Over at the blog err…whateverz. snugglebus I has posted a couple of nice posts on Speculative Realism. Before getting to the actual content of the posts, I’d first like to note that I love it that here in the blogosphere making interesting and thoughtful remarks with names like “snugglebus”. Moving on to the content, snugglebug defends speculative realism against some criticisms by Giuseppe in his second post. As snugglebus writes:
Responding in the comments however, Giuseppe thinks I kind missed the point entirely. As he put it:
what is it that lures intellectuals into the comfort of “reality” in the rather consolidated turn that so many social sciences are experiencing towards some form of “ontology” (another way, very academic indeed, to name the interest in the “real” nature of things)?… I suspect it has something to do with a very precise insecurity and a certain modesty that affects social scientists when they are compared to solid scientists: the former would talk about real, solid, things, the first would just babble away about the sex of angels.
Ok – I’ll take the bait! I’m not an SR scholar, just an interested, but uninvested, spectator, so I might not be the most effective spokesperson, but this will help me start to work out my own thoughts on a group of thinkers who I have been following for a while now.
I think there is a lot more to the success of SR than a reactionary response to the fact that ‘physical’ science is saying ever more concrete things about areas that were once the preserve of social scientists. Just anecdotally SR people (see for example Larval subjects here) seem to be intensely interested in hard science and thinking its consequences (though SR is concerned above all with metaphysics, not philosophy of science). In fact I think it would be more productive to turn Giuseppe’s view on its head: isn’t it actually crude idealism that expresses the insecurity (in a very different, less modest form than Giuseppe meant) of social science? Doesn’t idealism sometimes seem to shut scientific ‘reality’ away, seeing science somewhere between a naïve enterprise at one end of the spectrum (whereas we know that ‘truth’ is a function of consciousness, power, signs etc.), or just a separate field that is at best interesting, but not our concern as social scientists…?
Obviously I cannot speak for all the speculative realists and, in fact, it is impossible to do so as our positions tend to be radically different. For example, beyond a rejection of the centrality of the human, my own thought shares almost nothing in common with that of Brassier’s. Brassier advocates a sort of eliminative materialism that leans heavily on the hard sciences, whereas I advocate a realism. While there is a robust place for the sciences in my ontology, I do not see the sciences as delivering us to “true reality” whereas all the other disciplines investigate things that are epiphenomenal or mere illusions. In this I follow Bruno Latour in his rejection of the nature/culture distinction, the division of the world into two distinct ontological domains– the domain of nature and the domain of the subject –and instead replace this division with collectives of human and non-human actors. This is quite a difference.
read on!
Giuseppe raises a question that the speculative realists, and especially the object-oriented ontologists, have had to address again and again. We’ve made some headway in addressing these assumptions, but I suspect we’ll have to do so many times again in the future as OOO continues to develop. Certain intellectual categories are deeply sedimented in our culture, and this is above all the case with the distinction between nature and culture, nature and society, or object and subject. As a result of this, whenever the term “realism” is evoked there is a tendency to immediately arrive at the conclusion that one is siding with the nature side of this binary and disavowing the “distortions” of culture, society, perception, mind, and thought. In other words, the real is implicitly treated as falling on the nature side of the equation and the non-real on the social-cultural-mental side of the equation.
This, however, is not the move that OOO is making. OOO is not drawing a distinction between two ontological orders, nature and culture, and then seeking to reduce one to the other or escape the illusions of the latter, but rather is abolishing the distinction altogether. This point can be elucidated through reference to the diagram to the right. Let line AB refer to Nature and line CD refer to Culture-Society-Mind-Language (etc). Within the modernist framework, we have two distinct ontological realms that never touch one another. Within the game of modernist ontology you are thus required to choose one or the other of these lines and show how the other is derivative from that line. Thus, for example, the neurologist or sociobiologist has chosen the Nature line, CD, and sets about attempting to show how all of the formations of Culture are really fetishes and illusions produced as a result of natural causal processes.
If one chooses the AB or Culture-Society-Mind-Language line, we get the inversion of the “naturalists” gesture. Rather than showing how mind and the social are products of natural causal processes, the anti-realist instead shows how Nature is constructed by perception, society, culture, mind, or language. In other words, with the anti-realisms we get the inverse gesture of naturalistic materialism. The conclusion to be drawn is that both naturalistic materialism and anti-realism share the same “meta-ontology” or framework of thought. When I evoke the concept of a “meta-ontology” I am not speaking of the specific ontologies that philosophers such as Spinoza, Hume, or Kant might formulate. A meta-ontology is not attached to any specific thinker, but rather consists of the broad ontological assumptions inhabiting a particular milieu. Meta-ontology is ontologically and epistemologically neutral in that it embodies and houuses contradictory positions while nonetheless remaining the same. What a meta-ontology does is delineate the philosophical possibilities within a particular historical milieu. Despite the fact that Spinoza, Berkeley, Kant, and Hume all have opposed philosophies, their philosophies nonetheless inhabit the same meta-ontology. In this respect, a meta-ontology is a bit like a Foucaultian episteme. It will be recalled that the epistemes haunting the historical sequences investigated by Foucault in his magnificent Order of Things allow for a plurality of different positions in the social sciences.
When Giuseppe suggests that the speculative realists have turned to ontology and advocated realism on the grounds that we are insecure about the hard sciences, he reveals the meta-ontology within which he is working: That the only possible realism is one in which the philosopher turns towards nature as the real and explains culture in terms of nature or simply ignores the cultural-social-mental-linguistic altogether. But this is not what OOO is doing. In many respects it could be said that OOO is fed up with modernist reductivisms of all sorts, whether they be in the form of eliminative idealist reductions or eliminative materialist reductions. Where the modernist imperative is to reduce something to something else whether we are reducing objects to fields of the subject or the field of the subject to the material, OOO acknowledges dependency relations while vigorously reduction of one entity to another. As I have put it in another context, OOO is a slutty or promiscuous ontology. It does not aim at fewer but rather more entities. Moreover, it places entities of all sorts, whether social or natural, on equal ontological footing. This is not to say that all entities equally make a difference, but that all entities, whether cultural or natural are equally real.
Where the modernist constitution demands that we either choose line AB, or the Nature line, or line CD, the Culture line, reducing one line to the other, OOO draws a transversal line, SP, across both lines, abolishing the idea of two separate ontological domains that somehow have to be brought into contact and reduced to one or the other. In other words, instead of society on the one hand and nature on the other hand, we get collectives of social and natural object that interact with one another.
This brings me to the issue of the human or social sciences. One of the reasons I find OOO powerfully attractive is not because I want to escape the “softness” of the social sciences to the “hardness” of the natural sciences, but precisely because I want good social and political theory. In its obsession with a single gap between humans and world and the question of how these two domains can be related to one another, I believe that social and political theory has been led to a number of unfortunate theoretical decisions that lead to distorted analyses of the social sphere. Treating objects as mere receptacles for social forces, language, ideas, perceptions, etc., that contribute no differences of their own, social and political theory comes to focus almost exclusively on the discursive, the linguistic, texts, norms, social forces, and so on. As a result, it is led to ignore the role played by nonhuman objects the form or pattern that social fields come to embody. For example, as far as I can tell, contemporary sociology and social theory has a very difficult time discussing the role that a particular layout of public transit plays in the social organization of Chicago. Likewise, contemporary social and political thought has a very difficult time discussing the role that rice cultivation, the fact that it could yield three harvests a year, and how those crops had to be planted and harvested played in the social configurations of 16th Century China. Similarly, it has a difficult time discussing the role played by grain production in Europe between the 15th and 18th century and its fluctuations (and there were many) played in the form social relations took. And again, ignoring the rise of the city during this same time period, it has a difficult time explaining the rise of the incredibly strange idea of selling one’s labor as a commodity, because it tends to ignore the fact that city dwellers were no longer self-sufficient like peasants, but rather required money to pay for food, clothing, and housing to live in the city. In all these cases, a focus on mind, culture, society, language, and so on tends to render these other actors, these nonhuman actors, invisible to analysis. As a result we find ourselves resorting, in an almost knee jerk fashion, to “false consciousness” explanations of social relations.
Let me be clear because the modernist that sorts the world into two distinct ontological domains that are autonomous from one another has, I think, a very difficult time hearing what I’m saying when I make these points. The point here is not that we should abandon talk of norms, beliefs, ideologies, texts, and so on, so as to exclusively discuss techniques of grain production, distributions of roads, highways, trains, and flight paths between cities, factories, etc. Such a move would remain within the modernist orbit, asking us to forsake the culture-mind-society-language line in favor of the “nature” line or nonhuman actors. No. What I am calling for is analytic tools broad enough to embrace in its social analysis a variety of heterogeneous actors ranging from the technological, to practices of food production, the availability of food, the layout of roads and trains, the role of mountains, lakes, and oceans, texts, ideologies, narratives, norms, humans, networks of human relations, etc.
The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai– and generally ethnographers are very good on these points, weaving together the semiotic, the “natural”, the technological, the legal, the amorous, etc –makes this point nicely in his book Modernity at Large. There Appadurai proposes the notion of “scapes” that are something like fields of consistency presiding over relations between humans and nonhumans. In this connection, Appadurai proposes ethnoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, and ideoscapes all interacting in the production of cultural phenomena. To this we could add “naturescapes” and “weather” or “meteoroscapes”. The point is that we must become clear about the role played by these different fields in the formation of planes of consistency or collectives and how these different scapes interact with one another. We must overcome the illusion of thinking that the slice of the real we are investigating– for example ideology –exhausts the field out of which it is drawn. As Luhmann observes, an environment is always more complex than the system that relates to that environment. Theory, I believe, perpetually suffers from confusing system and environment, treating the distinctions operative in the system as exhaustive of the environment and thereby rendering entire fields of factors invisible. Is it our fault that the world is complicated and flat?
In this connection snugglebus, in his first post, already provides a simple object-oriented social analysis of how object-oriented ontology came to be. As snugglebus writes:
What is it about SR that has lent itself to this kind of blogosphere success? Obviously the fact that it had some prolific and well-known practitioners who blog helped, but generally I think it is also possible to perceive at least 3 superficial features which I would say have helped. SR benefits from being a (relatively) clear intellectual project (and therefore gives some key rallying points for prospective adherents), timely, and for want of a better word ‘sexy’ (the idea of a “turn”, i.e. rejection of predominant trends in favour of something ‘new’, has a particular appeal). Apart from perhaps ‘timeliness’, the other two are replicable.
In the same post snugglebus later goes on to write:
So the what conclusions to draw?
* SR would not have existed if it was grounded in mainstream academia, though now exists symbiotically with academia.
* The key elements of SR that have made it successful in the blogosphere have been a clear, attractive, but broad identity, around which people can rally, and the willingness of proponents to engage in dialogue with people from different disciplines, and with people who have no prior reputation, itself applying a certain genoristy in exchange.
* The blogosphere itself has added speed, and breadth, as well as contributing to this sense of openness.
There is probably an interesting question to pose about how this has then shaped the ideas of SR itself, but that’s beyond my both my-grade and concern here I think.
Let me note that this is only a thumbnail or brief example of what an object-oriented social analysis might look like. However, look at the motley army of actors snugglebus refers to in his discussion of the formation of speculative realism (and his whole analysis is well worth reading). Rather than a single obsession with the relation between humans and the world, snugglebus simultaneously treats the internet or technology as an actor in this movement, a particular electronic community (the theory blogosphere), contingent or chance encounters between different humans such as the encounter between Graham, Nick, Ben, Reid, Shaviro, Jodi, N.Pepperell, Jon Cogburn, Mel, Protevi, Mikhail, Nikki, Peter, Kvond, etc., and many others, the ideational, the amorous or libidinal, speeds of communication and exchange, the universities, and so on. None of these actors can be said to overdetermine the other. The internet, for example, did not make speculative realism or cause speculative realism, but in many respects speculative realism would not exist as it now does without the theory blogosphere or the internet. However, while it’s unlikely that speculative realism could have taken place in its current form in the halls of the academy alone, it is now feeding back on that “scape”. Increasingly papers are getting published in this area, various texts by speculative realist thinkers such as myself and Harman are being taught both inside and outside of philosophy courses, graduate students are taking these trends seriously and organizing their dissertation work and conference presentations around these subjects, and so on. Even the dissenting voices serve a role in bringing SR into the walls of the academy.
And not only do technologies, human encounters, ideoscapic features such as “timeliness”, and affective dimensions such as “sexiness” play a role in these developments, but even simple signifiers or signs have been actors playing a significant role in the development of this thought. Thus, for example, the term “Speculative Realism” was more or less an accident. The four philosophers that participated in the legendary Goldsmith’s conference back in 2007, sharing little in common beyond advocating some form of realism and a rejection of correlationism, anti-realisms, or philosophies of access, needed a name for the event and settled on the title “Speculative Realism”. Yet the signifier “Speculative Realism” created the phantom of an entity that has itself played a role in both shaping the reception of these thinkers and the movement itself. The signifier here was an actor.
Likewise, norms have been actors in this movement as well. Back in the day of the notorious “correlationism or Kant wars” that took place on this blog around February, much of the discussion revolved around norms of interpretation, argumentation, and how people ought to engage with one another in philosophical discourse. Here the norms did not precede these encounters– except in perhaps a virtual or potential fashion –but were more or less emergent from the encounter. As Latour observes so beautifully in The Politics of Nature, discussions of normativity tend to arise only when a new actor, a surprising actor, appears within a collective and struggle ensues as to where it is to be placed, how hierarchies need to be re-ordered, and so on. This was certainly the case in the “Kant wars”. In some cases, pre-existing norms were evoked and applied to the appearance of this strange new actor, calling into question both protocols or norms of standard continental argumentation and philosophical engagement. In most of the other cases, norms were being built, enginnering new relations among actors. One of the things that I find most remarkable in these discussions is that where blog posts were previously devoted to exposition over some philosopher’s text, participants began to existentially avow and argue for certain philosophical positions rather than simply engaging in explication de texte. While texts were still endlessly discussed, it was no longer possible to simply “talk about” a philosopher or text, but it now became necessary to elaborate arguments and positions, to take stands. What really shocks me is the rapidity with which this shift took place. Where before we were all simply “referencing out”, evoking this or that philosopher in a discussion, now suddenly we were engaged in tooth and nail debate making claims not about philosophers, but about being, norms, reality, and so on. Semantically the evocation of a philosopher changed markedly. It was no longer a question of elaborating the philosopher, but of evoking a sequence of argument in an existentially committed debate. It’s been remarkable to behold.
Nor would speculative realism exist as it now does without the cross fertilizations of textual backgrounds between the different people that came to participate in these exchanges. Graham, of course, has had a decisive impact on my thought and has led me to read figures such as Zubiri, Bhaskar, and Latour. Mel introduced me to Latour, Kittler, Ong, Bogost, and a whole host of other thinkers. Shaviro got me back into Whitehead. And so on. And to snugglebus’ merit, while he doesn’t execute the analysis himself, he does node to the parity or reciprocity of interactions between these different human and nonhuman actors, wondering how the medium of the blogosphere itself, of the internet itself, might play a role in moulding or influencing the content of speculative realist thought. In other words, we don’t have unilateral determination between human actors or objects and nonhuman actors and objects, but rather have bilateral relations where influence moves in both directions.
Enough for now. Read snugglebus’ posts.
Larval Subjects . 
October 22, 2009 at 5:47 am
For example, as far as I can tell, contemporary sociology and social theory has a very difficult time discussing the role that a particular layout of public transit plays in the social organization of Chicago. Likewise, contemporary social and political thought has a very difficult time discussing the role that rice cultivation, the fact that it could yield three harvests a year, and how those crops had to be planted and harvested played in the social configurations of 16th Century China. Similarly, it has a difficult time discussing the role played by grain production in Europe between the 15th and 18th century and its fluctuations (and there were many) played in the form social relations took. And again, ignoring the rise of the city during this same time period, it has a difficult time explaining the rise of the incredibly strange idea of selling one’s labor as a commodity, because it tends to ignore the fact that city dwellers were no longer self-sufficient like peasants, but rather required money to pay for food, clothing, and housing to live in the city.
Leaving aside any issues with SR or OOO, this is just not true. Or let me put it a different way. It is true that weaving, say, rice cultivation into a larger narrative about the social structures of 16th century China is difficult, because there are so many other factors to weave into that narrative, and they interact on multiple causal levels and on multiple time scales, making the structures and their conditions incredibly dynamic and difficult to describe, but this isn’t because social scientists (historians, sociologists, anthropologists, etc.) don’t focus on objects. There are whole segments of anthropology devoted to looking at the role of agriculture in the development of social structures, and they look at exactly the sorts of things you do. It is instead because such complex dynamics, with objects that are difficult to measure and agents that are damn near impossible to measure interacting in fluid and dynamic ways, is difficult to describe. But social scientists try their damnedest.
I’ll give an example. It’s well known that the little ice age made growing grapes in much of Europe difficult. This, in turn, made making wine in much of Europe difficult. So in much of Europe, they began to grow barley and other grains, and make beer. This had all sorts of effects on farming, local economies, and larger social structures. And it’s been studied to death, because it’s exactly the sort of thing that would interest any social scientist studying European society during the little ice age.
I probably don’t need to point out that there’s a huge literature on the effects of public transportation on social structures (e.g., on race and class issues).
Whatever the problems with the social sciences, and they are myriad, I don’t think a lack of focusing on objects is one of them. At least, I see no evidence that that is the case. In fact, one of the most prominent effects of the increasing tendency to model social scientific research on natural scientific research is the increasing role of measurement. Since things like agency are incredibly difficult to measure, this leads to an increasing focus on objects, because they’re pretty easy to measure.
Take an extreme example of this move to a natural science model of the social sciences, agent-based models of collective behavior and complexity in social networks. The name “agent-based” is a bit misleading. It just means that the model is comprised of a bunch of autonomous agents with very little going on (they have learning algorithms and input/output algorithms). The primary purpose of these models, as in all social sciences (and this, I suppose, is where they’re “subject-focused” rather than “object-focused,” but given that’s what the social sciences are supposed to study, that’s not surprising or problematic), is to figure out how the agents will behave in different environments. These models are used to study all sorts of things, like foraging behavior, the development of paths and trails, various forms of collective problem solving, the formation of collective structures, etc. What’s interesting about them, though, is that in the modeling itself, there’s very little done to the agents. Instead, the primary parameters in the models have to do with objects in the environment. For example, in foraging models, they’ll look at the distribution of food spatially and temporally, and see how these parameters affect the individual and collective behavior of the agents (e.g., food, or as they call it, wealth distribution). In other words, the focus of the models is on how objects in the environment affect collective behavior.
My point, then, is that I see no lack of focus on objects, or any evidence that social scientists are “treating objects as mere receptacles for social forces, language, ideas, perceptions, etc., that contribute no differences of their own.” Quite the contrary! Social scientists are very interested in how objects affect individual and collective behavior.
Maybe we’re reading entirely different and mutually exclusive social science literatures?
Anyway, I don’t know what, if anything, this says about the utility or relevance of SR or OOO for the social sciences.
October 22, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Hi Chris,
I don’t think we can run sociology and anthropology together. Anthropology has been pretty good on these issues. As Latour remarks in We Have Never Been Modern (and I think I make a similar point in this post or perhaps the earlier one on realism), anthropology is able to simultaneously weave together things like crop production, techniques, technologies, weather conditions, geography, resources, kinship structures, narratives, etc. It could be that we’re coming at the social sciences through different background literatures. I come from the continental tradition, so I’m primarily thinking of social thinkers such as Bourdeau, Foucault, Luhmann, Adorno, etc., as well as continental political theory such as Zizek and Badiou. This tradition is strongly influenced by the primacy of the linguistic and the semiotic, such that these other factors get reduced to receptacles for social forces, power, language, perception, signs, and so on without contributing differences of their own.
October 22, 2009 at 3:51 pm
Hi what you say here clarifies a great deal some of the matters of concern i raised in my brief comment to snugglebus’ post over in Err..whateverz.
That comment was so tentative I gave the impression I was advocating, or at least speaking from, a dualist (and radically so) point of view (as you correctly pointed out). The way you address the fallacy of such thinking is indeed convincing.
I should probably add that I find the Cartesian method derived by the separation of Res Cogitans and Res Extensa, highly unhelpful (to say the least).
I am not at this stage able to fully engage with the range of considerations you bring up in your post, but i consider this position against dualism an important starting point for a very interesting conversation with you and more broadly with OOO and SR.
I will, in the next days, reflect on my uncertainty on the use of ‘ontology’ in what i think can be considered a transformative approach to the nature/society dichotomy, one that does not privilege one or the other terms or does not reduce one to the other. As i was suggesting in my comment to snugglebus this conversation makes me want to try and put into words some of my musings about the brain-based epistemology proposed by Gerald Edelman with which I seem to find myself at ease when thinking about a transformative move beyond the stale nature/society dichotomy. I suspect there might be interesting convergences that might deserve to be explored between the two approaches.
I will write more soon. For the time being let me thank you for your post and your thoughtful engagement with what i said.
October 22, 2009 at 3:53 pm
Hi Giuseppe,
I’m quite a fan of Edelman myself. You’ll find a few posts on him if you use the search function in the lower right column.
October 22, 2009 at 4:05 pm
Well, excellent! I will read them soon and we’ll talk more.
October 22, 2009 at 6:44 pm
My knowledge of sociology is fairly limited, so I suppose I should restrict myself to talking about anthropology, political science, which I know enough about to say with confidence that objection orientation is not a problem. Though the work I know of sociology in urban areas at least seems to do a good job of looking at the way things like public transportation layouts affect society.
My approach to the social sciences actually started in the continental tradition, particularly the Frankfurt school (Adorno, Marcuse, up to and including Habermas) and Foucault, but over the years my knowledge of political science, anthropology, and history has become more and more steeped in a more analytic tradition, particularly the more “scientific” versions of political science and anthropology (as well as what I know of sociology).
I can definitely see where someone like Foucault, particularly in his early, structuralist days, had issues with objects. The Order of Things seems like exactly the sort of strictly subject-based analysis you’re talking about. Let’s call this animal you get in Foucault, Habermas, Adorno or, hell, Jameson or Lyotard, “agent-oriented” social science for now (simply for the sake of this discussion). Then let’s call what I’m more familiar with these days “interactive” social science, in that it’s focus is, largley, on objects (weather, crops, housing, the grid plan, whatever) and how they interact with social structures.
My question, then, is what benefits would OOO or SR bring to the social sciences that, say, a merger or dialogue between “agent-oiented” and “interactive” social sciences wouldn’t? Say, if more people anthropologists outside of cultural anthropology read Foucault, and if more people in cultural anthropology were less hostile to hypothesis testing? In other words, what does OOO/SR have that these two different approaches, when combined in some way, don’t? What would it buy us?
October 22, 2009 at 6:59 pm
[…] on the harmfulness of blogs In (one of) today’s posts (how does he do that??), Levi commented on a blogposts by snugglebus on SR and its […]
October 23, 2009 at 2:59 am
Chris,
I’m not saying everyone is a bad guy. The sorts of analyses you’re talking about are ones I’m fine with. I’m simply theorizing these things at a more formal or ontological level and making the concepts explicit. However, is your question even really fair? I think one thing a philosophy does is bring certain things into relief so that they can be more directly thematized in empirical practice. Similarly, I also think that philosophies intervene in specific theoretical contexts. For example, we can imagine a Derridean or a Foucaultian analytic-philosopher pointing to all sorts of blind spots in analytic philosophy that need to be surmounted through Derrida and Foucault (with new analytic bells and whistles). The continentalist would say “what does this approach have to offer that the continental tradition hasn’t already done?” I’m fine with discussing the theoretical concepts of OOO, its lines of argument, and so on, but I’m not interested in “selling” it, which seems to be what you’re asking for. I even find the very form of the question rather obnoxious because it has the form of “damn it, what authorizes you to do philosophy or talk about things!”. I already draw on a number of the sorts of social theorists you’re referring to. This post, for example, evokes the anthropologist Appadurai who does the sort of analysis I’m interested in. Similarly, Braudel and Latour are important social theorists for me, as is the cultural theorist Bogost. Philosophy, however, works at a more abstract level and one of the things I’m taking on here are what I take to be some central presuppositions at the heart of Continental philosophy to bring these alternatives into greater relief.
October 23, 2009 at 5:47 am
Levi, I’m sorry if I gave you the impression that I was questioning your right to do philosophy. I certainly wasn’t. I wouldn’t be commenting here if I didn’t find what you are doing, and OOP in general, interesting.
But my approach to new ideas, perhaps because I’m trained as a scientist, is always to ask, “what does this buy you?” And while I apologize, again, if you find the question obnoxious, to me it’s the most important question to ask of any new idea.
And in your reply, you’ve provided an answer of what OOP could buy you, and a good one I think, when you say:
I’m simply theorizing these things at a more formal or ontological level and making the concepts explicit. However, is your question even really fair? I think one thing a philosophy does is bring certain things into relief so that they can be more directly thematized in empirical practice.
I think your answer shows that the question is in fact fair, and that it’s something you’ve thought about. And I suppose it would be asking you to “sell” OOP to elaborate on what you thin OOP brings into relief that would allow it to have an impact outside of ontology (e.g., on politics or social science, two things you’ve posted on recently, or critical theory or aesthetics or whatever). So I won’t ask you. I’ll just keep reading and see if I can sort that out for myself.
October 23, 2009 at 1:47 pm
Hi Chris,
As someone who’s both interested in these abstract philosophical discussions, and the nitty gritty of empirical data, I’ve thought about your question a lot too. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with it, but the sociology of finance field has done some really stellar work that I’d consider to be an exemplary mix of stuff like OOP and the social sciences. In particular, you could try Michel Callon, Donald MacKenzie, Timothy Mitchell, Nigel Thrift, Karin Knorr Cetina, and Daniel Beunza, to name just a few. To summarize their sort of research project, I’d say that they look at the highly specific networks (of human and nonhuman actors) that construct certain formal relations. So Callon’s work, for example, looks at how markets are constructed, and the sorts of material objects that allow for a calculative subject (along the lines of neoclassical economics’ actors) to emerge.
And I’ll give one highly specific answer as to what the value of this stuff is (though I think there are more, I’m hoping to write on them in the future). I saw Beunza speak a few weeks ago, and he received a similar question, and answered by noting that the policy responses are vastly different if we take a neoclassical view of finance, a behavioral economist view of finance, or a sociology of economy view of finance. One sees the models as needing greater accuracy, another sees the problem in cognitive biases, and another points to the actual tools which allow for the others to emerge in the first place. And so, policy-wise, OOP can offer a lot I think. (Though I’d certainly be curious to hear critiques of my position here.)
Cheers,
-Nick
October 23, 2009 at 3:00 pm
Apologies Chris. I get a little touchy about this sort of question because among philosophers the speculative realists will occasionally get remarks to the effect that it is presumptuous for anyone to engage in philosophy and that the philosophical tradition is being dismissed or called stupid. In my view, this is a really ugly way of responding to a philosophical position that borders on ad hominem. I think Nick gives an excellent outline of just how OOO might be valuable to practice. In my view, one value of a philosophy is that it might lead us to ask better questions, engage in better research, and develop better practice. Within the Continental tradition, at any rate, I think there has been a tendency to focus too much on the ideational, discursive, and linguistic to the other sorts of actors or entities I mention in this post. As a result, in the field of continental social and political thought, this leads to a highly distorted understanding of why the social world is organized in the way that it is. That distorted understanding, in turn, leads to both poor policy at the governmental level, but also bad strategy at the activist level. This is, of course, only one example. As a cognitive scientist that no doubt has a healthy respect for neurology, I suspect you probably experience frustration from continentalists who are almost entirely dismissive of the sort of work you do, instead seeing subjects as products of language, the discursive, social forces, and so on. While I do not think Continentalists are mistaken to see importance in things such as signs, the discursive, the linguistic, social forces (whatever those might be), power (whatever that might be), and so on, I do believe it needs to be opened up from its myopia to make room for the sorts of actors or objects you talk about in the sort of work you do. I see the speculative realists and OOO theorists as engaging in this sort of project.
October 23, 2009 at 11:44 pm
Levi, I’m a bit strange for a cognitive science, in that my original degrees were in philosophy, and my focus on phenomenology. It seemd pretty straightforward, to me, to merge phenomenology and psychology, but most cognitive scientists don’t see things this way, and as a result, it’s not uncommon for my ideas to be dismissed within cognitive science. So I understand the knee jerk reaction, because I often have it too.
Nick, thank you for the suggestions. I will definitely check them out.