t truly independent of us, since interactions with our minds make up 1 of its essential properties.”
But the point is this– interactions with *our minds* doesn’t *exhaust* the reality of the thing for Leibniz, Whitehead, and (on a charitable reading) Latour.
I have many other problems with the relationist metaphysics, but at least it blows apart the prejudice that the human/world relation is philosophically unique.
May 17, 2009 at 5:34 am
Agreed, and I also think this is one of the reasons– as I argued in my last post –that it is important to distinguish the epistemological question from the ontological question.
May 17, 2009 at 3:56 pm
OK, aside from the Badiou, I think I’m getting a better sense of what you mean (when you said, “This process is not a self-enclosed process within the brain, but rather is a uni-lateral, uni-directional process that takes place between brain and world,” you meant “bi-lateral, uni-directional,” right? I want to make sure I’ve got the idea right). Ontologically, what things are is how they behave which only occurs in interactions with other things. Epistemologically, understanding something is to grasp how it interacts with other things. All of these interactions are real and, in general, the greater the diversity of interactions we can observe, the greater our understanding of the thing involved. This does seem quite close to Nietzsche’s Will-to-Power ontology combined with his perspectival epistemology.
This does violate Mind Independence, but in a spectacular fashion–it’s not that we can’t speak of things independently of our minds, but that we can’t speak of things as independent full stop. They only exist as interactive events; total isolation, were it possible, would be equivalent to destruction since it would prevent the thing from acting on or getting acted upon by anything else. Inertness is death. In this case, I think I agree with Graham–mind-thing interaction doesn’t fall away, but simply takes its place as one among countless alternatives.
Now one problem with this, if I have it right, is your language of scientific discovery, ie, of “discover[ing] the differences that lurk within the object.” I don’t see how you can talk of a thing’s containing potential interactive force independently of its actual manifestation of it (Hegel talks about something like this in his discussion of scientific analyses of force or energy near the beginning of the _Phenomenology_). Epistemologically, we can perhaps talk about the likelihood of a thing acting upon something else in a certain way based on prior experience, but until it acts that way, I don’t see how it can actually possess the property without falling back into a noun-adjective ontology.
I also don’t see how you’re entitled to say that, “in manifesting the object in this way it calls into question our lived world and how it is organized.” Why would it call our mundane perception into question if it enjoys no ontological priority? Aren’t the table that we see and the table as made up of atoms both just perspectives we have of the table? One comes naturally and the other takes great effort and may result in considerable predictive and manipulative power, but I thought we had quit the game of awarding one layer or perspective the status of the really real.
I think I’m also coming to see how later Heidegger can be the hero of this story. In his later work, he says that, “when understood historically, the relationship between ontic interpretation and ontology is always a correlative relationship insofar as new existentialia are discovered from ontic experience.” Whereas in BT, Dasein’s existentialia seemed fixed ahistorically a priori, in the later work they change. I focused on their epochal states emanating from Being’s sendings, but I also talked about how H’s later understanding of phenomenology allows for radical changes in our concepts when we closely examine our experiences. Attentive dwelling with things is to allow them to teach us, not just what they are, but what categories to employ in understanding them, which changes the way we think. The locus classicus for this would be the (usually overlooked) first section of “Origin of the Work of Art” where he uses predetermined concepts to try to grasp the artwork (tellingly, the concepts of equipment of object–the 2 from BT) and finds them crumbling in his hands. Once he “attentively dwells” with a work, tho, he comes up with new concepts & categories (earth, world, strife, aletheia). Reliance on familiar categories closes us off from experience as much as it opens us up to it (every unconcealment is also a concealment). To quote a bit:
“Today a world dominates in which the decisive question runs: How do I have to represent nature in the sequence of its appearances to myself, so that I am in a position to make secure predictions about all and everything? The answer to this question is that it is compulsory to represent nature as a totality of energy particles of existing mass, the reciprocal movements of which are to be mathematically calculable. Descartes already says to the piece of wax that he holds before his eyes: ‘You are nothing other than an extended, flexible, and mutable thing,’ and thus I proclaim myself to know everything about you that there is to know of you.”
In other words, subjects force objects to speak their language to eliminate the work involved in “translation.” We cling to our established ways of thinking, our identity, and maximize the object’s translation to our terms in order to minimize our own translation/adaptation. Changing our minds is taken literally as a loss of identity.
“Modern man, Cartesian man, se solum alloquendo, only talks to himself” because “the representation, namely, that is prior in regards to the object, posits the object across from it, in such a way that the object is never able to first presence from itself.”
This is also where I connect Heidegger with Levinas, for whom a genuine encounter with the other must overload our circuitry, crashing through our present ways of thinking about it. While Levinas admits that this is traumatic, it forms the beginning point of real experience.
Am I on the right wavelength?
May 17, 2009 at 5:06 pm
Hi Lee,
Thanks for catching my error re: “uni-lateral” versus “bi-lateral”. I go back and forth on whether or not there can be fully intert objects. In Graham’s ontology something of the object always withdraws in its encounter with other objects, such that there is always a vacuum packed kernel, a non-relational core, that exceeds any relation to other entities. I tend more in the relational direction, siding with Whitehead and Latour on these issues. However, if to be is to be relational, I encounter the question of how objects can appear to remain inert and stable throughout time? Here I think the answer lies in a “detente” of forces. My desk does not appear to be doing anything at this point in time beyond “being” a desk. It seems to be relatively inert. However, this inertness is the result of a balance between gravity, pressure, heat, etc., etc., etc. Were my desk on, say, Jupiter, it would very quickly be reduced to the gaseous magma that composes this planet due to shifts in temperature, pressure, gravity, and all the rest. The stability of an environment-object relation, then, partially accounts for why we’re so quick to adopt a subject-predicate ontology based on the fixity of objects or their stability throughout time because the forces underlying the encrustation of an object withdraw into the background. We are led to think of qualities as something an object has rather than something an object “does“.
I’m not opposed to the Hegelian point you make about epistemology. As I remarked in my previous post– “Realism Through the Eyes of Anti-Realism” –the realist truck with anti-realism lies not in the thesis that we must relate to the world to know objects, but rather in the thesis that the being of objects related to is dependent on us, such that the object 1) would not be what it is independent of our relation to it, and 2) that we can never know what the object would be independent of this relation (i.e., that the noumenal and the phenomenal in no way resemble one another). In my view it is obvious that we must relate to objects in some way or other in order to know their differences, but this doesn’t entail that the being of the object is dependent on this relation. Following Stengers and Whitehead, the objects of knowledge are simultaneously constructed and real. When I say that the objects of knowledge are constructed, I am not referring to a linguistic, discursive, or social construction, but rather a very literal material construction that takes place in the laboratory setting. Substances, for example, are purified in a way they would never appear in nature, they are placed in a controlled environment, they are stimulated and catalyzed in very specific ways, and so on. But the results are no less real for all that.
I think you’re right that the expression “calls into question our lived experience” is too strong for what I’m trying to get at. What I mean to say is that the activity of inquiry opens us to relations among objects that are both above and below the field of everyday human relations to objects. Quantum mechanics, for example, opens us on to a strange world in which objects behave very differently than they do at the level of everyday lived experience. The question then becomes on of how to think nested relations of interdependency among these different levels.
May 17, 2009 at 5:07 pm
Correction: “bi-lateral, bi-directional.”
May 17, 2009 at 5:19 pm
Hi Asher,
I think you’re right with respect to the issue of how the question is being framed in terms of mind. It is all world. This is what I’m trying to get at with my proposal of a “flat ontology”, where ontologically everything is on equal footing.
I’m of mixed thoughts with respect to the issue of biology and epistemology. It does not seem to me that we should think of our biology as a reliable guide to “how the world is”. All that’s required biologically is that our critterness be able to reproduce. This need not suggest that there is anything accurate in how an organism represents the world. On the other hand, I do think there are some promising Whiteheadian rejoinders to Kant’s thesis that works in this direction. Whitehead famously argued that the subject is a “superject” of the world. Where Husserl– working roughly in a Kantian lineage –claims that Nature cannot be a condition of Consciousness because Consciousness is the condition of Nature, thereby making the world a “superject” of consciousness, Whitehead argues that the subject is itself a product of the world.
This move, I think, gives us a foothold to respond to some of Kant’s more pressing questions about space, time, and causality. We have intuitions organized around space and time not because mind “imposes” these on things-in-themselves, but because we evolved and developed in a spatio-temporal world. Likewise, we experience the world in terms of causal relations precisely because our body is one object among others governed by causality. This sort of naturalistic approach to these questions does not give us more complex topographies of time and space such as those discovered by relativity theory, but it does give us, perhaps, the minimal conceptual apparatus to bootstrap our way to these more complex topologies through activities of formalization. The strange thing is that a good deal of scientific work involves becoming cognizant of the manner in which the structure of our perception distorts objects and determining ways to overcome these limitations.
May 17, 2009 at 5:48 pm
I think a lot hangs on Levi’s claim:
“Following Stengers and Whitehead, the objects of knowledge are simultaneously constructed and real. When I say that the objects of knowledge are constructed, I am not referring to a linguistic, discursive, or social construction, but rather a very literal material construction that takes place in the laboratory setting.”
I think a lot more work is needed to show that this is a difference that makes a difference. Some of my own research is relevant to arguing that it does.
Say person X asserts that morals are constructions by humans. On the one hand this could be to give them a fictive status (cue relativism, eliminativism, whathaveyou). On the other hand one could be asserting something stronger, that morals are emergent from humans, but nonetheless really really, not just fictions- but how to make this precise.
For me (Mark and I have an unpublished paper on this) the difference is between the property being *merely epistemically emergent* versus being *genuinely ontologically* emergent. We argue that ontologically emergent properties are such that there is *no* algorithm from descriptions of the states of the parts that will return “yes” or “no” successfully when the question of whether the property is instantiated is posed.
We think this tests works well with properties like “strategy for winning a computer game” (and have argued, using limitation results from logic, as much in print), but hope that something like it would also work with respect to emergent normative properties such as being the right thing to do.
It’s a strange view, by which (along with passing a set of other tests perhaps including causal efficacy) the reality of a property instantiation is dependent upon it’s ability to surprise.
May 17, 2009 at 7:51 pm
Lee Braver wrote: “Aren’t the table that we see and the table as made up of atoms both just perspectives we have of the table? One comes naturally and the other takes great effort and may result in considerable predictive and manipulative power, but I thought we had quit the game of awarding one layer or perspective the status of the really real.”
Lee, this passage shows why I wasn’t actually wrong to present you as an enemy of speculative realism. No shame in being an enemy (I really liked your book as you know) but after writing a passage like this one you can’t possibly claim that our differences are small.
First: “”Aren’t the table that we see and the table as made up of atoms both just perspectives we have of the table?”
Yes, and that’s why I’m not a materialist. But you also seem to be implying that “table that we see” and “table made of atoms” (i.e. table that we theorize about) are the only two options. There is also the table, period– the subterranean table-reality that no seeing or theorizing or practical handling can ever adequately translate.
Second: “but I thought we had quit the game of awarding one layer or perspective the status of the really real.”
This is the problem– you think realism is a “game”. That’s why I can only take with a grain of salt your new claim to express a bit of scepticism toward Derrida at the end of your book. The book reads to me like a flat-out celebration of anti-realism, and so does the remark I just cited. That is your right, and you will have plenty of allies in doing so, but I think it’s also important to acknowledge that there is a profound difference in these two philosophical positions.
And here again, as with the first point, I think your way of phrasing the problem forecloses the most interesting option… As a descendant of phenomenology and a rough adherent of Latour, I would agree that my perception of the table deserves to be called real, just as the real table is called real (here’s where Brassier disagrees). But that’s not the real question. The question is whether the reality of the table is “nothing more than” its reality as seen or as described by atomic theory.
May 17, 2009 at 7:55 pm
And by the way, Levi, it’s a pleasure to read your comment sections now that the riffraff have fled or been censored, whichever it is.
While I’m dead set against snobbery of credentials, rank, background, or persons, I am always in favor of a snobbish assessment of people’s motives. If people are arguing in order to move a discussion forward or clarify it– excellent. But if people are arguing just to score points and playing devil’s advocate just to slow others down– expel them from the conversation. We’ll all be dead soon enough. There’s no time to waste on the loungers and the goofs.
May 17, 2009 at 9:23 pm
Thanks for the response. This is precisely what I was trying to say by referring to the mind as working in “world-like” ways. You put it much more clearly.
I like the terminology of “flat ontology” for the basic set of “it’s all world” propositions.
I have to admit, I’ve always liked Whitehead’s argument a little better than Husserl’s. I feel hypocritical using Husserl’s approach because the concept of self-organizing systems involves a sort of co-conditionality that Husserl’s logic implicitly rejects.
You may be right that the “an accurate picture of the world is needed for survival” argument is the wrong road to go down. I should probably try to formulate a post on this, but I’m seeing a general trend in the realism/non-realism discussions. We start with ontology, and once the positions are laid out, the discussion moves to epistemology (“if that’s so, how can we know…). When the answers to the epistemological questions are on the table, the discussion moves to normativity (“how can we justify that this is a better way of acquiring knowledge”…). It can be frustrating.
I think that just maybe, the best answer to the “why is the scientific method preferred?” argument is a counter-attack. “What other method would you propose that we use? Let’s see how they compare.”
May 17, 2009 at 9:54 pm
Jon writes:
I’m not sure I understand the opposition of “constructed” vs. “real” here, maybe you can explain it a bit as it seems to be me that saying something like “morals are constructed” and “morals are fictive” are two different things – and I think this is what you are pointing out, right? – but it just seems that “constructed”/”fictive” and “real” are in such different systems of reference that it seems like oranges and apples. I suppose it’s just a remark, not really a question.
May 18, 2009 at 1:22 am
Mikhail,
Maybe you could say a bit more as to how you see “being constructed” and “real” as belonging to different systems of reference. A house is constructed, but is also real. I would also argue that species are constructed, but are nonetheless real. It seems to me that one of Marx’s central projects throughout his various historical writings and Capital was to explain the construction of different systems of values. That is, one the things Marx shows is how, as a result of different systems of production, new values became available allowing for the complete transformation of society. For Marx it wasn’t simply that “capitalism is bad, bad, bad and communism is good”. Rather, it was that new values had become available as a result of the capitalist system of production, yet the social system had not yet actualized these values in a living form. As a historical materialist, Marx rejected the notion that we can simply measure various societies by an ahistorical values or principles. Rather, the historical materialist requires a genesis of very criteria by which social organizations are measured.
May 18, 2009 at 1:59 am
“Systems of reference” is perhaps too strong, I admit. I think what I was trying to say was, using your example, is that “house is constructed” is as connected to “house is real” as to “house is green” – clearly, house has a number of characteristics – I think that to say that something is constructed does not tell us anything about its reality/non-reality, I think that’s a fair summary. Again, depending on what we mean by “construction” and “reality”.
Take “constructed morals” – I think that pointing out that they are constructed is sometimes done in a way as to suggest that they are not binding (real?) which is of course not the case. I agree with your example of Marx and construction of values – maybe this a different take on a point we disagreed over in the past vis-a-vis the whole business of genesis of mind’s capacities (evolution) and its present capabilities if you recall that conversation, in short, I don’t think that knowing how values come into existence undermines their validity or their force in general.
May 18, 2009 at 2:03 am
Mikhail,
I agree:
I think this is a problem with some orientations falling under the name “social constructivism”. Just as you suggest, they associate “construction” with “artificial” with “not real”. This is why I use examples like the construction of a house. A house is something entirely real, but also constructed. When I claim that values are the result of a genesis I am not, by any means, suggesting that they are non-binding or unreal.
May 18, 2009 at 2:50 am
Hopefully this doesn’t stray too far from the topic, but can you clarify further what the reference to the “reality” of the house does in that example? From what I understand of social constructivism, the gesture is that the reality of “house,” for example, is bracketed to reveal its form to be historically/etc. contingent and the idea of a house, as an a priori & necessary form of a space in which we dwell, is nothing more than an illusion. The only problem being that this kind of method, perpetuated ad infinitum, leads to the ridiculous assertion that *all* things are socially constructed and hence it leads to the dead end of skepticism, where it has to doubt its own doubt (that the social constructivist viewpoint is itself a historically contingent and socially constructed viewpoint…).
So I guess to return to the original question, do you mean “real” the simple idea that it can be experienced and is built with concrete, wood, etc.? Or is there something more profound that I don’t understand?
May 18, 2009 at 3:41 am
Bryan,
I take it that a number of social constructivist positions are implicit heirs to the modernist nature/culture distinction. Anything on the side of the constructed is treated as being artificial and having a lesser ontological status. “x is just a social construction.” “Gender is just a social construction.” Etc. On the one hand, we thus have “natural” features of humans that are somehow “more real”, while on the other we have “cultural” features of humans that are treated as less real. Look at the form that debates surrounding homosexuality have taken in the United States, for example. Gay activists have taken the position that they are born gay. Why is this? Because if they are born gay then homosexuality has a more legitimate or sanctioned ontological status than if they become gay. Of course, from the proper psychoanalytic perspective we are not born gay or straight, but are rather born polymorphously perverse. However the fact that sexuality comes to be channeled into particular tendencies in no way undermines the reality of these sexual identities nor makes them merely “artificial”. Language, for example, is a “social construction”, but it’s extremely difficult to imagine unlearning our mother tongue.
Thinkers like Deleuze and Guattari, Latour, Oyama, and Stengers (Bernard Stiegler is really good on this too) have attempted to develop a constructivism that evades this nature/culture distinction. Referring to things like houses helps to underline the reality of construction because of its emphasis on the materiality of houses. Houses are built and constructed but they can fail to hold up or hold up very well. Moreover, houses, despite being constructed, must bend to the physics of their ambient environment in being whatever we might want them to be and also take on a reality and objectivity of their own that exceeds the builder (as any artist knows in working with a medium).
May 18, 2009 at 4:32 am
I think I understand a little better what you mean by “reality” now. I guess there are a few things though that I’m not entirely sure I agree with:
(1) In your gender example, you argue that for the social constructivist, gender, as a cultural category, is designated as “artificial” and therefore loses its significance relative to nature. But isn’t the opposite the case with constructivism? Unless you’re deploying some sort of pseudo-Hegelian trickery here, whereby one can say X, but perform Y, isn’t the social constructivist point that, by demonstrating the artifice of the *content* of gender, that its very *form* has a certain preponderance over the biological/natural? In other words, the goal of ideology would be to hypothetically naturalize cultural constructs, and then the heroic social constructivist says, “No, nature is inaccessible within the realm of the social and hence what is natural is in fact socially constructed!” So although the cultural remains an artifice, it’s still the most important locus of analysis. To reiterate: I definitely don’t consider myself a social constructivist, but nevertheless, I think there’s a big jump from “artificial” (as a property) to “unimportant” (value judgment). Hence, I think your line about language would actually be proudly hailed as a constructivist motto, if anything.
(2) Like in Kant’s *Critique of Practical Reason*, your example, e.g., of homosexuality, seems to do more of the lifting than the argument itself. For example, if I abstract the content of that example from your argument, I could just replace “gender” with “nation” and argue that it’s unfortunate that these social constructivists treat the nation as just a contingent product of history/etc. when in fact it has a “reality” and ontological weight as well. I imagine this would be a less comforting example, but you can see where the problem lies and where it could lead. As a good Kantian I just think we should be careful about how we argue rather than what the conclusions are–you would probably agree here as well.
To return to houses:
“Referring to things like houses helps to underline the reality of construction because of its emphasis on the materiality of houses. Houses are built and constructed but they can fail to hold up or hold up very well. Moreover, houses, despite being constructed, must bend to the physics of their ambient environment in being whatever we might want them to be and also take on a reality and objectivity of their own that exceeds the builder (as any artist knows in working with a medium).”
Okay, to clarify here: would you agree that “reality” has less to do with naïve realism of object-properties (e.g., the objects that are used to assemble a house), than the fact that there is a certain kind of traumatic objectivity which exceeds my intentions? Would it not, then, be possible to resuscitate, here, the Kantian thing-in-itself, not as a transcendental entity that eludes our grasp, but as the very designation of this traumatic kind of objectivity that prevents me from obtaining a correlation between my socially constructed vision of my house and the finished product? I think that is sort of what I was hinting at in my previous post…
May 18, 2009 at 4:45 am
In retrospect, this line:
“As a good Kantian I just think we should be careful about how we argue rather than what the conclusions are–you would probably agree here as well.”
seems fairly contradictory in the context of my comments about replacing “gender” with “nation,” in which case it would seem as though I were criticizing your argument on the basis of what kind of outcomes it has, rather than the structure of the argument itself. If I could go back and edit my post, I suppose I would rephrase it by championing the “reality” of the nation, so long as we’re all okay with that and open to the possibilities of that kind of formalism.
The real intent of that comment, though, was to point out that immanent critique of social constructivism seems like a more effective path.
May 18, 2009 at 4:53 am
Also, if we admit this “objectivity that exceeds,” then I think it’s worth reflecting on the issue of passivity brought up in your post:
“For the Naive Realist the relationship between world and mind, object and subject, is uni-directional and uni-lateral, such that the object does all the “work” and the mind merely receives and registers the object. Similarly, for the Anti-Realist, the relation between mind and world, subject and object, is uni-directional and uni-lateral, such that the object, now, is a passive vehicle of the mind’s synthetic activity, contributing nothing of its own beyond the manner in which it “affects” the mind providing it with matter for intuition.”
Your characterization of anti-realism is to me kind of like a fat oaf sitting on a couch eating chips and watching TV. Perhaps to some extent! But I think if we accept this idea of traumatic objectivity, a better visual image is a man who is on a tread-mill running as fast as possible, but nevertheless he is not actually going anywhere. Here, the tread mill is “for him” active, but as an object, inert and passive, thereby structuring the very basic conditions of himself as an object. In other words, the *real* anti-realist motto would be that, yes, passive, but we can only reach such a judgment once we look passed the ridiculousness of the subject’s hyper-activity.
May 18, 2009 at 5:12 am
Bryant,
I think part of what I’m trying to do is undermine the nature/culture distinction and how it operates altogether. Traditionally essence or the real falls on the side of nature, while culture is treated on the side of the artificial. I think Mikhail’s remark really gets to the core of the unspoken assumptions behind this distinction. As Mikhail writes:
I think Mikhail here gets at something very real in how we think about these distinctions. The constructed is the artificial is the non-binding, whereas the natural is the binding. Indeed, even Kant, in the development of his moral theory, makes an appeal to nature as the ground of the categorical imperative. As Kant writes in Section I of the Groundwork,
In short, Kant makes an appeal to nature and ends in order to ground his claims about purpose and function of reason. Why does Kant do this, if not because a derivative status is attributed to culture or techne? When I target the nature/culture distinction, I’m targeting both sides of this distinction. In other words, the side of culture becomes a little less artificial and becomes more real and abiding, while the side of nature itself becomes more constructed and a little less stable and abiding. In a post-Darwinian world, Kant’s line of argument no longer holds up because 1) we now now that organisms are not a product of design and do not function teleologically according to purposes (the eagle can catch prey because it has keen eyesight, it doesn’t have keen eyesight for the purpose of catching prey), and 2) we know from investigations into ontogeny that development is not a uni-lateral process from a genetic code to an actualized phenotype (I’ve written about these dimensions of ontogeny ad nauseum here on this blog, so hopefully you’ll give me a pass in spelling it out). In other words, the natural takes on the constructed and contingent properties that, under theocentric pre-Darwinian models we treated as the exclusive domain of the cultural.
I am not sure where I see the problem you’re alluding to above. I personally would wholeheartedly endorse the thesis that “nation” has more ontological weight and reality than we might think, while also holding that it is a contingent product of history. There’s nothing in my ontological framework that is not a product of genesis. But simply because something is the result of a genesis it does not follow that it is somehow less real. When you claim that the example of nation is less comforting than the example of homosexuality you seem to be sneaking normative judgments into what is an issue of ontology, i.e., you seem to be suggesting that we should reject this thesis because it leads to conclusions we might not be very happy with for political or moral reasons. If I’m reading you right, that strikes me as an illicit move where ontological issues are concerned.
As a realist this move is prohibited to me as it shackles the real to the human (i.e., that which is a traumatic kernel that exceeds my intentions). “Being real” in my framework, has nothing to do with “being-related-to-the-human”, but rather lies in whether or not something makes a difference (the Ontic Principle). So long as something makes a difference, it is real, full stop. In saying that it is real so long as it makes a difference, this is not shorthand for “makes a difference to humans or culture”. It can be ice making a difference to a mountain on Mars. It could be a particle making a difference to another particle that no other human has ever witnessed. Making a difference to humans is only a very small subset of a relation that is generalized throughout the real. With that said, I do not disagree that the lack of adequation between our anticipations and what manifests itself in the present is a very interesting and important psychological phenomena. I just don’t make it the mark of the real. I’m not sure why you would treat object-properties as being a naivete. Objects resist us in all sorts of ways and thereby inscribe their differences in us, marking their reality in very palpable terms.
May 18, 2009 at 5:15 am
Sure, I don’t disagree and have often written on precisely this point on this blog. One of the most powerful tools in the arsenal of ideological critique lies in showing how something is contingent and could be otherwise. I think maybe you’re missing that my critique is directed at the category of the natural not the cultural, as could be seen in my critique of how American versions of gay activism have tried to naturalize homosexuality rather than “contingify” sexuality as such.
May 18, 2009 at 5:20 am
Hmmmm,
I don’t think I characterize the anti-realist as an oaf sitting on the couch, but rather the object for the anti-realist as a sort of passive oaf that simply has forms of intuition and categories imposed upon it. The object does very little work beyond “affecting” the subject and providing matter of intuition (sensations) that then get striaghted by the forms of intuition and the categories of the understanding. Anti-Realism– at least under Braver’s formulation (and I think he gives a representative picture of how many anti-realists think of realists) present realists as an oaf sitting on a couch simply regarding objects without introducing anything else or engaging actively with the object.
May 18, 2009 at 5:27 am
I wonder who or what is constructing the constructed? Back before our exchanges I would certainly say “humans” but now I’m not sure.
May 18, 2009 at 5:31 am
I already mentioned this above, but to quote you:
“I personally would wholeheartedly endorse the thesis that “nation” has more ontological weight and reality than we might think, while also holding that it is a contingent product of history. There’s nothing in my ontological framework that is not a product of genesis. But simply because something is the result of a genesis it does not follow that it is somehow less real. When you claim that the example of nation is less comforting than the example of homosexuality you seem to be sneaking normative judgments into what is an issue of ontology, i.e., you seem to be suggesting that we should reject this thesis because it leads to conclusions we might not be very happy with for political or moral reasons. If I’m reading you right, that strikes me as an illicit move where ontological issues are concerned.”
I don’t think my example is at all illicit: my point is that your argument shouldn’t be judged on whether or not we respect people who identify as homosexual or not. Your example suggested that if we accept social constructivism, we should reject the basis of homosexuality as natural and hence undermine their cause. My only intention was to say that we could say the same of nationalism and far Right ideology, so if anything my goal was to show how your argument is much more practically ambiguous than you let on with the example, not to condemn it (as I indicate in my above post). But anyhow, it’s a moot point since you and I agree here.
Okay, so if I can summarize differently: Contrary to what you wrote in your example of the house (my point of confusion through which I’m basically curious about what you mean by “real”), where you wrote the following:
“Moreover, houses, despite being constructed, must bend to the physics of their ambient environment in being whatever we might want them to be and also take on a reality and objectivity of their own that exceeds the builder”
…In which case you reference “whatever we might want them to be” and refer to “the builder” (a human subject) who, I take it, is imbued with desire and intentionality–that this was merely an accidental use of anti-realist language and not indicative of what you mean by “realism” at all.
Okay, to continue then: realism for you means complete immanence, a completely flat ontology, where any difference makes a difference, and all objects object to other objects and there is no privileged human-object axis, etc. Essentially, you admit of nothing transcendental, nothing that would deny to your ontology the property of flatness, etc. Granting that, I can at least say that I think I understand what you mean by “reality” now, even though I disagree with you about the flat ontology premise.
May 18, 2009 at 5:39 am
Yeah Mikhail,
That’s one of the key points of Dynamic Systems Theory or interactive constructivism in biology that I’ve written so much about. Under this model, there isn’t a unilateral directional arrow from the constructor to the constructed, but rather a dynamic feedback between all the terms involved (some of the adherents of this approach refer to it as “Dialectical Constructivism” for this reason). A number of the adherents of DST have contested the whole nature-nuture debate on these grounds (especially Oyama) because it places the constructor all in the genes, failing to notice the way in which other levels feed back into how particular gene sequences are actualized (the level of proteins, cells, groups of cells, organs, environment, culture, etc). What we get is bi-directional causality where one term doesn’t overdetermine the rest. The form of this argument can be generalized to other areas of inquiry as well.
May 18, 2009 at 5:54 am
Bryan,
No this isn’t what I was trying to suggest at all:
I wasn’t aiming at undermining the cause of gay emancipation at all (which should be evident given that I’ve been such an outspoken defender of gay rights here on my blog). What I was contesting was the way in which this debate has been grounded in the United States. In certain respects here, my point is similar to the point I was making in my recent post about torture (https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/05/14/torture-and-topics/ ). What I object to in the whole torture discussion is how the debate has been framed, not with whether or torture is wrong. By taking a position on torture vis a vis whether or not it works we are reinforcing a conception of the law that is noxious regardless of whether one comes out for or against torture. Likewise, by framing the debate on homosexual rights in terms of whether or not homosexuality is natural, we are reinforcing a frame that is noxious even if we have the right stance on gay rights. Rather than treating homosexuality as “deviant” or “natural”, the right move is to undercut the entire alternative altogether and discern all human sexuality as constructed, contingent, possessed of a history, etc., and affirm the rights of sexuality regardless in principle (so long as consent is involved).
There is nothing particularly anti-realist about referring to us. The realist doesn’t deny that we exist and that we contribute differences to the world as well, i.e., that we are real. What the realist denies is that the human is necessarily included in all worldly relations. As I outline in the post above, the distinguishing feature between the realist and the anti-realist lies not in whether or not humans relate to the world– we all agree there –but with whether the being of an object is dependent on humans. The anti-realist says the latter, the realist does not.
A couple of points here. First, one of the central points of Kant’s Copernican revolution was the move to a philosophy of immanence. However, for Kant this meant immanence to mind, not immanence as such. For the realist and the supporter of a flat ontology, all immanence means is that there is no extra-worldly causation like Platonic forms, God, etc. This seems like a fairly standard thesis across the board in contemporary philosophy. When you talk of the “transcendental”, I am not sure what you’re referring to. For Kant the “transcendental” denotes conditions that are strictly immanent, whereas Kant’s philosophy is designed to eradicate anything transcendent. In short, the transcendental is not the transcendent. Now, I have written an entire book on the transcendental and, in particular, what Deleuze calls “transcendental empiricism” (as opposed to transcendental idealism). I do not necessarily reject the transcendental, though I do reject Kant’s particular formulation of what constitutes the transcendental.
May 18, 2009 at 6:04 am
Without even reading through your post yet, I just want to make sure this conversation does not get de-railed through misunderstandings:
“I wasn’t aiming at undermining the cause of gay emancipation at all (which should be evident given that I’ve been such an outspoken defender of gay rights here on my blog).”
No I never suggested that! Just the opposite, that the way you phrased your argument was to say that social constructivism, if taken seriously, weakens the strength of gay emancipation and, since you are arguing against social constructivism, ergo you support gay emancipation.
“Likewise, by framing the debate on homosexual rights in terms of whether or not homosexuality is natural, we are reinforcing a frame that is noxious even if we have the right stance on gay rights. Rather than treating homosexuality as “deviant” or “natural”, the right move is to undercut the entire alternative altogether and discern all human sexuality as constructed, contingent, possessed of a history, etc., and affirm the rights of sexuality regardless in principle (so long as consent is involved).”
I should just re-iterate then: there is no disagreement here between us.
May 18, 2009 at 6:05 am
But I’m not arguing against constructivism… I’m arguing against the thesis that somehow constructions are flimsy, less real, less ontologically stable, and are ultimately artificial.
May 18, 2009 at 6:06 am
To conclude: I know very well what the difference between “transcendent” and “immanent” is and I know what Kant’s position is as well. Hence you could just skip to the last sentence of what you wrote:
“I do not necessarily reject the transcendental, though I do reject Kant’s particular formulation of what constitutes the transcendental.”
And it would basically summarize what I meant. And hence what I wrote:
“Granting that, I can at least say that I think I understand what you mean by ‘reality’ now, even though I disagree with you about the flat ontology premise.”
May 18, 2009 at 6:10 am
LS:
“But I’m not arguing against constructivism… I’m arguing against the thesis that somehow constructions are flimsy, less real, less ontologically stable, and are ultimately artificial.”
Yeess, but you said that that idea is itself generated by social constructivism. To requote what you wrote above in response to Mikhail:
“I think this is a problem with some orientations falling under the name “social constructivism”. Just as you suggest, they associate “construction” with “artificial” with “not real”. This is why I use examples like the construction of a house. A house is something entirely real, but also constructed. When I claim that values are the result of a genesis I am not, by any means, suggesting that they are non-binding or unreal.”
Either way, it doesn’t make sense for us to argue about this since we both agree with each other on the basic premise and I think we’re just getting lost in less precise summaries & paraphrases of what we both wrote.
May 18, 2009 at 1:07 pm
It looks like this dialogue has reached a resting point, so I’ll briefly try to respond to Graham’s comment (#9) on my status as an enemy combatant in the Realism Wars (TM) (anyone seen “eXistenZ?”).
“you also seem to be implying that “table that we see” and “table made of atoms” (i.e. table that we theorize about) are the only two options”
I didn’t mean to imply that. I just grabbed a famous example (from Eddington) of the face of an object that is immediately available to us and one that takes scientific effort to access, suggesting that the latter is the case regardless of how or if we view it. That’s why I said, “I think I agree with Graham–-mind-thing interaction doesn’t fall away, but simply takes its place as one among countless alternatives.” Note the word “countless,” since there are indefinitely many possible interactions any object can enter into. You read my example of the table’s atomic structure as still from the human perspective, as “described by atomic theory,” but I meant it as an example of science’s ability to reach beyond what we can perceive with the senses to grasp the inhuman face of things (what Dennett calls “mental prostheses”). That’s how I thought Speculative Realists (or at least LS) viewed science.
“There is also the table, period– the subterranean table-reality that no seeing or theorizing or practical handling can ever adequately translate.”
This is a bit tougher for me to agree with, and here my anti-realist leanings come forward. But on LS’s objectile ontology, as I understand it, nothing can be “subterranean” in the sense of pure potential which is not actually interacting. All actually is action and all action is interaction. The thing exceeds any particular set of interactions, and certainly interactions with humans, but I thought that objectile ontology empties out the underground, just not exclusively in the direction of us. Rather than uni-directional, or even bi-directional, things are omni-directional. Is this a disagreement between you and LS or have I misunderstood?
“This is the problem– you think realism is a “game”. ”
I didn’t intend anything derogatory by the term “game;” I just meant that I thought that flat ontology ruled out the metaphysical project of sorting out the objectively real from subjective projections of society, etc. I happily withdraw that word if it connotes anything further than that.
“That’s why I can only take with a grain of salt your new claim to express a bit of scepticism toward Derrida at the end of your book. The book reads to me like a flat-out celebration of anti-realism”
I did a poor job of explaining myself, so I’ll give it one more quick go. I do consider myself an anti-realist; I find this position persuasive. And my book is more than just, “Hey, this position isn’t crazy,” tho that’s the minimum I hoped to accomplish. You’re right–it does celebrate anti-realism. When I said that I wasn’t an enemy of Speculative Realism, I didn’t mean that I am a Speculative Realist, but that my reaction to it isn’t to barricade the doors and mobilize my forces against an obviously false doctrine. I’m very intrigued by the movement and am fully open to having my mind changed. In fact, the first part of _After Finitude_ shook my tacit complacency, much the way you have described sudden philosophical conversions a la Whitehead. I’m not yet convinced, and I do really like continental anti-realism, but I’m not invested in it in a way that makes me hostile to Speculative Realism by default.
Also, I didn’t mean to say that I was skeptical of Derrida, but rather that I couldn’t see any way to develop the movement past him. He seems to have brought it to a conclusion by exhausting its possibilities, tho this may very well be more a matter of my lack of imagination and intelligence than about the movement’s potential. Rather than its triumph, he can be the occasion to turn the page.
Ultimately, this may be conceding very little. Presumably, any reasonable person should take this stance in philosophical discussion. But, except for Graham and my divergent classifications of Heidegger, I think that Speculative Realists can read my book as telling the birth, development, and death of a movement they are now in the process of moving beyond. In other words, the history I tell may be just that–history. And if so, if Speculative Realists can give good arguments that take the anti-realist arguments into account, then I’m on board (I just haven’t purchased my ticket yet; I need to read a lot more first).
May 18, 2009 at 1:58 pm
Re: Bryan’s point: I really didn’t know the difference between “transcendent” and “transcsendental” in this context, so it did help some (at least one) of the rest of us track the dialogue. [Sometimes when LS does that kind of thing it’s for this very reason. A lot of people read this blog who don’t have sufficient background in the philosophers in question, and one of the great things about LS’s postings is that he really keeps that in mind. I realize it can but some of his interlocutors, but it’s an important part in keeping the discussion accessible.]
Back to Mikhail’s point. I think that “constructions” should be thought of as cases of emergent properties, which have causal power of their own without people but which are also non-algorithmicly determinable by the properties of the stuff they are made of and creative in that sense. Maybe a hurricane being a construction is a better example than a house in this regard.
May 18, 2009 at 4:07 pm
Hi Lee,
I think Graham’s position and my own position are substantially different on this point:
In Graham’s ontology, as I understand it, the object is always in excess of its interactions with any other object, such that it is never exhausted by any of its manifestation. There is always some core, not unlike a Kripkean rigid designator, that exceeds every manifestation and always remains the same in every manifestation. This would correspond to the moment of the veiled in Heidegger’s aletheia. My ontology is much more relational, such that the being of the entity is its manifestation in relation to other entities. I go back and forth on the issue of potentiality. I have a very difficult time seeing how we can coherently conceptualize entities without attributing potentials for them. What would it mean to say that a match is purely actual such that it doesn’t contain or possess the potential to burn? I don’t know.
The point of intersection between Graham’s position in my own would lie in non-reductivism. That is, unlike Speculative Realists like Brassier, neither of us reduce everything to some ontologically primordial level like atoms or brain neurons. Atoms and brain neurons are beings of course, but they are one type of beings among others. In my own ontology, however, I understand these relations in terms of relations of emergence and dependence among various strata of being– adopting a thoroughgoing materialism that nonetheless sees unique properties as emerging at different levels of material organization –whereas Graham seems to attribute a much more independent nature to differrent types of entities, even allowing for the existence of non-material, yet real objects.
May 18, 2009 at 5:37 pm
Jon, I do like “emergent properties” phrase better than construction which still smells of humans, regardless of the use it is put to in scientific discourse LS mentions in his explanation (comment #26) (I’d have to read up on that) – it seems that construction implies a kind of purposiveness that is still very much human-oriented, no? To throw in Derrida, since Lee mentioned him (although in a different context), what he says about de-construction seems to rely on a concept of construction that is already not very human-oriented, i.e. that something is constructed (which means it can also deconstruct – I always liked Derrida’s use of “to deconstruct” as an intransitive verb, although he does use as a transitive one and thus confuses me) means it has an organization and potentially a principal behind that organization, yet it can also deconstruct and it is not achieved by some active deconstructing (as a method), but is simply witnessed.
My only confusion here is that if we start talking about omni-directional causality, the very idea of causality disappears and we have a complex network of interactions (rather than cause-effect pairs) as it becomes unclear what causes what and therefore whether there are causes to begin with.
May 18, 2009 at 6:07 pm
Mikhail:
“My only confusion here is that if we start talking about omni-directional causality, the very idea of causality disappears and we have a complex network of interactions (rather than cause-effect pairs) as it becomes unclear what causes what and therefore whether there are causes to begin with.”
I think I agree with this, although I hesitate to bring it up since it was a subject of discussion in Levi’s “Flat Ontology” post a few months ago. But perhaps it’s worth hashing out again.
May 18, 2009 at 6:15 pm
Mikhail,
The category of bi-directional causality (I do not advocate omni-directional causal as in the case of Leibniz or Whitehead where everything is interconnected) is fairly common in the natural world and in the sciences. There is, of course, Newton’s famous principle that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Kant’s third category under relation– community –is the category of bi-directionality or reciprocity in causality. It is unlikely that biological systems can be conceived without reciprocity (all the elements of a cell simultaneously produce and regulate one another, and the heart causes the brain just as the brain causes the heart), etc. There’s a lot of sorting to do here at the level of these systems and the specific type of causality involved. For example, feedback differs from what Edelman calls “re-entry”. Bi-directionality certainly makes things more complicated but I don’t see how it abolishes causality. Moreover, the world is a pretty complicated place.
Once again, I feel compelled to point out that realist ontology does not eradicate the human or things like purposes, etc. This seems to be a reaction to realism that comes up again and again, and I’m not sure why. Realism rejects the thesis that every ontological relation necessarily contains a relation to the human as one of its conditions. In other words, it doesn’t place the human at the center of all being. Clearly, however, when we raise questions of epistemology— which are distinct from an independent of questions of ontology –we’ll be talking about the human and it will be perfectly appropriate to talk about things like constructions, purposes, norms, and all the rest. After all, the human is as real as anything else.
May 18, 2009 at 6:18 pm
Bryan,
This is an exceedingly strange thing for someone who has such an admiration of Hegel to say!
Bi-directional causality– again I don’t advocate omni-directional causality –marks one of the central transitions from the Logic of Essence to the Subjective Logic in the Science of Logic.
May 18, 2009 at 6:33 pm
It’s strange only because I haven’t made up my mind whether I would side with Kant or Hegel on the issue. I think I would need to read more Hegel before I decided. If I could rephrase my agreement more precisely though, I think it would be more pointed with regarded to the issue of omni-directionality, which I think Mikhail rightly point out is a kind of non-directionality or aimlessness, but then you clarified by saying:
“(I do not advocate omni-directional causal as in the case of Leibniz or Whitehead where everything is interconnected)”
May 18, 2009 at 6:43 pm
Levi, I was not suggesting that your ontology eliminates humans, I should have said, using your terms, that “construction” still smells of like something “human-centered” – I think I understand your point about decentering and all that, I think we’ve expressed ourselves fully in the past as to how a non-realist would see such decentering as problematic etc etc.
I guess than my remark about omni-directional causality does not apply to your position, I still wonder if talking about even bi-directional causality is safe, unless I misunderstand what you mean by bi-directional causality (your example of Kant’s category of community helps, but still “causality” and “community” as reciprocity are distinguished in Kant, right?) I wonder if this description is fair: bi-directional causality involved a cause A producing effect B, and this effect B producing cause A in return (a sort of a circle) or is bi-directional in this case means that cause A produces effect B in one “direction” and effect B’ in another “direction”? – this might be a strange question, possibly based on my ignorance of biological sciences your cite.
May 18, 2009 at 6:47 pm
It’s good that these things are coming up as I think they get at some pretty fundamental ontological premises. For example, I would argue that Marxist and Althusserian thought cannot be understood without bi-directional causality. This just is the meaning of “overdetermination”. A similar point would hold for the work of the primary process in the unconscious. Moreover, the structural concept of language is that of an interdependent system where discrete and separated units cannot be localized. Marx wrote Capital in the [stylistically awful] way he did precisely because of the complex networked nature of the social system that required a very particular style to be unfolded in the right way. N.Pepperell has written a lot of really good stuff on these stylistic considerations in Marx over at Rough Theory. In many respects, I think Hegel is simply fulfilling something that was already there in Kant. The second part of Kant’s Third Critique deals heavily with this type of causality. The Anglo-American/Continental split can be seen as originating in Kant. Where Anglo-American thought sided largely with the First Critique, Continental thought largely took the path opened by the Third Critique.
May 18, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Mikhail,
As I understand it, Kant thinks the category of community is necessary to account for things like gravity in natural science. The very difficult thing to think when thinking Newton’s account of gravity is that the causality does not run uni-directionality, but rather falls under the category of community. Thus, for example, the moon exerts gravitational force on the earth affecting the earth and the earth exerts gravitational force on the moon affecting the moon. The causal influence isn’t one way. As I understand it, then, the category of community is that of cause and effect relations where every element of the “community” is simultaneously a cause and effect of the other elements in the community. This becomes “writ large” later in the second part of the Third Critique in Kant’s analysis of teleology where all of nature seems to get conceived under the category of community. Hegel’s system can profitably be read as the careful working out of this thesis where none of the categories of the Logic can be treated in isolation from one another, but rather must be conceived in their interdependence (i.e., each category entails all the others).
I think Graham has gotten some of the issues with bi-directional causality right in a way similar to what you seem to be alluding to here. If A and B, in your example, are nothing but this relation, the two terms seem to drop out altogether such that we get nothing causing nothing. That is, if A is caused by B and B is caused by A, don’t the two terms simply fall out or disappear into nothingness? Graham’s strategy, in response to this observation, has been to argue that there is a kernel of the object that is always in excess of all of its relations and which is completely irreducible to its relations. I’m still working out my own position on this matter, though I do think it is one that has to be responded to.
May 18, 2009 at 7:06 pm
One further point. This is a good opportunity to underline a difference between ontological questions and epistemological questions. The community of cause and effect in phenomena of gravitation causes all sorts of massive headaches when trying to calculate the manner in which, for example, all of the planets and the sun affect one another gravitationally. We can do a good job for this with two bodies, but as soon as we start trying to make calculations for three or more bodies our equations turn very chaotic. This would be a situation where ontologically we know gravity affects all objects in the form of community, but where epistemologically we are (perhaps only as of yet) to determine the precise nature of this interrelation. Paradoxically we are here able to know more than we can know.
May 18, 2009 at 7:16 pm
Perhaps a better way of phrasing my hesitancy is less over the split between uni-directional causality and bi-directional causality. The former simply can’t be upheld since it espouses a pretty positivist, linear conception of causality (“Here’s cause X, here’s effect Y!”). The real split is between bi-directional causality which retains the terminology of cause and effect, or if we totally abandon cause and effect in favor of dialectical relationships.
To speak in correlationist terms, the way I read Kant on causality is in the following manner: we might suppose that there is some cause X that precedes all other causes, a supreme cause, but this supreme cause can only be retroactively constructed and assumed as a mere empty place that is neither a concept nor an intuition of any object. Here Kant basically posits the distinction between the thing-in-itself as an object which tickles our senses through our encounter with the manifold and that of the transcendental object = X as the designation of some unknowable supreme cause that can only be assumed to exist based on the series of conditions leading back to the unconditioned. As Kant says:
“We may, however, call that merely intelligible cause of appearances in general the transcendental object, in order that we may have something which corresponds to sensibility as a kind of receptivity. We may ascribe to that transcendental object the whole range and connection of our possible perceptions, and we may say that it is given in itself prior to all experience. Appearances, however, are given in conformity with the transcendental object, not in themselves, but only in experience;…” (CPR, B523, 524 | A495)
On the other hand, for Hegel I take it that bi-directionality qua dialectical relations implies an abandonment of any notion of supreme causality (read thing-in-itself), and instead we have some object-cause that engenders its own specter through the dialectic (hence it’s circular as it includes itself as beginning and end, etc.).
May 18, 2009 at 7:26 pm
Thanks, I think this makes more sense now, although I’m not sure how A and B become nothing. I don’t know if it’s worth veering off the path into discussion of Kant’s category of community, I think it could be fruitful considering that “reciprocity” could be understood as “correlation” and take us back to the whole business of correlationism (if we haven’t been already talking about it all along anyway).
May 18, 2009 at 7:33 pm
Hmmmm, Bryan,
This differs markedly from my understanding of Kant. As I understand him, causality doesn’t apply to things-in-themselves at all– at least –not in any sense that we could know, but is restricted entirely to the domain of appearances. The transcendental object = x of the transcendental deduction does not refer to something “unknowable” (it’s not the same thing as the thing-in-itself) but is the formal structure of any object but possessing no content of its own, in much the same way that the transcendental unity of apperception must be able to accompany all my representations but possesses no content at all. Kant believes that he needs to evoke the transcendental object as a condition for experience because nothing in the manifold of intuition itself gives an object (objects of experience must be the result of synthetic activity, the manifold of sensibility– sensations –does not itself present objects). For Hegel I would differ significantly as well. Hegel abandons the thing-in-itself altogether. Everything is appearances for Hegel. For a discussion of this with lots of textual support, see my paper linked to in the post above (warning pdf):
Click to access existent_s_-_hegel_s_critique_of_kant12.pdf
It seems to me that you’re running together Zizek with Hegel and Kant, but Zizek gives a highly creative reading of Kant and Hegel similar to the way in which Lacan reads Freud (i.e., he puts a lot into the texts he’s grappling with that is, in my view, not there). For example, in Kant’s actual writings the thing-in-itself doesn’t do much in the way of “tickling” at all. For that we need the Lacanian real, the missed encounter, etc.. I would thus say that Zizek’s position is a new variant of transcendental idealism and absolute idealism.
May 18, 2009 at 7:36 pm
Mikhail,
I just mean that if objects are reduced to nothing but their relations then it seems objects become nothing at all. Each objects becomes nothing but its relations, so what would be the “something” that is being related? I don’t think Kant runs into this problem because the planet earth and the moon aren’t just gravitational attraction to one another. Viewed from one angle they fall under the category of substance, viewed from another they fall under the category of causality, and viewed from yet another they fall under the category of reciprocity.
May 18, 2009 at 9:06 pm
I’m getting some things run together here.
What are the causal relata in question? In the Marx case we’re talking about kinds of things relating to other kinds of things. Economic bases are such that they determine a cultural superstructure and the cultural superstructure also reciprocally determines the base.
When you unpack it this though I’m not sure it should count as an interesting case of bi-directionality. Certain facets of the economic base are responsible at moments in time for certain facets of the cultural superstructure. And vise a versa. As long as the same facets at the same time and place are not causing one another there is no token bidirectionality, right? Even in cases where it seems to be the same thing, you can parse them out as different events. Say declining median income on Jan. 1st causes people to start watching American Idol. Then their passive stupification *after that* causes a further drop in median income. You don’t have token events A and B (understood to be individuated by spatio-temporal location) causing one another.
Or would we still call that (type?) bidirectionality, where event of type A in category X causes event of type B in category Y, and vice versa?
While you don’t yet have event A causing event B and event B causing event A (which would be token-bidirectionality) type-bidirectionality seems interesting in in light of the above discussion.
When one property instance A is emergent relative to another set B of property instances, we can say that B caused A in something like Aristotle’s sense of material causation (maybe formal too, I don’t know).
But if A is genuinely ontologically emergent we should expect it to have its own causal agenda, including downward causality effecting property instances of the very kind that made up B (that is A can change the set of property instances that make up it’s emergence base). I think Hurricanes do this.
I realize I need to understand the dynamic systems theory stuff better, to tie this into all the good work by Deleuzians (I amazoned Levi’s book a few days ago; and am going to engage more deeply with Protevi’s work after I do my first course on speculative realism).
May 18, 2009 at 9:43 pm
Hi Jon,
Interesting comments here. I was thinking of Marx more along the lines of his theory of classes. Being a member of a class, say the bourgeois, as I understand it, has little or nothing about the intentions of the agents involved. That is, the bourgeois doesn’t set out with the intention (in most cases) of exploiting the proletariat, etc., etc., etc. Rather, the decisions that any particular owner of the means of production makes are a function of decisions that other owners of the means of production makes. Thus, to give a very crude sketch, I, as the owner of a widget factory, wish to stay in business. In order to do this I need to make more widgets at a cheaper price to undercut my competition. To drive down cost I need to drive down wages, benefits, the cost of materials, and reinvest some of my capital in automating production. In the meantime, the other capitalist that I’m competing with has to do all the same things. I’m caused to do these things because of him and he’s caused to do things because of me. The origin of the causation is the result of both of us. If capitalism is driven by the production of surplus, then this is because this arms race among competing capitalists leads to the necessity of producing a surplus that can be re-invested to produce more capital for the sake of the next series in the cycle. In other words, it is not greed that drives the system– though that’s there too –but rather this arms race that’s everywhere and nowhere. Similar dynamics take place in the relation between the proletariat and the capitalist.
Interestingly, these dynamics also generate values in the form of emergent properties of the system that in turn gradually change the system. For example, insofar as labor itself becomes a commodity that is bought and sold in these systems, and insofar as the qualitative dimension of labor (the specific type of labor) gets replaced by units of equivalence (money), we get the genesis of values like the individual, individual rights, etc., etc., etc. Why is this? Under the feudal system persons are understood in terms of functional roles within an organic social system where everything has its proper place. Capitalism marks the undoing or erasure of this qualitative notion of the social, turning everyone into an individual that sells their labor. The emergence of money and the sale of labor for money allows for a unit of equivalence where suddenly it becomes possible to code all agents as comparable or equivalent or equal before the “bill”. It matters little, for example, whether a child, a woman, a black man, a gay woman, etc., etc., etc., does the labor so long as there is a numerical equivalent between the labor and the wage paid. Everything becomes comparable. By contrast, in the prior social system there were defined social roles that were very different for aristocracy, peasants, men, women, and children. This institution of equivalence sets the groundwork for thinking of ourselves as autonomous individuals that are equal before the law and endowed with particular rights.
Marx argued then that capitalism generates its own emancipatory potentials. While the liberal conception of rights is still deeply tied to the alienation of the system of capitalism, it does nonetheless generate a set of values that “feed back downward” into the system, modifying that system in a variety of ways, generating further tensions within the system that potentially mark the undoing of the system. Moreover, by generating a universal system of equivalence, it sets the groundwork for thinking production as the “common” or that which belongs to all of us (as we’re all enmeshed in a single system). Anyway, enough free association here.
Alas, you’ll find very little in the way of dynamic systems theory in my book. My book is more devoted to an account of how Deleuze radicalizes the Kantian critical process, shifting the domain of the transcendental from the subject to the ontological.
May 18, 2009 at 9:53 pm
Interestingly, Marx also talks about how the very form of factory production generates/trains the proletariat as a revolutionary class (rather than just mere workers). That is, in and through the organization of the factory system a new type of subjectivity is engendered that produces the conditions for the possibility of something like a “military”. This ranges to everything from the punctualization of the day in terms of the clock to working with others on the assembly line, to the manner in which the worker, as it were, enters into a “becoming-machine” through working with machines. The fellowship generated from working in the Fordist factory plays a role, according to Marx, in generating the “common” that functions as a necessary condition for the possibility of socialist forms of socialist organization. Here then would be another example of bi-directional causality. The worker produces not only the technology but the commodities generated by the technology, but is also produced by this technology, these commodities, and the fellow workers. This is what makes Capital so difficult to read. All these things are going on simultaneously, but we can only write in a linear fashion.
May 18, 2009 at 9:57 pm
One final point. I think the example above about the bourgeois is indicative of just why ideology critique is such small beans where Marxism is concerned. Ideology is, of course, real and contributes. But the sorts of relations the bourgeois and proletariat are enmeshed in has little to do with how they think of their situation and a lot to do with these relations of interdependency that leave little recourse but to participate in the system. I think one appropriation of Grasmscian Marxist thought has been deeply mistaken in drawing attention almost entirely to the cultural, ignoring almost altogether these material conditions. The Marxist influenced by this tradition of Grascian thought– say Zizek –would have been entirely caught by surprise by the economic meltdown and even more surprised by how quickly political winds began to change from a few years ago, because these dynamics of capital completely fall off the radar in that mode of the analysis.
May 18, 2009 at 10:21 pm
Jon, I think exploring further all the possible ways in which American Idol damages all we hold dear is a future philosophical move you must undertake, if only so that you can tell your son that you have accomplished something in your life, you know?
May 18, 2009 at 10:57 pm
Great points on Marx; I’m going to think more about these in terms of bidirectional causality.
Given the subject matter, it will be fantastic to read your book alongside the Transcendental Heidegger anthology and after reading Harman’s and Braver’s books.
My calculus is too crappy to feel comfortable having much to say about DST in any case.
May 19, 2009 at 1:23 am
ME,
I think I’m failing here. Thomas is not nearly as moved by Adorno’s “On Jazz” essay as I had hoped him to be.
Jon
May 19, 2009 at 5:28 pm
Jon – the nuts-and-bolts DST stuff is interesting, but I think there’s a lot to provoke thought in the ideas themselves. For a good popular look at it, check out Stuart Kauffman’s The Origins of Order.
May 19, 2009 at 5:40 pm
“I think Graham has gotten some of the issues with bi-directional causality right in a way similar to what you seem to be alluding to here. If A and B, in your example, are nothing but this relation, the two terms seem to drop out altogether such that we get nothing causing nothing. That is, if A is caused by B and B is caused by A, don’t the two terms simply fall out or disappear into nothingness? Graham’s strategy, in response to this observation, has been to argue that there is a kernel of the object that is always in excess of all of its relations and which is completely irreducible to its relations. I’m still working out my own position on this matter, though I do think it is one that has to be responded to.”
Yes, and this is actually stated more succinctly than I’ve done it, too. It’s always odd when that happens, but it seems to be a fairly frequent experience (that other people can fire back our own ideas in clearer form than we can do it ourselves; Zizek said that about Johnston’s book, and Latour said it about the first half of Prince of Networks).
But there’s another twist to my position, which is that not only is there a kernel of both A and B outside the interaction, but there’s also an asymmetry to the interaction. Real A comes in contact with the sensual B, but the reverse is not necessarily the case. There really is an active term and a passive term in all relations (though there might be a simultaneous relationship the other way in which the active and passive roles are reversed, as almost always happens between two people, this is not true of all relationships between entities– it is possible and even normal for A to be in relation to B without B standing in any relation to A at all; this will be a major theme of my upcoming project).
May 19, 2009 at 6:53 pm
While I am also very interested in Dynamic Systems Theory, I actually meant to say “Developmental Systems Theory” in the original post. Developmental Systems Theory is related, but very different. It’s a biological theory that focuses on the ontogeny or development of organisms that contests the nature/nurture distinction and gene centrism (Dawkins, Dennett) as being unable to give us an adequate account of phenotypes.
May 19, 2009 at 7:29 pm
Whoops. I (sheepishly) maintain, though, that dynamic systems theory is useful in understanding things like bi-directional causality. Large object examples like earth/moon are good, but examples from self-organizing systems are conceptually rich. Activity at a cell wall, for example, can be viewed in a “mechanical” way, but the whole picture of causality is more complex (e.g., which protein’s shape causes a morphological change?).
May 19, 2009 at 7:32 pm
in other words, A causes B? isn’t that just causality proper (uni-directional)? Or larger, isn’t “A relates to B uni-directionally” a relation proper? Or do you mean a situation in which A relates to B while B does not relate to A even in the sense of being-related-to by A, i.e A is actively relating to B while B is not passively being related to?
May 19, 2009 at 8:08 pm
No disagreement here, Asher.