via The Inhumanities:
We are pleased to announce the next event for The Inhumanities, which will be a cross-blog event with the fine folks of Speculative Heresy.
We plan on hosting a discussion centered around the following question:
While speculative realism has critiqued anthropocentrism in ontology, and critical animal studies has critiqued anthropocentrism in ethics, there has yet to be many productive connections made between the two. With each offering the other important insights, the question to be asked is, what is the relation between ethics and ontology? Does a realist ontology require the suspension of any ethical imperatives? Can ethics and norms be grounded in something real? Are nonhuman actors capable of ethical relations?
Besides the participants of the two blogs and anyone we are able to recruit to respond, we are also opening up the field for answers to anyone. All answers must be 1500-2000 words, and submissions for answers must be recieved by Friday, November 13th. Inquiries can be sent to Inhumanitiesblog@gmail.com or speculativeheresy[at]gmail.com, or to the email addresses of Scu, Greg, Craig, Ben, and Nick. I hope you are all looking forward to this event as much as we are!
I’m very much looking forward to this event. I will, however, say that earlier this year those of the various SR orientations had a debate as to whether trees are real. The eliminative materialist-Brassier side of this debate contended that it amounts to “folk ontology” to claim that trees are real. The OOO folk contended that reductivism fails to recognize that objects exist at multiple levels of scale and are irreducible to one another. This was treated as “folk ontology” because it was claimed that we were individuating objects by virtue of how we perceive objects. Long story short, I cannot say that I see much of use for ecology or critical animal studies coming out of the scientistic/reductive materialist side of this discussion. If we can’t even hold that trees are real objects, then I am unsure of what possible use SR can possibly be for the ecologist or the critical animal theorist. Fortunately SR isn’t exhausted by scientism and there are those that are not allowing their ideologies and emotions to get in the way of posing the question of what the being of beings might be. I sincerely hope the discussion has progressed since this last debate, however given that this variant of SR finds the existence of even trees suspect (maybe it endorses eukaryotes), I’m not sure what it might have to offer here. Progress certainly did not appear to be the case in many of the Paul Ennis interviews (which is no fault of Paul’s who’s done nothing but great work). Given the fact that there was an almost complete absence of mention of OOO and serious OOO theorists as one of the central trends or trajectories by a number of others claiming to work in SR, you can count me as skeptical about whether or not the discussion has progressed. I mean, Negarastani was claimed to be one of the three foundational works of SR, but Harman’s work wasn’t mentioned at all. I can get by the fact that I wasn’t mentioned much given that I haven’t yet published much on my ontology, but Harman? Bogost? Latour? Stengers? Whitehead? I admire Negarestani’s work as much as anyone and am not disputing the importance of his work, but I’m unclear as to how SR has anything to offer to media studies, critical animal studies, feminist thought, technology studies, or a whole slew of other things in the absence of a robust object ontology. I attribute this profound deficiency to an ontological approach too deeply wedded to reductive and scientistic materialism and Laruelle. I pretty much think Speculative Heresy is the last venue suitable to host such a discussion given their ontological orientations, but that’s just me.
Larval Subjects . 
September 22, 2009 at 4:41 am
Hey Levi,
I believe the above characterization of myself and Nick is a bit problematic.
In the interviews we both mentioned Harman and Latour and I mentioned you and Bogost. Furthermore we weren’t asked what the foundational texts were but for our personal recommendations – and a large reason I mentioned Reza’s work (besides that I think his work is amazing) is that his work is far less known then Graham’s. And Harman’s Prince of Networks was mentioned by Nick as one of his three recommendations anyway. Had it been a question of foundational texts Guerilla Metaphysics would of absolutely been on the list.
I meant no disrespect but it seems as if you and Graham do a wonderful job of making yourselves known because you are intelligent and prolific in the blog world and didnt need the boost! That was my thinking.
As for the event – I am far more in Iain Grant’s camp then Ray’s and from past experience I know that Nick and I disagree on quite a few ontological issues – I wouldnt call myself a eliminative materialist. Anyways – I hope the event will prove fruitful.
September 22, 2009 at 4:41 am
Thanks for the shout-out.
I should begin by saying that Ben and Nick have been great guys for pursuing this project off of a completely half-formed thought shared as a comment on their blog. I won’t speak to their ontological commitments here (hopefully the speculative animals event will be a place to get into all of this!), but from their commitment to seeing such a discussion happen, Speculative Heresy is a great co-venue.
Other venues may have worked as well, but these guys have been great.
If there has been some confusion based on the joint venues, we are not trying to restrict what alliances or loyalties to philosophical camps can participate.
Actually, this post seems to me like you got most of your 1500-2000 words figured out (that was my subtle way of saying I hope and expect to see a contribution from you!).
September 22, 2009 at 12:50 pm
Hi Ben,
No worries. Reading over this post it came off far harsher than was intended. This is why one shouldn’t write when in a rush. I look forward to seeing where the event will go and I think it’s a good opportunity to reopen some of these questions.
September 22, 2009 at 3:43 pm
I’m looking forward to this. Apropos of the subject, I wanted to draw attention to a recent Shaviro tweet:
“I’m not being facetious when I criticize the zoocentrism of “animal studies.” What about plants, fungi, protists, bacteria, etc?”
September 22, 2009 at 4:46 pm
I’m glad you are excited, so am I.
Also, Ian, do you know where Shaviro criticizes animal studies?
September 22, 2009 at 4:49 pm
Haha, Levi, the post does come off a bit harsh (‘the last venue suitable’ – ouch!), but I understand what you’re getting at and we’re too good of friends for me to take it mean-spiritedly. First off though, I do hope you and Ian can participate in some way – either on your own blogs, or by sending us a response.
Which leads me to my broader point that SH self-consciously is not trying to limit the range of SR in any way. The 3 of us all have distinct inclinations from each other, and we all have distinct ideas from what OOP is doing. So there’s an inherent bias in that we write about the things that interest us. But we also try to represent OOP through its publications, and through its internet presence. We’re not exclusionary in any way.
Another point to make is that my own thoughts on situating ANT, in particular, are still up in the air. I find a hell of a lot to use in ANT, and this leads me to considering OOP in some pretty fundamental ways. So despite my tendencies towards naturalism and eliminative materialism, I still think OOP has some major contributions to make. I hope to sort out the relations between these all in future publications, but it’s not settled for me yet.
Finally, I think you are aware that politics is a massively important aspect of my work, and I don’t see any way that politics can be separated from issues of norms and ethics. So my own position is not a scientism that rejects norms and ethics entirely, but one that is trying to understand how they function in a realist ontology.
Which is all to say that there’s plenty of important issues to be discussed and hopefully some of them get raised during the event.
September 22, 2009 at 5:46 pm
Regarding “the zoocentrism of ‘animal studies’”, see especially the last paragraph of Matthew Calarco’s response to the discussion of the Levinas chapter of his Zoographies, currently being read at The Inhumanities.
http://inhumanities.wordpress.com/2009/09/16/facing-the-other-animal-levinas-or-pin-the-face-on-the-donkey/#comment-60
September 22, 2009 at 6:29 pm
Scu, I wondered that same thing, but I haven’t read an extended argument from him. I did find this blog post from a number of years ago, but it’s on not quite the same subject. I’ll drop him a line to come by.
Nick, I’m going to try to contribute something, as the questions are conveniently relevant to writing I will be doing around this time anyway.
September 22, 2009 at 7:02 pm
Happy to hear that you plan to participate, Ian.
Anyway, that post on In Praise of Plants is pretty neat. And if Shaviro simply means that plants and other forms of life are cool and interesting, right no, I agree. I wonder if he is saying anything else. I would assume so.
September 22, 2009 at 7:19 pm
I agree with Nick’s comment vis a vis politics at the end there.
I also have to say I’m afraid you’re misrepresenting eliminativism in your recent posts, conflating it with reductivism… Reductivism is an ontological disposition, claiming all things should be seen as supervening to some degree on physical substrata. Eliminativism is a programmatic doctrine which simply says theories should explain evidence, rather than evidence explaining theories.
Churchland’s (vastly misrepresented) reproach to much cognitive science and philosophy is that it demands neurological research provide evidence for concepts like ‘hard consciousness’, qualia, intentional states, etc. Churchland’s point is that these theories are derivative of pre- and para-neuroscientific thinking, and that forcing neuroscience to explain them or admit inadequacy is absurd. Yet he does not deny their existence, nor even that they have some basis in brain processes – he is very explicit in claiming that these sorts of concepts really exist as particular vector space organizations, and that these are transmitted, reinforced and altered by extra-neurological media like language, social customs and rituals, and so on (unfortunately this later point is too often neglected, even by Churchland himself, a criticism made by Brassier in Alien Theory).
There is nothing in an eliminativist program that necessarily entails reductivism, and while Churchland’s scientific realism does lead him toward a sort of physicalism (again, something criticized by Brassier in both of his major works), this position does not directly follow from eliminativism. He adjoins the qualifier ‘materialism’ to indicate the simple point that evidence culled from the material reality of the brain should have absolute precedence over ideas we have about cognitive processes…but again, this is very narrowly directed at cognitive science and philosophy, and does not need to culminate in the sort of violent reductive ontology you warn against.
Brassier runs with eliminativism in a different direction, making a sort of metaphysical position from it – but it should be quite clear from his criticisms of Churchland and from his non-philosophical roots that this has nothing to do with the sort of reductive scientism with which you associate him. I admit, I have no idea where these associations are coming from, and I wish they would cease because they do nothing but obscure the point. It’s no better than calling Latour a social constructivist or Deleuze a postmodernist. While I’m sure you have distaste for Brassier’s transcendental approach to metaphysics, this does not and really cannot coincide with physicalist reductivism.
To be honest, I’m not much of a fan of this approach of lumping everything together under a negative signifier like ‘idealism’ and therefore shirking the details. I’m much more interested in an approach that reserves judgment on such grand scales and prefers to learn and steal what it can from specific thinkers, without drawing such lines in the sand. Of course, that’s my approach, and you don’t have to agree (although I think your discussion of ‘reconstruction’ points in this direction, and I do hope you take it up again). I just think its more productive to approach our discipline’s history with curiosity and wonder rather than hostile rejection and name-calling, a tendency which I think has its own peculiar knot of jouissance at least as harmful as the sort of ‘police’ disposition from which you seek to distance yourself.
September 22, 2009 at 7:25 pm
Just to be brief here — Ian quote a Twitter comment of mine. Often I say things on Twitter that are engaging my thoughts, but that I am either to lazy or too busy or too early in the thought process to be able to work out more fully.
But I’d say I am suspicious of zoocentrism for a number of reasons. Following Whitehead (as well as Graham and Levi) I don’t think that any one class of entities should be given any ontological privilege. Whitehead clearly suggests that differences between life and nonlife, as well as between different sorts of life, are relative rather than absolute, and have blurry outlines. From this point of view, one can move on to Stengers’ (and Latour’s) “cosmopolitics.”
I am also interested in following Whitehead’s claim that all entities have a “mental” as well as a “physical” pole, including entites that are not alive, or that are alive but, like plants, do not have animal nervous systems. I am interested in the ‘liveliness’ even of ‘inert’ matter, and of how Whitehead claims that all entities make “decisions,” that this aspect of existence is irreducible. This, evidently, brings me close to the territorynof panpsychism (which is seeing something of a revival these days, cf. David Skrbina, and also certain analytic philosophers, e.g. David Chalmers and Galen Strawson).
Also, I think that Lynn Margulis’ arguments about symbiosis need to be taken seriously — she points out that human beings, and all multicellular organisms, have other organisms, often unicellular, with their own DNA, as integral parts of their bodies, and without which they could not survive at all. More speculatively, Margulis argues that symbiosis is a major factor in speciation; this hypothesis is so far largely untested, but it needs to be at least considered.
One can mention other arguments coming from biology and ecology as well, from Stuart Kauffman on self-organization to developmental systems theory to so-called “evo-devo, to Francis Halle on the significance of plants’ difference from animals (e.g., plants do not have the separation between germ and soma that is taken for granted with animals). I am by no means a scientific reductionist or eliminativist, but I think there are a lot of valuable suggestions in contemporary biological speculation.
I am also suspicious, for reasons that I will not go into here, of the contemporary valorization of the ethical as a “first philosophy” (as one finds in Levinas, but not only in him). I am not trying to say that one needs to adopt the same ethical stance towards corn and wheat as towards dogs and apes, but I don’t think the difference here can be maintained as an ontological or pre-ontological one. I think that ethics needs to be given a more “derivative” position (which doesn’t mean that I am claiming to be “beyond good & evil”).
I am throwing this out for what it’s worth, but I realize that I am stating a lot of this flatly, without argument or sufficient explanation. The only thing I can say is that I am working on it, and it may well be a good while before I can back any of this up.
September 22, 2009 at 10:56 pm
Yes Reid,
I’m familiar with Churchland’s arguments. I think you’re missing my point though. I am not suggesting that the reductivist is denying things like qualia and whatnot. I am suggesting that eliminativism leads inquiry in the wrong direction in many instances, generating the wrong sorts of questions, and generating, despite the claims you refer to, an exclusion of a whole range of objects. I think this is more than evident in the work of the theorists you mention. In my view, I believe that SR should do all that it can to disassociate itself from this sort of eliminativism, which doesn’t mean rejecting naturalism where appropriate, neurology, etc. Rather, I just think the strain of SR that has endorsed eliminative materialism is the wrong way to go in thinking about ontological issues.
September 22, 2009 at 11:21 pm
Just a note of general nodding to Shaviro’s comments here. Feels very much right to me.
September 23, 2009 at 2:45 am
Shaviro, thanks for the explanation. I don’t entirely agree, or entirely disagree, either.
I will say that many of the arguments you make are pretty central to the claims of many people in the critical animal studies camp. (For example, I was first made aware of Margulis’ work from an essay in the Animal Others volume).
Nevertheless, thanks again for the explanation. I would love to see you expand upon your comments about ethics and ontology. Maybe in a 1500-2000 word post in a certain cross-blog event. Just sayin’.
September 23, 2009 at 2:54 am
It’s folk ontologies all the way down.. We are doomed! Eliminativism, thus, must reduce us all to dead monkeys.. and so may the Earth be saved..
September 23, 2009 at 3:33 am
Steven, I’m not sure you’ll find many people in animal studies disagreeing with the gist of your comment. I don’t think anyone would seriously dispute, for instance, that it is intrinsically interesting that human bodies–or any other animal body–have more bacteria and virus cells in and on it than there are cells with human DNA.
Having said that, animal studies has more than its fair share of people who want to drive their intellectual project with a political project. But this is likely the case with any of the various “studies.”
September 23, 2009 at 3:43 am
Craig,
I think this is a really interesting observation. Following Whitehead we can talk of enduring objects as “societies”. So maybe one question worth addressing with the CAS framework would be just what “individuates” an “organism”, perhaps, through mereological reflections, undermining the unity of organisms along precisely the lines you suggest.
September 23, 2009 at 8:17 am
http://www.scribd.com/doc/17858432/isabelle-stengers-a-constructivist-reading-of-process-and-reality
” As I already claimed, the worse misunderstanding about Whitehead’s conceptual scheme would be,
and too often is, to identify it with a “conception of the world”.
This, as it can now be understood would
mean attributing to it the same kind of claim to reality that is associated with experimental beings.
I do not mean that actual entities, eternal objects, or Whitehead’s God would be fictions only, while electrons would truly exist.
The very crucial importance of constructivism as I present it here is to
relate mode of existence and mode of achievement.
We may well say that electrons “truly exist” as opposed to fictions – meaning what would refer to human free interpretation -, because the whole of
the experimental practice aims at dramatizing this alternative, making the possibility of deciding about
it the crucial demand and value associated with an experimental device.
But the crucial point for Whitehead is not, emphatically not, this alternative, which, if generalized, would deface interpretation.
Our modes of interpretation matter. The experimental opposition between “mere fiction” and “truly
existing” is to be understood as giving its value and importance to a very particular and demanding mode of interpretation. Interpretation is a serious, vital, business, never to be reduced to “mere
interpretation”.
September 23, 2009 at 11:00 am
“I am not suggesting that the reductivist is denying things like qualia and whatnot. I am suggesting that eliminativism leads inquiry in the wrong direction in many instances, generating the wrong sorts of questions, and generating, despite the claims you refer to, an exclusion of a whole range of objects.”
And I am suggesting that these suspicions of yours are unfounded, seeming more like an ideological knee-jerk than anything.
“I think this is more than evident in the work of the theorists you mention.”
Then you think wrong. As I said, this sort of rejection belies a less than even-handed treatment of the material. If you don’t care to give it one, that’s fine, but crusading against something without such treatment is sloppy and unfair. Nobody is going crusading against your work in such a manner!
Is there really something so offensive in trying to learn what you can from those with whom you disagree, rather than claiming other philosophers should ‘dissociate’ from them, effectively calling for their denunciation and exclusion? I made what I think are substantial arguments against your caricature of EM, and you dismissed them without comment. Why? Seriously, what is going on here?
September 23, 2009 at 2:26 pm
Reid,
I am going to try and put this delicately. I don’t think you understand what the material you’re grappling with is claiming and doing. The truth of the matter will become more evident when The Speculative Turn is released and you can read for yourself how certain theorists are [rejecting] treating social theory. This point aside, if SR gets branded as eliminative materialism it will be dead on arrival in Continental circles. Already there have been a whole slew of rejections based on the charge that it is a scientific positivism. The variant that you’re talking about only exacerbates this. Finally, if the charge “folk ontology” had not been thrown about as a criticism of talk about trees, mountains, and stars, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. The whole reason this discussion emerged is that the eliminative strain of SR has a tendency to treat only very small things like particles and neurons as being real objects. At any rate, I think your most recent post is proof positive that my concerns are entirely well founded. As for your “substantial arguments”, why would I respond to an argument against a claim I was not making? Incidentally, Brassier does call Latour a social constructivist or correlationist.
September 23, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Interestingly enough, Meillassoux himself does not call Latour a correlationist. He considers Latour (and presumably me too) more of a metaphysical vitalist, which I think is still wrong, but closer to the truth.
September 23, 2009 at 3:22 pm
I would just add that I think one *can* try to read Latour as a correlationist, for these two reasons:
*For all his talk of negotiations between actors, there is always or almost always some human scientist or engineer present in Latour’s examples. In Whitehead there is plenty of room for inanimate interactions, but we don’t see those in Latour’s books.
*There are also Latour’s more extreme moments, such as “microbes didn’t exist before Pasteur discovered them” and “Ramses II couldn’t have died of tuberculosis, because it wasn’t discovered yet.” These are definitely correlationist *moments*.
In my opinion, these are outweighed by statements such as “objects interpret each other just as we interpret them,” and similar formulations.
My sense is that Latour is more temperamentally sympathetic to correlationism than is Whitehead. This is why Latour was able to jokingly call himself a correlationist (at the salon he hosted for Meillassoux at his home, he placed a sign on the table reading “welcome to this correlationist house”) when it’s inconceivable that Whitehead would have placed such a sign on his own table under the same circumstances.
Nonetheless, I still think Meillassoux gets it right when he says that Latour is *not* a correlationist. That case is best made by pinning Latour to the wall on a couple of his most unfortunate statements rather than through attaining a balanced sense of the tendency of his thinking.
And in the end, who cares if Latour is a correlationist? In that sense, we could still say: “a few modifications are necessary to remove the remaining correlationist biases from actor-network theory”. Not that tough a job. But sometimes polemic is the major motivation for people, and I don’t mind letting them have their fun.
September 23, 2009 at 3:26 pm
That said, I’m unconvinced by Reid’s claim that eliminativism is not meant to decimate the ranks of objects in the world. The whole *point* of eliminativism is to do so. Whenever I deal with these people their making taunts about the Tooth Fairy and ripping on folk-psychological interpretations of our moods (and Churchland’s rather disappointing Collapse interview made it pretty clear that if he had his way, statements such as “she’s depressed” would merely be replaced by others such as “she has a chemical imbalance in the brain”– i.e., replacing a non-physical statement with a physical one.)
Sorry for splitting this into three different comments, Levi. I kept thinking of new things I wanted to say.
September 23, 2009 at 3:52 pm
Graham says,
This is how I view Latour. And more importantly, this is primarily how Latour has been adopted, particularly in areas like science studies where he has been most influential, such that some philosophical effort is required to decouple Latour’s thought from its current patterns of use. Prince of Networks is a great start, but more effort will be required to allow Latour’s philosophy to escape the context of Latour’s sociology.
In this respect, I think it may actually be a tougher job that you think to remove the correlationist biases from actor-network theory, not because of anything inherent to the philosophy of ANT, but because of the way it has been adopted, used, and valorized for the past 20 years. I’ve already run into resistance in this regard during my limited public discussions of ANT in the context of OOO.
September 23, 2009 at 5:00 pm
I would agree that it may be a tough job *to convince practitioners of ANT* to take a realist line. Indeed, I think that’s a hopeless task, because most of these practitioners aren’t interested in metaphysics, which is fine. They’re interested in the methodological cash value for the human sciences of what Latour has done.
“Prince of Networks is a great start, but more effort will be required to allow Latour’s philosophy to escape the context of Latour’s sociology.”
Those would have to be “political” efforts, because I don’t think I can do any more in intellectual terms to frame Latour’s metaphysics than is already done in that book. By “political” here I am referring to dealings with ANT practitioners in an effort to convince them that realism is a good thing. I’m not sure I’m the one to do that. It would have to be someone internal to that world who could come up with plausible, concrete reasons for why realism can do more for the social sciences than ANT without lapsing into the sort of olden times realism that ANT people disdain. I did try to come up with some methodological ramifications at the end of my Manchester talk, but it was just a start, and I’m simply not as at home in empirical fieldwork as ANT folks are. Besides which, it is not my goal to convert the ANT world to realism. They are mostly social scientists, and are likely remain temperamentally biased against realism just as natural scientists will be temperamentally biased in favor of it.
As to your first point, I would concede that Latour’s analyses are more human-centric than Whitehead’s. But you still have to account for Latour’s statement that “objects interpret other objects just as we interpret them.” I suppose I see this as a case, much like Heidegger’s tool-analysis, where the philosophy is at odds with the philosopher’s own interpretation and use of that philosophy.
The more interesting point is this: reading Latour is able to set off realist bells in the head of philosophers who read him sympathetically. In this sense he resembles Husserl, who is far less of a realist than Latour, but who also *feels* like a realist in a way that Fichte or Hegel do not. And that’s because of the role of objects for Husserl (and, mutatis mutandis, actors for Latour).
The one place I know of where Latour calls himself a “realist” is in Pandora’s Hope, and there it is a false claim: what he calls realism there is actually just a kind of relationism. But Latour, like Husserl, provides rich resources for realism despite not being a full-blown realist himself. In fact, I would say that both Husserl and Latour (and Husserl is far more of an idealist than Latour) provide more resources for realism than billiard ball realists do.
September 23, 2009 at 5:21 pm
Strategic position within the academy is hardly a good argument for or against a metaphysics, though, is it?
September 23, 2009 at 6:09 pm
And a p.s. to Ian (sorry, Levi, for scattering ly remarks like this):
Ian says: “This is how I view Latour. And more importantly, this is primarily how Latour has been adopted, particularly in areas like science studies where he has been most influential…”
I’d say that this is only half-true. The social constructionist Latour is what we hear about in the Anglo-American sphere from Sokal and less vehement versions of Sokal. But if you read the critiques of Latour by Bloor or some Bourdieuians, what you hear is: “Latour is TOO MUCH of a realist! What are inanimate things doing in sociology? This is so reactionary!”
And though I’ve never been an admirer of the smug claim that “if they’re criticizing me then I must be doing something right” (many criticisms are perfectly justified and perfectly devastating), I do think that “if they’re criticizing me *simultaneously for opposite reasons* then I must be doing something right” is an excellent principle. It suggests that both wings of critics are trying to shoehorn you into their own tired trench war and thereby missing the point. In this respect it’s an excellent sign that Latour is portrayed both as too realist and as too social constructionist.
An analogy would be this… Derrideans often roll their eyes at the claim that “Derrida reduces reality to a text.” But it’s quite telling that no one ever says”Derrida is just a reactionary realist.”
And to follow the analogy, Speculative Realism is in pretty good shape when we hear both “Speculative Realism is just warmed-over postivism” AND “Speculative Realism is not scientific enough.” Though in this case it’s admittedly a bit messier because the charges are aimed at a somewhat hazy group of different people with varying positions rather than at one person who can be held responsible for a fixed position.
In fact, if it weren’t so contrived, this might even be an excellent method for innovating in any given area: “How can I invent an idea about this topic that will be attacked from both sides simultaneously?” It wouldn’t be such a bad method, since it would be sure to free you from the intellectual trench war of the moment, and thus would force one to think pretty hard to come up with a new option.
September 23, 2009 at 6:18 pm
And one last point, in support of Levi this time:
“I’m very much looking forward to this event. I will, however, say that earlier this year those of the various SR orientations had a debate as to whether trees are real. The eliminative materialist-Brassier side of this debate contended that it amounts to ‘folk ontology’ to claim that trees are real. The OOO folk contended that reductivism fails to recognize that objects exist at multiple levels of scale and are irreducible to one another.”
This is true. If the eliminativist side were to say that trees are real it would be the shock of the month. I’ve heard them say that societies are not real, so it’s not just Popeye who’s on the firing line here.
September 23, 2009 at 7:58 pm
There is also, always present, a human ‘faith’ in human reason:
“the trust that the ultimate natures of things lie together in a harmony which excludes
mere arbitrariness.
It is the faith that at the base of things we shall not find mere arbitrary mystery. The faith in the order of nature which has made possible the growth of modern science is a particular example of a deeper faith.
This faith … springs from direct inspection of the nature of things as disclosed in our own immediate present experience“ (SMW, 18).
September 23, 2009 at 9:55 pm
No Mark, but this is not the only argument, nor even the central one. It is, however, an important consideration.
September 24, 2009 at 5:04 am
I have been rabbiting on about ‘what is philosophy’ here and there, and I think I have found one quite satisfying answer in Stengers’ essay ‘A constuctivist reading of process and reality.’
In that essay she is claiming that PR is not another ‘conception of the world’ to be compared to those we might find inspired by physics, complexity theory or theories of emergence.
In fact, in her earlier essay ‘Complexity: a Fad? (in Power and Invention) she had already claimed that the vision of a complex world per se cannot be substituted for another scientific vision of the world; it is the notion of a vision of the world, from the point of view of which a general and unifying discourse can be held, that in one way or another must be called into question.
As for philosophy Stengers argues in ‘a constructivist reading of PR) that:
“I would claim that we may follow in the compositional adventure of Process and Reality as Lewis Ford
has tentatively reconstituted it, an intertwined process of co-emergence. The adventure of the creation of a conceptual agency cannot be disentangled from the experiential adventure of the philosopher
experimenting sheer disclosure, not disclosure of a pre-existent experience, but of experience as conceptually “lured”.
“Each concept had to be designed and redesigned, as the point was not adequacy
to any kind of pre-existent matter of fact but two questions always at work:
is the conceptual agency succeeding in doing what the philosopher aims it to do, and are the aims of the philosopher as he formulated them an adequate expression of the challenge he has decided to confront.”
The other fascinating step of Whitehead’s (which Stengers highlights in the ‘Laws of Nature’ essay), and which separates his metaphysics from physics, is the one taken in April 1925, of denying the continuity of becoming.
He then stated that time was not an extensive quantity but the sheer succession of epochal durations (SMW, 125).
Interestingly, this conjecture is, as Stengers notes, supported by Prigogine’s attempt to include the arrow of time in physics. And by other traditions which I won’t rabbit on about any more. Excuse the digression…
September 24, 2009 at 12:08 pm
(Amazing how much interesting discussion Levi manages to drum up in the course of a day or two here…)
Just to throw in a slightly different perspective on the issues Shaviro raises: My own thinking works from most of the same sources he mentions (Whitehead, Stengers/Latour, panpsychism, self-organization/developmental systems, etc) but doesn’t necessarily arrive at the exact same conclusion with respect to ‘animal studies’, because I see the latter project as not restricted to ‘animals’ in the way we usually think of them (i.e., as opposed to other living or non-living things). If we reconceive ‘animal’ (anima, animacy, animism) as a kind of lively matter, I think it can be very compatible with a Whiteheadian ontology.
There was a book written several years ago called ‘What is an Animal?’, edited by anthropologist Tim Ingold, that got into some of these definitional kinds of issues, drawing, among others, on ‘ecological realist’ James J. Gibson. I see Gibson as, in some ways, a kind of ‘realist’ version of Whitehead. Where Whitehead articulates a panexperientialist metaphysics of continual emergence/becoming, in which each actual occasion includes a subjective and an objective pole, Gibson looks at how the subject and object relate in concrete circumstances: how a chair is an object for a subject who might sit on it (or throw it at someone), how a tree is an object for one who might climb it or burrow into it, etc. Somewhere between Whitehead in his abstractness, Gibson in his concreteness, Jakob von Uexkull in his thickness/richness, and a Latourian systemic/networkedness with its focus on the messy entanglements arising from our relations with each other, we can derive an account of animacy (which is a more lively term than ‘agency’) that includes anything that acts/becomes/emerges/subjectivates.
I also agree with Shaviro (I think) that ethics need not be privileged, but that it – like aesthetics – is just part of any moment of becoming, in Whitehead’s sense. Given the world in which humans live (our typical umwelt), we tend to interact more directly and more intersubjectively with things like ‘animals’ (dogs, pigs, birds) than we do with things like rocks or protozoa or whatever else. So it makes sense to me that ethical interaction with lively matter will naturally tend to lead toward a concern for those whose liveliness is most similar to ours (they are mammals, they like to socialize in similar ways, they like to roam around) and which we most directly affect by our own decisions (we let them run free or confine them in cages, we eat them). I see critical animal studies as emerging from that kind of recognition of close kinship across a much wider spectrum of relationship. As animal liberation folks (like Peter Singer) have put it, liberating animals from our oppressive relations with them is a step towards a more general liberation. This is a political, or cosmopolitical, project, but if all description of the world (metaphysics) is value-laden (ethical, aesthetic) from the outset, then it’s normal to act on the values of our perceptions of the world in this way.
September 24, 2009 at 4:37 pm
Hey, Levi, we have a new blog at:
http://thenakedvoid.com
I published a text inspired by your recent post on idealism. If you have time, check it out. I’m really interested in your opinion:
http://thenakedvoid.com/blog/nikola/idealism-and-the-plane-of-immanence
Cheers,
Nikola
September 24, 2009 at 10:01 pm
Graham says:
Yes, agreed that they are political efforts. And I grant you the big about the Bordieuians. That said, as we contextualize Latour within OOO it is worth keeping in mind that these resistances will continue to appear.
Adrian says:
Interesting. I feel exactly the opposite: my typical umwelt is much more replete with things like rocks and protozoa than dogs and pigs and birds. That said, there is something to the idea of a commonality of liveliness that underwrites ethics.
September 25, 2009 at 12:33 am
Ian says:
I feel exactly the opposite: my typical umwelt is much more replete with things like rocks and protozoa than dogs and pigs and birds.
I recognize the sentiment, and would certainly prefer relating to rocks than to certain people. But would you say that your interaction with rocks is as intersubjective (i.e. characterized by a mutual recognition of subjectivities) as your interaction might be with a cat, or an elephant, who wandered into your house and sat beside you as you were reading?
Of course, individuals and societies distribute ‘subjecthood’ (and ‘objecthood’) in various ways among the things we recognize (e.g., other people, people of my family or nation as opposed to foreigners, dogs or pigs, gods and spirits, quarks and gluons, etc.). But, all else being equal, the potentials for interaction characterized by mutual recognition are substantially greater between humans and other primates or mammals than they are between humans and rocks, no?
September 25, 2009 at 2:26 am
But would you say that your interaction with rocks is as intersubjective (i.e. characterized by a mutual recognition of subjectivities) as your interaction might be with a cat, or an elephant, who wandered into your house and sat beside you as you were reading?
Aha! This is a question I have been considering in some detail, and while I’m not yet prepared to answer, I do have an answer in the works–perhaps that will form my response to the Inhumanities/Speculative Heresy invitation. I don’t mean to be evasive, I just don’t know that I have a detailed answer to offer you yet.
September 25, 2009 at 2:30 am
As you might suspect, though, I want my answer to be “yes” or at least “yes, with provisions.”
October 1, 2009 at 2:53 am
[…] these two positions are antinomical. There’s no getting around that. At any rate, given his recent castigation of me for my criticisms of eliminative materialism, suggesting that I was simply […]