A few have objected to my generalization as to what constitutes idealism, quoting a passage from my last post where I remark that,
If you find yourself immediately talking about language, signs, subjects, co-constitution, power, the nature of inquiry, etc., then you are an idealist. There is no ambiguity here. The implicit thesis in all these moves that the being of being cannot be even entertained independent of the human. …All philosophical questions do not revolve around the human. Nor is there any conflation of questions of access in Whitehead with questions of ontology. The question of how we have access to such and such a being, say a rose, is irrelevant to the question of what constitutes the being of beings. I find myself utterly baffled as to why philosophers seem to have such a difficult time distinguishing these two issues…
The important point to make here is that the issue is not with whether or not one talks about signs or language or power, but with whether or not one believes that being can only be discussed in relation to some human related phenomena. If you endorse this thesis, then you are an idealist. It’s as simple as that. This doesn’t mean that you’re a Kantian idealist, a Schellingian, a Berkeleynian, or a Hegelian. Idealism is a genus with many species. You can be a linguistic idealist like Wittgenstein or Derrida. You can be an idealist of the sort that Foucault or Bourdieu is with respect to power. The distinguishing feature here lies in whether or not beings can only be thought in relation to the human.
read on!
However, it’s important to trod carefully here. Insofar as onticology is a flat ontology or an ontology that places all objects on equal footing in the sense that if they produce differences, then they are real, the issue is not one of claiming that signs, language, and power are not real. What onticology opposes with its flat ontology is eliminativism of any sort. Thus, on one side, we have eliminative materialism or eliminative physicalism that argues that only material things like quarks, atoms, electrons, and neurons are “really real”. In response to eliminative materialism, onticology says “no, cities, texts, political movements, armies, signs, signifiers, and so on are also real and are not mere epiphenomena of brains or particles.”
On the other side you have eliminative idealism, where it is said that language or concepts or power or signs or minds are the “really real” and things like quarks, stars, black holes, solar systems, rocks, rabbits, zebras, and trees are mere epiphenomena of how humans form the world or an amorphous “one-all” that is not itself inhabited by these things. Against the eliminative idealists the onticologist says “no, rocks, solar systems, galaxies, stars, zebras, and so on are real and not mere epiphenomena of language, concepts, minds, or power.”
Latour likes to say that the aim of philosophy is not to make things less real, but more real. Where eliminative materialism and idealism set about striving to make one region of the world less real than another, OOO rejects this whole game from the outset. Paraphrasing the old expression, OOO allows you to have your neurology and your semiotics too. Both a sign and a neuron belong to the order of the real. It is in this respect that the ontology of onticology is “flat”. Flat does not mean equal. There are all sorts of differences in strength among objects. Rather, “flat” signifies that the relative difference in strength between one object and another object is irrelevant to whether that object is an object or whether it is real.
From an onticological perspective, therefore, we can talk all we like about signs, signifiers, powers, and so on, so long as we treat these things as objects in an assemblage, rather than as exhaustive of being as such. All of this, of course, requires a new mereology or theory of part-whole relations. Onticology is not making the absurd claim that kings, as distinct objects, do not require neurons. The claim is far more subtle. The point is that neurons do not explain the proper being of the king or that the kingness of the king as a distinct object cannot be reduced to neurons. Parts, yes. But the parts do not make an object what it is. Indeed, the parts are themselves distinct objects that are autonomous and independent in their own right. At any rate, far from diminishing the scope of what we can talk about or theorize, in my view OOO opens things up tremendously, enabling us to theorize assemblages composed of heterogeneous objects interacting at a variety of different levels.
Larval Subjects . 
September 18, 2009 at 7:01 pm
I have a question: would you say that “resisting” differences is part of the way that objects behave? I understand, I think, your ideas about translation, but I’m curious whether you’d say that translation would intrinsically involve resistance in some way.
The reason I ask this particular question is that I’m trying to envision a way in which OOO fits into a non-reductive physicalism.
September 18, 2009 at 7:07 pm
Another question (sorry to dump two at once): Do you see the relations that exist between what we call “descriptive levels” as an object-object interaction?
September 18, 2009 at 7:10 pm
For one, I think that both you and Graham are being a bit hard on Foucault. Foucault was not opposed to ontology and metaphysics in the way Wittgenstein was (see his friendship with and endorsement of Deleuze). People like Dreyfus who read Power as something like Being, are entirely wrong. Foucault isn’t an ontologist or a metaphysician. His analysis of power and power structures is just a specific analysis of the human, in your terms, one part of reality, rather than the whole of it.
Beyond this, I think you have to be careful with your attacks on eliminativism. Eliminativism needn’t be formulated as the doctrine that only a certain set of independently specific entities (such as those of physics) are real. However, it does need some criteria for distinguishing those entities which are not describable in objective terms (e.g., fictional entities), and those properties we ascribe to entities that assessable objectively (e.g., teleological purposes). This claim is that some of the things we talk about don’t exist, and some of the ways we talk about what does exist don’t get any purchase on them.
This doesn’t mean that we can’t talk about the social and the symbolic, and all of these other areas of reality that aren’t covered by physics, biology and neuropsychology, just that we have to make sure to talk about them in the right way, and to work out the real entities that are involved in them, as opposed to those that we posit in our folk-discourses about them.
Now, there are certain kinds of object which you do deny the existence of. You definitely reject the existence of universals for instance. I’d also suggest that you reject the existence of fictional entities, despite your claim in the post before last to the contrary. You accept the existence of ‘symbolic’ entities, or whatever it’s best to call them. This means that you don’t think Batman exists, even if you think the symbol ‘Batman’ exists, or some such other entity which underwrites our talk about Batman.
I think you need to temper your rhetoric of ontological promiscuity and be explicit about what entities you won’t let in on the party. You then need to let us know what the status of these objects is, if they aren’t to be thought of as ‘unreal’.
September 18, 2009 at 9:53 pm
[…] 18, 2009 I CAN SIGN OFF ON THIS POST by Levi as well. (Though he’s actually a bit closer to Latour’s position than I am. […]
September 18, 2009 at 10:23 pm
Deon,
It always amazes me how rigorous and careful about language eliminative idealists become when questioned. I’ll abide by the discourse criteria they’ve already instituted in their practice with respect to realism, thank you very much. Your concern is noted. You also seem to miss the point that I do endorse the thesis that fictional entities are “objective” entities, and that real being is not exhausted by physical entities. Physical entities are one type of entity among others and do not function within my ontology as the substrate of all other entities. I’ll take your word for it that eliminative materialism and physicalism do not lead to the sort of reductivism I outline here. I cannot say I’ve ever seen an instance of a materialism or physicalism that does not lead where I suggest, and I think you’ve got it wrong with Deleuze but since my ontology is Deleuzian I don’t care to get into a prolonged interpretive battle over your reading. But we’ve already been over all this terrain and there’s little point in continuing that discussion. I don’t know how many times I have to make the same point with you. I really do endorse the thesis that Batman exists. As a physical person? No, as a fictional entity. But he’s no less real for all that. You shackle all object-being to the being of physical objects. That’s not a move I accept. I’ve endlessly outlined my reasons why, so please quit chasing me around on the issue.
September 18, 2009 at 10:31 pm
Asher,
I’m not sure what you have in mind by a “non-reductive physicalism”. My version of OOO is not a physicalism. There are physical beings within my ontology, but many other sorts of objects besides. More to the point, at the moment I’m inclined toward the thesis that the proper being of objects or the objectness of objects is not physical or material at all.
September 18, 2009 at 10:46 pm
Deon,
Just to clarify, the reason I’m responding so strongly to your query is that my beginning move prevents me from making the sort of distinction you’re asking for. Insofar as I begin from the premise or hypothesis that if something produces differences it is, I can’t make the sort of distinction between the real and the unreal you’re wanting. I’m all for distinguishing between different types of entities such as fictional entities and physical entities. What I cannot do is claim that fictional entities are not real because they do make differences. Consequently, this beginning point requires a reconceptualization of just what the ontological status of fictional entities is. The case is similar with universals. This seems to be a logical entailment that you’re not quite getting. You’re asking me to play the language game of materialism where material being falls in the category of the real and everything outside of material being must therefore be counted as unreal. Because of my root ontological hypothesis I’m prohibited from making this move. Additionally, I just don’t think materialism has the sort of resources you believe it does. However, since it’s a fool game to joust with another person in the dark when they’re lobbing all the questions at you without telling you what their position is but simply evoking a master-signifier like “materialism” (as far as I can tell the term has no meaning as you use it, but just means whatever you want it to mean, and for some odd reason you keep evoking Deleuze in relation to me as if he’s some sort of authority here or these are questions of how to interpret Deleuze) to support their position, I’ll await your book where you outline your position. In the mean time, I’ll continue to employ my “rhetoric” (gee thanks) in the way I see fit.
September 19, 2009 at 1:08 am
LS: Yeah, it’s pretty obvious that you’re not a physicalist ;). However, the idea of a flat ontology and your ideas about differences are not completely incompatible with a certain kind of physicalism. In fact, I think there’s actually some harmony between them that’s worth exploring.
That’s why I’m curious about your thoughts concerning resistance in the process of translation, and also about whether you see the relations between descriptive levels as being of an object-to-object sort.
September 19, 2009 at 4:26 am
For what it’s worth, some of us are happy to take Derrida or Foucault as skillful interlocutors of specific texts or situations without taking them also as the final word on beingness. If I understand you correctly here and over several past posts, you are generally opposed to anything that reduces the splendor of beings. Great. I think even those still indebted to Derrida or Foucault (like myself) will ultimately find themselves opting for your flat ontology (or one like it) as the greater context for deploying local knowledges. (When I’m doing literary commentary Derrida is stimulating or irritating in your sense; when I’m setting up historical context, Foucault). Ie, the sense in which D or F can be reconciled to a flat ontology will ultimately be the sense in which they are useful in the future.
September 19, 2009 at 6:25 am
The defense of Foucault above is not a good one. I say that everything described in Foucault involves people, and the response is basically “he’s just doing a regional description of power in its formation of the subject, not saying that that’s all there is.” That might work if Foucault were just claiming to be a sociologist and pleading ignorance about philosophy. But that is not the case. Where is there any trace of Foucault saying: “and of course there is also the inanimate world, apart from humans, so important and yet so absent from my work.”?
September 19, 2009 at 6:49 am
Levi,
I don’t mean to offend you. I’m sorry if I did. I use the term rhetoric here because you are so fond of distinguishing between the conceptual core and the rhetorical strategy of philosophy. I simply think that some of your rhetorical strategy disguises the fact that there are some parts of your position that need filling in.
If you don’t want to be materialist, fine. If you don’t want to have a distinction between the real and the unreal, fine. It simply seems to me that you do want to exclude certain entities, and you need to be clearer about how you are doing this.
I thought we’d come to a certain point of agreement on fictional entities, but I’m obviously wrong. The reason I think that you don’t believe in the existence of fictional entities is that whatever kind of object you think Batman is, it doesn’t live in Gotham city, and he doesn’t wear a cape. There are those who would accept both that Batman exists, that he wears a cape, and that he lives in Gotham city. Those people believe in fictional existence. As far as I understand it, your position is weaker than theirs. All I’m trying to point out is that you are in fact excluding something they are including in their ontologies.
It’s got nothing to do with the fact that you don’t think that Batman is physical. It’s got everything to do with the fact that whatever you think Batman is, he/it is doesn’t resemble what we think of when we think of Batman.
September 19, 2009 at 11:16 am
[…] 19, 2009 Since Levi’s been speaking a lot about “flat ontology” on his blog, let me add a few quick points to the […]
September 19, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Part of your use of idealism strikes me as non-standard: “The implicit thesis in all these moves that the being of being cannot be even entertained independent of the human.” However, idealism is usual aimed not at humans totally but “mind and spirit” and I think the slippage is not unimportant. Even if one believes in a “flat” ontology (I would like to say that I do, but the metaphor “flat” imports so many – to me – undesirable consequences that I itch) that does not mean that the positionality of the human is inconsequent. Similarly with language, one can believe that language or, more generally, signs are “just” one kind of thing and still understand them as having a position not accorded other entities of being irremediably present in the discussion of entities as it is the medium – not the limit – of such a capture. Indeed, Derrida repeatedly tried to clarify exactly that misunderstanding and the trace as concept suggests the tension between the semiotic and the actual as the center of his program not, as you imply, the semiotic alone. So, to repeat, one can hold with a “flat”ontology and still suggest that elements of the human — not the spiritual or mental — can be dismissed as they imply, Nietzsche’s point, a perspectivism that one cannot transcend by an appeal to the formulaic, the mathematic, or the diagrammatic. Note — I am not trying to characterize your position with these last terms but trying to hint that science often dreams it leaps over its particular locality with its method only to be embarrassed again and again.
September 19, 2009 at 5:44 pm
Doctorzamelak: I must still disagree. Philosophy is not just ontology. One can potentially do philosophy of science, epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, and so on, without committing oneself to any particular ontological viewpoint. Foucault can make philosophical claims without necessarily needing a completely functioning ontology or metaphysics which applies to all domains.
One might think that it is proper to develop such an ontology before one can tackle these other philosophical areas, and I would not be unsympathetic to this point. However, getting one’s philosophical priorities in the wrong order does not an idealist make.
September 19, 2009 at 6:35 pm
Deon,
I think you miss the point. Foucault himself is quite clear about his idealist affiliations. What else are you to make of the equation of power and knowledge and his discursive constructivism that refuses to acknowledge beings independent of discursive networks and systems of power? There’s no way around this. That is idealism. Now, I say this as someone who is deeply influenced and who has learned a great deal from him. I believe there is a way of reworking Foucault and other eliminative idealists like him that preserves many of these insights. However, the result of such a reworking would be something other than Foucault. Let’s not be dishonest about the dominant trends of contemporary philosophy. There is nothing “idiosyncratic” about how idealism has been characterized in these discussions. If you hold the position that nothing can be said of being independent of humans, you’re an idealist. When you cut through all the various bells and whistles of recent thought, this is the shared premise of all these positions.
September 19, 2009 at 8:14 pm
I heard that Foucault was secretly a Nominalist, and wrote all of his philosophy specifically to fool people into thinking he wasn’t. That might be an urban legend, though.
September 19, 2009 at 10:06 pm
I’ve got nothing wrong with the characterisation of idealism provided here. I’m happy to agree that if one puts together an ontology in which beings can’t be talked about independently of their relation to humans (or Dasein, language, social structures, etc.), then one is in effect an idealist of some stripe. I just think that you’re mischaracterising Foucault, by turning him into someone much more like Heidegger or the later Wittgenstein.
I assume that when you talk of Foucault’s idealist affiliations you mean Heidegger and perhaps Kant. These are important influences on Foucault (especially Kant), but at best they provide circumstantial evidence of idealism.
In short, Foucault never explicitly claims that “nothing can be said of being independent of humans”, and there’s good evidence to think that he’d deny it, such as his praise for Deleuze’s philosophy. Now, he takes as his object the social structures of power and knowledge, and he does indeed talk of them in relative isolation from the non-human objects they incorporate or refer to. However, this methodological stance doesn’t imply anything like the Wittgensteinian ban on metaphysics, or talk about the real as it is in itself. At best it puts forward hypotheses about how a discourse upon the real as it is in itself would be structured (one which may of course be wrong).
Foucault repeatedly faced the accusation that he thought there was nothing outside of power, and he denied it. One might think that his talk of ‘the Outside’ is far too weak or timid, and I think one would be justified in saying this. However, a failure to put forward a fully functioning ontological realism is not thereby an idealism.
September 20, 2009 at 5:20 pm
I’ve enjoyed reading these notes and found them quite informative of your developing position. But I can’t help feeling that you are probably accidentally producing a solid defense of idealism. Given that you have constructed such an interesting lineage for recent idealisms – including Hegel, Kant, the only unmentioned 19th century figures appear to be Nietszche and Marx. Are you suggesting the Nietzsche and Marx are not idealists ?
I think the note would have worked better if idealism did not incorporate the entire breadth of western thought…
September 20, 2009 at 5:43 pm
sdv,
I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking or how it is that I’m defending idealism. One can’t list everything, nor have I anywhere claimed that the entire breadth of western thought is idealistic.
September 20, 2009 at 5:58 pm
What I’m asking is what is excluded from the charge of idealism given the initial comment on the breadth of idealism in western thought.
The statement that an “onticologist says ‘no, rocks, solar systems, galaxies, stars, zebras, and so on are real and not mere epiphenomena of language, concepts, minds, or power….’ ” Appears to suggest that only a realism founded on a scientific realism is not open to the charge of idealism.
My question to you is twofold – what in western philosophy is not an idealism for you ? and secondly if this is not founded on a scientific realism then why is this not a constructivism and an empiricism ?
September 20, 2009 at 6:09 pm
The reason I believe you are defending idealism is because of your selected and identified targets. You are actually implying that idealism must be a stronger line of thought than conventional understandings suggest. Your targets are after all some of the central figures of recent western thought – to say they are idealists is to make us all idealist… Given this why should we not rather proudly proclaim our idealism?
September 20, 2009 at 6:10 pm
Sdv,
I suggest you go back and carefully read the post you’re responding to. If you believe that I am claiming that only scientific realism is free of the charge of idealism then it’s clear that you did not read the original post all the way through. Look at the paragraph directly before the one you’re citing, where I criticize eliminative materialism or the scientific reductivism. If you’re wondering what’s not an idealism for me, you can go and read the post directly before that where I talk about Latour, Whitehead, and others. These are instances of realist philosophers. At any rate, and I cannot emphasize this enough, realism is not identical to scientific realism. This is a point I’ve made continuously on this blog.
September 20, 2009 at 6:15 pm
Sdv,
I think that’s an interesting question. I am not sure why those I criticize do not proudly proclaim their idealism. It is odd that they let the realists define the terms of the debate, though I am gratified that they do.
September 20, 2009 at 7:41 pm
It’s a mistake to think that I haven’t read your note. I simply read and understand Whitehead and Latour differently than you do. To proclaim Whitehead as a realist is to accept a tragic theologians self definition, and you don’t appear to be referring to the work with Russell, which was one of the great failed realisms of the early 20th C, no less interesting because of that. Nor would I read Latour as a realist in the sense that you appear to do, I imagine that to some extent you are referring to his piece in Dastons ‘the Biographies of Scientific Objects’ where he appears to refuse both social constructivism and scientific realists with his reference to ‘historical realism’ … history aways history.
Which is precisely why your argument that Whitehead and Latour are iconic realists seems a little strange.
Is that really the best you can do ?
I’m not sure that you can avoid the problem of scientific realism that easily,another time perhaps when you explain why and how you can conflate scientific realism (which is the only realism worthy of the name) to being a reductionism.
This little box I’m typing into is a terrible piece of design, bad engineering…
September 20, 2009 at 11:11 pm
SDV,
You may have a different interpretation of Whitehead and Latour – fine – but Levi has continuously made it clear, in numerous places, why he considers those thinkers realists. The burden of proof is up to you to show why they are not realists despite Levi and Graham and Shaviro (and my) claims. You can’t just say something like ‘Is that really the best you can do?’ without any evidence or argument for why you think we’re all wrong and your interpretation is right.
September 21, 2009 at 7:55 am
Levi,
elsewhere you make the point that ‘they allow scientistic realists to frame the nature of the argument, accept the terms in which they frame the argument, and then react to the scientistic realists position by conceding them everything…’
So let’s be absolutely clear the only philosopohical position which I would accept as a ‘realism’ or a ‘naturalism’ (Maddy) is one that is founded on scientific realism. That my philosophical understanding is an anti-realist and constructivist position is precisely because it is necessary to reject this realism.
That this places me names me, within the terms of your discourse an idealist is quite understandable – but at the same time I do not recognize your position as being a realism. To convince me of your superior realism would require a substantial critique and refutation of the other realisms rather than a naming of idealisms… Of course you may direct my attention towards posts critiquing naturalists like Maddy, the experimental philosophy group and so on, in which case thanks in advance.
I’ll try and expand on this later.. am a little pushed for time.
September 21, 2009 at 8:03 am
Nick,
So you’ve read the work with Russell then, which I’d accept as a failed attempt at a realist work, or are you basing this statement solely on a reading of Process and Reality ? Or because your colleagues and philosophical friends argue that P & R is a realist text it must be. The problem here is that the terms of the debate have already been framed by the discourse and I am still functioning within this framework. I do not blame Levi Bryant for this it is the nature of these things. But I do reject your naivity in assuming that it is necessary for me to ‘explain’ my difference merely because it exists.
The difference I interested in exploring is how Levi can call himself a realist given his statement on scientific realism. But then I don’t accept that you are a realist either for exactly the same reason, but that statement derives from my own philosophical positions and not yours.
September 21, 2009 at 10:08 am
The idealist definitions at the beginning of this post seem to slip a bit from one to the other. I’m not sure many of the eliminativist idealists actually make the confusion of access and ontology you ascribe to them in the first definition; but they do of course claim that things can only be discussed by humans in relation to human-related phenomena. My read is that many make that 2nd claim based purely on the issue of access, though. Not that other things don’t exist, or even that sensible books could not exist about them; but that human authors lack the access that would be needed to write such books, so there’s no use trying.
September 21, 2009 at 11:53 am
ok,
I will try to express why I don`t agree with the accusation of idealism that you wielded to Foucault and to Bourdieu. It should be a good exercise for me. This has to do a lot with the way you utilized such an accusation to make your point, what ever this point was anyway.
For instance, regarding to Foucault`s work, you did not consider that, by the time he was proposing his nietzschean views concerned to The order of things, he was one of the first thinkers to say that the man was a recent invent in history and that as such he will not pervive for too long, or that he will just do as long as the historic block or epoch pervive -as you might know, am referring to the episteme that sediments the knowledge that gives sense to the idea of man-. I guess this is a good argument to say that he was not an idealist. Then, you did not consider how influenced Foucault was in respect to his nietzschean views, mostly, in respect to all what he could say, think and work, regarding to the dissolution of the subject. You did not consider that Foucault was very concerned not to be asked who he was (he famous “don`t ask me who i am”) and, within this concerning, his effort to propose his genealogy as the method to erase the prominence of man, and to think history without such prominence. You did not consider that all this effort leaded him to think and to grasp, as a very novel abstraction by that time, all what he proposed & developed about discoursive practices: for instance, his theory of enunciation, which is kind of difficult to follow -without mentioning the subjectiveness that enunciation meant for him as a sediment of knowledge, mostly speaking about what he referred to discoursive sockets, or to truth as a functor of knowledge that has nothing to do with what any man can say but to the conditions of its possibility, its historical apriori, and all that stuff-. But all this needs to be contextualized properly so to not let us reduce his views through the retrospective effect, and so to happily avoid easy accusations. So, if we consider that all his early efforts were mostly moved by his nietzscheanism (this is to say that his genealogical point of view was also meant to be put on as a practice above the prominence of humanity and its representations, in order to question them through analytical exercise, through an analytical toolbox, a toolbox that lead him also to think power, for instance) and mostly with the idea of the dissolution of the subject and the event in the nietzschean sense (that was by the way against sartrian consciousness and even against levistraussian structure -if so-) if we consider all this, its very easy to find how unfair is to say, at the end of the day, that he was an idealist.
But my rant was not meant to refutate your accusation, even though it is refutable concerning to all this things that i am saying now. My rant was referred to your argumentative and pragmatic manners (and if u dont want to publish this comment because I`m touching this matter, its ok, i understand, -spotting myself here is not quite my goal-, but anyway, I have to say that I will post it in the blog that i have in wordpress, which is a special blog where I collect all my commented stuff on the blogosphere, so it is nothing personal). Regarding to this question , for example: you did not bother to give sense to the effort that Foucault did back then at his time to grasp what we all now know it is his thought, as many times he stated: a thought-in-progress, a thought that never pretended to do objectivist theories, but a thought to put in practice thought itself throughout a variety of analytical departures to think concrete problems. With your accusation you cutted all this sensible foucaultian context, and the reason that u did that is because you are very used to take the work of an author, his thought, and his efforts, as nothing more than a text. You are not very worry to embody what you take of an author, you just use it, which is more like to say, that you don`t know it, but you manage it in a very bureaucratic way. The infamous “what can i do with this phrases, with this assertions, so to feed my textual proposes and demonstrations, so to wield them or not against this or that consideration, so to use it fruitfully to construct or destroy” is something that is for you the order of the day. You are so used to this manners that you don`t even notice this scholastic vice, which by the way, it is perfectly exposed precisely by Bourdieu. Bourdieu criticizes the way scholars reproduce their scholar views as the view that they give sense to their own endogenous & common practices, without doing any healthy objectification of such views an practices.
But why to accuse? what is the point to stigmatize as “fat” to who is “fat”? what for? Is not this a terrible manner to make a point, somehow ad hominen claim to separate tendencies and to take parties just to suit an pompous investiture, just to feed a personal trend negatively by the defect of others? (and I`m not saying that your are accusing as idealist who is actually an idealist, in the case speaking of Foucault or Bourdieu they are not, so to my mind, you are so mistaken for double: 1. using the accusation as a way to demonstrate whatever you need, and 2. accusing who does not deserve such accusations). So, as you abuse of your textual tendencies, as you are doing this in a way of a sort of mercenary textual practice, you are not willing to consider that Foucault and Bourdieu walked rather different paths than the ontological ones: they had social commitments that nowadays are still very up to be respected at any rate. Here your pragmatic response or your axiological blindness would sound like “but i dont care, as i am only interested in ontology”. But this interest of yours is not enough argument to sustain an ethical standpoint to accuse them, it just does not justify the “civility” such accusations. “Oh well, what do you expect, if i can only see thing right through my navel”: this neither justifies your pragmatic manners, nor your ways to state your points: with a little bit of intellectual humbleness you may want to objectify your practice, your textual manners, your intellectual procedures, so to take account of them doing the proper margins, and in other to take the positions that you are willing to take in the philosophical fields, as something that shall be very useful to your ontological concerns. (At this point, you may now say that i am trespassing the line between civility and uncivility: but i am not, am just wielding back to you what is meant to be taken beyond the text, as a foucaultian and bourdieuan point of view: so, as u can see, am putting that in practice here or at least am trying to do so, so to ask you what do you expected of a foucaultian or bourdieuan, if being foucaultian or bourdieuan lead to this way to put things and denounce the blindness that they imply and mean by themself, so to take them better through their own discoursivity and sense of practice?).
In respect to Bourdieu, it is sort of the same considerations that should be applied on his defense, regarding to your manners. But for instance, i can say that he denies to take things that easily. Bourdieu`s work is a constructivism-structuralism, but its also meant to be taken as a strategic relationism: he denies the prominence of the man, as he does not consider any actors or actants in the way that Latour does -thought, am not very familiar with Latour`s standpoints-. Bourdieu proposes socioanalysis using a conceptual machinary that lead us to think and to value the logic of practices, this is, from a very macrosocial point of view. His conceptual frame of work is related to the notion of habitus, in one hand, and to the notion of social field of production, in the other. Now you might say: “gotcha! correlationism!”, yeah it might be, but the dynamics that he proposes between these two conceptualizations are not meant to be taken as something centered in an human ontology. The bourdieuan habitus is a notion meant to rupture with realism naivety, with psychologisms, and with the objectivist positions that cannot reach the logic of the social because they overflow “ontologically” their relations, and when doing so, they also fall into a rampant subjectivity: an endogenous social insight. Certainly, the habitus is a system of relations that is embodied within its practice, a system of skills and schemes, ways of views that are meant to reproduce the know-how of practices in respect to their consequent fields, the fields that are accordant to those skills, schemes, know-hows and social points of view. This is to say, that the habitus breaks with the notion of awareness and intentionality of the actor, the subject and the individual, while it introduces the idea of agent (agency) that can be either singular, collective, or institutional. The habitus has a reproductive component that assemblages with social space in many ways and with its categories (that are also reproduced, and embodied). But the habitus can be shared through different individuals, so to say, that you share the same or similar habitus with any else that has the same or similar trajectory that you have, that has the same or similar conductive patterns of action, that has the same or similar tastes, the same or similar education, that has the same or similar position in the social space -family and parents as its departure- , that went to the same or similar school -and coursed the same or similar lessons-, that frequent the same or similar bars, that presume the same or similar way to think. To this point it is hard to think that could be another guy very similar to Levi Bryant doing the same or similar things that you doing (oh god no please!), but the habitus allows us to comprehend such “coincidences” and to understand, for example, the non spoken criteria to select who is a good candidate to be spoused, or to explain the conditioned reasons of a divorce. As u can see, this is the heart of bourdieuan socioanalysis, and socioanalysis is the main work of Bourdieu: his theories of symbolic power or symbolic violence are just a tasty complement to the whole of his work, as they explain the doxa and its ideologies, etc etc. At this end, the last thing that it is important is if he is an idealist or not, and I am sure that if you would know all this, and take it in consideration, you would not use him as an example to wheel your accusation. The same with Foucault.
So, even if you still manage to demonstrate that they are idealists, which would be something very stubborn to my mind, very forced if so, and even if you manage to demonstrate, of course, with all the proper respect that they deserve about their work, and with all what you might know about such work -giving tribute to your effort, energy and time invested to do so-, and even, with all that you surely know that is left to know or you don`t actually know by now about such work as well -as an exercise of intellectual frankness and humility- even if all that, you will find, at the end of the day, that they were never the good and clear example that you needed to hold your disparaged points. So, as you might see, this is were honesty and unwillingness should be admitted or not as part of the scene.
So this is my take on the question. I hope this writing is enough to stand some points, and forgive my broken english.
cheers
September 21, 2009 at 12:05 pm
Thanks for the lengthy post, Naxos. For me everything boils down to whether or not being is unthinkable apart from the human. If being is not thinkable apart from the human then we have an idealism. For Foucault and Bourdieu being is not thinkable apart from the human, therefore…
September 21, 2009 at 12:07 pm
sdv,
Within the framework of my ontology, the sole criteria for whether or not something is real is whether or not it produces differences. Stars, black holes, quasars, quarks, and grains of sand all produce differences, therefore they are real. Likewise, cities, fictional characters, signifiers, signs, credit card debt, and social security numbers also produce differences, therefore they are real as well. The scientific realist holds that only the former are real and that the latter are epiphenomena that have no real existence. I do not. Ergo, I am not a scientific realist.
September 21, 2009 at 12:18 pm
idealism,
Right, I get that. There are different variants of idealism. Thus you get Berkeleyian subjective idealism where being is perception, you get Hegelian style absolute idealism where subject and substance are identical, and you get Kantian style idealism where there is an in-itself that is independent of humans, but where we can never know anything about it. In my view, the question of access is not the crucial distinguishing feature between realism and idealism. Setting aside certain rationalist 17th century rationalists that hold we can know some things about beings a priori, most realist philosophers will argue that we have to engage with beings through inquiry to know them. That is an issue of access. The crucial feature that distinguishes anti-realism or idealism from realism is whether or not one holds that these features of being are only for us such that we are prohibited, as in the case of Kant, from claiming that these beings themselves possess these features, or whether one holds these features belong to the beings themselves.
September 21, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Oh well, Levi..
So “being” is like the keyword here is not it? and i mean the *tricky* one. All that i wrote there is like saying that the keyword -that you just imposed to your commentators- just would not fit in the frame of Foucault`s and Bourdieu`s work. “Being” is just out of the question for them. So therefore, I guess we all here tramped in your textual *tricky* “keywords”. OK.
September 21, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Naxos,
Are you seriously contending that Foucault and Bourdieu are not anti-realists?
September 21, 2009 at 12:42 pm
No, I am not.
I am seriously saying that they are not idealist as you accused them.
So, do you think that it is enough just to say -begging us to believe in you words just without any elaboration- that for Foucault and Bourdieu the tricky “being” is not thinkable apart from the human?
Are you capable to elaborate your assertion speaking about what you know about their frame of work, and i mean, taking their whole frame of work, if it happens that you know it and domain it?
September 21, 2009 at 12:56 pm
Naxos,
As I understand it, idealism and anti-realism are interchangeable terms. Perhaps we could get further if you clarified just what you mean when you use the term “idealism” and why you find it so objectionable.
September 21, 2009 at 1:06 pm
Naxos,
The sticking point for you seems to be the terms “man” and “subject”. If I am following you properly, one has to endorse the existence of man and the subject to be an idealist. I do not share this view. The sole criteria for whether or not one is an idealist is whether or not they hold that being is only thinkable in relation to the human. “Human” is not a synonym for “man” and “subject”. Foucault holds that we can only relate to being in terms of discourse and power, and cannot know anything of being apart from discourse and power. Discourse and power are human phenomena, they would not exist without the human, and therefore Foucault falls into the category of idealism or anti-realism. The same holds for Bourdieu. As for respect for their work, I have great respect for their work. However, we’re all philosophers here and respect does not entail agreement or endorsing a position. If I’m following you correctly, you are suggesting that one can only respect a work or body of work when one refrains from disagreeing with it or critiquing it. Not only do I think Foucault and Bourdieu themselves would be highly hostile to this thesis, but I believe this would be the ruin of thought. There is a lack of civility here, but I don’t think it is on my end. Pointing out that Foucault is an anti-realist is hardly an egregious insult to Foucault.
September 21, 2009 at 1:14 pm
Actually I would have no problem with your fast-track definition, if it is the case that you could get generous and elaborate with hairs and details all the important things that would show us how dominant you are, regarding to Foucault and Bourdieu`s line of thought, and how you overflow the whole frame of their work -and i mean, seriously, as your accusation might get pretty much graver than it is if you don`t do so (at the time that we might think then that you are not capable to demostrate it because of a sort of very specific reasons)-.
September 21, 2009 at 1:27 pm
“Foucault holds that we can only relate to being in terms of discourse and power, and cannot know anything of being apart from discourse and power.”
Can you say where exactly he says that so? and I mean, exactly in such terms? i.e “holds”, “being” I cant remember where he says that, and i am very familiar to his work. The terms “being” still sound tricky. We really want to read your foucaultian and bourdieuan style. I did so, would you?
September 21, 2009 at 1:36 pm
Besides, I am afraid that you are not quite following me correctly: where did i suggest “that one can only respect a work or body of work when one refrains from disagreeing with it or critiquing it”? I do think that -for disagreeing- it is needed to know the whole work of an author, at least to be serious,and just as a matter of honesty, so to accomplish the right to speak about it, in favor or against him, mostly if such an author is accused and trended without any elaboration.
September 21, 2009 at 1:49 pm
And by the way, regarding to a healthy objetivification of the philosophical practice, that I somehow mentioned and suggested you to contemplate in my first comment, if you don`t mind:
The Scholastic Point of View
http://tinyurl.com/krjekr
This will help to let know that i was not being uncivil at the end of the day:
September 21, 2009 at 1:57 pm
Naxos,
I am deeply familiar with the work of both Foucault and Bourdieu. I do not share the view that one has to engage in an extended analysis of a philosophical position, ranging over all the texts written by that author, to critique a position. There are root claims upon which positions are based and often these can be summed up rather quickly. This is how Kant approached Hume in his first Critique and is a basic model for any argument. Were this not possible, philosophies would never get on to providing the alternative views they’re seeking to provide. Continental philosophy has created the bad habit of leading us to believe that we must engage in an extended, careful textual analysis to articulate a position. Were I to do this with Foucault I would still arrive at the point from which we began: that he’s an anti-realist.
September 21, 2009 at 1:58 pm
You’re serious Naxo?
Now you’re just being a troll. What do you think it means to be an anti-realist?
September 21, 2009 at 2:40 pm
The point is that I seriously don`t think that you can hold your accusations sticking strictly to the whole frame of work of this specific authors, and I mean envisioning it in such a way to demonstrate the procedure that you have followed to assert the sense that trend them as idealists or anti-realist.
September 21, 2009 at 2:53 pm
[…] Levi’s recent discussion of eliminativism, Harman has an interesting response: “Eliminative idealism” is a great phrase. And I also […]
September 21, 2009 at 4:12 pm
But SDV, you still haven’t argued anything. You’ve said you reject scientific realism, you’ve said you don’t think Levi’s realism is correct, and you’ve said you’re an idealist. That’s all fine – I’m sure you have good reasons for those positions, and I’d like to hear them. But you’ve not given any of those arguments or evidence yet. When you say this…
“But I do reject your naivity in assuming that it is necessary for me to ‘explain’ my difference merely because it exists.”
…you even appear to be suggesting that explanation and argument aren’t necessary at all. How is there supposed to be a discussion if you aren’t willing to set out what, specifically, you think is wrong with Levi and Graham and Shaviro’s readings of Whitehead (and my reading of Latour)? My very simple point is that just saying you think they’re wrong doesn’t do anything; my ‘naive’ desire for explanation is the crucial part.
September 21, 2009 at 4:23 pm
I don’t think acknowledging that to produce an account of ontology humans have to think and only human as really do this kind of thinking (I don’t see fish producing philosophy right now) is the same as saying that being is unthinkable apart from the human. Being exists if the human is not there to describe it (this is the central arche-fossil argument), but in order for it to be described humans have to exist, produce a discourse called philosophy etc. You simply can’t erase the human completely from the equation unless you are being particularly perverse.
For a thought experiment, let us imagine a world without humans in it. Would the discourse of philosophy, that provides an account of being exist? No. Would being qua thing in itself exist? Yes.
Equally, would the entities described by science, for example, subatomic particles, exist without humans having observed them and created conceptual categories (atoms, electrons etc)? Yes I believe they do. But for us to talk about them it required humans to do various types of experiment to discover them, without which humans could not talk of them.
September 21, 2009 at 4:43 pm
Alex,
You’ll find no disagreement with it here, but what you outline here is not what the anti-realist is claiming. I could be mistaken, but I don’t see any of the realists claiming that humans must not relate to the world to conduct inquiry. That’s not the issue. Of course we do! I think the issue comes out most clearly in Kant. Kant draws the distinction between phenomena and things-in-themselves. His thesis is that we only ever relate to our representations or phenomena, never things-in-themselves. As a consequence, we are told we fall into dogmatism if we hold that things-in-themselves are anything like phenomena. For example, Kant explicitly states that we cannot claim that the domain of the in-itself is structured by time and space. Rather, his thesis runs, our mind imposes these forms of intuition on the matter of experience. From Kant’s point of view, your thesis that being exists regardless of whether humans exist would be perfectly fine, however your thesis that particles exist without humans would not be fine as these are phenomena structured in a particular way by time and space, organized in terms of the categories of the understanding and cannot be said to have any existence in this form independent of the human. In other words, this would be to fall into dogmatism.
In one form or another, as Lee Braver has shown, all Continental anti-realisms are a variant of this Kantian thesis. This is not to say that all Kantian anti-realisms endorse Kant’s theory of the mind, time and space, or the categories. Clearly they don’t. For some you get language doing the work of the categories in Kant. For others you get social structures doing this work. However, all of these positions more or less adopt this thesis as to what constitutes dogmatism and the distinction between the in-itself and phenomena.
Maybe a better way of putting it would be to say that for the anti-realist the being of beings is dependent on the human in some way, whereas for the realist the being of beings is not dependent on the humans. For the anti-realist either a) a particular being like a particle cannot be said to exist independent of the human because human practices, social forces, distinctions, language, minds, etc., constitute that being. For the realist, by contrast, this being has independent existence. Both the realist and the anti-realist are agreed that humans must engage in experimental investigation to find out about particles. They differ as to this dependence relation.
Within the framework of my own ontology, the issue is a bit more complicated. Insofar as I hold that whenever two entities interact, there is a process of translation that takes place, I resemble the anti-realist. All Kant is really talking about is how minds translate the world, giving rise to phenomena as a product. Where I differ is that I hold that while translations take place in the relation between any two objects, nonetheless these differences are real and mind-independent. It is something that is producing these differences.
September 21, 2009 at 5:19 pm
Is this at all related to the sense-data ideas, granting that the latter focus only on the human-everythingelse relations rather than treating relations symmetrically? Perhaps a version of the sense-data view that argues: whenever humans and some other entity interact, their relation gets translated into sense-data in the human’s mind, but the sense-data is produced by those real relations in the first place, which really exist independently.
September 21, 2009 at 5:41 pm
This conversation is too broad to think about it as a whole yet, but having read through a couple of questions come to mind.
First, does it make sense to use “real” as one word for such a diversity of meaning? And why? What about ‘fiction’ denotes un-real, why is ‘fiction’ or ‘fictive’ not enough to assert both ‘real’ and ‘human-dependent’?
Second is the application of this question to these cases of idealism you suppose. Fictive characters can’t be said to exist outside human beings and the practices that engender them. Why does it make one an idealist to attempt to uncover the operation of human-dependent realities while retaining the knowledge that these are, like all things, contingent upon the persistence of the sufficient causes that produce them, here human practice?
I’ve been attempting to catch up on the last few posts and comment threads, so if this is already explain and I’ve just been too hasty, I apologize.
September 21, 2009 at 6:07 pm
Hi Grant,
Admittedly I’m still working through this issue, so I’m not sure where I’ll finally come out yet. I am not suggesting that fictions can exist independently of humans, and see nothing wrong with pointing this out. As I understand it, realism does not commit one to claiming that there are no human dependent entities. The issue is more nuanced than that. One passes into anti-realism or idealism when they claim that all beings are dependent upon humans. And again, the issue is more nuanced than this. Kant, of course, argues that there is a domain of being-in-itself for Kant that is not dependent on humans. I suspect that most anti-realists believe something of this sort. The point is that for the anti-realist all of the beings we deal with cannot be said to be anything like the beings that populate the domain of being-in-itself. That is, for the anti-realist there is always fine print or an asterisk that qualifies every statement about objects with the qualification “for-us”.
Returning to the issue of fictions, what I want to say is that fictions are simultaneously real and engendered by humans. You are engendered by humans (your parents) but you are also independent of those that engendered you. It seems to me that symbolic entities are similar. They are engendered by humans but once engendered they circulate through the world as real and independent beings. Here, I think, that it is maybe best to draw analogies to something like ecosystems in biology. Many organisms cannot exist outside of the ecosystem in which they evolved without dying. These organisms are independent and autonomous objects in their own right, but nonetheless require their ecosystem to exist. It seems to me that symbolic entities are similar. They require a particular ecosystem to exist (human culture), but are nonetheless real actors within these ecosystems. What I want to avoid is the idea that these symbolic entities are “just in the mind” (of an individual). My intuition is that they have a mind independence that grants them a status as real. For example, if I sign a contract for a house I can’t just will or think that contract away. The contract is an object independent of me that has all sorts of repercussions on my legal status in the world.
September 21, 2009 at 6:18 pm
I deleted this comment by Alex by mistake:
September 21, 2009 at 6:24 pm
Alex, right. Where epistemological is concerned I consider myself a “constructivist realist”. I take it that knowledge about the world is constructed in the sense that we purify substances in experiments that we would never find in this pure form in nature, we isolate phenomena from contexts, we build controlled contexts, we interpret data, we use all sorts of instruments, etc., etc., etc.. For me the real emphasis where questions of nature are concerned shouldn’t be how we talk about the world (theories)– though these are important –but how we act on objects to provoke differences in them. For example, if you want to know what vinegar and baking soda are, you don’t just look at them or talk about them, you mix them together and see what happens. At any rate, the creation of these controlled environments, the purification of materials, the use of instruments like the Haldron supercollidor and whatnot, are all things that are constructed, but they are also entirely real. Similarly, I believe the differences that occur when entities are acted on are also real and not simply of our making.
In my own case, one of the reasons I am so keen to de-emphasize the human is not because I don’t think humans are important or because I believe somehow we can know things without interacting with the world, but because I think there has been an obsessive focus on the role played by humans, language, concepts, and so on, to the detriment of the role played by nonhuman objects.
September 21, 2009 at 6:25 pm
Mark,
Yes. Objects stimulate human bodies and the perceptual apparatus and the brain translates these stimulations in their particular way. Object-oriented ontology holds this isn’t unique to human-world relations but is true of all relations among objects.
September 21, 2009 at 6:51 pm
LS: I’d say that #48 is your clearest statement yet on the matter. All one has to do is nudge Kant the tiniest bit and hook up the phenomena to the things-in-themselves, and you’ve got a sort of realism. And the whole “revolution” becomes the fact that we actively impose stuff.
As to the fictions thing, I’m personally into the embodiment and cognitive extension ideas that Andy Clark talks about. As far as I’m concerned, if you kill all the people and Hamlet is still retrievable, then he’s human-independent.
September 21, 2009 at 6:57 pm
‘Where I differ is that I hold that while translations take place in the relation between any two objects, nonetheless these differences are real and mind-independent. It is something that is producing these differences’
Could you please write a link to where you argue for this position?
Kant is far too rigid,he draws a much too harsh line between the world of phenomena and the thing-in-itself.But the crucial question remains:how do we know that we speak of things as they are out there,and not of things as they are for our minds?
September 21, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Asher,
Clark’s book is fantastic. It seems to me that killing all the people is a tall order. In many respects, I think this issue is similar to all those paradoxes revolving around the question of when a pile becomes a heap or a mount becomes a mountain. How many entities have to disappear in an ecosystem before that ecosystem can no longer support a particular organism? The case is similar with entities like Hamlet. Hamlet depends on an ecosystem to exist. He is independent of any particular entity in that ecosystem. But there are conditions where Hamlet can cease to exist just as an organism can cease to exist.
September 21, 2009 at 7:06 pm
Neon,
I’ve made this point in just about everything I written for the last nine months. As for the question of how we know what is “out there” versus what is “in here”, my answer is that we don’t. However, here I think we have to take great care. In my view, the question of how we know is the wrong sort of question. Instead of asking how we know, we should instead ask how we discover the differences that compose the world. In other words, we should look at the process by which knowledge is produced, rather than looking at fixed propositions.
September 21, 2009 at 7:23 pm
But it doesn’t seem to be that much difference between how we know and how we discover.If I say that I know something by making experiments,it still describes a process.Maybe we could somehow substract what we’ve put in the discovery ,to arrive at the thing in itself.Like,in contemporary physics,time doesn’t seem to exist,even though we can really experience anything without it.
September 21, 2009 at 7:40 pm
Neon,
My post “re-circulating reference” responds to a number of the questions you’re asking. You can find it by using the search function to the left of your screen. The process is important. The whole problem behind the question “how do we know” is it tends to ignore the process altogether and is thus completely mystified as to how we draw these distinctions.
September 21, 2009 at 7:52 pm
Perhaps that’s a fundamental divergence of motivation as compared to many of the antirealists? My impression is that a good many people taking strong antirealist positions don’t want nonhuman objects to play a strong role or be much discussed, either because of a political commitment to social construction (as with David Bloor’s attacks on Latour) or out of simple disinterest (what I suspect drives much of the push-back to Bogost’s attempts to force serious consideration of things like cartridges and microprocessors).