In a recent remark responding to one of my posts, Dan quotes me and goes on to propose some critical commentary on my claims:
“While the sun certainly enters into political compositions within being, the sun is what it is regardless of whether or not politics is. Presumably the sun was over 5 billion years ago when our solar system accreted. Humans have existed for only about 200,000 years.”
I like you am drowning in undergrad papers that have an ability to drain what little intelligence I have, but this quotation seems indicative of a modality I have tried to flag and discuss in the past, what I nominate “science valorization.” This kind of utterance seems to me fine if everyone subscribes to a certain pattern of speech, a set of rules about narrating the world but it does not seem to me to reflect the usual standard of thought found here in other contexts. There are many issues here but the basic one perhaps is the claim to continuous past entities through time for which little present evidence of identity persists. Let’s say since we are all fond of difference that that chain of events called man or that called the sun evolve (I pick this since you are pro-evolution) but that the changes cannot be shown to be continuous or governed by one variable. Then the identification across time becomes not a statement of fact but a rhetorical injunction or a juridical limit. We find ourselves back with all the problems of essence and a platonic ontic. And what did this win since it gave up the very real it seeks?
While I always appreciate Dan’s comments– even if he might think otherwise –I often have a very difficult time understanding them as they strike me as extremely dense and elliptical. When I first read this comment, I interpreted the charge of “valorizing science” as a charge of dogmatically accepting scientific claims. This reading seemed suggested by the fact that Dan goes on to discuss my remark about the sun in terms of rhetoric, talking about utterances, patterns of speech, and whether or not everyone agrees with those patterns of speech. Since Dan talks about consensus (whether everyone agrees), it seems clear to me that Dan is making rhetoric the measure of reality. If I am portraying his position correctly, the thesis would be that there are different language games, science is one language game among others, and therefore it is dogmatic to “valorize science” because such a valorization fails to self-reflexively recognize the manner in which it is a language game among others.
This interpretation seems warranted as Dan goes on to remark that,
Levi, The majority of what you say strikes me as political and rhetorical, and a clear analysis then would have to be within those disciplinary vocabularies if we “wished to participate in a dialog with others.”
Here, if I understand Dan correctly, “disciplinary vocabularies” are treated as the condition for science, such that a “critical” discourse first requires an analysis of the disciplinary vocabulary or language game we are playing so as to demonstrate the manner in which this disciplinary vocabulary or language game socially constructs its objects. If, then, a discourse that makes claims directly about the world without first engaging in this self-reflexive analysis of disciplinary vocabularies or language games is dogmatic, then this is because it fails to recognize, pace a rhetorical variant of Kant’s Copernican revolution, the manner in which its object is a product of these language games rather than an entity in its own right.
read on for the really good stuff!
I have called such a line of argument humanist (we could just as easily call it “human-centered” or anthropocentric), because it makes the human or some human phenomena the condition for all other entities. Take the examples of Derrida and Lacan or the Heidegger of the “Letter on Humanism”. I purposefully choose these examples because all of these thinkers have characterized their positions as anti-humanisms. However, while the Derridean, Lacanian, and Heideggerian critiques of the focus on consciousness are well taken, I fail to see how these positions can even come remotely close to ontologically being anti-humanisms as they still give the human or human phenomena pride of place within their ontology. In these instances, of course, the human phenomena in question is language. Simply demolishing the primacy of consciousness or the sovereign individual does not yet an ontological anti-humanism make, as human phenomena such as language, rhetoric, power, social forces, and so on are still granted an ontological privilege as the condition for all other entities. One does not formulate a genuinely anti-humanist ontology until humans and human phenomena are dethroned from their privileged place and treated as one set of entities among others. This does not entail that humans and human phenomena are unimportant or that we should not discuss them, as some have unfairly suggested of SR, only that the human should not be treated as the condition for the being of all other entities.
Setting all this aside for the moment, I cannot but be perplexed at Dan’s suggestion that I “valorize science”. This is a charge that Dan has often leveled at me in the past, once even suggesting that I endorse a Newtonian model of indivisible atomic particles as my conception of what constitutes objects. Given what I have written about objects and realism in general, I am not sure how Dan could possibly arrive at this conclusion. Yet, my references to science are rather occasional and certainly do not dominate the lion share of my posts here on this blog. Far more of my posts are devoted to signs, psychoanalysis, rhetoric, politics, etc. I thus wonder why Dan believes I somehow valorize science. Here I suspect the “unconscious” is at work. There is a tendency among those in the humanities to immediately leap from the signifier “realism” to science. In other words, the term “realism” seems to invite a sort of metonymical sliding from “realism” to “science”, such that realism is equated with the position that science, and science alone, tells us what is real.
First, I get the sense that many in the humanities are deeply threatened by the sciences. Here I don’t blame my colleagues. There is, of course, the sort of discomfort many of us “literary types” suffered in our math and science classes that I think sometimes informs our attitudes towards the sciences. However, more importantly and as a matter of academic institutional politics, many of us in the humanities have suffered having scientific criteria hoisted on our own forms of intellectual engagement where they do not belong and have had to fight funding wars against administrations that increasingly take monies away from the humanities and funnel all sorts of funding into the various sciences and technical degrees. Additionally, I think the humanities have increasingly suffered a crisis of identity wondering where, precisely, their place lies in the academy. Philosophy, for example, was once foundational to all the other disciplines. Yet with the rise of modern science philosophy increasingly finds itself marginalized as a sort of “idle speculation”. What sort of knowledge, precisely, is it that philosophy contributes to the world or the academy? I believe many of us in the humanities are asking these sorts of questions and I get the sense that many of us often have a sort of knee-jerk reaction to the sciences, wishing to equate them with dogmatic discourse and reject them altogether. How else are we to account for the fact that within Continental philosophy and theory claims from the hard sciences are generally treated as inadmissible within the framework of philosophical discussion? Perhaps many of us are still smarting from the Sokal affair and this is why, with only a few exceptions, we tend to shy away from the sciences. But what the Sokal affair revealed was not the absurdity of people in the humanities evoking the sciences (were that the case Dennett and others would be in trouble), but the absurdity of social constructivism and rhetorical idealism gone woefully wrong. No, I get the sense that the inadmissability of the sciences in Continental discussions is more a defense formation than a rational position. To be sure, it dresses itself up in rational garb, but when you look at the actual arguments they turn out to not be very good (I’ll get to this in a moment).
Second, and more importantly, while all the speculative realists and the object-oriented ontologists have a healthy respect for the sciences and think that they reveal something real and genuine about the world, it has never been the position of us object-oriented ontologists that the objects investigated by the sciences exhaust the real. This is one reason I find myself so perplexed by Dan’s observations. For the object-oriented ontologists things like suns, quarks, DNA and so on are real. But signs, cities, groups, books, and so on are also real. The physical objects investigated by the sciences are for OOO a subset of the real, not exhaustive of the real. Dan seems to suppose that OOO treats that subset as being exhaustive of the real.
So let me outline what I take to be the problem with Dan’s argument from rhetoric, universes of discourse, disciplinary vocabularies, or language games. And again, if I am misrepresenting Dan’s position I hope he will show me how, though I think these points are still valuable as this line of argument seems to often arise. The problem as I see it with this line of argument (and its other variants) is that it jumps from the obvious and true premise that we must relate to things to know them, to the invalidly derived conclusion that this relation makes things what they are. In other words, Dan seems to be jumping from the premise that because we relate to objects through language these regimes of discourse make things what they are. This is akin to arguing that because I must look through a window to see a tree the window constitutes the tree as a tree. We can, of course, agree that the window limits our field of vision in all sorts of important ways, but we should not concede the point that the window makes the tree the tree.
For the sake of some clarity in these discussions let us distinguish four possible positions using the terms “realism”, “anti-realism”, “epistemology”, and “ontology”. Through a sort of combinatorial we can generate four possible positions through grouping these terms:
1. Realist Epistemology: A realist epistemology would be the position that we have direct access to the objects of the world, such that our representations of objects are exactly like these objects themselves. Here mind is treated as a passive recipient of the world that merely receives data from objects as they are from the world and then dutifully reports them.
Anti-Realist Epistemology: The anti-realist positions is far more complex. Here the knower is not a passive recipient, but makes active contributions to inputs, organizing them through concepts, practices, language, social categories, etc., that give these inputs a specific form or structure at the level of our experience. Here I think the model of the black box is perhaps the easiest way of thinking about the difference between anti-realist epistemologies and realist epistemologies. Where a realist epistemology portrays the mind as a passive receiver that does nothing to the received stimuli but record them, anti-realist epistemologies conceive stimuli from the world as inputs that are then processed by the structure of the black box (language, social categories, a priori concepts in the mind, etc) that then produce an output different from the input that went through the black box. The model of the black box, in my view, is common to all anti-realist positions. Where they differ, what they debate over, is the question of what processing mechanisms the our black boxes contain. An anti-realist epistemology is, of course, rightly going to be human-centered because the question of knowledge is a question of how we— you know, us humans –come to know the world.
3. Anti-Realist Ontologies: An ontology addresses not the question “how do we know?”, but rather “what, in the most general and abstract sense, is and what dynamics govern these beings?” An anti-realist ontology is thus an ontology that equates the being of beings, what beings are with the outputs of our little black boxes. To be, the thesis runs, is to be the output of a black box, a manifestation (as Derrida put it in Of Grammatology), or, as Kant put it, a phenomena. Note that for anti-realist ontologies being is generally said in two-senses. On the one hand, being is equated with outputs of blackboxes. However, since outputs cannot be produced by black boxes without inputs, and since these inputs must come from somewhere, there must be another type of being, we know not what, that provides the inputs for our black boxes (where the black box can be thought of as containing a priori categories of mind and intuition, the play of differance (Derrida), the bestowals of being to Dasein, etc.). In short, anti-realist ontologies are unable to give a univocal determination to being unless they take a Hegelian or Berkeleyian route.
[Aside: It is interesting to note that the very fact that there is a debate over what our black boxes contain is indicative that we don’t have access to the mechanisms of our black boxes. In other words, the anti-realist is pushed into a position every bit as speculative about the “programming” belonging to black-boxes as that of the naive epistemological realist that believes he can directly talk about objects. In my view, this simple point significantly deflates the potency of anti-realist arguments from the primacy of access.]
4. Realist Ontology: Where the anti-realist ontologist holds that “to be is to be a phenomena (for-us)”, the realist holds that while there are beings that only are for-us (e.g., money), this is not exhaustive of being. There are also beings that are independent of humans in the sense that the tree was independent of the window, and we can say something significant, but very general about the characteristics of what it means to be.
Having outlined these two possibilities for epistemology and these two possibilities for ontology, it will be noticed that it now becomes possible to form combinations of these positions. There are three such positions:
1. It is possible to advocate a realist epistemology and a realist ontology. Indeed, someone who advocates a realist epistemology necessarily advocates a realist ontology.
2. It is possible to advocate an anti-realist epistemology and an anti-realist ontology. I would argue that this is the dominant position in Continental thought today.
Finally 3. It is possible to advocate an anti-realist epistemology and a realist ontology.
I would argue that it is the third position that the object-oriented ontologists advocate. Here Harman, hopefully, will correct me if I am attributing claims to him that he would not make, though I’ll stand by them with respect to my own version of object-oriented ontology. The anti-realist epistemologists are correct to reject realist epistemologies as both naive and dogmatic. There is no reason to suppose that the way we immediately perceive things or our disciplinary boundaries within the sciences map on to the world as it is. Moreover, in their epistemological investigations the anti-realist epistemologists are correct to note the active role played by black boxes in organizing phenomena, producing knowledge, and so on. We should have these debates about what our black boxes contribute to the production of outputs and should not abandon the important findings of the tradition of anti-realist epistemology.
However, where the anti-realist epistemologists and the realist ontologists part ways is with respect to the thesis that questions of our access to beings is sufficient to determine what beings are. For the object-oriented ontologist, over and above questions of how we know objects there remains an important and crucial question of what it means for a being to be. This question, following Roy Bhaskar, is not, for the realist ontologist, exhausted by how we know. Likewise, while the object-oriented ontologist readily acknowledges the limitations of our knowledge, the fact that we must engage in inquiry to know any particular type of object, and so on, the realist ontologist rejects the thesis that the differences discovered in and through inquiry belong to the domain of outputs alone. Rather, the realist ontologist begins from the premise that these differences cannot be restricted to outputs alone, but rather that there must be something about the inputs, about the world that produces these differences, that is mind-independent. I’ll stop here as I’ve run out of steam and gotta get cracking on dinner. Hopefully, however, this sorting will serve to generate a more refined discussion and to discount certain standard lines of criticism that emerge from the anti-realists.
Larval Subjects . 
November 4, 2009 at 4:14 am
Levi:
Another good post. Some questions: if one holds with the third option you list, how is it that the philosopher bridges this gap between how phenomenon is interpreted (the output), to what is prior to such output, ie, what may, or must, be said about the noumena (input) as such, and how are we obliged to say it? How should we think this split of the epistemic “how” and the ontological “what”?
Secondly, might it not be observed that it is always-already human to discuss what is independent of humanity itself, that the very notion of ontological independence from human existence (which I completely agree with: there are things out there, completely extrinsic to mind, culture, language, etc) is itself only a concern for human beings?
Finally, what of the notion that the truth of being and the being of being are split precisely because of the condition of the “black box,” and it isn’t that beings are dependent or conditioned by dasein, but that the truth of these beings, their nomination, their meaning and their appearance qua beings, is dependent on dasein?
November 4, 2009 at 1:28 pm
Dan can speak for himself but it seems to me….
“There are many issues here but the basic one perhaps is the claim to continuous past entities through time for which little present evidence of identity persists.”
Can be related to…
“Humans have existed for only about 200,000 years”
The presumption being that you homogenised 200,000 years, which introduces essence in the classical sense through the back door. (i.e. what it is to be human vs Nietzsche/Foucault genealogy).
“It seems clear to me that Dan is making rhetoric the measure of reality.”
Au contraire, he is charging you with the privileging of science as the measure of reality in a specific context to draw upon its authority to marshal debate… for me it seems that we lack a given measure to measure, that humanitas is in excess of itself, which means that we are not able to pigeon whole so called “humanist” arguments as there isn’t a given place for it as such.
A lot of this though I do believe is to do with positioning of a new embryonic discipline visa via to that of before, a setting of boundaries, differencing in action.
November 4, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Will,
But this line of argument only gets off the ground if we make rhetoric the measure of reality:
That collapses back into a humanism because rhetoric/discourse only exists in and through the human. Ergo…
Additionally, I think there is a sort of dogmatism to this move. The scientific claim that those entities we refer to as biologically human (I have no gripe with the Nietzsche/Foucault line of analysis but believe it’s beside the point here) is subjected to all sort of rhetorical critique, yet oddly the major concepts of the rhetorical analysis (force, power, etc) are never themselves subjected to a similar critical analysis. Yet these concepts have all appearances of being occult forces or entities that the rhetorical idealist must presuppose for his analysis to get off the ground.
November 4, 2009 at 6:03 pm
Combinatorial number 3, I think it’s a great synthesis and gives me a sense of relief. Am I wrong in believing that the implication is that things exist but you can’t know them in essence because they are simply too complex to bend to conception? Neverthless, the components of the real power to affect, sometimes deeply.
I notice you use lots of cubist works on your blog, I have long admired the philosophical implications of those paintings which rather cruelly withdraw the solid ground of the viewers footing and would surely undermine the realist epistemologist. In cubism it’s as if you get a view inside the black box and watch light projecting off and among the filters within it. I believe this could be better stated.
November 4, 2009 at 6:16 pm
Hi Amarilla,
This is more or less right. Epistemological realism begins from the premise that to know is to represent something in its identity. It is based on the idea of passively gazing or looking at an object. For the epistemological realist we know when our representation is identical to the object out there in the world or when there is a one-to-one mapping between representation and object. Within the framework of my ontology, to know is to provoke differences in an object. For example, we come to know what salt is not by simple gazing at salt, but by burning salt, mixing it with other elements, cooling salt, etc., etc., etc. Like the cubist painting, all of these activities produce repeatable differences. We never know the internal core or identity of an object because we only encounter objects in and through the differences they produce under controlled conditions. For the object-oriented ontologist– and here I think Graham and I are roughly in accord –the key point is that this “withdrawal” of objects is not unique to human/object relations. All objects, whether human or otherwise, only encounter one another differentially and selectively through the differences they evoke in one another in interacting.
November 4, 2009 at 6:50 pm
The word “withdrawal” is difficult for me, it makes it seem as if objects deliberately hide themselves. I like animism as much or more as the next, but doesn’t it seem like the gap in witnessing an object’s properties stems more from the way viewers are locked into a particular perspective or position or sensory filtration at a given moment? Why the word withdrawal?
November 4, 2009 at 8:50 pm
[…] 4, 2009 But my favorite part OF THIS VERY INTERESTING POST comes a bit later. Namely: “Having outlined these two possibilities for epistemology and […]
November 4, 2009 at 8:55 pm
Amarilla, the reason I use “withdrawal” is simply for the historical reason that Heidegger used it, and he’s a good pillar to build on. It doesn’t imply any anthropomorphization as I understand it. (I also agree that you got it right in post #4).
Levi, as for your point #3, it reminds me of one of Latour’s more hilarious passages in We Have Never Been Modern, which I will quote from memory here. He complains roughly that those who favor Hobbes over the more realist Boyle are being simultaneously realist where society is concerned and constructivist where reality is concerned. And then the very Latourian punch line:
“But it is not very probable that the air’s spring has a more political basis than English society itself.”
November 4, 2009 at 11:18 pm
This a clear statement.
There is another(!) recent book by Stengers ‘La Vierge et le neutrino: les scientifiques dans la tourmente’, (2006) that is relevant to this topic.
Amongst other things Stengers asks how we might imagine the coexistence, without hierarchy, of science practitioners and pilgrims of the Virgin Mary…
She also argues that we might renounce a definition of ‘science in general’.
It is claimed that what is common to scientific practices is that they are ‘sometimes capable of saying something new about the world’.
These practices ‘people the world with new beings’ – but never in a straight path according to a predetermined method – but rather by way of ‘incessant hesitatations’.
November 5, 2009 at 12:28 am
I think if Levi does in fact valorize science, whatever it is, it’s towards balance considering all the corners of the world in which fundamentalists and dogmatics of all sorts want nothing to do with discovering anything new. But that’s a different subject.
Thanks for the answer to my question, I wonder if anyone could indulge me and translate “withdrawal” from the Heideggerian idiom into a language with as much traction as that which builds the anti-realist epistemology/realist ontology cocktail set forth above. When you’re good, you’re very good, Levi.
November 5, 2009 at 2:58 am
“The scientific claim that those entities we refer to as biologically human is subjected to all sort of rhetorical critique, yet oddly the major concepts of the rhetorical analysis (force, power, etc) are never themselves subjected to a similar critical analysis.”
Yes, you’ve identified the logical mistake made by strict social constructionists and humanists/anti-realists– it’s a version of the “special pleading” fallacy.
This is a lesser known fallacy wherein one category/thing/object is allowed to operate without having the same rules applied to it that are being applied to every other category/thing/object in question. For example, strict social constructionists and anti-realist humanists accuse realists of valorizing science and cry “No Master Narratives!” when findings from science are invoked to support a viewpoint, while they themselves then go on to posit some other, alternative narrative that gets valorized and does all the heavy lifting in their epistemology (be it politics, the social, the “human”, language, etc.)
November 5, 2009 at 4:58 am
This was a very good post Levi but it leaves me with a question. I understand the distinction between realist and anti-realist epistemologies, but it seems there is room for a middle ground. I am of course referring to those thinkers that figure prominently in my own ongoing work, Schelling and Schopenhauer. They both argue against a naive realist epistemology, they are Kantian in that respect, and yet both also defy Kant when he claims that things-in-themselves are unknowable. Schelling for instance maintains that it is not through knowledge but “intuition” that we know things-in-themselves, and Schopenhauer makes a similar argument in his deduction of reality as Will.
What I am wondering is how exactly such a theory, one that seemingly cuts diagonally across your distinctions, can be categorized? Both thinkers maintain a form of metaphysical realism (it is not the subject that generates reality, but a single underlying principle that is indifferent to the human) and while we do not Know things-in-themselves through the faculty of reason, we still have a form of awareness of the noumenal, almost through a form of phenomenological reduction. I am doubtful that either of them could really be called epistemological realists, so what are we to make of them?
November 5, 2009 at 5:59 am
[…] my last post I argued that object-oriented ontologies tend to advocate an anti-realist epistemology while […]
November 5, 2009 at 6:08 am
Hi Levi,
Above you write:
“Within the framework of my ontology, to know is to provoke differences in an object. For example, we come to know what salt is not by simple gazing at salt, but by burning salt, mixing it with other elements, cooling salt, etc., etc., etc. Like the cubist painting, all of these activities produce repeatable differences.”
So you are moving away from objects to events (to burn, to mix, to cool, etc. like a tree greens, to green, I think is the example of an infinitive verb that Deleuze uses in LoS)?
And you are also inverting Harman’s implicit definition of event in Prince of Networks (objects are events) so there are only events, which are actualised with a given composition of bodies (‘objects’)?
Wouldn’t you then need to include events of human perception and the capacities of objects to be perceived (perceived in strictly human ways, as codified by science and biology), which in turn means that the event to perceive (as an expression of our interacting senses ‘mixing’ with the world) also works to determine the objects perceived?
Otherwise the *measure* you have of an ‘object’, as a catalog of capacities, will be partially determined by the capacities of the ‘bodies’ brought into relation or ‘mixed’ with it. We don’t know what a body can do, yes? However, we can know what events are actualised through it.
November 5, 2009 at 6:23 am
Hi Glen,
I don’t think the term one uses really matters, it’s the concept that’s important. I don’t see myself as moving away from objects, but rather I have always conceived objects as events. You might want to check out this post from December when I first began formulating my variant of object-oriented ontology:
https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2008/12/21/objectile-and-agere/
I do not make a distinction between bodies and events. There are just events. A body is, in my ontology, an event, not something actualized in a body. And, of course, how humans perceive things are dynamic processes as well. After all, humans are objects among other objects. This is the whole point about translation that folks seem to constantly overlook. What you call “perception” I call a process of translation.
November 5, 2009 at 9:20 am
“That collapses back into a humanism because rhetoric/discourse only exists in and through the human. Ergo…”
It would be an accurate critique to be laid at Heidegger, but not so say for Derrida if you highlight the role played by “outside” in his work. Where I think Derrida is weak however is on handling scale (how can you approach “scale” with a measure without measure?), Deleuze and Latour are perhaps better in this respect.
“The problem as I see it with this line of argument (and its other variants) is that it jumps from the obvious and true premise that we must relate to things to know them, to the invalidly derived conclusion that this relation makes things what they are.”
All good, however it is too easy marginalize that they nevertheless still have a discursive emergence. What makes me uneasy, is the holding up of “humanist” examples for flagellation and thereby circumventing discursive emergence (in wider context of a flat ontology ).
November 5, 2009 at 9:38 am
[…] of Derrida November 5, 2009 I’m not much in for apologizing for Derrida, but this strikes me as odd given that Of Grammatology is book wholly about traces, writings, etc., and not […]
November 5, 2009 at 9:38 am
I do think the “realist epistemology” is overly constrained and I wonder if anyone takes it seriously or has ever done so.
We cannot simply measure the delta between the real world of things and our own view of them. We can only believe that this delta is tolerably small and we mostly do so.
It is possible to scale the delta globally and indefinitely. That’s what Plato has done in his Cave Allegory, Descartes with his deceitful God, or the Wachowski brothers in “The Matrix”. Those are rather extreme thought experiments which apply equally to all content. They are interesting but violate Occams razor. As long as we reject serious anomalies and paranormals, reality seems to be approximately flat and consistent – with a subjective mind, qualia etc. as a possible bump.
So the “realist epistemology” which is actually used may be better characterized by the following positions:
1) Reality is anomaly free
2) Applying Occams razor is appropriate
3) The error we make when sensing objects of the external world is bounded and can often be minimized by additional measurements or taking new perspective into account.
1)-3) are not orthogonal but I do think it’s brief enough.
November 6, 2009 at 3:50 am
Levi,
If everything is an event, which I wholeheartedly agree with, then why use the Heideggarian language of objects at all?
As you would know, Deleuze spent most of his philosophical career coming to terms with events (pun intended!).
Forget objects!!
An architecture of events is very similar yet different to the way you have been describing the non-relationality of nested objects, etc. In the post you link to, you still begin with objects and then describe them as acts. Yet an act, even in the common sense understanding, is something distributed across objects; its ontology is not ‘objectified’ *as* an object. An example of this is Latour’s definition of the ‘social’ in RtS.
November 6, 2009 at 4:14 am
Glen,
If you prefer to use the term event that’s fine by me. In part I think the choice of the term “object” is more rhetorical than anything else. Philosophy has been so subject-oriented for the last few hundred years that the term “object” functions to shake us out of our dogmatic slumber. But as I previously said, it’s the concept that matters, not the choice of signifier. As for how common sense understands the term “object”, so much the worse for it. I don’t see that it has any more a sophisticated understanding of the term “event”. Indeed, even in your prior remark you characterized events as something that happen to objects, thereby playing to this problematic folk or common sense ontology. I really don’t find these debates over what words we should use all that interesting. The reason for this is that all of our language is riddled with bad ontological common sense assumptions. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about objects or events or processes, etc. Latour’s concept of “actants” runs into all sorts of similar problems. We have to make due with what we have to express concepts. If you’re going to beat me up on a silly point like my use of the word “object” without paying attention to the conceptual content of that signifier, there’s really not much possibility of discussion. The point is not to focus on what you take to be the connotations of this term, but to focus on the signifiers that get attached to that term giving it its conceptual content. If you wish to use the term “event”, fine by me, but don’t demand I use it as well.
November 8, 2009 at 9:48 pm
Levi, thank you. As usual, I am struck by your clarity and intelligence. Further, I see this post as an act of generosity as it engages my — as you point out correctly — less that clear position. Both because I am a tad sick and because I wanted to watch the developments, I have not responded myself until now. As usual too, I think it is hopeless to try and capture all the vectors of these statements. Still, I will interact a bit with your taxonomy of epistemic and ontological types.
Before I do, I want to try — in a biographic way — to respond to what seem to me mistaken interpolations of my positions. I have some love for science and math and also some talent for these. I am not, in the usual sense, anti-science. I view science like a bee’s hive, as an amazing manufacturing exteriorization of a living instinct which has been codified and delimited by deductive presuppositions. Understood this way, science is a necessary and laudable part of our collective agency, our neg-entropic requirement. This does not mean, however, that science, at least as currently understood, does not have errors that may be as pernicious as cancer, that too alive growth, is to a sustainable vitality. I do not think the ecological disaster humanity has wrought in the period since science is an accident. I also do not think there is not a science for which this result was not incumbent, a science that has less hubris, that is less colonizing, that listens, that wants to understand its limitations more than it wishes to extend its rule. Such a science, I do not think I see in the choices framed by your summary, though I am not saying your summary is faulty.
You start out with “realistic epistemology” and immediately, some of my concerns with the underlying orientations occur. You say RE can be understood as “the position that we have direct access to the objects of the world.” While the following positions alter what they affirm or deny of this picture, the elements largely remain. It is these elements I challenge, and it is this disagreement at the axiomatic level that, in part, makes my objections incomprehensible. Let me take these a bit slowly.
“We” I, of course, use personal pronouns for “self” identification. These shifters are a crux, of course, for the various debates about the subject and its “deconstruction” or “epiphenomenalization” , etc. I am not uninterested in these debates but they do, by and large, touch what I think is important since they are largely undoings of the evident character of subjectivity. While this step may be necessary to think about the contingency of the subject, this in itself affirms nothing. More interesting is the affirmations of the connectedness, the seamless embedding of the “we” in a monism that is, as opposed to one tradition, heterogeneous and dynamic. The”we” does not disappear or simply sublate as a crossed out term but understands itself in a paradoxical wash of forces of which its current debate is one. It is one half of a dualistic portrayal that you participate in which even as it is unintelligible maybe irrevocably necessary to collective activity even as it is never the same once and always illusory.
While — again — I cannot tease this all out at once, this untranscendable character of the category of subjectivity is not Kantian for it is not a faculty or category. It is our ontological situation and as such raises questions about the nominal elimination of the “semiotic” or the “human.” It’s hard to render the meaning of the scare quotes but they imply not a fixed form or definition and not a priority but exactly the dynamic and unfixed positionality: they vary and crossed with every other available difference, indeed only appear concurrently with everything else but they are vectors that can only be eliminated by a transcendental appeal that negates its own ontic situation. So, the “we” is needed but not as either part of a dualism nor as a temporary counter before it is eschewed in a supposed post-humanism.
Opposite, this you have “objects” and oddly this pairing runs all the way through, even in the comment exchanges, and this smacks of dualism. I know — I think I know — that flat ontology is not dualistic since it sees all things as entering into relatednesses of mutual difference without hierarchy in the ontic theory. Therefore people, poems, trees, hypotheses, planets, suns, curse words, etc., have a democratic equality — apparently. None is elevated or demoted in advance though in any given situation one may have, in the instance, more effect. You reject – I think — humanism and the linguistic turn because you see them as prescriptive, and I share that complain but see the ontic character of a living being — not as described or theorized but as extant in some way — as the precondition for knowing being , sense and sense.
I am not arguing for some Hegelian progress of knowing being: like Deleuze, I think that’s a large part of the problem. Indeed, I think that the inadequacy of science to encounter anything more than a subjugated, colonized, and reduced real is currently impossible. Further, it seems to me that the overhead of knowing reality as itself is infinitely large. To mistake the kinds of knowing that populate theory or science as ontological and objective alone, with the freight those words have, is to be in the very dream one tried to avoid.
I am sorry I am out of time.
November 9, 2009 at 4:44 am
Dan,
Given your remarks I am unclear as to whether or not you actually read this post, since it rejects realist epistemology. Oddly however, you seem to be attributing a realist epistemology to me.
November 9, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Levi,
I read it twice. I understood too, and long before, that you reject realist epistemology. Most of what I began, but did not finish posting, was a reaction to the terms and picture which pass through these various positions and not with anyone’s affirmation or denial of their global truth or validity. Thus, I may still be allowed to interpret your position as apophatically saving vocabularies and structures even as you reject their conclusions. While this was not the point of my last and is therefore underdeveloped, to me your conclusion is still vested in exactly that picture with which I do not agree.
“while the object-oriented ontologist readily acknowledges the limitations of our knowledge, the fact that we must engage in inquiry to know any particular type of object, and so on, the realist ontologist rejects the thesis that the differences discovered in and through inquiry belong to the domain of outputs alone. Rather, the realist ontologist begins from the premise that these differences cannot be restricted to outputs alone, but rather that there must be something about the inputs, about the world that produces these differences, that is mind-independent.”
It should have been clear by now that while I think I understand what you mean by “type of object,” “input,” “output,” and “mind independence,” I do not find these terms unproblematic. Some year perhaps I will have adequate time to make the long journey from what I think to what you do in an adequately formal and complete way. For now, I will just cop, again, to the inadequacy of my response.
November 9, 2009 at 8:16 pm
Hi Dan,
Good to know that you understand my position, however, I’m still not clear what your argument is against it. You write:
While I share your view that modern technology has impacted our world in many pernicious ways, I am unclear as to how your remarks here are an argument against a realist ontology of objects. If I am following your criticism correctly, you are rejecting realist ontologies based on the pernicious impact technology has on our world. However, I am unclear as to how such an argument undermines the reality of the entities that science investigates. Remember, the issue was not with whether or not technological praxis is a good thing or a bad thing for human beings or the world. The issue was about the ontological, not ethical and political, status of these entities. The line of argument present here would be similar to rejecting the existence of serial killers because we find their actions to be morally reprehensible. That is not an argument or, at any rate, a good argument.
You go on to write:
As I hinted in my last response, I do not start out with realist epistemology. While I indeed define realist ontology in the post I go on to criticize it and defend anti-realist epistemology as the position I advocate. However, while I more or less advocate a version of anti-realist epistemology I also hold that our inquiry into the world cannot be rendered coherent without adopting a realist ontology. Take a very mundane example such as going to the doctor’s. In order for your trip to the doctor to be coherent and for your submission to his investigation of your body to be coherent, you must work on the premise that there is some sort of mind-independent, language-independent, culture-independent causal mechanism that produces what you’re ailing from. While it is indeed the case that our medical theories can be riddled with errors, filled with ideology, contaminated by power, and so on, the condition under which we’re able to evaluate their erroneous, ideological nature, and contamination by power depends on the premise that there independent mechanisms that produce our symptoms. In your day to day practice this is what all of us, I believe, advocate. It’s only when we put on our theory hats that we begin to forget this very simple premise.
Let me give another example from within the framework of more contemporary continental thought. If the work of Levinas is such a crucial and revolutionary moment for realist object-oriented ontology, then this is because, in his meditations on our encounter with the Other, he unearthed a “special case” that cannot be reduced to a correlation or “phenomena” for a mind or a sense-bestowing intuition. Levinas’ Other is neither an effect of language, a subordination to categories, nor a phenomenological phenomenon given to intuition. Rather it exceeds all of these things. However, we find that this excess, which should not survive the phenomenological reduction as articulated by Husserl, cannot be eradicated from our phenomenology. The problem with Levinas lies in his supposition that somehow this excess that exceeds all intuition or givenness and all categorizations or discursive articulation is unique to persons rather than true of all object-relations. If Levinas is so important from a realist standpoint then this is because his account of the Other explodes the supposition that our philosophical reflection can be reduced to talk of the given, sensibility, categories of mind, or the manner in which signs structure the world. It is only a short step from here to an object-oriented ontology that generalizes this thesis along realist lines.
You write:
This is a line that often comes up as a criticism of object-oriented ontology and one I find deeply perplexing. The supposition seems to be that because object-oriented ontology refuses to place humans at the center of being that somehow the human, subjectivity, etc., is being rejected or crossed out. Yet this criticism doesn’t follow as the human is one type of object among others. We can analyze subjectivity all we like within object-oriented ontology. The only thing refused is the thesis that everything else is dependent on the human. If you are truly concerned with the ecological issues you raise in your first paragraph I would suggest that you’re going to have a very difficult time doing these issues justice if you continue to place the human at the center of being.
November 9, 2009 at 11:26 pm
Levi,
I really hate doing a partial posterior job in regard to your positions. I think my posting often do not serve me well, much less you. I have about a half hour before I have to meet another pack of disappointed undergrads who feel I inadequately appreciate their writing, so I will necessarily blow it again, and I am not sure I honor you by another cartoon salvo on my part. Still, I will try to make a couple distinctions as per your quotations. I ask to be forgiven in advance. OK so too quickly:
“The issue was about the ontological, not ethical and political, status of these entities.”
For me, everything is real but affects vary with “proximity” and “applicable force,” (more on these later if you like). To me, then, taking about the real in the abstract is not unreal but such speech meters primarily only the forces of the model it subtends or understands. I would call this something like attention and competence (while these personify I think the processes can be thought of inhumanly). If ontic difference is not a quantity but a force its “reception” — the force it delivers in a given instance — reflects upon the intersection of those other differences that in that instance interact to produce a moire (my substitute for a thing or event). So, while science produces real consequences — I recognize no exception — it does so within a very constrained attention which re-produces more than it “listens.” ( to move fast I insert all these metaphors — I hope you can tease something out of them). Therefore to make science a central model is to validate one impoverished if necessary mode of ontological interaction.
You say ” while I more or less advocate a version of anti-realist epistemology I also hold that our inquiry into the world cannot be rendered coherent without adopting a realist ontology, ” I know you have spun this elsewhere but for me a realistic epistemology is inseparable from an anti-realist epistemology as part of its necessary repertoire. They are not separable since knowing and information are intrinsic to the being and becoming.
You say, ” Object-oriented ontology refuses to place humans at the center of being that somehow the human, subjectivity, etc., is being rejected or crossed out, ” This statement seems to mean that this is a discretionary philosophical position as if “humanism” or “vitality” in the abstract were being made axiomatic. I do not believe that. I believe I am a necessary prerequisite to my knowing and that no delusion of knowing apart ever escapes this ontic reality — as opposed to an ontology or onticology. This “new solipsism” however is not centered on me, unreal, closed, nor does it have any of the limitations of dualistic versions: it only claims that “my” reality is a given. I am out of time again but please do not interpret this to me any-commitment to a traditional I or even a pomo one – this “I” is a contingent moire of dynamic instability and context sensitivity that is unseparated from a monist real.
So I am out. See too much too fast — a botch.
November 9, 2009 at 11:59 pm
Dan,
I’m in a hurry myself, so hopefully a few brief remarks will suffice. I suppose that what I find perplexing about your criticisms is that I agree!!! In other words, I don’t see how these charges can be leveled against the ontological framework I am proposing. As I have said, the single most important principle of onticology is that of translation or the thesis that all objects translate one another. This principle immediately forbids any representational realist on my part where epistemological questions are concerned. Now think about what takes place in any act of translation in the ordinary sense. For example, the translation of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake from English to French. You can’t do it. When you translate Finnegan’s Wake you not only lose much of the original work, but you produce a new work alongside the original that has very different resonances. Scientific inquiry is itself a form of translation. As a translation it loses a good deal in its objects and adds other things besides. What it cannot abide, however, is the view that there is no a mechanism that produces the differences investigated in the experimental setting.
Second, you seem to suggest that somehow I am excluding or rejecting the thesis that subjects are objects or actors as well. But this isn’t the case at all. Subjects are real as well, subjectivity is real as well. These are entities within the world. Here I get the sense that I am far more ontologically pluralistic than you are. I advocate the position that stars and humans (and many things besides) are real entities in the world, whereas you seem to wish to deny these things. Nothing in my position eliminates the possibility of you making the judgments about science you make. However, it does reject the possibility of those normative judgments legislating what is and is not. I think this is a very straightforward and simple point.
November 11, 2009 at 5:05 am
[…] I wanted to draw attention to a fallacy that Anodyne Lite mentions in relation to one of my recent posts on epistemology and realism. The “special pleading fallacy” roughly consists in submitting something else to a […]
November 17, 2009 at 5:13 am
[…] reference to our actual practice should clue us in to the point that Bhaskar’s argument for ontological realism is transcendental. It will be recalled that, roughly and crudely, a transcendental argument […]
November 19, 2009 at 7:54 am
heidegger trying to answer the question of being starts by saying that the ontological grounds for being is in the being of beings. there is no substance that can be traced through time to decipher the core naturality of being. this is almost juxtapositioning Kant’s argument of apriori awareness into a self-inclusive sentientality. then, he says that he is going to unveil the several bare “actions” of being by surrounding the question of being somewhere in between strict historical categories and playfulness. there really is no other way to detect the essence of being than in nature, and he does use examples such as the ripening of fruit. Daesin almost seems like hes putting a half self-referent and half nature observer into an ambiguous think tank sphere. By taking it into a pre-sentientality, heidegger almost prefigures realist ontology. the only problem is that some sort of primitive panpsychism has to be advocated. then, if materialism is advocated with it, the outcome has to either be hard determinism or hard panpyschism. the end of heidegger for me is really hard determinism. starts out as phenomena, ends as phenomena. kants categories are malleable within the subjective physio-chemico mind. over time, the distinctions wont be as evident, such as in two dogmas of empiricism by quine.
November 19, 2009 at 8:38 am
“changes cannot be shown to be continuous or governed by one variable.”
compared to the history that we have from our interpretations of ancient, medieval 19th century history, it is easy to say that we do have some sort of “variable”. thinking in this way is already starting to refer to a form of thinking that was only solidified by ancient greeks and indians. obviously there were homo-* before this. we can then say that having that variable is objectivity and absoluteness. mathematics is ontology if that is the case. whether or not there is strict continuity does not matter much if the time from when math was incepted to now is not an abyss. not every single particle, object, rabbit, human is carrying the idea of somewhere around darwinian evolution to you. to know the global variable is to know the origin of existence, and it also to know the algorithm of existence. i’m pretty sure it would take all of the energy in the universe to know the movement of the universe.
December 11, 2009 at 8:51 pm
I have greatly enjoyed the post and subsequent comments. I am writing a dissertation on Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology of givenness, in which he claims a third reduction, beyond that of Husserl’s object and Heidegger’s Being. He posits a saturated phenomenon that exceeds intention, a surplus of intuition rather than one of meaning. This move breaks the noetico-noematic correlation, dissipates the ego, and decenters the self. His claim is that any “self” has been given solely by the phenomenon. Indeed, the broken “subject” simply receives that which the phenomenon gives.
Thinking about it in terms of realist/anti-realist epistemologies and ontologies, this seems to be a move toward some form of phenomenological realism, both epistemologically and ontologically. I myself hold to some ontological hybrid (while some objects “exist” independently of the black box output, some seem to come into existence only because of the constitutional/constructivist work of the black box itself) and a thoroughly anti-realist epistemology.
Ricoeur’s psychotherapeutic critique of Levinas seems relevant here, that an encounter with the truly Other prompts one to discover with one own “self” an otherness that Otherwise remains hidden from (or perhaps withdraws from) consciousness. That Otherness crosses the (phallic) bar of (un)consciousness only through Lacanian metaphoricity, and I’m constructing a schema by which to examine the structure of Marion’s argument in light of Hayden White’s poststructuralist treament of tropes (particularly metaphor, metonym, synedoche, and irony).
Some tropical structures are characterized by the sliding signifiers under the bar and thus remain hidden (dispersive tropes); others function to cross the bar and reveal analogically what had been hidden (integrative tropes).
No single trope provides a better epistemology than any other (gosh I’m taking a lot of shortcuts here; I hope I’m making sense). In some ways of knowing, some things are unknowable (they deceive through misdirection; they never cross the bar), in other ways of knowing, things are known through the noetico-noematic correlation (whether emphasizing either subjective or objective knowledge; am I saying here that there is no bar, as signified and signifier are bound together naively? I hadn’t thought about my argument in this way before), in other ways of knowing, some things are known analogically (via the crossing of the bar). Ricoers’ Same, Other, and Analogue inform me here.
Okay, I have no real point here. I just wanted to jump into this great discussion, which seems to have relevance for my own work. Maybe I should start my own blog to help me flesh out my ideas.