Responding to Paul Ennis’ Blogpost on Humanism, Asher Kay of Spoonerized Alliteration remarks that,
My first reaction was, “Well, we *caused* the technological debasement and ecological catastrophe! We could use a little slapdown as far as our importance in the universe is concerned.”
But I think that OOO doesn’t really amount to a slapdown. It’s more of a change in perspective.
If we accept that our thoughts, concepts, drives, etc. are inextricably embedded and embodied in the world; if we accept that our mathematics and formal systems are based on how the body and mind work, and have no separate existence or special, “pure” access to the way things really are; then we start to develop a perspective that lets us solve problems like technological debasement and ecological catastrophe.
Quite right. While all of those working within the framework of speculative realist thought would certain argue that they are not simply attempting to shift perspectives but are making genuine ontological claims, it is nonetheless the case that speculative realism will have done a service to philosophy if it manages to draw attention to dimensions of the world largely ignored by contemporary philosophy. Speculative realism can be usefully articulated in terms of Lacanian discourse theory. Depending on what it is engaging, speculative realist thought occupies each of Lacan’s four discourses. When speculative realism critiques correlationism or philosophies of access, it occupies the discourse of the hysteric, occupying the position of a split subject declaring that the emperor has no clothes. When it formulates an ontology it occupies the discourse of the master, introducing new signifiers that organize the buzzing confusion of the world. When research is undertaken employing these concepts, it occupies the discourse of the university, situating the unknown in terms of these categories and concepts.
read on!
However, at the level of rhetoric it could be said that speculative realist thought occupies the discourse of the analyst. In the discourse of the analyst the analyst addresses the analysand or split subject from the position of the excluded or surplus object. What the analyst listens for in the analysand’s discourse is not what the analysand intends or the meaning the analysand hopes to convey, all of which remains at the level of ego-discourse. Rather, what the analyst listens for are all those elements excluded from the analysand’s discourse or those elements treated as so much irrelevant waste, flotsam, and nonsense. It is not what the analysand intends that is important, but the slip of the tongue, homonyms, the bungled action, the dream, the offhand joke, and the symptom that increasingly come to occupy center stage in the analytic setting. What before appeared to be so much irrelevant nonsense becomes the cipher of the analysand’s desire.
Speculative realism also occupies the position of the remainder, the surplus, and the excluded with respect to philosophical discourse. Where philosophy has, for the last three hundred years, been obsessed with questions of self-reflexivity and the relationship of a subject facing an object and an object reduced to the manner in which it faces a subject, speculative realism seeks to occupy those strange entities excluded from philosophical discourse such as the object, the animal, technology, and so on. It seeks to bring that which is largely unspoken, that which can barely be heard, within the domain of a philosophical thinking. One will object that Heidegger speaks of the animal in his brilliant lecture Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. Indeed he does, but only relative to the human. The animal is there said to be “poor in world”. What we do not get is the animal for itself. It will be said that philosophy everywhere speaks of objects. Indeed. But only objects insofar as we represent them or insofar as they are vehicles for our signs and discourse. It will be said that thinkers like Adorno and Heidegger have all sorts of things to say about technology. Indeed. But again it is only a technology that poses the “greatest danger”, where being is thoroughly occluded, or a technology that enslaves us. Never a technology for itself.
The animal, the object, and technology are so many remainders, surpluses, or exclusions that scarcely find treatment in philosophy. Oh yes, there are exceptions to this. As is always the case when I write a post like this there will be those that say “but what about Serres! What about Stengers! What about Ong and Kittler! What about Simondon! What about Stiegler! What about McLuhan! What about! What about! What about!” Yet this misses the point that within the institutional frame of philosophy these figures are treated as largely marginal, rather than being at the center of discussion. One of the tasks of OOO is that of re-construction or the creation of a counter-tradition that excavates those corners in philosophy where these things have been thought about and worked through.
A long while back I wrote a post entitled “The Alethetics of Rhetoric” that resonates nicely with Asher’s point. My idea was that activity of the rhetor can be usefully understood in terms of Heidegger’s concept of truth as aletheia. For Heidegger, alethetic truth is always an activity of revealing and concealing. When I use my coffee mug to drink coffee the cup is disclosed as something for the sake of something else. It belongs to the referential network of the equipmental world to which it belongs, speaking to relationships with other objects like coffee, but also to my ends such as being stimulated and awake for the sake of coherently writing this post, for the sake of generating more discussion and so on and so forth. In revealing itself in this equipmental way, the mug as an entity composed of certain atomic bonds, for example, is concealed. My relationship to the mug must shift to see it as a natural object in this sense. When disclosed as a collection of atoms with a particular geometrical form, the mug as a bit of equipment is, in turn, concealed.
Rhetoric functions in this way as well. For everything that a particular way of speaking about the world discloses, something else is concealed. In this regard, discourses are like sun spots or the death of Michael Jackson. All over the world scientists monitor sun spots and solar flares because they have the capacity to interrupt satellite communications and radio transmissions. With the sun spot nearly everything can become concealed. Likewise, stories in the media like the manner in which the death of Michael Jackson was reported are like major storms that shut down everything. People joked that God must love Governor Sanford because he killed Michael Jackson to save him. In a sense they were right. In the face of a media storm like the reporting on the death of Michael Jackson, everything else is concealed or hidden. And regardless of the truth or rightness of a philosophical position– with Whitehead I agree that there is truth in all philosophical positions –nonetheless the manner in which a philosophical discourse organizes issues conceals as much as it reveals.
In part this has to do with the inherent temporality of speech and writing. No one can say everything at once. An entire system might be synchronous and there altogether, but it can only be spoken element by element. There’s no way around this and it is always charitable to recall that simply because someone is not speaking about one particular thing at a particular moment it does not follow that they necessarily exclude these other elements. However, rhetorics also conceal by selecting topics and bringing certain elements into relief, shunting others into the shadows. This is, I think, in part, an element of the philosophical situation that speculative realism and object-oriented ontology is responding to. A philosophical tradition that has been obsessed with questions of access, representation, self-reflexivity, normativity, mind, culture, language, and history discloses certain regions of the world making others fall into hiddenness.
If these issues were marginal or of no importance, this would perhaps be of no consequence. However, in a world where networked society due to international travel significantly speeds the epidemiology of diseases, in a world that faces looming environmental catastrophes, in a world where technology fundamentally transforms our relations to one another and the very nature of our cognition, these issues cannot be ignored or shunted aside. What is needed is an alethetics of rhetoric, a technology of concepts, that makes it easier to directly discuss these issues and harder to remain awash in signs, language, representation, etc. If speculative realism and object-oriented ontology make some small contribution to revealing these largely invisible dimensions of our experience, if it can make some small contribution to getting institutional philosophy to take notice, it will have made a significant contribution regardless of whether others come to accept its ontological and epistemological claims.
Larval Subjects . 
August 24, 2009 at 11:44 pm
[…] 24, 2009 An especially interesting POST BY LEVI. Posted by doctorzamalek Filed in Uncategorized Leave a Comment […]
August 25, 2009 at 12:58 am
Interesting post. I’m not sure that I would see Stengers as a ‘marginal’ thinker within the institutional frame of phil (maybe in the States – certainly not in Europe). Her reputation in the USA may change when the Whitehead book ‘Thinking with Whitehead is published in English by Harvard…
Interesting also that Derrida (the only bit I really read) claims that he has never come across any protest by the ‘great’ philosophers – or by anybody who approaches philosophically as such the so-called animal question – against the singular general term ‘the animal.’
He goes so far as to declare this homogeneous term ‘the Animal in general’ one of man’s greatest stupidities.
But I’m sure most readers are familar with his ‘The animal that I am’ essay (L’animal que donc je suis) which I think is translated somewhere.
Derrida continues to employ the scholastic term ipseity to designate the self-relation of the living but this term does not do justice to the distinctio btween a fish or penguin species and a single individual because all of them are deemed alike.
Stengers argues in the untranslated Cosmopolitiques tome 1, chapter 2, ‘The paradoxical mode of existence of the neutrino’ that an entity like the neutrino exists at the same time and indissociably ‘in itself’ and ‘for us, becoming all the more ‘in itself’ as it comes to exist ‘for us.’
‘This mode of apparently paradoxical existence, where…the ‘in-itself’ and the ‘for us’ are corelatively produced, is well and truly what experimental practice aims for, of which the triumph is to make exist factishes at the same time dated and transhistoric…
‘Recognizing factishes [a la Latour) as irreducible to a critical epistemology, or to ‘objects’ such as philosophy likes to put in front of ‘subjects’, is not at all synonomous with pacification and coherence…
‘Factishes are a way of affirming the truth of the relative, that is, of relating their power to a practical event and not to the truth of a world whose access a practice would be confined to discovering.’
In fact Speculative Realists might find this chapter a kind of required reading rather than a marginal text! (see also Stengers, The Invention of the Modern Sciences, for a treatmen of scientific ‘events’).
And the fascist druid tries to cover him himself by remarking briefly ‘…this does not mean that life represents something inferior or some kind of lower level in comparison with human Dasein. On the contrary, life is a domain which possesses a wealth of openness wiht which the human world may have nothing to compare (FCM 255).
August 25, 2009 at 1:02 am
I totally agree with myself!
And, as I think Paul Ennis said somewhere, with the convergence of a whole bunch of elements, the timing seems eerily right.
What strikes me after reading this post (and the one on the Alethetics of Rhetoric) is that what is revealed in an ontology might be more powerful by far than a moral theory, by providing a vista for self-realization rather than a didactic formula.
August 25, 2009 at 1:14 am
Absolutely Paul. I fully agree that Stengers is required reading! When I talk about re-construction I am talking about bringing such philosophical projects front and center. Stengers is actually a contributor to The Speculative Turn collection Harman, Srnicek, and I are putting together. What I was suggesting was that these philosophers have been shunted aside into a rather marginalized place in Continental philosophy. You do not, for example, ever see Stengers, Latour, or Serres at the center of discussions around which debates in phenomenology, the post-structuralists (with some notable exceptions among Deleuzians), critical theory, Badiou and Zizek revolve. I am sure, of course, that this differs geographically. When I refer to these figures as marginal what should be heard is minor in the proper Deleuzian sense. I suspect that the majoritarian neglect of figures such as this has a lot to do with the way that certain Greek distinctions between episteme and techne, culture and nature, remain operative in contemporary thought despite claiming the contrary. Those thinkers that deign to take practice and technology seriously are seen as doing something beneath exalted “theoria“, occupying themselves with irrelevant details of how ideas are implemented when, the story goes, “everyone knows that it’s the ideas that truly matter and that engineering, the lab, building, technology, nonhuman objects are just passive media that take on intellectual form.” “Why bother ourselves,” the subtext goes, “with all that grubby work that the servants do. After all, they just brutely enact the architect’s ideas and all these nonhuman things contribute nothing.” I take it that certain strains of speculative realism, especially OOO, are trying to draw attention to these excluded “marginalia” (for the Lacanian the truth is always in the margins of a text), undermining this distinction. Latour is another contributor to the collection who I would count among the OOO theorists even if he wouldn’t describe himself in those terms.
August 25, 2009 at 2:22 am
[…] Ontology, Real, Realism, Speculative Realism, problems Leave a Comment In response to my post on speculative realism and the alethetics of discourse, Asher Kay writes: What strikes me after […]
August 25, 2009 at 4:49 am
Yes, esp. as neither Stengers nor Deleuze would see themselves as ps or phenom.
But to get the ‘grand prix de philosophie’ from the somewhat conservative academie francaise is a kind of ‘assimilation’.
In fact it’s prob. a compliment not to be included in the oh so tiresome ‘institutional frame.’ Not sure someone like Illich would have rejoiced at that. And given that Latour has been teaching for years at a fancy college in paris full of ‘agreges’ I doubt he cares!
August 25, 2009 at 4:52 am
Believe it or not, Bruno seems to have a massive inferiority complex and is convinced no one appreciates or pays attention to his work. This seems to be a despair suffered by many who begin with philosophy and go on to do tremendous work in other disciplines, as if they still crave the recognition of philosophers. He’s extremely generous though and not at all full, as far as I can tell, of ressentiment. How this works, I do not know.
August 25, 2009 at 8:05 am
That is surprising and almost ‘absurd.’ Esp. for someone like Latour with such a great sense of humour.
I have yet to watch this vid of Latour at the MAD conf.2008
http://intercession.over-blog.org/categorie-10385566.html
August 25, 2009 at 6:41 pm
Hi! I came across your blog while searching for articles on Meillasoux, who a friend of mine mentioned in a conversation the other day. The comment I have more specifically references your discussion on time and Meillasoux, but since that was a post you made months ago I figured it might be more relevant to attach it to one of your more recent posts.
The most important mistake I see in Meillasoux’s argument has to do with his treatment of time (which you touched upon). I happen to have some background in physics, and I believe that your discussion, at least, of Meillasoux’s rejoinder vis a vis time is rather inadequate. There is a subtle assumption being made in the argument, it seems to me, that the world consists of a preexisting background of space and time, and that events that “precede” the current moment can be thought of unambiguously as having occured “away” from the observational event (i.e., we infer as much). But first of all, the notion that space and time are a kind of preexisting background container as it were for events is highly questionable; many of the more recent formulations of physics do not, in fact, presume this is the case. Furthermore, there’s a fundamental problem in quantum mechanics called the preferred basis problem, a problem which is currently unsolved, which essentially comes down to a mystery as to why the world of objects and relations between objects that we seem to observe can be said to be implied by the laws of physics (in particular quantum mechanics). There are fundamental difficulties with solving this problem (I highly recommend reading Lee Smolin’s book _Three Roads to Quantum Gravity_ for more on this subject).
Furthermore the notion that the past “precedes” current events, from a scientific perspective, is also highly questionable if not simply inconsistent with modern quantum theory. As Smolin and others point out, it is quite consistent with QM to say that the past that we infer “comes into being” in some real sense at the moment we observe evidence of it; that is to say, it remains in a fundamental state of indeterminacy until observation occurs. This includes, for example, dinosaurs having presumably walked the Earth millions of years ago — i.e., that event didn’t objectively simply “happen” but in some sense comes into being as having happened for us when we dig up the fossil evidence. The same could be said for carbon dating or cosmological evidence of quasars or any other observation of the distant past. In other words, our very idea of a “past” is contingent upon observation, and the extent to which we can say such a past “exists” is contingent upon observation.
This in itself doesn’t completely invalidate Meillasoux’s critique of radical “correlationism” as he puts it, as I do happen to believe it makes sense to say there is “some” sort of Being that precedes awareness, but to ascribe attributes to it (i.e., “this event occurred in the past, prior to observation”) is nevertheless extremely questionable. Speaking of the past really is just a statement about a model or picture, and it is contingent upon observations which occur now; the past occurs now, in other words. There’s no reason why one cannot speak of the past “as if” it occurred in some time that “preceded” awareness, but to make ontological realistic claims based on this is, I believe, not warranted.
August 25, 2009 at 6:43 pm
(Not only not warranted — but inconsistent with physical theory as well as experiment —- I recommend looking up experiments such as Wheeler’s Delayed Choice experiment for more on this.)
August 26, 2009 at 3:45 pm
[…] but I don’t believe these rejoinders work for the reasons I state above. You can see some more of my reasoning about time and physics appended here and I discuss further issues of interpretations of physics in my comments to this interesting post. […]
August 27, 2009 at 3:13 am
[…] What I would like is a theory capable of integrating these diverse theoretical technologies, and reconciling this heterogeneous pastiche of thought. Yet make no mistake, this is a heterogeneous pastiche. These orientations are not complementary. If I emphasize that these theories are technologies, then this is because concepts are tools, they are instruments, they are machines that evoke differences. In this regard, Ian Bogost, in his title Unit Operations, and in the manner in which he performs his theory of the unit with respect to theory– treating elements of theories as smiles without a cat and cats without a smile, and approaching the smile without a cat to which the muse speaks as an entity in its own right –has the right idea insofar as he marshals blocks of difference to enter into amalgams and mixtures that produce something else in the process. If a demonic mixture of these technologies is to be produced, it is necessary, above all, to overcome the humanities/science rut. We need science fiction, and I make this assertion as a cipher to be de-ciphered. Yet so long as we remain in the rut of epistemology, privileging the human-object relation above all other relations, such a science fiction is impossible. No, what is required is a deflationary move that renounces any ontological duality and places all beings on an equal ontological footing. This is the only way, as far as I can see, that it is possible to avoid the sort of concealing that theory produces that I talked about in my Alethetics of Discourse. […]