Paul Ennis has a terrific post up on his experience reading psychoanalytic thought, the dis-ease it generates in him, and how he encounters something similar when reading the speculative realists:
Reading psychoanalysis generates a sense of uneasiness in me. To borrow Zizek’s voice for a moment ‘I mean it quite literally’. When I’m sitting there reading about gaps and Others and Fathers I feel anxious. What is Metaphysics style anxiety.
There seems to be a direct psychological impulse behind what speculative realism wants to do. If my more informed readers will allow me to make a crude analysis: speculative realism wants to ‘allow’ the real in. It wants to collapse some symbolic order that we are not supposed to collapse.
Read the rest of the post here. Paul hits on something fascinating with his observation about collapsing something in the symbolic order that is not supposed to be collapsed. In the subsequent discussion in the comments revolving around the “heimlich” or “being-at-home”, I think the point of the unheimlich is somewhat missed in the discussions that somehow it is constitutively impossible for us to not be at home.
In developing onticology or object-oriented ontology, one of the things I’ve been aiming at is what I call, following DeLanda, though developed in a different way, a flat ontology. A flat ontology is, to use a term my good friend Jerry the Anthropologist recently shared with me, a lumpy ontology. In referring to such an ontology as “lumpy”, I intend an ontology that is composed of a heterogeneity of different entities. As such, heterogenesis is one of the central questions of onticology. Heterogenesis is the question of how the disparate, the heterogeneous, enters into relations or imbroglios with one another to form a collective and a common. These imbroglios or collectives can be thought as logoi. Rather than a single logos for the world, we instead get islands of logoi where the organization governing these imbroglios are emergent results of ongoing heterogenesis.
The idea of a flat ontology can be fruitfully understood in contrast to materialisms. Where materialism posits a single type of entity– whatever that type might be –out of which all other entities are composed, a flat ontology is pluralistic, positing an infinite variety of different types of entities. Flat ontology does not reject the existence of material entities like quarks, atoms, and trees, but merely asserts that these aren’t the only types of entities that exist. Consequently, when onticology claims that “to be is to be an object”, this thesis is not equivalent to claiming that “to be is to be material”. A city is an object. Indeed, it is an object that contains a variety of other objects and that depends on a variety of other objects both in terms of its own endo-relational structure and its exo-relations to things outside its membrane. Nonetheless, were we to take an inventory of all the material objects included in the city we would not have the “city-ness of the city”. For all intents and purposes, nearly all the matter composing New Orleans remained after Hurricane Katrina, but it was a very different city after this event and its continued existence still remains in doubt.
As I lay in bed fighting the flu this weekend I found myself once again reading Braudel’s Civilization & Capitalism. In my view, Braudel’s approach to history provides a model example of what an object-oriented analysis might look like. Braudel does not tell the story of the emergence of capitalism from the standpoint of ideas, political conflicts, nations, or “great men”, but rather from the standpoint of what he calls “material civilization”. Material history consists of those constraints and affordances upon which the social world is based at any given point in time. “Material life is made up of people and things. The study of things, of everything mankind makes or uses– food, housing, clothing, luxury, whether or not money is used, what sort of money is used, tools, coinage or its substitutes, framework of village and town… (31).” This material civilization thus consists of things such as the way in which food is produced, the epidemiology of disease, the sorts of foods produced, whether or not roads are present, the layout of towns and their relationship to the countryside, clothing styles, forms of cooking, weather patterns, wild animals, the relationship of nomads to agricultural society, technologies and technics, and so on.
Another Heidegger Blog has an excellent interview up with Nick Srnicek. Nick’s remarks are especially interesting insofar as he approaches Speculative Realism from the Brassier/Laruelle angle.
In one fell swoop the truth of my domestic life is captured:
Witness me, in graphic detail, trying to figure out the objectness or objectality of the coffee pot as I am asked to take out the trash. As Mel said upon reading this comic, “he’s got your number.” Needless to say I was annoyed and denied everything.
Last week Nate of What in the Hell suggested to me that we both experiment with the 21 Questions Youtube video in our classroom and compare notes. I haven’t yet gotten a chance to look at the video Nate referenced but this got me thinking. With this medium we now have the technology to collaborate in teaching. Not only is it possible to assign texts that we would like to read together, but it is actually possible for us to design assignments that make use of the internet so that our students might collaborate with one another. Over at Perverse Egalitarianism the Braver reading group has, I believe, been a tremendous success. If I have not participated in that discussion it is because I have already been coded in a particular way such that I would be unproductive to the discussion itself and such that my views, honest as they are intended to be, would be characterized in a less than charitable or productive way. Nonetheless, the Braver reading group has shown that such forms of engagement are possible. Why not take it to the next level and develop courses together in tandem that would read one text together over the course of the semester. I am not suggesting that the entire course should share the same texts, but simply a single text. It would be possible to set up either wiki groups or yahoo groups that students would join so that they would be required to interact with one another across the country or the world, enhancing the entire learning experience through collaborative debate and investigation of both the text itself and the topics that the text generates. Simultaneously, faculty would be able to coordinate texts that they want to study or read in greater detail, generating potential conferences, journal issues, or edited collections with one another. This would be an effective technique both in generating shared research and new pedagogical approaches. Ultimately I would be interested in seeing an interdisciplinary approach to such “team teaching”. While I deeply value Nate’s thought and envy his grounding in Marxist thought, I think that such a pedagogical experiment would be most productive if somehow it could meld philosophy and lit courses, philosophy and sociology courses, philosophy and history courses, and so on. My desire is to learn from my colleagues in other disciplines: their research methods, their ways of posing questions, their ways of gathering evidences, their evidences and so on. This is one of the reasons that my experience teaching with Jerry the Anthropologist was so productive in my own thought and pedagogy. At any rate, it would be possible to form a collective where we form collaborative networks from semester to semester or every other semester or every couple of years, where we parcel up experiments and texts and form these networks. Ultimately our students benefit by being drawn into discussions with those outside of their local geography and engaging in discussions from a variety of different disciplinary perspectives. From a Marxist perspective such a pedagogy would be an element in the process of moving beyond the ghettoized university system to a more global sort of discourse, much like what we’ve already been doing here in the theory web where we’ve already been forming our own discourses, questions, trends, journals, publication projects, movements, and presses. Some of us have discussed the possibility of forming another EGS. This would be a step in that direction.
Responding to my perplexity as to just what to call OOO’s engagement with the history of philosophy with realism as its guiding clue, Paul Ennis proposes the term “re-construction”:
That may be a warning. I’ve not seen you struggle to name things before. You seem to have a talent for it. I would add that whatever the project is named it ought to be an ‘explosive’ name. Why? Otherwise it risks becoming another jaded catch-phrase or cliche (a new semiotic toy).
The other, cheeky I admit, possibility is that we are the true re-constructors who are beyond the deconstruction. Sure Derrida was neccessary, but now its time for the real work. In this sense we would be engaged in a Re-Struction of the History of Ontology. Instead of sneaking up on texts in order to discover presence we sneak up on texts and try to find when they came closest to onticology (or when they gave objects a fair shake of the stick).
I think this is a brilliant suggestion that also resonates nicely with certain points Bogost makes about the limited nature of de-construction in his recent interview. I especially like the cheekiness of this proposal as I think, among certain strains of speculative realism, there is a sort of Monty Pythonesque dimension. In Graham you get the carnivalesque as a constant point of reference. Clowns are constantly flying about alongside cotton, fire, armies, and a menagerie of objects worthy of the strange literature of Ben Marcus. The abbreviated term “OOO” is designed to resonate in an amusing manner. I often describe my ontic principle as a sort of joke that mocks the idea of getting at the “really real” being of being altogether insofar as if something makes a difference then it is, i.e., let’s get back to work. Even the term “object-oriented philosophy” is a bit of a joke or thumbing of the nose at the reigning tradition of anti-realism, not unlike the French soldier that “farts in the general direction” of the crusaders in The Holy Grail. Re-construction would be yet another nice satirical turn.
I have often commented on what I take to be the insufferable figure of the scholar, but never seem to tire of doing so as I encounter them everywhere. By the “scholar” I have in mind the person who has devoted their entire life to work on a single figure in the history of philosophy. Allow me to be clear. When I describe the scholar as insufferable, I am not referring to scholarship. I have benefited tremendously from the work of scholars that have devoted all their work to understanding particular thinkers. I have engaged in this sort of work myself when it comes to Lacan and Deleuze. Nor does every engagement with figures in the history of philosophy count as what I would characterize as “scholarship”. Derrida’s Speech of Philosophy, despite being devoted exclusively to Husserl and a close reading of certain key moments in Husserl’s thought is not a work of scholarship but a genuine work of philosophy in its own right. Derrida does not set out to represent Husserl, but produces something new in and through Husserl. Heidegger’s Sophist lectures or his massive four volumes on Nietzsche, while engaging with a particular thinker, are not scholarship but genuine works of philosophy. Iain Hamilton Grant’s book on Schelling is not scholarship, though it is very scholarly, but is a genuine work of philosophy. Although the dividing line is fuzzy, the difference between a scholarly work on a philosopher and a philosophical engagement with a philosopher seems to revolve around whether the work seeks to represent the philosopher or whether it is engaging with the philosopher to produce a new work of philosophy. In this respect, my Difference and Givenness is a work of scholarship insofar as it seeks to represent Deleuze and explain his transcendental empiricism and how it is working with the rationalist tradition and the tradition of transcendental idealism, whereas DeLanda’s Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy is a genuine work of philosophy in that it takes up Deleuze’s thought to produce a philosophical work of its own. Both types of work are valuable and make their own contributions.
When I describe the scholar as an insufferable figure I am speaking of the manner in which a certain breed of scholars engages with others in discourse. The problem endemic to so many scholars is that they seem to have a very difficult time engaging in dialogue with others that does not end up trying to trace everything back to a discussion about their favored figure. Rather than approaching the discussion as a discussion about the issue at hand, these discussions instead become discussions about the figure. Often the scholar understands himself as “setting the record straight”. The philosopher criticizes some thesis of a particular thinker in the process of developing his argument, concepts, and position. For example, Kant criticizes Hume’s empiricism, arguing that impressions and associations are insufficient grounds to account for how we are capable of making judgments about causality. “How”, Kant asks, “do humans ever arrive at the concept of necessity at all entirely on the basis of impressions and associations, both of which are contingent or subject to the structure of subalternation in Aristotle’s square of opposition?” Kant answers that you cannot. He has made a philosophical argument against the root claim made by Hume and uses this as his launching point.
Enter the insufferable scholar. Noting that in the Critique and the Prolegomena Kant never gives a detailed discussion of Hume’s Treatise Concerning Human Nature or Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, the insufferable scholar– who I’ve elsewhere referred to as the “minotaur” in a slight misrepresentation of the original myth –smiles wickedly and immediately brings out his knife. Of course, Kant never gets criticized in this way because he is coded or marked as a “master-thinker” and therefore the very same “sloppy” scholarly work that the scholar would charge another contemporary thinker with is off limits in the case of Kant. Not only does Kant not give a sustained analysis of Hume’s Treatise or Enquiry, he doesn’t even reference them! The first charge is that Kant is misrepresenting Hume or misinterpreting him. “If only, Herr Kant, you understood Hume you would assent to his position!” The second charge leveled by the insufferable scholar is that Kant is ignorant of what Hume is claiming. If this kind of scholar is insufferable– and certainly not all scholars are like this –if they are obnoxious, if they are disrespectful and lacking in civility, if they are the last person you want to invite to a party, then this is because they relate to others in such a way that they deny 1) that in most cases, philosophers make very basic arguments that can be addressed without engaging in the activity of the collector that turns over every corner of the philosopher’s text, and, more fundamentally 2) they are perpetually accusing others either explicitly or implicitly of being ignorant or poor readers. In other words, the insufferable scholar or the minotaur is a poor participant at the party (in the Greek sense of a “symposium”) because they rudely wish to talk only about themselves (they make every issue an issue about their fetishized thinker rather than engaging in a broader discussion capable of including others), and because they constantly condescend to all of those about them suggesting that they don’t know what they are talking about or that they are unfamiliar with the works to which they refer. Everywhere they seek to occupy the position of the teacher and to situate their interlocutors as students.
There seems to be a very peculiar will to power behind these figures. What they seem to enjoy is policing or “making the record straight”. When others criticize those who police, the police officers often respond by claiming that these critics want “anything to go” and to evade all rigor. That is, the police figure interprets those disgruntled by policing as wanting to play without any constraints. But this isn’t the issue at all. The issue is that the police mentality, not unlike Nietzsche’s priest, seems to be psychologically organized in such a way that they perpetually aim to correct others as a way of maintaining their power and mastery. Because there is this underlying will to power behind such figures, they interpret others in such a way as to maximize their opportunity to correct others. In other words, there’s a systematic distortion in how they read others that approaches their interlocutor in such a way as to treat them as a priori ignorant, guilty of absurd claims that no reasonable person would make, and guilty of misinterpretation precisely so that they might have the opportunity to correct the other. They will note, for example, that their interlocutor does not express another philosopher’s concepts using the same language, or will argue that everything hinges on some occasional, obscure piece written by the philosopher. The mechanism is not unlike that of Debbie Downer on Saturday Night Live:
Just as Debbie finds every opportunity to locate the insufficiency of every thing and every event, the insufferable scholar situates discussion in such a way as to perpetually make it about their figure, how others have misinterpreted their pet figure, or how their figure has already done what others are trying to do. It seems to me that this figure of consciousness, to use Hegel’s expression, is a sort of habitus produced through graduate training. Those of us in the humanities already suffer a great deal of insecurity– especially in the United States –feeling usurped by other disciplines and having a rather small voice in the general social order. Despite the countless hours we devote to our work and the sacrifices we make in pursuing this sort of life, many of us feel as if we go unrecognized. On the one hand, the game of playing the scholar in social interactions functions as a way of establishing social hierarchy among graduate students or professors attempting to assert their superiority over others in their discipline. On the other hand, it functions as a mechanism for insuring one’s superiority over others outside of academia. If one is capable of situating others as always being mistaken, as being ignorant, and so on, then they can think themselves as having a secret truth to which the others are not privy.
In a very real sense this activity resembles Plato’s cave where the philosopher thinks of the rabble there in the cave as engaged in all sorts of idle talk and thinks of the philosopher as swooping down to rescue them with his superior knowledge of the forms. In this case, however, it is not knowledge of the forms that the scholar possesses but knowledge of the master-thinker that he and he alone understands and that everyone else, despite their own careful studies and training, have somehow missed. What this scholar seems to misrecognize is that far from practicing intellectual rigor by “correcting the record”, the scholar has changed the subject and is no longer discussing the issue at hand. I have often been guilty myself of behaving this way in discussions surrounding Deleuze and Lacan. It is an ugly posture and one best abandoned both professionally and intellectually, though one difficult to overcome.
It will be said that I condescend, attack, police and all the rest. Like the recent rightwing “protests” at the town hall meetings regarding healthcare, this is the way it always is in these discussions: a whole lot of attempts to prevent the discussion from taking place at all. What the insufferable scholar seems to forget is that he was the one that condescended by suggesting that a genuine philosophical disagreement is a matter of misinterpretation, that my criticism is the result of ignorance rather than already having worked through these things myself, that I am so stupid and idiotic that I would advocate positions that no reasonable person would advocate. Somehow the trollish insufferable scholar always seems to miss the way in which his own mode of engagement resonates or speaks, or what it says at the level of subtext. And above all, these speakers rudely attempt to change the subject of discussion by making it a discussion about the figure, rather than attending to the issue and the argument. Were the Hume scholar able to simply make the issue about whether or not association can account for how we are capable of making causal judgments a discussion could take place. Yet when the Hume scholar suggests that somehow I haven’t understood Hume’s arguments, that I can’t simply cite these arguments, outline why I believe them to be problematic, and move on to my own project… Well such a person is just a prick that seems unable to recognize their own condescension or what a philosophical discussion is about.
No doubt this is the reason that those doing genuine work so often flee from the scholar. What are such figures but ephemera that contribute nothing and that fail to recognize all constraints and norms governing discourse? How do they differ from the protesters that are attempting to silence all discussion? How is dialogue possible with someone who doesn’t first practice charity in their interpretation of what you’re claiming and who doesn’t begin from an egalitarian stance that both of you are on equal footing in your understanding of the basic contours of the issues being discussed. And then when you point out that the insufferable scholar has been rude and condescending, that they changed the subject, that they situated you in a position of ignorance and idiocy, they have the gall to accuse you of behaving like a prick even as they lecture you and shift the entire issue being discussed. What a wretched species we are. But this is exactly how the insufferable scholar proceeds: uncharitably in their interpretation of your claims, rudely in shifting the issue to their own figure of which they are fanboys, lecturing like the petty professor that can brook no discussion and that is accustomed to filling student papers with red ink (and no doubt arguing with their relatives about the importance of what they do), and inegalitarian in their views your understanding of the figure you’re criticizing. Nothing is ever a genuine difference in positions. Rather, it is perpetually a failure to read to the corners.
Recently I have found myself wondering if object-oriented ontology does not require something like the destruction of the history of ontology called for by Heidegger in §6 of Being and Time. In the case of Heidegger, the necessity of this destruction arises from the fact that
[i]n its factical Being, any Dasein is as it already was, and it is ‘what’ it already was. It is its past, whether explicitly or not. And this is so not only in that its past is, as it were, pushing itself along ‘behind’ it, and that Dasein possesses what is past as a property which is still present-at-hand and which sometimes has after-effects upon it: Dasein ‘is’ its past in the way of its own Being, which, to put it roughly,’historizes’ out of its future on each occasion. (41)
For Heidegger, the aim of this destruction of the history of ontology is to make the fundamental structures of this tradition explicit. If there is a problem in them remaining implicit, then this is because “[w]hen tradition thus becomes master, it does so in such a way that what it ‘transmits’ is made so inaccessible, proximally and for the most part, that it rather becomes concealed. Tradition takes what has come down to us and delivers it over to self-evidence; it blocks our access to those primordial ‘sources’ from which the categories and concepts handed down to us have been in part quite genuinely drawn (43)”.
For Heidegger, the destruction of this history of ontology does not consist in the abandonment of the philosophical tradition, nor is it a negative project, but rather this destruction is a positive project that seeks to free up possibilities for philosophy by undermining the self-evidence of that tradition but also by disclosing the primordial sources upon which it is based in an “implicit” way. In Heidegger’s thought, the question of being is to be taken as the clue for the investigation of this tradition. As Heidegger puts it,
In thus demonstrating the origin of our basic ontological concepts by an investigation in which their ‘birth certificate’ is displayed, we have nothing to do with a vicious relativizing of ontological standpoints. But this destruction is just as far from having the negative sense of shaking off the ontological tradition. We must, on the contrary, stake out the positive possibilities of that tradition, and this always means keeping it within its limits; these in turn are given factically in the way the question [of being] is formulated at the time, and in the way the possible field for investigation is thus bounded off. On its negative side, this destruction does not relate itself towards the past; its criticism is aimed at ‘today’ and at the prevelent way of treating the history of ontology, whether it is headed towards doxographhy, towards intellectual history, or towards a history of problems. But to bury the past in nullity is not the purpose of this destruction; its aim is positive; its negative function remains unexpressed and indirect. (44)
Clearly the aims and method of object-oriented ontology’s destruction of the history of philosophy will differ from those outlined by Heidegger, yet nonetheless there will be certain similarities. First, like Heidegger’s destruction of the history of philosophy, one of the aims will be to overcome the self-evidence through which which the question of being is formulated today. In particular, the target here will be the subject-object division of being into two incommensurable houses or ontological domains perpetually at war with one another, such that one is offered the stark alternative of either choosing the correlationist route of mind and reducing the object to a carrier of culture, mental categories, language, and so on; or choosing the side of world or object as in the case of materialism and reducing all human actors to effects of matter. The work of Latour already outlines what an alternative to the modernist project might look like in his careful dismantling of the two-world ontology of nature versus culture.
Second, like Heidegger’s destruction, such a project would seek to liberate or render available positive realist possibilities from out of the tradition. Instances of this way of approaching the history of philosophy can be found in both Whitehead and Graham Harman’s work. Readers of Process and Reality will be familiar with the manner in which he approaches the work of Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Kant. For Whitehead it is never a question of dismissing these thinkers, but of reading their epistemological investigations that revolve primarily around questions of representation and the nature of mind with “realism as a guiding clue”. Thus, for example, Hume’s “impressions” become, for Whitehead, “prehensions”, but prehensions refer not to representations or sensations in the mind, but rather to the manner in which one object grasps another object in the constitutions of its own being. Mind becomes a particular case of a generalized process characteristic of all beings. By treating realist ontology as his guiding clue, Whitehead is able to liberate all sorts of possibilities from the history of philosophy while also escaping the endless epistemological deadlock first inaugurated with Plato’s allegory of the cave and its two-world ontology consisting of the rabble of the slaves and the Truth of the philosopher. Similarly in the case of Harman. When one reads Tool-Being or Guerilla Metaphysics, he very quickly discovers that Harman does not simply dismiss the tradition of correlationism, but that he engages with a series of correlationist philosophers such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Husserl, and so on, treating realism as the guiding clue of his investigations and liberating, as a result of this guiding clue, all sorts of insights into the nature of objects that can be found embedded in these texts but covered over by the self-evidence of a philosophical tradition that pitches the question of being in terms of a divided house between the distinct ontological realms of the subject and the object. By reading, to use Zizek’s term, the tradition awry through the lens of realism as the guiding clue, a rich resource of realist insight is made available for thought.
Larvae are creatures in a process of becoming or development that have not yet actualized themselves in a specific form. This space is a space for the incubation of philosophical larvae that are yet without determinate positions or commitments but which are in a process of unfolding.
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Paul Ennis has a terrific post up on his experience reading psychoanalytic thought, the dis-ease it generates in him, and how he encounters something similar when reading the speculative realists:
