Peter over at Philosophy in a Time of Terror reflects on why speculative realism might be significant:
Call it the argument from catastrophe, in which you cite the real possibility of global environmental devastation (in a previous era it would have been the nuclear holocaust) and then accuse X figure of basically wanting that through some theoretical apparatus. In any event, what is exciting about the work in SR is how it meets up with work in environmental studies and animal ethics, to name but two areas, which have long argued for getting out of the human as a part of a larger normative project, part of which would be finding means for averting the very catastrophe in question. This is where, in a sense, I see SR going, namely connecting up with these other movements in such a way as to bolster SR’s normative accounts (such as they are). Or at least, I see these connections whenever I’m at an environmental philosophy conference.
I confess that my gut reaction is to dismiss Peter’s musings out of hand because the bastard gets to live in San Diego. However, I take solace in the fact that the California higher education system is currently a mess, so I guess I can forgive him. Jokes aside, this sounds right to me. At the risk of generating all sorts of ire, I suppose what I want from the object-oriented ontology I’m trying to develop is a “theory of everything” or a “grand unified theory” (a GUT).
read on!
Now, the moment I suggest something a GUT the ghost of Hegel enters the room and specters of totalitarianism swirl in my mind. A GUT or a ToE is not a totalizing theory that would assign everything a place within a system. I hope this much is clear from my ontic principle and Harman’s vacuum packed and withdrawn objects (which I’m finding myself more and more sympathetic to in light of recent discussions with some very fine interlocutors such as Mitsu and Deontologist). No, for me a GUT or a ToE is a wish that arises from coming from a very eclectic theoretical background that draws on semiotics, semiology, psychoanalytic theory, critical theory, technology studies, sociology, complex systems theory, developmental systems theory, Marx and Marxist thought, mathematics, deconstruction, phenomenology, post-structuralism, autopoietic theory, ecological thought, feminism, German Idealism, physics, race studies, Lucretius, rhetoric, American pragmatism (especially Dewey and Peirce), gender studies, the great 17th century rationalists, cybernetics, Kenneth Burke, ethnography, media studies, biology, history, and a host of other things too numerous to mention that have since fallen out of my ear or disappeared in too many bottles of cheap yet good wine. On the other side of the spectrum, there are the issues that concern me such as questions of pedagogy, critical animal studies, globalization, capitalism, the impact of technology on our world, hate, ugly ressentiments, and on and on.
What is one to do when faced with this bewildering array of thinkers, movements, and orientations of thought that howl inside of me like so many damned voices in Dante’s Inferno that refuse to be silenced? What am I to do with the Josiah Royce and Santayana that still echo in my mind from high school? What do you do when you’re fascinated with and convinced by all of these things? Am I a theory slut? A whore that is persuaded by whatever it is I happen to come across? Or is it rather, as Leibniz, Nietzsche, and Whitehead say that there is a truth in all philosophies, that we are points of view on the world, or that, as I argued in Difference and Givenness, point of view or perspective precedes the existence of the subject, such that the subject is an effect of a topology of a point of view rather than the point of view an effect of a subject from which a “look” issues?
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.
Yet such a deflationary move can only occur in a thought that is post-ontotheological and that has learned well the lessons of Heidegger and Derrida, refusing a realism of presence and representation. What is needed is a post-onto-theological metaphysics. A metaphysics that is no longer premised on presence or parousia, but which has learned the lesson of withdrawal. Yet no longer a withdrawal for us as a result of our finitude, but a withdrawal of being qua being with respect to itself. Harman already showed the way in the thinking of this strange world composed of milk cartons, Harry Potter, quarks, mountains contemplating us from the standpoint of eternity, and, yes, humans as well. I do not share Harman’s ontology, but I think with my friend and admire his thought. And as a function of this strange post-ontological metaphysics where even fiction becomes real, we get an unheard of realism that traces a transversal across all our accustomed lines of how the realism/anti-realism debate is formulated, allowing for electrons that are everywhere and nowhere and flying clowns, all to our delight as we dine on Mediterranean couscous.
August 27, 2009 at 3:56 am
Peter writes:
‘In any event, what is exciting about the work in SR is how it meets up with work in environmental studies and animal ethics, to name but two areas, which have long argued for getting out of the human as a part of a larger normative project, part of which would be finding means for averting the very catastrophe in question.’
Continuing my Stengers rave, for those who haven’t noticed Isabelle Stengers published the sequel to ‘Capitalist Sorcery’ (La Sorcellerie Capitaliste – in press with Palgrave). The new book is;
Aux temps des Catastrophes:resister a la barbarie qui vient (something like – ‘The Age of Catastrophe: resisting the coming barbarism’ – or whatever).
Listen to the radio interview
http://intercession.over-blog.org/categorie-10385566.html
for a discussion of the new book.
Btw i’m still offering a copy of my ToE to anyone who can’t afford it.
August 27, 2009 at 3:56 am
As I noted in my last other remark, I’m very much sympathetic to what appears to be a decentering project on your part, i.e., away from the exclusively human. I happen to think, as I noted before, that all of the salutary properties of the project you have in mind can be accomodated by the (object/concept, language game/life world, Being) approach, however, without the difficulties I find inherent in the term “object”. It ought to be possible to move discourse away from human-centered relativity without introducing a notion of object having beingness in itself; but again, it may be that I am misunderstanding you, so I look forward to your remarks on this subject.
August 27, 2009 at 6:53 am
I’ve been mulling over this quite a bit more, since all these ideas are quite interesting. There’s another maneuver which I think is critical to your project which I think is worth talking about, because it is a maneuver I personally find quite useful even if I don’t accept the notion of the beingness of an object, and it is this:
What I think you’re trying to get at is that one can think of subjects not only as the center of a life world or language game, but also as objects as viewed from an “external” point of view. I.e., one can think of a subject as potentially arising out of, say, the operation of the metabolism of a cell or a collection of cells (as in a living organism), or a human body, etc. This is precisely what I was getting at when I was referring to Gregory Bateson’s materialist cybernetics —- it’s also a maneuver taken up by Brian Cantwell Smith in his excellent book I mentioned earlier, _On the Origin of Objects_.
Where you and I might differ (and I say might because I’m not entirely sure where you stand om this) is what it means to talk about a subject being an object. For example, when I look at Bateson’s attempt to address this question, he assumes a certain classical physical world and then reasons from there about how awareness could arise in that context. The same is true, to some extent, in Brian Cantwell Smith’s book. However, I don’t happen to object to this maneuver at all, because what is being talked about there isn’t that these cybernetic models correspond to actual objects in “reality”, but that we are positing a sort of thought experiment — what if you had a world that were structured in a way that corresponded to one of these classical pictures, then how would we think about awarness, etc., in such a world? One isn’t making a realistic claim about the elements of this thought experiment, but one CAN I believe make a claim that the thought experiment, taken as a whole, can be taken seriously in the same sense that any theoretical statement about the world within a language game embedded in Being can be taken seriously. In other words I don’t have to believe that a Batesonian mind is an object with independent ontological status or “beingness” to think that the Batesonian model may have something to say about mental process, even though it is positing in advance a sort of background which is prior to mental process.
In other words, I think it is more than legitimate to talk about subjectivity from an external point of view, and I think one can get this via a (object, life world, Being) tuple with the added proviso (perhaps this is an axiom) that different life worlds can intersect in some sense. Once you have that proviso it becomes possible to speculate about mental process, subjectivity, within the context of Being which is in some sense prior, and even to talk about the structure of this (i.e., neuroscience, etc.) without having to give the objects of your discourse a sort of independent ontological position (outside the context of a life world/language game).
August 27, 2009 at 1:37 pm
Is the misreading of Gratton’s blog’s title as “Time of Terror” rather than “Time of Error” an inside joke of some kind? This is the second time in the past few days that you’ve linked there with the “Terror” title.
August 27, 2009 at 4:27 pm
Ha! Thanks Cameron. I’ll fix it when I get a chance.