A central aim of Bhaskar’s A Realist Theory of Science is to diagnose what he refers to as the “epistemic fallacy”. In a nutshell, the epistemic fallacy consists in the thesis, often implicit, that ontological questions can be reduced to epistemological questions. The idea here is that ontology can be entirely resolved or evaporated into an inquiry into our access to beings, such that there are no independent questions of ontology. As an example of such a maneuver, take Humean empiricism. As good Humean empiricists, we “bracket” all questions of the world independent of our mind and simply attend to our atomistic impressions (what we would today call “sensations”), and how the mind links or associates these punctiform impression in the course of its experience to generate lawlike statements about cause and effect relations.
Note the nature of Hume’s gesture: Here we restrict ourselves entirely to our atomistic sensations and what can be derived from our sensations. Questions about whether or not our sensations are produced by entities independent of our mind are entirely abandoned as “dogmatic” because we do not have access to the entities that might cause or produce these sensations, but only the sensations themselves. Consequently, the order of knowledge must be restricted to what is given in sensation. Hume’s epistemology is thus based on a thesis about immanence or immediacy. Insofar as our minds possess and immediate relation to our sensations, we are epistemically warranted in appealing to sensations as grounds for our claims to knowledge. We are not however, warranted in appealing to objects, powers, selves, or causes because we do not have sensations of these things. Consequently, all of these ontological claims must be reformulated in epistemological terms premised on our access to being. If we wish to talk of objects, then we must show how the mind “builds up” objects out of atomistic impressions and associations. If we wish to speak of powers, then we must show how the mind builds up powers out of atomistic impressions and associations. If we wish to speak of causality we must show how the mind builds up an idea of cause and effect relations through impressions and associations. If we wish to speak of selves and other minds we have to show how mind builds up our sense of self and other minds out of impressions and cause and effect associations.
At the level of the form of the argument, not the content, nearly every philosophical orientation since the 18th century has made the Humean move. While the content of these positions differ, the form of the argument remains roughly the same. That is, we perpetually see a strategy of attempting to dissolve ontological questions through epistemological questions. This move always proceeds in two steps: First, one aspect of our experience is claimed to be immanent or immediate. Second, the furniture of our ontology is then dissolved through an analysis of those entities with reference to this plane of immanence or immediacy. The immediate can be impressions as in the case of Hume, the transcendental structure of mind as in the case of Kant, the intentions of pure consciousness as in the case of Husserl, or language as in the case of late Wittgenstein or the thought of Derrida. Other examples could be evoked. In each case, the gesture consists in showing how the being of beings can be thoroughly accounted for in terms of our access through this immanence or immediacy. The point is that we no longer treat the entities in our ontology as existing independently of this field of immanence or immediacy, but now see them as products of these modes of access. Whether the world is really like this independent of our chosen regime of construction is a question that is abandoned as dogmatic.
read on!
If Bhaskar refers to this form of argument as the “epistemic fallacy”, then this is because, in his view, it renders our actual engagement with the world incoherent. In other words, for Bhaskar we are unable to make sense of our actual praxis in seeking knowledge if we dissolve questions of ontology into questions of epistemology. I’ll get to how this might be so in a moment, but the first point to note is that Bhaskar’s point is not that epistemology as such is a fallacy. In short, Bhaskar is not claiming that we should abandon epistemological questions or questions of how we know. Indeed, Bhaskar pitches A Realist Theory of Science as an epistemological inquiry. As he writes in the first chapter,
Any adequate philosophy of science must find a way of grappling with this central paradox of science: that men in their social activity produce knowledge which is a social product much like any other, which is no more independent of its production and the men who produce it than motor cars, armchairs or books, which has its own craftsmen, technicians, publicists, standards and skills and which is no less subject to change than any other commodity. This is one side of ‘knowledge’. The other is that knowledge is ‘of‘ things which are not produced by men at all: the specific gravity of mercury, the process of electrolysis, the mechanism of light propogation. None of these ‘objects of knowledge’ depend on human activity. If men ceased to exist sound would continue to travel and heavy bodies fall to the earth in exactly the same way, though ex hypothesi there would be no-one to know it. Let us call these, in an unavoidable technical neologism, the intransitive objects of knowledge. The transitive objects of knowledge are Aristotlean material causes. (21)
The central nut that Bhaskar’s theory of knowledge seeks to crack is how knowledge can be socially produced (the transitive dimension), while nonetheless delivering us to intransitive or human independent objects that exist in their own right. It is the second of these claims, of course, that is controversial within the framework of contemporary philosophy. While the reigning anti-realisms are more than happy to argue that our knowledge is socially or mentally constructed, the thesis that the objects, things, or entities that our social or mental constructions deliver to us are real or intransitive to that knowledge, that they are independent of the social and the mental, is understood to be the height of dogmatism. Here it is important to note that anti-realisms are not being accused of Berkeleyian idealism or the thesis that mind creates reality without remainder. Most anti-realists are more than happy to hold, as did Kant, that there is a mind-independent reality. Rather, the anti-realist thesis tends to be more nuanced. The point is not that this mind-independent reality doesn’t exist, but that we can never have any access to that reality. Rather, we must be content with treating ontological claims in terms of what being is for-us, remaining agnostic as to whether reality itself is “like this” independent of us or our social practices.
Bhaskar’s thesis is that when epistemology makes this move our practice becomes incoherent. If the epistemic fallacy is, according to Bhaskar, a fallacy, then this is because 1) questions of ontology cannot be reduced to questions of access or epistemology, and 2) we cannot dispense with a realist ontology if our theory of knowledge is to be coherent. The fallacy then consists in the thesis, often implicit or assumed, that ontology can be dissolved in epistemology. Not only will Bhaskar argue that daily practice and science become incoherent under this model, but he will also argue that this thesis undermines the possibility of emancipatory politics.
The 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 proceeds by asking “under what conditions is such and such a particular practice or form of cognition possible?” Thus, for example, Habermas’ theory of communicative action asks “what does communication presuppose in order to be possible?” and proceeds to deduce the norms governing communication between two or more people. Similarly Kant, accepting Hume’s arguments that we cannot ground causality based on sensation and association, notes that we nonetheless do make causal judgments, and therefore proceeds to inquire as to the conditions under which these judgments are possible. If these judgments can’t be grounded in sensation, yet we nonetheless make them, then it follows, according to Kant, that we must have an a priori category in the mind that the mind imposes on the flux of sensation, contributing the judgment of necessity. Generally transcendental arguments take the form of tracing conditions of possibility back to mind or society. The Kantian revolution consisted in analyzing our cognition of objects, rather than objects themselves. The price he paid was that we must now reject knowledge of things-in-themselves as we have duly restricted ourselves to our cognition of objects. In other words, we can never know whether things-in-themselves possess these causal relations.
Now what makes Bhaskar’s transcendental argument so delicious is that he inverts the nature of transcendental arguments. Where transcendental arguments tend to trace the transcendental conditions of possibility back to mind or some variant of the social and proceed based on the question “what must our cognition be like for this sort of experience to be possible?” or “what must language be like for this form of experience to be possible?” or “what must society be like for this form of experience to be possible?”, Bhaskar instead asks “what must the world be like for science and our daily practice to be possible?”
If we cannot imagine a science without transitive objects, can we imagine a science without intransitive ones? If the answer to this question is ‘no’, then a philosophical study of the intransitive objects of science becomes possible. The answer to the transcendental question ‘what must the world be like for science to be possible?’ deserves the name ontology. And in showing that the objects of science are intransitive (in this sense) and of a certain kind, viz. structures not events, it is my intention to furnish the new philosophy of science with an ontology. The parallel question ‘what must science be like to give us knowledge of parallel question ‘what must science be like to give us knowledge of intransitive objects (of this kind)?’ is not a petitio principii of the ontological question, because the intelligibility of the scientific activities of perception and experimentation already entails the intransivity of the objects to which, in the course of these activities, access is obtained. That is to say, the philosophical position developed in this study does not depend upon an arbitrary definition of science, but rather upon the intelligibility of certain universally recognized, if inadequately analysed, scientific activities. In this respect I am taking it to be the function of philosophy to analyse concepts which are ‘already given’ but ‘as confused’. (23 – 24)
We will recall that “intransitive objects” are objects that are mind-independent and that would continue to do what they do regardless of whether or not humans existed. By contrast, the transitive consists of those changing theories, social conditions, language, categories, and so on. That is, all the elements that belong to the domain of how knowledge is produced. Here it is important to note that ontology does not tell us what particular objects exist and what their powers are. This is a question for actual inquiry that requires hard and laborious work. In other words, we can’t know before we know and we have to engage in the process of inquiry to reach these intransitive objects. Moreover, we can be mistaken about the nature of these objects. Ontology, then, simply outlines the most general features the world and objects must possess for our practices to be intelligible.
But why must we presuppose the mere existence of these mind and society-independent intransitive objects to render our practices intelligible. As chance would have it, a discussion with a good friend and colleague (a rhetorician) today provided me with a wonderful example of just why the epistemic fallacy is a fallacy. In a discussion about the differences between realist ontology, realist epistemology (which I don’t advocate), and anti-realist epistemology and ontology, my friend made the offhand remark that, “I just figure that perception is the best we have so we’re constrained to work within this framework.” In articulating this thesis my friend had articulated a very basic anti-realist claim. If we don’t like the term “perception” (content), we can nonetheless preserve the form of the argument, plugging language, society, social forces, power, mind, sensations, intentionality, etc., into the place of “perception”. The point is that my friend, in making this offhand statement, was making the claim that we can only work with what is given, immediate, immanent, or what we have access to. For him this was perception. In a manner analogous to Hume, my friend was proposing that all claims about beings are really claims about perception (not the things themselves).
Now, it has been my experience that for whatever reason us Continentalists tend to get squirrely or really nervous whenever there is talk about science. Somehow all our critical acumen is directed at showing how science is dogmatic, yet we don’t interrogate our own key concepts. In this connection, it occurred to me that perhaps Bhaskar’s argument would get more traction with my friend if, rather than talking about things like the atomic properties of hydrogen, I instead discussed something closer to home in the world of the humanities and social sciences: psychoanalysis. Wouldn’t it be delicious, I thought, if it could be shown that Lacanian psychoanalytic practice could be shown to presuppose a realist ontology? So where, and how, can Lacanian psychoanalytic practice be shown to presuppose a realist ontology?
To answer this question we must look at what actually goes on not in the theory, but in the clinic. Here my focus will be on neurosis as this is what is most commonly treated in the clinic. To understand the realist underpinnings of Lacanian psychoanalysis we must, in a thumbnail way, have a sense of 1) the Lacanian theory of subjectivity, and 2) the position of the analyst and how the analyst comports himself in the clinic. Within the framework of Lacanian theory, the subject is essentially relational. This is one of the reasons that Lacan was so interested in topology, and, in particular, topological figures like the moebius strip, the torus, the cross cap, the Klein bottle, and so on. Where our standard notion of mind tends to conceive it on the model of a sphere with a clearly defined inside and outside, topological structures like the moebius strip, the Klein bottle, the cross-cap, and the torus do not have a clearly defined inside and outside. They appear to distinguish inside and outside, yet what we find when we investigate these structures is that the surface is continuous.
These topological meditations on the structure of the subject are not idle musings, but have real clinical consequences in terms of how treatment is conducted. If the subject is, for example, like a moebius strip, this is because the relationship between the “I” and the “Other” (and no, I’m not here confusing the “I” and the subject) is a continuous surface, not a relationship between what is “inside” a sphere and what is “outside” a sphere. Just as when we draw a line along the surface of a moebius strip (make one for yourself!) we find that, much to our surprise, the line appears on both sides of the surface, the relationship between the subject and the Other is not one of two separate spheres, but is rather a continuous surface. The manner in which the subject relates to the Other is itself a dimension of the subject, not something Other than the subject. Put otherwise, we can say that the subject constructs its Other as a sort of formal schema of how it relates to all others so as to constitute itself as a subject. However, here’s the kicker: Just as when we initially view a moebius strip we think it has two sides (not one), when we relate to others we genuinely think they are others and don’t recognize the manner in which we construct our others or our “formal schema of the Other”. This construction of the Other is what Lacan calls “fundamental fantasy”.
Here I am simplifying tremendously, but it is this strange topology that is the focus of the Lacanian clinic. It could be said that the Lacanian clinic practices the difference between the Other and the Other. What do I mean by this? The Lacanian hypothesis is that the symptom of the patient, the reason the patient suffers, is because of the Other that she constructs. As Lacan will put it in the middle work, the neurotic subject converts the desire of the Other into a specific demand or request. Whenever we hear the term “desire” we should think “opacity” or “enigma”. In Seminar 10, L’angoisse, Lacan gives the disturbing image of standing before a praying mantis without knowing whether or not you’re wearing the mask of a male praying mantis or a female praying mantis. The female praying mantis, of course, devours her mate. This state of non-knowledge is– and here I simplify again –for Lacan, desire. It is the anxiety of being before an Other without knowing that characterizes desire. As Lacan will say, neurosis is characterized by perpetual doubt. What is it that that Other wants. We construct our own desire around this question.
The neurotic strategy for dealing with this anxiety provoking state with respect to the Other’s desire is to maneuver herself so as to convert that enigma and opacity into a specific demand. A demand has content, whereas desire is perpetually withdrawn or enigmatic. This gives us a sense of just what the Lacanian subject is. The Lacanian subject is a sort of strategy for evoking demands. The obsessional neurotic, for example, might be extremely attentive to all the wants of his partner. He listens to what sort of housework she wants, how she wants it in bed, what sorts of gifts she wants, how she wants to be talked to, what his bosses want, how forms are to be filled out, etc., etc., etc.. In relation to these demands he tries to perfectly fulfill each and every demand, completely satisfying them and always being attentive in every way. Indeed, this satisfaction of demand can go so far that it becomes mockery. For example, the partner says, one time, in the bedroom “no, do it this way!” with some particular touch or kiss, and suddenly that is all the obsessional does in bed.
Two things are going on here. First, by satisfying each and every demand and doing so before they are even requested, the obsessional strives to negate or dissolve the desire (enigma, opacity) of the Other. The idea is that you can get rid of the trauma producing enigma of the Other if you only satisfy all their demands. Second, by over-satisfying the demands of the Other, the obsessional insures that he will not be an object of the Other’s jouissance or enjoyment. This sounds counter-intuitive. Why wouldn’t someone want to be the object of an-other’s enjoyment? To understand this, we should think in terms of “being enjoyed by an-other at our own expense” as in cases where we feel a boss is just using us as their tool with no regard for who we are or when someone else mocks us. What terrifies the neurotic is being this type of object of enjoyment. And when the neurotic is enjoyed by an-other this “at my expense” is how they experience this jouissance of the Other. They experience themselves as fading or disappearing as a subject. In this respect, the obsessional’s behavior can be interpreted as a way of negating of defending against the Other’s jouissance because, in that jouissance, they disappear as a subject.
The case is similar with hysteria. Where the obsessional strives to satisfy all the demands of the Other and to convert desire (enigma, opacity) into demand, the hysteric strives to evoke the Other’s demand (“do this!”) so as to frustrate it. In frustrating the Other’s demand the hysteric strives to evoke the Other’s desire. In other words, where the obsessional strives to negate the Other altogether by reducing them to a specific set of demands that he can then parodically fulfill, the hysteric’s strategy for negating the Other’s desire is to turn himself into an enigma for the Other or an object of desire that perpetually evokes the Other’s demand, seeming to want that demand, while frustrating that demand leaving the Other wondering “what is it he wants?” He might turn forms in late at the office, for example. He might adopt an enigmatic and elliptical style of writing. He might give all the signs that he sexually desires the Other only to swerve and feign indifference when the Other shows interest. In this way, the hysteric manages the desire of the Other by himself becoming an opaque enigma.
The key point is that the neurotic himself does not know that he is the one orchestrating this drama. Just as we first think the moebius strip has two sides, the subject thinks that it is the Other that is making all these demands, that it is the Other who mysteriously always ends up desiring him, and so on. He doesn’t recognize his role in orchestrating these intersubjective dramas.
Enter the analyst. By now descriptions of the Lacanian analyst are famous. She doesn’t speak much. She often simply repeats what the patient says or says “hmmm” in a high pitched voice. When she does speak she does so in riddles worthy of the Oracle at Delphi or Jesus. The analyst is opaque and enigmatic. “Why don’t you just give me the answer!” the patient cries out? “Why won’t you even talk to me about how your day was or your latest article?” In the initial sessions of analysis the posture of the analyst can be extremely anxiety provoking. It’s like being thrust into a world without coordinates. And the coordinates absent here are the coordinates of the Other or our standard others.
This posture can seem extremely cruel. “I want a therapist that will talk to me, that will comfort me, that will give me advice, tell me what my problem is, or lay down the law!” However, there is a point to this “cruelty”. What the analyst practices through his practice is the difference between the Other and the Other. Here we are finally in a position understand just what it might mean to practice the difference between the Other and the Other. On the one hand we have the Other as the construction of the subject or that moebius strip that organizes the patient’s self-other relations. On the other hand, we have the Other as that enigma that perpetually withdraws from our ability to capture them in the net of demands, the Other as opacity and enigma, the Other as irreducible to any specific demand the Other might make. In occupying the position of enigma and opacity— and this is what is above all important in the position of the analyst —the analyst gradually draws the attention of the analysand or patient to the differend between the Other that he constructs and the Other as independent of that construction. In the dawning awareness of this differend, in the experience of the fact that he perpetually attributes all sorts of thoughts and dispositions to his analyst without the analyst behaving in any way that could merit or support the attribution of these attitudes towards him, the analysand gradually becomes aware of how he has constructed the Other. Put otherwise, the analysand comes to see how the desire he was attributing to the Other was his own desire all along. No longer does he see himself as the innocent victim of the Other’s demands and desires, but he now sees himself as the origin of these desires, such that he is now in a position to choose those desires or adopt other desires. For example, where before he saw the demand to be a doctor as issuing from his parents, he now sees that as his own reflection in a mirror that he encountered without recognizing that image as him or the result of his construction. This is a central part of what it means to traverse the fantasy.
So, we might ask, where is the ontological realism in all of this? Why, we might ask, is this practice only intelligible on the grounds of an ontological realism? If, as my good friend suggested, we only went on perception, the practice of analysis would be completely incoherent? Why? Because the practice of drawing the differend between the Other and the Other is dependent the premise of something that we do not have access to through perception. Rather the Other would be that construction. This, for Lacan, is the position of the psychotic, where the Other does not exist for the “subject”. For in the case of the psychotic, the “intersubjective” relation is defined not by the perpetual doubt that characterizes neurosis, but in certainty. The psychotic holds that the Other is nothing but the Other that they know and that he has immediate access to that Other. By contrast, the Other upon which the position of the analyst is premised is an ontological Other, or an Other that is independent of any of our constructions or fantasies. It is an Other that is not exhausted by our access to this Other, but rather an Other that can only be thought in ontological terms as what is in excess of any perception, talk, or idea we might have of this Other. Here we have a case of an entity or entities that must be presupposed in order to render a practice intelligible or coherent in transcendental terms. The question is not strictly one of access, but of what the world must be like– what intersubjective relations must be like –in order to be rendered intelligible. This discovery is not isolated to Lacan. It was discovered with respect to Husserl in the case of both objects and others, again in the case of Levinas with respect to the Other, and yet again in Jean-Luc Marion with respect to existence. In each case, epistemology passes over into ontology, discovering a limit where the question “how do we cognize objects” encounters an internal limit where the question can no longer be exhausted by epistemology, but where we must pass over into genuine ontology.
Larval Subjects . 
November 17, 2009 at 6:05 am
Your argument is interesting, but in my opinion I don’t find it entirely convincing, for basically one simple reason.
The beginning of your post does a decent job of outlining the difference between epistemology and ontology. Very well… You talk about how epistemology is premised on “bracketing” entities as they are and privileging the sensible realm of *how we perceive things*, in other words, epistemology is a philosophy of access. On the other hand, ontology, etc., etc.
What I don’t understand is this: you go from talking about the difference between ontology and epistemology (let’s call this “axis 1”), and then after your very large quote by Bhaskar, you switch to talking about the difference between anti-realism and realism (let’s call this “axis 2”). In other words, it seems to me that your argument makes sense only if we agree with this clever substitution of axis 1 for axis 2. Note that the first reference to ‘realism’ (occurring as ‘anti-realism’) doesn’t appear until immediately after you cite Bhaskar.
Maybe I’m stupid or missing something, but how can you make this jump from axis 1 (epistemology—ontology) to axis 2 (anti-realism—realism), without providing any argument for why we should believe that these two axes of terms are interchangeable? I’ll grant you the fact that your reference to Hume implies that you’re talking about a specifically anti-realist form of empiricist epistemology (as opposed to naïve epistemological realism, which you’ve gone into quite some depth about in your past posts), but that doesn’t solve the problem of conflating the latter of the two terms (ontology and realism) in your set of binary oppositions, which seems a bit deceptive in my opinion.
Now, obviously, you have partisan commitments to ontological realism, but unless you’ve convinced yourself so thoroughly of just how correct you are that you don’t even need to provide an argument for why ontology and realism are interchangeable, one would at least expect some mention of why you are substituting these terms for one another. I mean, it seems pretty clear to me that there are a lot of different forms of ontology that *aren’t* realist, as I’m sure you’re well aware of.
Ordinarily, such a substitution might not be entirely problematic if the argument just ended there—we could then just presuppose that you were extending an argument you were making from a previous post about how ontology, presupposed as ontological realism, offers a more powerful, coherent argument than does epistemological anti-realism, but that isn’t the point of this post. The point of this post seems to be that *psychoanalysis presupposes a realist ontology*, which is another thing entirely:
Of course, this isn’t exactly what the title of your post suggests (“A Psychoanalytic Defense of Realism” is different than “A Realist Interpretation of Psychoanalysis”), but I’ll put that aside for now. The problem seems to be that you’re extending your conflation of axis 1 and axis 2 towards a second argument about psychoanalysis presupposing a realist ontology. But, while you’ve provided a convincing argument for why psychoanalysis is premised on certain fundamental ontological issues, this hardly equates to *realism*.
Your last paragraph purports to answer the question of where the “realism” is in all of this, but it seems that you’ve only restated what is *ontological* about your argument, not what is *realist*. Allow me to quote you:
That psychoanalysis is not premised on epistemology/perception/cognition/”access” is *not tantamount to psychoanalysis being realist*. You can’t simply jump from axis 1 to axis 2 like you’ve done.
November 17, 2009 at 6:22 am
[…] has recently posted an argument on psychoanalysis and ontological realism, which I felt was worth responding to, if […]
November 17, 2009 at 7:23 am
BryanK,
It’s difficult to have this discussion with you because, as you’ve admitted elsewhere, you’re not really familiar with the major texts of object-oriented thought:
Absent an engagement with Harman’s work, Latour’s work, or Whitehead’s work, there’s no common vocabulary within which a discussion might occur. You make the claim that OOO doesn’t provide arguments or explanations, yet how can you know this without being familiar with that work? This is important because OOO makes a number of counter-intuitive claims about what objects are that don’t mesh with common sense assumptions about objects. I’ll try anyway. In this post, you suggest that I start out by talking about the difference between epistemology and ontology and then engage in a “trick” that replaces that distinction with the distinction between realism and anti-realism. I am not sure I understand this criticism. The gesture that seeks to dissolve ontological questions or questions about what beings are regardless of whether or not we know them is anti-realism. Anti-realism is just the position that mind, language, social forces, or power constructs objects or the world and that what the world might be like independent of humans is a question that is off-limits or indicates a fall into dogmatism. Anti-realism thus restricts us to questions of our access to beings and brackets or suspends any questions of what those beings might be independent of that access.
Now why do I claim that the intelligibility of psychoanalytic practice in the treatment of neurotics requires a realist ontology? The point is simple here. In order for psychoanalysis to get off the ground it must presuppose a real Other or that persons are real Others in order to draw the distinction between the constructed Other of the fundamental fantasy and all the others that we encounter in day to day life. In other words, psychoanalysis must posit an Other independent of the Other to whom we have access. In this it is making an ontological claim, and a realist on at that, not an epistemological claim. If psychoanalytic practice were to begin with the premise that all there is is language, perception, access, etc., then the very practice of distinguishing between the fantasy Other and the abyss of the Other would be completely incoherent. Rather, it requires the thesis that the real Other is always in excess of any constructions we might make of it. Note, I am making a claim about how psychoanalysis proceeds in practice or the clinic, not how it theorizes itself. I am, of course, aware that Lacan makes claims like “the Other does not exist”. Here, however, I take it that Lacan is making a claim about the fantasy or constructed Other, not real others. In other words, the realism of Lacanian psychoanalysis refers to what Lacan calls the split or divided Other, not the manner in which we try to construct the Other or reduce it to demand.
There is an important point about just how OOO thinks about objects here. Under a standard realist epistemology, it is argued that we have direct and immediate access to objects. This is not the thesis of OOO. For OOO objects are withdrawn or “in-themselves” in the Kantian sense of the thing-in-itself. This is precisely how the real Other is encountered in the analytic setting. This, incidentally, is why Harman reacted so strongly to your suggestion that he’s simply rehearsing Hegel’s argument against the Kantian in-itself over at Shaviro’s blog in the link above. Where Hegel dissolves the in-itself altogether, reducing it to an illusion of positing consciousness, Harman’s thought defends the Kantian in-itself, generalizing it to all relations among objects, regardless of whether humans are involved. The claims are exactly the opposite of one another. However, within the Lacanian framework the ontology of the Other cannot be eradicated by reducing it to questions of access to the Other. First, there is the argument that I just made. Second, in order for the analyst to have the capacity to listen analytically he has to have reached a point beyond the lures of the constructed Other that allows him to catch glimpses of that real Other and to distinguish his own structure of fantasy from that of the analysand’s structure of desire.
November 17, 2009 at 8:02 am
BryanK,
A couple of further points since your blog doesn’t allow for comments. You write:
Perhaps you could say a bit more as to just what you understand by an ontological realism.
You go on to write:
http://velvethowler.com/2009/11/17/ontological-but-not-realist/
First, the passage I’ve bold-faced above seems to suggest that you believe I’m rejecting epistemology. Under this thesis I would be committed to the view that any epistemological inquiry is a fallacy. However, this is not what I claim. The “epistemic fallacy” as developed by Bhaskar is not equivalent to the rejection of epistemology. Rather, one commits the epistemic fallacy only when they implicitly or explicitly hold that ontological issues can be reduced to our access to beings. I outline an example of what this looks like in the case of Hume. Epistemological inquiry or inquiry into how we come to know is not, in this view, objectionable. The point is that our knowledge producing practices become unintelligible or incoherent if we do not retain ontology.
Second, I’m perplexed by your suggestion that somehow OOO excludes self-reflexivity. What leads you to that conclusion? The thesis of object-oriented ontology in its most basic form is simple: being consists of entities and entities are real or mind-independent. It does not assert that entities are all the same. It does not assert that entities are all structured alike. It does not assert that they all function in the same way. The point is a simple matter of deduction here: Being is composed of entities. Subjects are beings. Therefore subjects are entities. Now it just so happens that subjects– and a few other entities besides –have a peculiar characteristic: self-reflexivity. Nothing in my position requires us to reject the self-reflexivity of social systems, language, or subjects. Just as organic processes differ from chemical processes, so too do self-reflexive systems differ from chemical systems. The point of “flat ontology” is not that all entities are the same, nor that all entities impact the world to the same degree, but that minimally if an entity produces differences it 1) exists, and 2) cannot be reduced to other entities.
You cite one of my posts from July:
http://velvethowler.com/2009/11/17/ontological-but-not-realist/
Where I criticize positions based on self-reflexivity. All I can say in response is that my position has continued to develop and evolve in the past few months. What I was gropingly trying to get at when I formulated the hegemonic fallacy was the problem with reducing one entity to another entity. For example, reducing a tree to the signifier, signs, intentions issuing from consciousness, concepts, an effect of power, and so on. If I call this a fallacy, then this is because it doesn’t track the differences that the tree contributes, but instead reduces the tree to a vehicle of something else. In this respect, the hegemonic fallacy resembles the epistemic fallacy outlined in this post. Nothing in this criticism undermines self-reflexivity. By all means, we should investigate self-reflexivity.
November 17, 2009 at 8:22 am
Hi Levi,
I am glad to see that you allowed my comment through. Anyhow, I was under the now obviously mistaken view that you wouldn’t allow it through, so I added a few more points to my post at the Velvet Howler, which you understandably didn’t address, since they weren’t included in my comment here.
I don’t entirely understand what knowing the vocabulary of Harman, Whitehead, or Latour has to do with this anything, or this post in particular, as none of these authors are cited above. This seems more like a move to push me out of the conversation, but since you engaged my admittedly pointed remarks anyway, I’ll just ignore it, as it appears that we aren’t entirely talking past one another. At least not yet.
A few remarks:
1) I am pretty sure at this point that the entire blogosphere does not interpret “realism” to mean naïve stupid realism. I am equally sure that the entire blogosphere does not interpret “objects” to be naïve stupid objects of every day life. So I think we can presumably skip Object-Oriented Dogmatics, Volume I.
2) Okay, to claims: so the ontological realist part of psychoanalytic has to do with the “real Other,” which allows us to draw a line between constructed Other qua fundamental fantasy and the ordinary Others we encounter in every day life. So far, so good (I might disagree, but I comprehend), even though you don’t specifically use this phrase in your actual post.
Anyhow, you then go on to say that this real Other is divided or split. What I take you to be doing here is drawing a connection between Harman’s theory of withdrawn objects, his extension of the Kantian thing-in-itself to all objects, not just human-object relations. This, I think, is where the trouble starts: it is not entirely clear that “the Other” for Lacan is an object, and you don’t provide an argument for why this is the case. I mean, obviously there’s the objet petit a, but objet petit a is characterized not by withdrawnness, but rather by paradoxically being both a cause and an effect. And while Lacan says that objet petit a belongs to the register of the “Real,” I believe you’re conflating Lacan’s notion of the “Real” with the “realism” posited in objet-oriented ontology. What I take this form of realism to mean is that it tries to avoid undermining and overmining: if we “overmine,” we face the possibility of slipping back into correlationism by characterizing entities as bundles of qualities a la phenomenology, whereas if we undermine, we lose the sense of objects entirely and they become entirely unintelligible. If you wanted to set out to argue that Lacan’s notion of the “real Other” is the same is your notion of “realist objects,” you’d have to somehow prove that Lacan avoids both phenomenologically overmining objects, as well as undermining them by relating them back to some more fundamental or eliminativist entity.
But as it stands, your notion of the “real Other” seems pretty vague and if this “real Other” somehow satisfies the criteria for Harman’s withdrawnness of objects, then how does that make psychoanalysis “realist,” rather than making Harman’s notion of object simply Lacanian?
More fundamentally, I still don’t really know what the heck “extending the thing-in-itself to all objects” really even means, unless we ALSO adopt Harman’s theory of panpsychism. For me, it seems rather unfathomable what a duck’s inability to intuit curved-space-time-as-it-is-in-itself really tells us about the world. Furthermore, I don’t see the relevance of this idea, qua your notion of “real Other,” to the psychoanalytic clinic. While real people form real relations to real or introjected fantasmatic objects that need to be deciphered, I don’t understand how clinical practice could be improved or changed using your idea of a real withdrawn Other and tossing out the issue of language and signifiers. Furthermore, if you too side with Harman’s notion of pansychism, which is the only way that his theory of all objects being withdrawn makes sense, then do you propose that analysts begin psychoanalyzing hummus, cars, or the Eiffel Tower?
3) Finally, I want to bring up the issue of self-reflexivity, and highlight your contradictory thoughts on the matter. Over at Ktismatics you wrote:
>It is, of course, true that every practice has a theory of what it is doing behind it. The shaman has a theory of his interventions, the CBT a theory of his engagement, and so on. This isn’t really the point. What distinguishes psychoanalytic theories of practice from a number of other theories of practice is that it is a self-reflexive theory. Other therapeutic orientations tend to think of the therapist as something separate from the patient. They think of the problem as in the patient and their role in the treatment as separate from that problem. This is basically the medical model of psychological disorders. When a doctor treats someone for the flu, the flu is strictly inside the patient and the doctor is independent of that disorder. Psychoanalysis, by contrast, takes into account the transferential relationship between the patient and analyst and how transference structures the dynamic of treatment.
But then in one of your posts from a few months back you write:
>What self-reflexive approaches cannot abide is an ontology where the agency of difference cannot be localized in any one or predominant agency. In other words, self-reflexive analysis cannot abide multiplicities where the final phenomena is the result of a complex interaction of differences without one presiding over the putting-into-form, and where the actors in these multiplicities are heterogeneous, consisting of a variety of different objects ranging from the human to signs to technology to physical objects to animals and so on. Unfortunately, for self-reflexive thought, the world consists of these sorts of multiplicities.
Given that your support of theories of self-reflexivity came only about a week or two ago, I’d like to know how it chimes with your view of this supposed “real Other,” as well as your object-oriented ontology as a whole. I mean, as I point out over at the Howler, and as you yourself wrote some time ago, we first need the category of the subject to think of reflexivity.
What this seems to suggest is that, when we’re down to serious business of defending psychoanalytic theory against its attackers, we have to rely on theories that actually make sense and are actually efficacious, like defending self-reflexivity as what differentiates psychoanalysis from other psychologies or treatments, like CBTs. Here I support your effort. But your object-oriented theories seem to me to be incredibly vague, and I just can’t conceive of any possible way that Harman’s notion of withdrawn objects applies to psychoanalytic clinical technique, let alone theory (unless, again, we simply identify Harman’s idea with Lacan’s, in which case Harman is simply Lacanian or what have you).
November 17, 2009 at 8:28 am
Okay, I see that you just replied to my comment on self-reflexivity. First, I was never claiming that you reject epistemology, just that your comment belies your commitment to setting epistemology aside to concentrate on ontology. Your comments over at Ktismastics suggest that, when discussion gets serious and psychoanalysis is coming under heavy fire, we have to use terms and theories that are actually precise and efficacious. Hence, we have to use the notion of self-reflexivity to defend psychoanalytic conceptions of symptoms, and we have to rely on epistemological theories pertaining to the analyst-analysand relationship. Talking about how objects are inherently withdrawn and never touch and are vicarious does not seem to contribute much to psychoanalytic technique.
Now, I want to quote you:
>The point is a simple matter of deduction here: Being is composed of entities. Subjects are beings. Therefore subjects are entities. Now it just so happens that subjects– and a few other entities besides –have a peculiar characteristic: self-reflexivity.
Well, for one, I would like to know what these other entities are that are self-reflexive, and what evidence there would be for them. As I see it, you include that caveat in there so as not to suggest (and yes… I agree they are indeed entities! To deny that would be foolish) that subjects possess some sort of unique trait called self-reflexivity. Because if you did that, all of a sudden you are frighteningly close to DREADED IDEALISM. There is no escape!
November 17, 2009 at 9:15 am
Bryan,
You write:
No, I don’t have a commitment to setting aside epistemology to concentrate on ontology. Rather, my view is that ontological questions or questions about what beings are are distinct from epistemological questions or how we come to know entities. Both forms of inquiry have their appropriate place. The discussion over at Ktismatics was an epistemological discussion therefore epistemological points were in order.
The thesis that objects never touch is Harman’s thesis, not my own. My thesis is that objects translate one another. In language, of course, translation involves a transposition of meaning from L1 to L2 or a source language and an object language. The naive theory of translation is that the meaning remains the same from language to language. But as every translator knows, and as philosophy has increasingly become aware, meaning changes as a result of being situated in a new language. Riviere and fleuve is not the same as a “river” and a “stream” in English. In English the difference is one of size, whereas in French it is one of whether or not the entities in question flows into the ocean. I generalize this notion of translation from the domain of language to all relations between entities. For example, a leaf translates photons of sunlight producing sugars. Sugars are obviously not the same as photons of light. Something different or new is produced.
I often use Harman’s language of withdrawal because we both arrive at similar places. If it is true that any interaction between two objects involves translation, then it follows that no object ever encounters another object as it is, i.e., the object “withdraws” from the first object producing something new. Put otherwise, the object is “in-itself” with respect to the object “doing” the translation. As for what OOO might contribute to psychoanalytic technique, I think this is the wrong sort of question to ask an ontology. As I said in the post, these are questions for focused inquiry, not questions for ontology which only articulates the most basic and general structures for our practices to be possible, to answer.
I would say that in addition to subjects, social systems and language are self-reflexive. Why do you see conceding self-reflexivity as inevitably leading one to idealism?
It’s not simply a matter of knowing “vocabulary”, but of being familiar with the content behind central concepts of this line of thought and the arguments in support of these positions. There’s only so many times we can all repeat them and as is the case in any philosophical discussion some background knowledge is required for engaging with the position. That’s all. I don’t think you should be entitled to the claim that Harman’s concept of withdrawn objects or vicarious causation is “vague” and “makes no sense” if you haven’t actually grappled with those texts where he develops those claims. I’m sure you would agree with respect to psychoanalysis, Hegel, Kant, Zizek, and so on.
As you know, Lacan uses the term “Other” in a variety of senses and differently in different contexts. I am basing my reference to the “real Other” primarily on how he discusses the Other in seminars 4 – 6, as well as seminars 8 and 10. There he treats the Other as an opaque enigma or as something akin to a withdrawn object. Your point about the Lacanian real and realism is well taken. I should have specified this in the body of the post. In speaking of the real Other I was not making a claim about the Lacanian real. I was making a claim about what Lacanian practice presupposes in order to get off the ground. The ontological claim that Lacanian practice, as I see it, presupposes is that there be real Others irreducible to our access to them. This posit is necessary to distinguish between fantasy structure and the others on whom that fantasy structure is projected. In other words, as a condition for the possibility of that practice we must posit something that is not simply what we have access to. At this point we have to shift from questions of what we have access to, to properly ontological considerations, i.e., what must others be like– not simply our cognition or experience of others –for this particular practice to be possible? Now this is a specific question for psychoanalytic ontology. Kant distinguished between metaphysica generalis and metaphysica specialis (Heidegger has a nice gloss on this in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Metaphysica generalis interrogates the being of beings at the most general level. But within ontology there are all sorts of regional ontologies that are the object of specific inquiries. We can read Lacan’s theory as an example of such a regional ontology of the subject and the Other or an instance of metaphysica specialis.
As an additional caveat, the focus on practice in the line of argument I’ve tried to make here is important because there can be a vast difference between how a theorist describes their practice and what they’re actually doing in their practice. For example, there might be a difference between how Newton theorizes his epistemology and what Newton is actually doing when he investigates the world. I’m suggesting something of this sort with regard to the difference between Lacanian theory and what takes place in the clinic.
I take it that this is because the real Other is vague. That’s what it means to point out that it is opaque and enigmatic. But all this aside, I think if you actually read Harman you’ll find that his concepts of withdrawn objects, allure, etc., are not at all vague as you suggest. Guerilla Metaphysics is a good place to start, as is Prince of Networks. Both texts flesh out what he has in mind by withdrawn objects and allure.
Apologies for the brevity of this response. It’s late and I have to get some sleep to teach in the morning.
November 17, 2009 at 10:33 am
Very interested post! Sorry if this is a dumb question, but could you just briefly explain what you mean when you say that your position is ontologically realist but epistemologically anti-realist? Thanks!
November 17, 2009 at 4:05 pm
Good post, Levi. Even setting aside the Lacanian complexities, what you’re talking about fits well with most people’s unschooled intuitions about how we encounter the real world. From earliest childhood we’re continually engaged in “reality testing,” trying to sort out what’s real not just from ignorance but from fantasies, biases, fears, wishes, projections, traditions, and so on. Psychoanalysis is one sorting technique; empirical science is another. The Mobius-like interface between mind and reality means that, as we achieve more accurate knowledge about reality, we simultaneously gain access to more knowledge about ourselves and our fantasies, projections, etc.
I’m aware that I’m speaking epistemologically here, but isn’t that the main point of knowing-about: to distinguish reality from unreality? Or, if you will, knowing-about enables us to distinguish realities that are “out there” from those that are inside heads or cultures. As I understand it, the “speculative” part of some ontological work consists in the attempt to characterize what might lie beyond the limits of all possible epistemic praxes for encountering the real. Would you agree?
November 17, 2009 at 6:27 pm
OK, maybe I am missing something, but both your example from psychoanalysis and the nature of science seem to imply only one thing: that there is something out there that is the Other or the object of science. It doesn’t suggest that we can know anything about it. One could explain both with a Kantian position about the thing-in-itself’s unknowability, for example. So there does seem to be a leap not, as a previous commenter said, from epistemology/ontology to realism/anti-realism in epistemology, but from a realist ontology to a rejection of certain kinds of epistemology.
November 17, 2009 at 7:11 pm
Chris,
Bhaskar’s realist claims are a lot more robust than a sort of nod to the Kantian in-itself. Bhaskar’s question, you will recall, is “what must the world be like for our science to be possible?” He argues that minimally intransitive objects (mind and society independent objects) must be causal mechanisms, that are structured and differentiated, and that act regardless of whether or not humans know about them or exist. Additionally, he argues that these objects must be 1) capable of acting independent of experience and 2) being actualized in the world. This latter point might appear perplexing, so I’ll try to briefly explain it even though I’m dog tired (so please be kind!). One of Bhaskar’s major gripes with contemporary philosophy of science is that it tends to embody an implicit positivism. This, for Bhaskar, is especially the case with how philosophy of science conceives causal claims. For this form of philosophy causal claims are not claims about objects themselves but about regularities between events in experience. These events are not natural events but rather phenomenal events or sense impressions.
For Bhaskar, this conception of causality renders scientific practice incoherent. The problem is two-fold: First, in ordinary experience the consequent of an event often doesn’t obtain in a regular fashion, i.e., the antecedent occurs without the consequent following. This should lead us to reject the causal claim as ungrounded, yet we do not. Second, Bhaskar believes that philosophers of science don’t pay enough attention to the difference between closed and open systems. The reason that scientists create highly specified and controlled experimental settings is, according to Bhaskar, to get at the things-themselves. In open systems other causes or causal mechanisms intervene, preventing the antecedent from producing the consequent. The causal mechanism continues to act but it doesn’t produce a particular result because of these other factors. What the closed system of an experimental setting allows is the release of these causal mechanisms in an environment where these other causal mechanisms are not intervening. In this way, the scientist occasionally discovers a causal power of a particular type of thing itself. In other words, what the scientist is interested in, according to Bhaskar, is not regularities of experience (generally these regularities don’t appear in experience because they are functioning in an open system), but rather causal powers of things themselves. When these powers are found, argues Bhaskar, we are warranted in making what he calls “transfactual claims” (he critiques induction and dismisses it as a model of science), where the “transfactual” is understood as the thesis that the causal mechanism (the thing itself) acts in open systems even though it doesn’t produce an experiencable event for a subject or observer. Again, this is just a thumbnail but hopefully it gives you a sense of just why he is making a far more robust ontological claim than Kant’s claims about the existence of things-in-themselves. For Bhaskar, knowledge claims are not claims about regularities in our experience or constant conjunctions of sensible events, but rather about things-themselves that continue to act regardless of whether they produce an experience for us.
November 17, 2009 at 11:19 pm
Levi, thank you for the reply. I have to admit, as someone who finds the positivism of much of science (and most scientists) distasteful, I am intrigued. I will definitely have to read the Bhaskar’s book to hear more about it. I’m a little dubious of his claims about causality, as you describe them, both because I’m not sure the work of people like Salmon, Dowe, and Kistler have theories of causation (which have been highly influential in Phil of Science) that seem to avoid the problems he attributes to Phil of Science theories of causation, and because I’m not sure science doesn’t deal with “open systems” (e.g., in Bayesian reasoning) in just the way that Bhaskar prescribes. But I am interested to see how he argues for these positions, and if he gets around the objections that immediately come to my mind.
November 18, 2009 at 12:09 am
[…] Posted by larvalsubjects under Epistemology, Object-Oriented Philosophy Leave a Comment In response to a recent post, Kathya asks: Very interested post! Sorry if this is a dumb question, but could […]
November 18, 2009 at 1:06 am
Levi:
Thanks for reminding me of those references to Seminars 4-6 and 8-10. I knew I had run across the term “real Other” in Lacan’s work somewhere, but couldn’t pinpoint it exactly. Anyhow, I’m going to look into the issue a bit further and look forward to hearing about further developed thoughts on the Lacanian Real—obviously this blog is yours to do what you want with, but I find your remarks on Lacan and psychoanalysis to typically be the best or most interesting (the reason why I first subscribed to this blog to begin with, and when our relations were still friendly, by and large).
I disagree or at least would like to develop further some of my remarks about idealism and reflexivity, and why I think reflexivity might be opposed to object-oriented ontology. Unfortunately, like you, I’m extremely bogged down at the moment and I’m not sure I could entirely do justice to the issue itself in this comment box. But, I figured I would leave a comment here just to let you know that I haven’t dropped out of the dialogue and that I will try to address the issue discussed in your comments here soon on my blog (additionally, I think I promised a post on Malabou a very long time ago, and I will probably weave that into the hypothetical post as well, as a heads up).
November 18, 2009 at 1:23 am
Thanks Bryan,
Just a caveat, since the days when I was writing on Malabou my position has shifted quite a bit. At that time I was tending towards a sort of reductive materialism. While I continue to find neurology important and certainly don’t deny its truth, I don’t advocate that sort of reductive materialism anymore.
November 18, 2009 at 1:45 am
[…] Defense of Realism“, Chris over at the great science and psychology blog, Mixing Memory, asks: OK, maybe I am missing something, but both your example from psychoanalysis and the nature of […]
November 18, 2009 at 6:17 pm
[…] Epistemological vs. Ontological Realism. AKA can we reduce ontological problems to epistemological ones. […]
November 18, 2009 at 8:41 pm
Chris, just to add to your comment while I’m very sympathetic to the Object Oriented stuff in philosophy of science stuff it gets tricky. For instance how to deal with the issue of “observation” in say relativity or quantum mechanics. QM can handle this perhaps better. (Consider say Bohmian approaches) But relativity as presented it gets pretty tricky. Now the obvious approach is to differentiate between an event for a knower from an observation. But my point is that this isn’t just an issue with philosophy of science but is inherent with a lot of physics itself.
November 18, 2009 at 8:45 pm
I should add though that I’m not sure philosophy of science in most cases grapples well with this either – it’s one of those issues quite often dodged or seen as the realm of wackos.
November 21, 2009 at 4:59 am
Hi Levi,
When Henry and Marion speak of first principle as “apparition” and “givenness”, respectively, are they advocating a realist view? The reason I ask is because, only having read one book by each, it seems that they are quite a bit more ontologically real than Merleau-Ponty or Husserl (at least the later Husserl).
November 21, 2009 at 8:17 pm
Hi Austin-
If I can jump in here… Henry and Marion may well be considered “realist”, but that’s why I wonder whether realism is going to be a useful term for much longer. Saying that there is/may be something outside human access perhaps counts for realism (e.g., Kant’s things-in-themselves). But that doesn’t get us very far as long as the relation between the human subject and the “real” is given some sort of special status compared with the relation between *different parts* of the real. This is why I’m never very impressed with those strains of phenomenology that appeal to “givenness”… The main problem with phenomenology is not that its conception of the human is too actively constituting and needs to be made into a passive recipient of a gift. The problem is that the human/world correlate is the only topic of phenomenology. Husserl does other ingenious things that are insufficiently appreciated in our generally anti-Husserlian period, but on the topic of the human/world relation he’s really just another correlationist, not original at all. (Meillassoux is right about that. Where he is wrong is in his relative effacement of the differences between Husserl and Heidegger.)
November 22, 2009 at 6:02 pm
Dr. Z,
Thanks for the input. I like what you had to say. Recently, I’ve been reading quite a bit of phenomenology and have been impressed with certain aspects. I’ve also been delving into some Latour (not to mention a certain Philosopher’s book on Latour ;)), which I am finding quite useful. Somewhat (and I say that tentatively) emerging out of my correlationist/social constructionist background, I have found much that is useful for my current research in the writings of Latour. However, I’m also trying to understand a bit more fully the appeal in Henry (moreso that Marion) to revelation. It seems, at least in his later writings (ie. “I Am The Truth”) that this self-revelation that he equates with “Life” is a realism in the strict sense. I gather this because he makes a clear distinction between appearance and appearing and between phenomena and phenomenality. And while “appearing” is still a related to a subject, it seems that what Henry is getting at is an ontological ground that precedes appearance. Maybe that’s just a “weak correlationism”?
I do know one thing for sure, I’m not a fan of the apophatic/Eckhartian influence on either Marion or Henry…
November 26, 2009 at 9:38 pm
[…] A Psychoanalytic Defense of Realism from Larval Subjects by larvalsubjects […]
May 17, 2010 at 8:19 pm
Concepts! All mere concepts!