An old chestnut has it that if you are pissing everyone off you must be doing something right. This is especially the case if the charges against a position are themselves completely contradictory or diametrically opposed. In recent dust-ups surrounding my onticology and Harman’s object-oriented ontography, this has certainly been the case. On the one hand, there are the endless anti-realist critiques of onticology charging it with falling it into a sort of naive realism and naturalism, to the detriment of mind, culture, signs, and all the rest. Again and again you hear the charge that the human and all these formations are being banished and ignored. Of course, this criticism is baffling as Harman’s thesis is not that the natural world is the “really real” world and that we must exclude the human to get to it, but rather that the withdrawal of objects is not unique to human-object relations but holds for all inter-ontic or inter-object relations. In other words, there’s a very real sense in which Harman’s position can be read as a radicalization of Kant’s thesis about the unknowability of the thing-in-itself, holding that it is a general ontological proper of all relations among objects and not simply of human-object relations. The situation is similar in my case as well. My principle of translation has it that there is no transporation of a difference from one object to another object without a translation or a transformation of that difference by the second object. These sorts of processes of translation are what I’m principally interested in understanding. Since the human and cultural phenomena are counted among the field of real objects producing differences, there’s nothing in my account that excludes the human. I merely make the claim that the human isn’t included in all inter-object relations. Yet still, somehow, I get situated as a naturalist and a reductive materialist.
However, if this were not comic enough, from the other end I get the charge of rejecting naturalism and materialism, thereby falling into a sort of humanism. Thus, in a couple of truly obnoxious posts written by John (not to be confused with the great John Cogburn who has been sadly absent of late), ire is expressed because I am alleged to reject neurology, quantum mechanics, and relativity theory (here and here). Needless to say, I suspect I won’t be posting any further comments from John as I don’t particularly care for sarcastic assholes, especially those who remark, from the outset, that my project will not hold up under scrutiny. There’s little possibility of dialog with a person who dismisses you from the beginning. At any rate, John charges me with claiming that all things are real, seeming to miss the point that my thesis is not that everything is real, but that if something makes differences it is real. From John’s end of the spectrum I am thus accused of some sort of wild and wooly postmodern idealism where everything goes.
In the meantime, Glen, in a set of criticisms I don’t really understand as they seem to be making many of the very points onticology and ontography makes, charges object-oriented ontology with being profoundly humanist, despite the fact that everywhere speculative realism strives to dethrone the centrality of the human. Elsewhere, in a post also characterized by a rather obnoxious tone, he charges speculative realists with being entirely too pre-occupied with responding to Kant and not doing enough to develop an ontology. This is a curious claim given that I’ve written literally hundreds of pages on this blog alone developing the details of onticology, and there are literally thousands of pages worth of speculative realist writing developing various realist ontologies. The only time Kant ever seems to become a focus is in discussions with anti-realists, which comes as no surprise. Barring that, I think the speculative realists are by and large simply working through the details of their various ontologies. Even more ironic is the fact that this charge is made in the context of other charges where object-oriented ontology has been accused of not attending to Kant enough (usually accompanied by a number of lengthy posts explaining Kant to the poor speculative realists that just don’t get it).
read on!
You’re a humanist! You’re an anti-humanist! You’re a naturalist! You’re a culturalist! You’re too focused on Kant! You don’t focus on Kant enough! What a curious chorus of conflicting charges! If, I think, object-oriented ontology– and here I would include not only Graham’s ontology and my own ontology, but thinkers as diverse as Whitehead, Latour, and Ian Bogost under the umbrella of object-oriented ontology –is particularly prone to this strange array of conflicting criticisms, then this is because there is something in object-oriented ontology that fundamentally crosses the circuits– or dare I say units? –of traditional philosophical frameworks. As Zizek describes it in the series forward to MIT’s Short Circuit series,
A short circuit occurs when there is a faulty connection in the network– faulty, of course, from the stanpoint of the network’s smooth functioning. Is not the shock of short-circuiting, therefore, one of the best metaphors for a critical reading? Is not one of the most effective critical procedures to cross wires that do not usually touch: to take a major classic (text, author, notion), and read it in a short-circuiting way, through the lens of a “minor” author, text, or conceptual apparatus (“minor” should be understood here in Deleuze’s sense: not “of lesser quality,” but marginalized, disavowed by the hegemonic ideology, or dealing with a “lower,” less dignified topic)? If the minor reference is well chosen, such a procedure can lead to insights which completely shatter and undermine our common perceptions. This is what Marx, among others, did with philosophy and religion (short-circuiting philosophical speculation through the lens of political economy, that is to say, economic speculation); this is what Freud and Nietzsche did with morality (short-circuiting the highest ethical notions through the simplest lens of the unconscious libidinal economy. What such a reading achieves is not a simple “desublimation,” a reduction of the higher intellectual content to its lower economic or libidinal cause; the aim of such an approach is, rather, the inherent decentering of the interpreted text, which brings to light its “unthought,” its disavowed presuppositions and consequences. (The Parallax View, IX)
While onticology is not occupied with the activity of critical reading but with ontology– which isn’t to say its opposed to critical reading or sees it as without value –nonetheless, it does seem to me that my onticology, Harman’s ontography, Bogost’s unit analysis, Latour’s actor-network-theory, and Whitehead’s philosophy of organisms are all critical activities of short-circuiting that reveal disavowed and unconscious dimensions of ontology and epistemology as they have hitherto been practiced. While object-oriented ontology or (OOO!) refuses the centrality of the human or the thesis that the human in some variant is included in all relations, perhaps its more disquieting move is to refuse the division of the world in two: the real and the human. Latour represents this beautifully in a diagram in We Have Never Been Modern:
In the upper portion of the diagram we have the “old constitution” of modernity, where the world is purified into two absolutely distinct domains: non-human nature and the human world of mind and culture. The narrative of modernity has it that all those barbaric pre-moderns endlessly confused these two domains, treating signs, norms, culture as natural, and the nonhuman world as natural. The project of modernity thus becomes one of purification, where these two worlds are carefully separated from one another, and placed in their proper boxes. Based on this modernist narrative, we get, of course, a host of positions. We get those who, like the anti-realists, reject the possibility of any direct relation to the nonhuman, seeking to show how the human or cultural side of the modernist culturalist constitution overdetermines our relation to the nonhuman. This would be your variants of idealism, social constructivism, deconstruction, etc. When a Heideggerian or a Derridean tells you that the divide between nature and culture is meaningless, what they’re really saying is that the relation falls on the side of the human in all cases. Then, of course, we get the naturalists that place everything on the side of the natural. This would be your sociobiologists, for example, who seek to explain all cultural and human phenomena in terms of things like genes, biological adaptations, neurology, physics, etc. Both sides, however, maintain the divide, if only as something against which to contrast their own position like the tain of a mirror.
Given that the modernist constitution is the unconscious of contemporary thought and philosophy, it thus comes as no surprise that object-oriented ontology receives such a conflicting array of criticisms, for what it refuses is this way of parsing up the world. A flat ontology is not an ontology that delivers us at last to the nature side of the modernist constitution, finally abolishing all these fetishistic confusions that beset those so-called “barbaric pre-modern savages”, but rather is an ontology that places all objects on equal footing. This, then, would be the bottom portion of Latour’s diagram where we no longer have two worlds carefully partitioned from one another, but rather we have a network of very diverse actors ranging from the human to signs to discourses to institutions to quarks to suns to, yes, cotton and fire interacting with one another on a flat plane. In We Have Never Been Modern Latour presents a very nice list comparing and contrasting his nonmodern position from the worlds of modernism, premodernism, and postmodernism:
From The Moderns
What is retained
Long networks, size, experimentation, relative universals, final separation between objective nature and free society.
What is rejected
Separation between nature and society, clandenstineness of the practices of mediation, external Great divide, critical denunciation, universality, rationality
From the Premoderns
What is retained
non-separability of things and signs, transcendence without a contrary, multiplication of nonhumans, temporality by intensity
What is rejected
obligation always to link the social and natural orders, scapegoating mechanisms, ethnocentrism, territory, limits on scale
From the Postmoderns
What is retained
multiple times, constructivism, reflexivity, denaturalization
What is rejected
belief in modernism, critical deconstruction, ironic reflexivity, anachronism.
But why go to all this trouble, especially given that things get so messy under this new constitution? The answer to this question, I think, lies in a certain deadlock we find in the domain of theory. On the side of the humanists we find an exclusive focus on meaning, whether in the form of texts, signifiers, signs, social forces, lived experience, history, and so on, to the detriment of anything else. While this largely Continental orientation of thought has given us tremendously powerful interpretive tools that are not to be dismissed only reworked, it nonetheless has increasingly become a form of self-absorbed navel gazing relevant only to others in the know. Similarly, those who choose the nature side of the modernist constitution teach us fantastic things about biology, physics, chemistry, etc., but seem to have little insight into the revolutions in linguistics, semiotics, historical analysis, ethnography, textual analysis, etc. As such, they all too often end up naturalizing what is not natural. What is needed is a form of thought, an ontology, that can fluidly work across these domains without reducing the one to the other or treating them as belonging to entirely distinct domains. As Paul Ennis so nicely put it recently,
This is the clearest expression of that which intuitively draws me toward the speculative realist crowd. Academically this is a necessary step in transposing us into a (genuinely) post-Continental intellectual atmosphere.
Flat ontology gives back to nature (‘naive’ realism) its position without leaving behind culture (human-all-too-human). It does so by tracing a line not between or across them, but around them: they both belong and contribute to reality. Is this not an ontology that lets us see the world anew?
Ecotheorist and philosopher Adrian Ivakhiv gets to the nub of the issue in his recent interview over at anotherheideggerblog. Asked whether he thinks Continental philosophy and ecology are natural allies, he remarks,
But conceived more strictly – with ‘environmentalism’ being the mainstream environmental movement of the last 40 years, and continental philosophy being the left branch (so to speak) of academic philosophy – I do think that the two could be natural allies, though this hasn’t always been seen as such. The so-called nature wars of the 1990s, emanating from the “science wars” and the fallout from Bill Cronon’s cultural constructivist argument about wilderness that appeared in the New York Times Magazine, showed that there was a lot of resentment among environmental academics (and some non-academics) toward their cultural and political theory brethren for the ways the latter seem to get caught up in self-important intellectual navel-gazing, e.g., terminological innovation based on the latest fads from France, and so on, rather than providing useful ways of resolving real-world problems, which were rightly thought of as reaching a point of some urgency. Fortunately, I think that moment has passed, partly because the sort of “high social constructivism” that was so prominent then has dissipated somewhat (with all manner of post-constructivist things arising in social and cultural theory, and now in continental philosophy, as with the “speculative realists”), and partly because of some political realignments in the US, the opening up of a more promising frontier for environmentalism.
I’m more skeptical with respect to Adrian’s thesis that “high social constructivism” is beginning to dissipate, but his point is apropos. If Continental theory and eco-thought have not been natural allies, then this is because Continental thought has focused almost exclusively on the domain of meaning, the cultural, and the social for the last one hundred years. Indeed, it has gone so far in this direction, that it has rendered it extremely difficult to discuss anything outside of meaning, texts, signs, power, and social forces; so much so that one suspects that these things outside of the domain of meaning don’t even exist for many Continental thinkers. What is needed is an ontology that straddles, as Paul Ennis puts it, both nature and culture; but this is accomplished not through treating the natural as a social construction, but rather through treating the cultural as a dimension of the real. If the necessity of this move is needed, simply listen to the sorts of problems eco-theorists, media theorists, technology theorists, feminists, artificial intelligence designers, neurologists, and so on are working with. Note the manner in which they all take meaning, texts, discourses, etc., seriously while also constantly grumbling over the inadequacy of these human centered approaches for their own work. The chorus of conflicting charges from within philosophy strikes me as a sign that object-oriented ontology is hitting a nerve, while the enthusiasm for object-oriented thought among ecologists, critical animal theorists, artists, media and technology theorists, feminists, queer theorists, AI folk and so on suggests to me that a useful set of tools are being developed that help to navigate the way out of what initially appears to be a dead end. As always, look to those that are working on something other than philosophy and philosophical texts to determine what needs to be thought.
Larval Subjects . 
July 26, 2009 at 4:59 pm
[…] July 26, 2009 LEVI RESPONDS TO THE CRITICS AT GREATER LENGTH THAN I DID, HERE. […]
July 26, 2009 at 6:09 pm
I haven’t thought this point out all that much, but one of the reservations I have about speculative realism is that, prior to engaging with any speculative realist thought, I hadn’t considered the nature/culture divide to be all that significant as a genuine “problematic” with regard to philosophy, theory, ontology, etc. This isn’t to say that I hadn’t considered it before, but rather that, at least for me, it always remained somewhat of a secondary issue.
My concern with speculative realism is that its obsession (admittedly too strong of a word, maybe “central problematic” would be more apt) with overcoming the nature/culture divide is that, in the very name of overthrowing this divide, it actually reinforces and reasserts this dichotomy. In fact, much of the ontography and onticology discussed here and elsewhere seems “compiled” towards this goal and this goal alone. I wonder, though, whether Hegel might have the last laugh, so to speak, when you wind up with something like a coincidence of opposites. I’m reminded here of Communist China: in the very name of overthrowing capitalism, it ends up becoming *the* capitalist state.
So, while the critiques of speculative realism–I think–have remained genuinely conservative in that they’ve sought to revive old-fashioned forms of continental philosophy (from orthodox Kant up to orthodox Derrida) as a means of overcoming the many of the genuine problems introduced by speculative realist thought, I can nonetheless at least partially identify with those who contradictory claim it to be both anti-humanist and humanist, naturalist and culturalist, scientific and postmodern. I think the problem has less to do with a short-circuiting than with, perhaps purely incidentally, reinforcing these binaries in the very name of overcoming them.
I wonder, then, whether there could be a possibility of a philosophical project in the vain of speculative realism that is authentically liberated from nature vs. culture, continental philosophy vs. science, etc.
July 26, 2009 at 6:14 pm
And perhaps this is a bit of crude psychologizing, but I wonder whether much of the “shackling” of speculative realism with regard to these problematics/binaries is tied to a paralleled need to overcome the idiotic stereotype that only Aristocratic Frenchmen are allowed to work on Big Philosophical Projects.
July 26, 2009 at 6:16 pm
I have been re-reading Bergson in an attempt to understand why Deleuze does so little with Nietzsche’s laugh and that — I think — in a spirit and manner which is not Nietzschean. Bergson because, like N, he is one of the few theoretical figues of laughter and the two are among Deleuze’s main guys — Spinoza too but if he is funny I do not get it. So what is the point here? First, this post lacks the sense of humor that is so often yours and that worries me a bit because I guess I see that as necessary condition for phiosophy — maybe even sufficient. Second because that matrix above suggest a number of perspectives about the object that in your narrative of diametric positions you do not seem to entertain as objections. I think in B’s M&M, objects appear as images that ride the turbulence between matter and memory whose character is dynamic and complex, simultaneously constrained by the interest which is the body’s proximity and the holism which is their dynamic connection to all they are, as delimited and defined, what they are not. I wonder if you think this a somewhat right rendition of version of the object and how or not you see it relative to the the two more traditional opinions you see lodged against you and your own flat onticology. BTW none of these is my position.
July 26, 2009 at 6:41 pm
@Bryan:
‘My concern with speculative realism is that its obsession (admittedly too strong of a word, maybe “central problematic” would be more apt) with overcoming the nature/culture divide is that, in the very name of overthrowing this divide, it actually reinforces and reasserts this dichotomy.’
The odd thing is there are a massive number of people who have come to your conclusion i.e. trying to overcome nature/culture you end up strengthening the divide without even knowing it.
I can almost hear Zizek in the background pulling off a witty remark about how those that want to overcome the divide are somehow unwittingly, at the level of ideology or so on, pursuing it (if they lose the divide they lose their task, they don’t really want to solve it, Marx…they don’t know they are doing it).
Is this not precisely the critical theorists classic point? The critical theorists already knows what he finds before he even encounters the ‘text’. Levi talks about this in a few places…our tendency to dwell on the signifier, to pursue the semiotic game embedded here means we are doomed to precisely never emerge from a problem of the nature/culture divide. I’m not a SR, but we can at least recognise here that they have found a nice way around that classic Hegelian response.
July 26, 2009 at 6:43 pm
Hi Bryan,
I don’t think I’m suggesting that the nature/culture divide is a central problematic of contemporary thought (though for some it is), so much as it is an unconscious postulate that organizes contemporary thought. What you then get is thinkers taking one side or the other, raising it to the level of the “marked term” or the higher term. With Zizek, for example, culture obviously wins out and everything is understood as a cultural phenomena. The same occurs, I think, in Hegel, despite his attempt to reconcile subject and object, spirit and nature. The subject gets the upper hand and the object is absorbed in spirit. By contrast, on the other side you get guys like Dennett or the Churchlands. There it’s clearly nature that gets the upper hand and everything else is absorbed into nature (though, to his credit, Dennett I think is a little more complicated here). It’s not that these thinkers are trying to solve the problem of nature and culture, so much as it is a distinction that inhabits all of their thought and guides the theoretical decisions they make.
I take your point about perhaps intensifying this distinction even more, thereby exacerbating it, but I think it’s something that needs to be discussed. Maybe you’ll allow me to draw an analogical comparison between approached based on the nature/culture distinction and what I’m trying to do. As you know, Marx argued that ideology consists of the ideas, values, and interests of the ruling class naturalized, universalized, and essentialized in such a way as to be presented as the ideas, values, and interests of all classes. Thus, a set of values that really only benefit a few is portrayed as if it benefits everyone. Even though a particular set of values, institutions, and social arrangements is presented as if it were in everyone’s interest, it is presented as if these things were in everyone’s interest. Now compare this with a perspective that doesn’t hegemonize the social to one set of values. Instead, you have a plane upon which a variety of different groups are interacting, with very different sets of interests and values vying with one another. In the first model, the ideological model, all of these different interests and systems of models exist, but their subordinated under a single set of values and interests and are hidden from view. On the second model, you just have all these different struggling groups without one set of values and interests hegemonizing them.
Transpose this example over into the difference between modernist thought and object-oriented thought. Modernist thought, whether in its naturalist or culturalist form, is “ideological” in the sense that it subordinates everything else to one condition, whether that condition be language, social forces, power, nature, genetics, etc. It then proceeds to explain everything in terms of that one condition. Thus, for example, Zizek always treats objects as simple vehicles of signifiers, never treating them as contributing differences of their own that have nothing to do with the signifier. By contrast, OOO places all these different dimensions side by side in such a way that one does not overdetermine the other. That bird flu virus really is a virus. It would be a virus whether or not any humans existed to encounter it. It does what it does. It is also a vehicle of signifiers, a locus of discourse, caught up in all sorts of networks of state power, a character in all sorts of media narratives, and so on. Initially the difference between these two positions seems slight, but really the OOO approach opens up a much broader field of inquiry. Where, say, Zizek would restrict analysis of the bird flu virus to its role in media narratives, the unconscious libidinal investments that surround it, its locus as a site of political struggle, and so on, OOO allows for all of these modes of analysis but also allows for the examination of the material dimension and how that contributes to a variety of forms of organization as well.
July 26, 2009 at 8:18 pm
First, with respect to Paul’s comment, I think the “classic” critical theory point still stands, and I’ll try and provide a brief defense as to why I think this is the case. But I don’t actually see it as being in opposition to speculative realism. Rather, I think that the tools provided by critical theory can be deployed in order to discern what, exactly, in speculative realism is worth saving and what is worth rejecting.
Second, with respect to Levi’s comment, I appreciate your numerous examples, but I’m not entirely sure that the discussion needs to be filtered through Zizek, nor is the idea that some elevate culture and others nature to a hegemonic or determinative ontological category lost on me. Fundamentally speaking, the problem isn’t one of understanding, so an elaborated explanation isn’t necessarily entirely suitable. On the other hand, though, I’m glad you implicitly raise the issue of flat ontology in your response, because as I see it this is where we markedly disagree and is the fundamental issue determining, if you will, the nature/culture debate.
To return to the example of Zizek discussing avian bird flu, I think the binary you again assert between cultural analysis/critique and “natural”/biological inquiry is somewhat arbitrary and also not really the central issue. For the sake of keeping my response concise and organized, here are the three main issues, as I see it:
1. NATURE/CULTURE BINARY
2. POLITICS
3. ONTOLOGY
To begin with part 1, I think your use of Zizek is here illustrative of a major concern I have with regard to speculative realism, at least insofar as it is represented by you and your blog (I don’t read Harman or other speculative realists). According to your above examples, you regard Zizek, essentially, as a culturalist whose analyses put aside any question of nature. Hence, for Zizek culture is determinative/hegemonic and nature that which is determined by the human or simply unimportant in terms of ideology critique. Now, all of this very well might be the case and my main interest here isn’t in discerning the Truth of Zizek vis-a-vis nature vs. culture. Rather, I think the problem, again, is that, for you, thinkers have all too long remained either culturalists or naturalists, without considering that such a divide could be healed through speculative realism and flat ontology, in which both culture and nature can equally participate and co-determine that which makes a difference. But again, I think this approach seems to lead towards a profound reassertion of nature/culture as *the* hegemonic difference among other differences. It’s not *as* important, for a speculative realist critique, that Zizek is Left or Right, Lacanian or Derridian, Atheist or Theist, etc. Nor is it as important with regard to the various non-cultural factors involved in the development of his thoughts or their popularity in human society. Hence, at two levels I think speculative realism and flat ontology together lead towards two internal contradictions: in the name of a critique of the nature/culture divide, it reasserts not only the importance of this divide, but actually has to deploy a priviligening of culture as a vehicle of critique (the option of nature is either incredibly limited/vague, or simply an adoption of whatever is discussed by scientists), AND that this divide itself is more determinative than other binaries or differences, hence violating the basic premise of a flat ontology.
2. At the political level, it seems to me that one of the issues preventing flat ontology/speculative realism from achieving much ground is that, at the level of critique, it either has to reassert nature vs. culture as a determinative binary (or to simply refer to itself as a better theory, which isn’t really much of a critique properly speaking), or it can’t achieve a critique at all because, since all differences make a difference, no difference can be said to make enough of a difference to be a truly critical difference. This, I think, is one way in which speculative realist thought is essentially depoliticizing (anecdotally speaking, Harman himself claims to have “boring and ordinary political views” and your latest planned book is called “Democracy of Objects”): by claiming that “all differences make a difference,” any notion of a fundamental antagonism is ultimately viewed with suspicion. Here speculative realism sounds more or less like Obama’s campaign promises: to heal the wound of Left/Right partisanship, big vs. small government, racial difference, etc. Here I could see a possible avenue for a Marxist critique of speculative realism/flat ontology as essentially compatible with liberal democracy and late capitalism: the attempt at eliminating all of that which is Excluded and to bring into the Included Ontology so that no group/object is ignored from civil society/metaphysics. Finally, for all of the discussons of Marx that you’ve had, many of them seem to be characterized, more or less, by aesthetic taste rather than politics, which is a common symptom of Deleuze-inspired thinkers: Marx talks of so many collectivities, objects, variables and groups coalescing, flowing, interacting with one another, etc. Here the element of struggle and antagonism is essentialy put aside in favor of negotiation and bringing everyone in to the bargaining table. (And to preempt the idea that this critique elevates the political as hegemonic, we could keep playing that game ad infinitum, since there would never be a point where we could say that we’ve properly found a place for all things, even things we don’t yet know anything about.)
Lastly, to bring back the Zizek example, if your fundamental point is in defending the legitimacy of a flat ontology, then it seems to me that one should engage less with the way in which Zizek deploys certain examples and whether or not they fit into speculative realist nature vs. culture “bipartisanship,” but to what extent his ontology is actually accurate. Hence, a genuine critique of Zizek would be to place his ontology in opposition to flat ontology, as you’ve done with Badiou and others (with respect to your numerous writings on mathematics and set theory). The problem, as I see it, is that the general way in which this has been argued is that, instead of dealing directly with ontological claims, you tend to deploy speculative realism more as a way of saying “this thinker is a cultural, this one a naturalist,” hence their actual ontological claims are not relevant with respect to your own.
Putting this issue aside, I do find much of the writing on set theory and Latour to be fascinating (especially the recent discussion of translation and transcription), but I find much of the claims regarding flat ontology, which heavily underly your discussions of speculative realism, to be somewhat problematic at the ontological and political levels. More to the point: I think that your emphasis on the nature vs. culture divide have less to do with speculative realism than with your ontological claims, specifically flat ontology, which is why I’m putting much of the emphasis on that issue itself.
July 26, 2009 at 8:18 pm
Hi Levi,
I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s grateful for all the time you’ve spent explaining this stuff. I’m beginning to get a handle on it, but as you describe the differences between a flat ontology analysis and something Zizek might do, for instance, I realise I need to see this ontology in action. A detailed flat ontology analysis might dissipate the feeling for me that the old nature/binary is still there, but now together in a new container.
I’m not sure what kind of sense that makes, but can you recommend something for my failure of imagination?
Oh, and don’t let the bastards grind you down…
July 26, 2009 at 8:19 pm
that should have said “nature/culture binary…”
July 26, 2009 at 8:23 pm
Hi Ghost,
Take a look at Latour’s Pandora’s Hope. There’s a lot of concrete case studies that you’ll find there.
July 26, 2009 at 8:55 pm
Bryan,
Well, of course, I vehemently disagree. You write:
The problem as I see it is that almost all of what we refer to as “critical theory” remains at the level of discourse and signs. That is, it is interpretive. The subtext of all of this is the thesis that political change occurs is made possible through the critical interpretation of texts and cultural artifacts. This is the reason that the avian flu example is at the heart of these issues. Interpretation has its place in political change and I wouldn’t want to see folks like Zizek, Derrida, Foucault, etc., disappear. However, any political engagement is doomed so long as we aren’t analyzing the organization of institutions, environmental conditions, resources, networks of actors, etc. The problem with critical theory is that this dimension becomes almost entirely invisible within the framework of critical theory as theorists are so keyed in to looking at things on the level of texts and signs.
With respect to your points about politics, I think the first things to note is that we should not decide ontological issues based on our political sympathies. Just as we wouldn’t judge a particular proposal in quantum mechanics based on whether or not it advances the politics we like, we shouldn’t judge ontology based on the politics we advocate. Given that the speculative realists are working through ontological issues, it comes as no surprise that they haven’t had a whole lot to say about politics to date. With that said, I think you significantly mischaracterize what OOO is up to when you write:
I am really not sure where you get this idea from what I have written, nor am I sure where to begin. Flat ontology is not the idea that “everyone gets along”. If anything, one of the key things that led me to SR and OOO was that I have found the options from political theory in Badiou, Zizek, Ranciere, Laclau, etc., to not be Marxist enough. The problem endemic to French inflected political theory is that it unfolds almost entirely at the level of discursivity. This is an inheritance from Gramsci that helped to put the focus on ideology and culture as a means to change. While Gramsci’s contribution was a welcome corrective to excesses of Marxist thought that focused almost entirely on economy, nonetheless, it had the long-term effect of reducing almost everything to the discursive, the signifier, discourses, and so on. Because of this, concrete questions of political strategy became almost entirely hopeless because theorists came to think that it was enough to interpret texts to change the world. No doubt this position was particularly attractive to academics because they would rather read a book and write an article rather than doing the difficult work of organizing people.
Compare the modes of analysis we get from someone like Zizek or Badiou, with the sorts of analyses you get in Marx’s Capital, The German Ideology, etc. In Marx you get the superstructural analysis of ideology, of course, but you also get an analysis of how material institutions like factories are related to one another, how flows of capital are interacting in networks, how various groups are linked together, environmental conditions, availability of resources, historical techniques used in forming resources, and so on. And when I say this, I am not saying that Marx’s discussions present us with an abstract theory of economy, institutions, flows of capital, and so on, but that Marx gives a concrete analysis of actually existing networks. Marx’s analysis in Capital is a beautiful example of what I would call a flat ontological object-oriented analysis. Ferdinand Braudel’s three volumes of Capitalism and Civilization are an even better example of such an analysis.
Nothing in flat-ontological network analysis denies antagonism. What flat-ontological network analysis strives to do is de-suture critical theory from the primacy of the signifier, the text, and the discourse, so as to open up the field of analysis. Within an object-oriented framework you get to keep all your discourse and textual analysis, but the domain of investigation is opened up tremendously. Why is this important? Well first off, if you want to change anything, you need to know how things are put together in order to change them. Textual analysis will only get so far. In addition to this you need to know how the network you’re addressing is put together. Minimally, understanding how that network is put together in terms of relations among institutions, nodes in the network, highway patterns, relations of dependency in the production of goods, etc., opens up all sorts of opportunities for strategizing points of engagement. You characterize Deleuze-inspired positions as proposing that we bring everyone to the negotiation table. Quite the contrary. The key question of Anti-Oedipus is how it is possible to form subject-groups capable of overturning molar forms of organization. Nor have I anywhere, at any time, suggested that it is a question of bringing everyone to the negotiation table so they can sing kumbaya. Rather, if anything, I’ve been obsessed with how revolutionary groups form, how messages proliferate, how it becomes possible to bring antagonisms to the fore, what sorts of infrastructures need to be produced, and so on. In other words, everywhere I’ve been focused on the material and processual dimensions of change. In my view, the whole problem with the cultural turn in political theory is that it lacks seriousness. It contents itself with interpreting texts, believing it is radical and changing the world in doing so, never descending to the level of material organization and how to change it… Indeed, never even recognizing that such a level even exists.
July 26, 2009 at 10:05 pm
Much in Latour’s substance and style bugs me, but somewhere in Pandora he says of the Laboratory that it finds truths out of a tacit tautology since the discoveries and indeed “objects” are pre-configured to reach the conclusions desired at the end. This is the central weakness – I think – of Popper. L implies that these class privileges of self-verification are less viable in the field and the collective, but I am not sure this is as true as the “purity” of science is taken with it as it goes so that science certainty finds its models in procedures — like Frege’s reference — that tend to order material sense according to geometric or quantitative protocols that, in Bergson’s terms, compress the object to a sign of a predisposed significance. Still one has an urge for the institution as the mechanism of the collective but without the repressions of homogeneity that institutionalization often elicits. This perhaps is what Nancy tries to finesse about community or you do with a “flat” ontology of differences. Still, I think I hear behind both the echo of the leviathan of Science — cap S — as a set of relations in advance of their differences.
I do not think the other to this is Latour’s misreading of post-structuralism — the insurmountable “brain in a vat” — but it may require a much different set of priorities. As I tried to hint with my earlier posts, these might valorize that which is proximal to the body/image but not as the personal, authentic, or natural, nor as the inauthentic, programmed, and ideological. Still, the weighting would differ from what I think you are doing since the im-mediate (not the immediate of romanticism — early romanticism) would be empowered, indeed obliged, to trump the very previous protocol by which it had been interpellated. While this can only be in one meaning “personal,” I think it would also be necessarily political and material. Maybe this is close to you but its emphasis would be on the unmaking of object traces not to nihilistically negate but rather to liberate them to more of their serial and differential potential. Briefly, this might be to honor always the extent un-captured qualitative of differencing over its quantitative modeling.
July 26, 2009 at 10:10 pm
Dan,
I hear you vis a vis Latour’s style. People either love it or hate it. I vacillate back and forth. Regarding your earlier remark, he does, at least, have the virtue of having a rather impish sense of humor.
July 27, 2009 at 7:16 am
“Now compare this with a perspective that doesn’t hegemonize the social to one set of values. Instead, you have a plane upon which a variety of different groups are interacting, with very different sets of interests and values vying with one another.”
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The problem is this critique of Marxism has been tried before, in Robert Dahl’s and the pluralists’ theory of power. I think it was pretty comprehensively rebutted by Marxists like Steven Lukes. There’s a tendency in Latour too (witness his discussion of what economists and politicians can add to the scenarisation of the collective) to merely adopt pluralist assumptions as if they were radical (because challenging a binarism in which he will lump Marxism has become such an idee fixe). As Lukes pointed out with regard to Dahl, what is not going to do is get us (conceptually or practically) anywhere beyond contemporary capitalism and its merely formal democracy.
July 27, 2009 at 1:05 pm
A couple brief comments.
First, I want to paste in an excerpt from the post itself that I think is quite nice. I’ve edited it a bit for coherence, but it’s a very good central thought worth coming back to.
Continental thought has focused so much on the domain of meaning, the cultural, and the social, that it has become extremely difficult to discuss anything outside of meaning, texts, signs, power, and social forces; so much so that one suspects that these things outside of the domain of meaning don’t even exist for many Continental thinkers. What is needed is an ontology that straddles, as Paul Ennis puts it, both nature and culture; but this is accomplished not through treating the natural as a social construction, but rather through treating the cultural as a dimension of the real.
Next, speaking as a rhetorician for a moment, I wonder if the discussion above (and in so many elsewheres) might suggest that we want to shift the frame of our discussion within SR. Rather than offering and defending a position against correlationism, continental thought, etc., we ought perhaps to make those statements concisely and definitively and then move on to the real work we want to do on that ground. I’m not suggesting that we avoid debates like the ones above, but rather that SR must be able to be described as a positive position rather than a negative one.
July 27, 2009 at 1:29 pm
Utisz,
I wasn’t aware that I was critiquing Marxism.
July 27, 2009 at 4:49 pm
larval, my apologies if that was not your intention. It would be worth clarifying how you square the variety of voices silenced by ideology and which it seems you want heard – “Instead, you have a plane upon which a variety of different groups are interacting, with very different sets of interests and values vying with one another” – with Marx’s belief that there is one particular human interest, that of the oppressed class, which is actually a universal interest, namely throwing off class society.
My deeper doubt is that you’re going to find it difficult to ally Marxism to OOO, partly because Marxism isn’t a realism. I agree, neither is it what Zizek makes of it, a Lacanianism which can only write the real in scare quotes. But Marxism was always beyond the idealism / realism split which is merely reproduced in these two positions you entertain.
July 27, 2009 at 5:29 pm
Utisz,
I suppose I’m inclined to say so much the worse for Marxism. In other words, the issue then becomes on of formulating a realist Marxism. Back to the post you were responding to, however, you’ll note that I was drawing an analogy to the difference between ideological thought and Marxist thought to illustrate a point about ontology, not to make a political statement. The argument ran “idealism is to ideology as marxism is to flat ontology”. In idealism you have one sort of thing becoming the explanatory principle for everything else (mind, signifiers, signs, social forces, etc). By contrast, in OOO you have a variety of different types of things interacting in complex networks. Similarly, in Marxist analysis everything from texts to the organization of factories to particular networks of capital flow among certain nations at a particular point in time to the availability of resources, etc., etc., playing a role. It’s not a question of “making everyone heard” (not sure why people keep concluding that), so much as understanding the concrete organization of these networks so as to effectively navigate them. Additionally, why is it always those that claim to be “beyond the realism/idealism split” seem really mean that idealism wins out?
July 27, 2009 at 5:34 pm
Utisz,
Just to add, I do think you’re right that there’s something problematic in much of Latour’s own political thought. In my view, there are far more resources there in actor-network-theory than he allows.
July 28, 2009 at 7:05 pm
Coming to this party a bit late, but here goes.
If the necessity of this move is needed, simply listen to the sorts of problems eco-theorists, media theorists, technology theorists, feminists, artificial intelligence designers, neurologists, and so on are working with. Note the manner in which they all take meaning, texts, discourses, etc., seriously while also constantly grumbling over the inadequacy of these human centered approaches for their own work.
Yes. From my perspective, though, it’s not enough to have first principles philosophy on the one hand, and application domains on the other. When I say “not enough” I mean “not as likely to succeed.” What I think we need in addition (not instead) is something in the middle. Think of it this way: a railroad built from two coasts is unlikely meet in the middle with precision.
I’m trying to work on this very thing right now, work that is half-philosophy, half domain-specific criticism. This is also where the concept of “pragmatic speculative realism” appeals to me.
July 28, 2009 at 7:17 pm
Absolutely Ian. This is one of the points I’ve been trying to make vis a vis epistemology. When I formulate an ontology organized around principles these principles are not hard and fast a priori rules, but operating hypotheses. They get reworked in the process of engaging in philosophical work or in approaching the world in these terms. The reason I say that philosophers should pay attention to all these folks is that they provide that “middle” that allows for philosophy to be successfully modified and rebuilt. As I argued in my recent interview, it is even more desirable that the philosopher herself do something other than philosophy– like you with your programming and comparative literature –as a fecund space in which concepts get built, problems formulated, and so on.
July 28, 2009 at 8:01 pm
We agree, so I don’t want to split hairs, but I see things slightly differently: it is not these other fields that represent a middle for me, although the particular ones you mention, who are struggling between the two, certainly do.