In a response to my recent post on materialism, Fabio Confunctor, of Hyper-Tiling writes:
…what concerns me about political action as different from other actions is that the practice is meant to bring about some change which is not random, but a change ‘in favour of’ the human. The difference between a scientific theory and a political one is that the former can be limited to an epistemological interest of describing the world while the latter (to paraphrase Marx) has the goal to ‘change it’. Where change is not ‘from random configuration of actors 1 to random configurations of actors 2′ but is to change the configuration in order to achieve and maximise a number of desired (by me, the human actor) outcomes.
First, a disclaimer: I am very much working through these issues myself, so I haven’t been able, as of yet, to resolve these questions entirely to my satisfaction. Second, I have recently been drawing a great deal of inspiration from Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Materialism: A Political Ecology of Things who, as a political theorist has thought far more penetratingly on these issues than me, so I think she’s a good place to look when situating a number of these questions. Not only does Bennett’s thought share a close proximity to various strains of OOO, but her work is particularly interesting due to how it weaves together ontological questions with questions of politics and ethics, while calling for a deep reformulation of just what agency is.
read on!
Returning to Fabio’s remarks, I think the question is what acts in any assemblage. Of course Fabio is right: We want to change the world, we want to improve the world, and we want to improve our own lives. Nothing about OOO denies this or stipulates that this is an aim that should be abolished. However, what OOO does call into question perhaps is how we think about these ethical and political issues, what agents or actors are relevant to these questions, and what it means to act. Bennett brings these issues into beautiful relief.
Let’s take three popular examples of ethical or normative thought as a contrast to what OOO might suggest at the ethical and political level: Kantian deontological ethical thought, Mill’s utilitarian thought, and Badiou’s ethics of truth-procedures. Kant enjoins us to act only according to the maxim that we can at the same time will as a universal law. Mill tells us actions are good insofar as they produce the greatest amount of happiness (in both quantity and quality) for the greatest number of people. And Badiou speaks of ethical action as that action that reconfigures the elements composing a situation based on the declaration of an event. For example, when the French sans papier declare that “if you live here you’re from here”, they make a declaration that exceeds the counting-mechanisms structuring the situation– the legal and ethnic structure of France –calling for a thorough reconfiguration of that situation.
In all cases, however, agency is more or less restricted to the domain of humans. Humans are the only agents, and the domain of the ethical and the political pertains only to humans. Kant will go so far as to say that in applying the categorical imperative we must exclude all considerations of circumstance, context, and pathology (affects, inclinations, bodily needs and desires, etc). For Badiou, by contrast, politics and ethics will exclusively be the domain of subjects and subjects only exist in relation to the human. And while Mill will certainly make room for things, these things will only be worthy of consideration in terms of either impediments to human action or affordances of human action (i.e., tools, technologies).
Now it is not difficult to recognize that implicit in these three ethical positions– and I don’t pretend to have done them justice here in a mere blog post –is a sharp distinction between the domain of the human on the one hand and the natural on the other hand. The domain of the human is conceived as that of intentional and will directed activity– Badiou’s thought constitutes yet another intervention into debates surrounding questions of structure (social constraint) and agency –while the entities that populate nature are thought as passive beings without aims or intentions that humans either a) form into tools for their own use and aims, b) impede human aims in some way or other, or c) function as screens for human concepts and values as in Marx’s treatment of commodities in the first volume of Capital.
Indeed, while Marx makes room for material nature, this material nature is entirely passive, functioning as an inert matter in the Aristotlean sense that receives the imprint of human activity by being transformed into use-values— tools and means of various sorts; in this respect nothing in Marx really contracts the opening line of reasoning in Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics pertaining to the difference between relative and absolute ends —exchange-values, and later in Baudrillard’s far reaching For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, sign-values. For Marx, in other words, to analyze objects is to analyze not the objects themselves, but rather objects as vehicles for human intentions at either the human level (how we use them for our own individual aims) or at the social level (how they take on value). Material objects are mere screens for human intentions and agencies. Consequently, if we begin with this premise pertaining to matter— that it is merely a passive stuff that at best reactively behaves in mechanistic relations of cause and effect and at worst is just a medium (media) to receive human form –we will believe ourselves justified in excluding nonhuman beings from the domain of our ethical and political theorizations because objects are here thought of as mere reflections of human intentions anyway.
In short, what is implicit in the reigning ethical and political philosophy of our time is the premise of what Adorno, in Negative Dialectics (and I owe this connection to Bennett), might have referred to as an identity of concept and object. The implicit premise is that nonhuman actors can be reduced to their status as vehicles for human intentions and conceptualizations. What is prohibited is the thesis that nonhuman objects are actors in their own right. And this because nonhuman objects are mere passive matters waiting to receive their imprint from humans. What Heidegger referred to as the thought of being in terms of “enframing” and “standing-reserve” very much remains at the core of our ethical and political thought like the glasses that now sit astride my nose; viz., as so close that we have difficulty even discerning it.
When, in The Pasteurization of France, Latour introduces the notion of “actants”, he takes a step towards calling into question this opposition. Latour observes that,
[w]e do not know who are the agents who make up our world. We must begin with this uncertainty if we are to understand how, little by little, the agents defined one another, summoning other agents and attributing to them intentions and strategies… When we speak of men, societies, culture, and objects, there are everywhere crowds of other agents that act, pursue aims unknown to us, and use us to prosper. We may inspect pure water, milk, hands, curtains, sputum, the air we breathe, and see nothing suspect, but millions of other individuals are moving around that we cannot see.
…There are not only “social” relations, relations between man and man. Society is not made up just of men, for everywhere microbes intervene and act. We are in the presence not just of an Eskimo and an anthropologist, a father and his child, a midwife and her client, a prostitute and her client, a pilgrim and his God, not forgetting Mohammed his prophet. In all these relations, these one-on-one confrontations, these duels, these contracts, other agents are present, acting, exchanging their contracgts, imposing their aims, and redefining the social bond in different way. Cholera is no respecter of Mecca, but it enters the intestine of the hadji; the gas bacillus has nothing against the woman in childbirth, but it requires that she die. In the midst of so-called “social” relations, they both form alliances that complicate those relations in a terrible way.
I am not using the word “agent” in any metaphorical or ironical sense but in the semiotic sense [sic.]. Indeed, the social link is made up, according to the Pasteurians, of those who bring men together and those who bring the microbes together. We cannot form society with the social alone. We have to add the action of microbes. We cannot understand anything about Pasteurism if we do not realize that it has reorganized society in a different way. It is not that there is a science done in the laboratory, on the one hand, and a society made up of groups, classes, interests, and laws, on the other. The issue is at once much more simple and much more difficult. To make up society with only social connections, omitting the invisibles, is to end up with general corruption, a perverse deviation of good human intentions. In order to act effectively between men– that is, to go to Mecca, to survive in the Congo, to bring fine, healthy children to birth, to get manly regiments –we have to “make room” for microbes… (35 – 36)
What we witness here, in an almost imperceptible gesture that passes so quickly it’s almost missed under the first reading, is Latour extending agency beyond the domain of the human to the nonhuman. In this case, with respect to microbes. In treating nonhuman entities as agents or actants, Latour is refusing that move that would reduce objects to mere matters waiting to receive human imprint in processes of production, the formation into human tools, or as vehicles for human conceptualizations, values, or signs. To be sure, as we will learn in Irreductions, published with The Pasteurization of France, humans attempt to subordinate nonhuman objects to human values, signs, conceptualizations, use as tools, and means of energy and subsistence, but Latour beautifully practices the nonidentity of concept and object, emphasizing the manner in which objects perpetually surprise us and act in aleatory ways that could not have been anticipated by our use of these objects.
In short, objects act. And in reducing objects to their use-value, their exchange-value, or their sign-value we not only miss the manner in which objects act, but we foreclose our ability to see the action of objects in the social milieu. We miss the manner in which objects are not merely passive but are active agents in their own right. Society is not a relation of human to human, but a relation of human to nonhuman and of nonhuman to nonhuman. And not only do objects act in the sense that they often impede and surprise us in our will to master them, unleashing tendencies from within their volcanic core that thwarts our will to master them, but they also act in ways that transform our agency. As Bennett remarks, for example, omega-3 fatty acids transform the very nature of my affectivity, enhancing concentration, decreasing aggressivity, and thwarting depression– was it me or the acids and how would this change my formulation of Mill’s greatest happiness principle or Kant’s categorical imperative? –but also in entering into relations with other objects, say my computer, my very intentions and aims shift. My relation to the computer and the internet, for example, generates all sorts of new ends and interests. Was it me or the computer? The question can’t be answered.
So this is the easy OOO thesis where questions of politics and ethics are concerned: Any account of ethical and political thought that fails to take nonhuman actants into account, any account of ethical thought that reduces nonhuman objects to mere use-values, exchange-values, and sign-values, is bound to be barbarous, truncated, and inadequate because it ignores a crucial dimension of the social relation: the nonhuman actors and the differences they introduce into human relations. If we don’t pay attention to the role played by the absence of, for example, fiber optic cables in the midwest and the west, we’re bound to miss all sorts of important questions as to why certain forms of human-human relations are not changing. We will scratch our heads as to why our demystifying critiques have failed because we’ve ignored structures of production and organization in these regions and why they tend to perpetuate certain human-human relations. Consequently, if you’re genuinely serious about not simply analyzing things but actually changing them, you cannot rest content with demystifying critiques that focus on use-value, exchange-value, and sign-value alone, but must extend your analysis to all those other social actors like roads, communications technologies, technologies of production, weather patterns, lakes, etc., etc., etc., etc.. And, you need to bear in mind the manner in which questions of human flourishing are never just questions of humans, but are also questions of how we live with these nonhuman actors that sustain us and inhibit us, making our lives either a living hell or more than tolerable. We need to think about the levees in New Orleans as actants in their own right and the difference they introduced into human-human relations for the citizens of New Orleans. We need to think about livestock and deforestation as the largest contributor to climate change, and how our diet composed of readily available meat not only functions to enslave large portions of the human population in abject misery (thereby generating all sorts of war and crime in the process) but also how this type of food enters into alienating assemblages with our own bodies having all sorts of impacts on our affective and physical states, but also on our social relations (what becomes of social relations when we don’t cook and dine together; are these the sorts of relations we want?).
The hard question of OOO and similar strains of thought like Latour’s and Bennett’s is that of what Isabella Stengers referred to as “cosmopolitics”. This is the set of issues that I can’t quite get my head around. As Bennett points out with her own thought and as holds equally, I believe, for OOO and related veins of thought, these ontologies point at conceptions of distributed agency where agency can no longer be located in one actant or actor such as the sovereign subject, but where they are distributed across a heterogeneous composition of multiple agents both affording and constraining one another, vying with one another and assisting one another, such that responsibility can no longer be located in one agency like Adam naming all the plants and animals in his mythical garden. We get something like Sartre’s subject-groups but where these subject-groups are no longer composed simply of human subjects, but where they include nonhuman actants as well. But if we extend agency to nonhuman actants, are we led to the conclusion that these nonhuman agents both have ethical and political rights and responsibilities?
Everything seems to point in this direction. When weighing interests, under this conception of agency, it is not enough to take into account the interests of human agencies (and we’re not sure what human agents are anymore anyway since they are never simply sovereigns that impose their intentions on “passive matters), but we must take into account the interests of nonhuman agents as well. What is their say? What are their interests? How do we discern them? Isn’t it just us attributing or projecting human interests on these nonhumans? I don’t know. It’s the hard question. But here we need to take a page from the character of Ann Clayborne in Kim Stanley Robinson’s sublime Mars Trilogy. The horror of Ann’s character, the supreme “inhuman ethics” that she manages to muster such that she herself becomes unthinkable under all concepts pertaining to the human and what we understand of the human, is the manner in which she treats the planet of Mars itself as an actant on par with all the human colonists that would reduce the planet to a passive matter to be formed in the image of human aims, daring to thing that perhaps we have no right to treat the planet in this way. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy, Mars is every bit as much a character as the other characters in the novel and every bit as much an actant as these other actants. In her “becoming-Mars” is Ann’s character a psychopath that has failed to understand key questions and issues of ethical and political agency, affording this “dead” planet an agency and therefore rights in a fit of madness constituting a category mistake taken to absurd extremes, or does her character simultaneously carry out a specious (pardon the pun) auto-critique of key ethical and political presuppositions of our thought and point the way towards a non-anthropocentric ethic and politics that conceives humans among other beings rather as sovereigns that dictate the being of other passive matters. By the third novel this seems to be the direction she’s moving in.
Larval Subjects . 
February 23, 2010 at 10:02 am
Levi,
In all of your discussions of materialism you seem to be missing what I consider to be the most important aspect of Marxist “materialism”, namely that matter poses constraints on human agency: “men make their own history but not under the conditions of their own choosing” entails that not only social relationships shape human practices, but also matter. No possibility to cross a continent in five days unless there exist the combustion engine and road infrastructure to do so. So i think it is unfair to reproach Marx that he sees matter as purely passive, a blank screen to be projected upon by humans: the roads and combustion engines are indeed actors in the sense that they act upon the humans (they allow, impede, break down and so on).
Now I know you or Garham will probably argue that the above paragraph makes me a correlationist since I am only interested in objects to the extent that they enter into a human-object relationship. But frankly, I could not care less about object-object relationships, because that to me is the field of physics, or even cosmology, not philosophy or whatever humanities branch you consider yourself to be part of.
But interesting discussion nevertheless.
February 23, 2010 at 2:43 pm
Jan,
The problem is that we just never see the sort of analysis in any sustained form in Marx that you’re proposing. What you say is what Marx should be doing, but not what Marx is doing. When Marx speaks of humans making history but not under conditions of their own choosing, he is inevitably talking about how the social world constrains their actions, not things like climate change. What we would need to get what I’m talking about is something of a synthesis of Marx and Latour. But that would require a pretty extensive revision of Marx. Being interested in human-object relationships doesn’t in and of itself make one a correlationist (and you seem pretty defensive here), but certainly reducing objects to mere passive matter to be formed by humans points in that direction. This is the way Marx tends to think about the nonhuman.
February 23, 2010 at 2:46 pm
Levi,
thanks for the detailed answer. I have no issue whatsoever with what you call the ‘easy thesis’. I think you argue for it clearly and in details (as Latour does), and I think that it is a perfectly consistent position.
As for the hard one, you write:
‘OOO and related veins of thought, these ontologies point at conceptions of distributed agency where agency can no longer be located in one actant or actor such as the sovereign subject, but where they are distributed across a heterogeneous composition of multiple agents both affording and constraining one another, vying with one another and assisting one another, such that responsibility can no longer be located in one agency like Adam naming all the plants and animals in his mythical garden. We get something like Sartre’s subject-groups but where these subject-groups are no longer composed simply of human subjects, but where they include nonhuman actants as well. But if we extend agency to nonhuman actants, are we led to the conclusion that these nonhuman agents both have ethical and political rights and responsibilities? […] What is their say? What are their interests? How do we discern them? Isn’t it just us attributing or projecting human interests on these nonhumans?’
I agree that the problem of ethical agency (which we could rephrase: can objects be the ethical subjects?), is indeed a problem. If I can quote myself, in my ethics and SR post where I made an instrumental distinction between relation and interaction:
‘The issue here, is with the kind of interactions. Withdrawn objects are surely conditioned by laws in their subterranean interactions, but they lack a key element which makes an interaction ethical: a will of adherence to those norms which characterize an action as ethical (where I would call an ethical interaction a relation, guided by norms, not merely laws). It therefore appears that that we simply cannot meaningfully talk about ethics in the context of objects: my mouse has many kinds of interactions with my mousepad (many more than I can be related to), yet no ethical interaction (relation). It seems that even when we put objects on the same ontological footing as humans, humans still manage to retain the privilege (is it a privilege?) over the sphere of ethics even when, with Badiou, we reject the pallid notions of ‘human dignity’ or ‘the commandment of the other’. Among objects, there are no ethical subjects, they have human-independent interactions, not mutual relations.’
The point being: how to talk about objects’ interests without projecting on them our own interests *and* without viewing their interactions as guided by a sort of ‘intention’ (which would made them proper ‘relations’)? To put is bluntly, I think the issue is that if for OOP ‘whatever makes a difference, is (an actor)’, ethics replies to you ‘yes, but whatever makes a difference *and means to do so*, is an ethical actor’.
If we cannot proceed this way, by attributing likes and dislikes to objects (as I think we cannot), then perhaps the way to go about facing the ‘hard thesis’ is another one, i.e. go back to human ethics and revise its terms.
To be provocative: if we cannot ‘fit’ objects in the framework of human ethics, and if objects are indeed an active and ontologically equal part of reality, doesn’t this mean that we have to change human ethics instead of forcing objects into a language that just cannot accommodate them? Doesn’t this mean to reconsider from scratch the conditions of possibility for something to be an ‘ethical subject’ (which can be given rights and responsibilities) just as we have reconsidered the conditions of possibility for something to be an ‘actor’?
Even if this makes sense, the question of course is: how? If forced to give an answer, I think the way to go is starting from the metaphysical basis of ethics, the concept of the subject (without which you don’t get ethics) itself (the ‘the sovereign subject’ which you mention above), which should undergo something like an ‘object-oriented deconstruction’ (or maybe ‘object-oriented reverse-engineering’ of the subject, given that we would see the subject as an heterogeneous aggregate).
What I definitely cannot answer, however, is the obvious question: how would this ‘object-oriented deconstruction of the subject’ differ from a neuro-biological reduction of the subject?
February 23, 2010 at 3:08 pm
Yes, I do think that Latour and Marx can be combined, but – and that is why my tone came across as “defensive” – I also think that Latour has a gigantic problem with politics, spelled out already very clearly in the epistemological chicken debate in the 1980s. I am not saying that all of you object-oriented ontologists are political conservatives ( I haven’t read enough of your works), but I have read most of Latour and he can only think and analyze that what exists. Marx wants to understand that what exists in order to change it – there would be my prime (political) reason to privilege Marx over Latour.
February 23, 2010 at 3:21 pm
In my own case I am broadly Marxist in political orientation. I do believe that Marx needs a lot of work. By and large his political theory is all human-human in its analysis of social situations. Objects are little more than vehicles for social relations, contributing little or nothing at all. This is even built in to the theory with respect to the famous thesis that under capitalism relations between humans are disguised as relations to things; the implication being that the things themselves are irrelevant to the analysis. Later on in critical theory appropriations of Marx things will more or less become screens for human sign-values. The point is not to throw Marx, or talk of sign-value, use-value, and exchange-value out the window, but to make room for these nonhuman actors. And the rationale for making room for these nonhuman actors lies in the fact that we can’t possibly give an adequate analysis of situations in the absence of including such actants in social relations in a manner that’s in excess of their status as vehicles for human intentions. As for Latour’s own problem with politics, that’s neither here nor there as far as I’m concerned.
February 23, 2010 at 3:32 pm
Hi Fabio,
Just a couple of quick points as I’m about to head off for the college. First, OOO certainly doesn’t make the claim that all objects are the same and therefore it’s not obligated to attribute duties and responsibilities to nonhuman actors. It could be that this is restricted to the domain of the human and other rational animals. That’s one of the reasons that I distinguish between the easy and hard question of OOO. Second, however, I do think that human intentionality or our capacity for goal directed activity is vastly overstated by those of a deontological persuasion. This for three reasons: First, there’s the whole dimension of the unconscious acting in our intentions. As Lacan liked to say “you are where you are not and are not where you are”. The unconscious is an acephalous or headless subject that pervades our decisions and willing in a way that is pre-personal or impersonal. This significantly deflates, I believe, attributions of intentionality to human actors as presupposed by these ethical traditions. The transcendental moralist can argue “but this is what is required transcendentally for ethical action to be possible.” At this point, however, I think the transcendental account should be thrown out as wishful thinking as it just doesn’t square with the sorts of beings we are. Second, as I nodded to in this post, our agency is never separated from how we enter into alliances with other nonhuman actants or enlist them in our own actions. This entails, for me, that any ethical theory that thinks human actants in abstraction, as willing subjects completely detached from the world, significantly distorts what’s really taking place. We need to think human agents as amidst these other actants. This, additionally, gives rise to all sorts of questions as to who is acting. Entities can no longer be subordinated to the simple category of “tools” under this model. Here I think Haraway’s concept of the cyborg is very valuable. At any rate, this further complicates the issues you’re raising as if we can no longer straightforwardly say “it is the human that is intended and willing” then this cuts a lot of the steam out of the concerns you’re raising. Finally third, the consequences of our actions can never be mastered or anticipated as objects always have their “own” say introducing unexpected differences when we act. This forces us to revise how we think about goal-directed activity in the political and ethical sphere.
February 23, 2010 at 5:59 pm
Dr Bryant, given an utterly flat ontology as I understand it, any action would be unethical. Any action would presume an unflattening of the playing field, a privileging of one object over another. Any action, all action, would be more or less “barbarous, truncated, and inadequate”. It seems that action throws ethics out the window. I mean, even if I eat a fallen apple I’m turning that apple-actant into something instrumental-for-me …. As I think about this I am somehow brought back again and again to a equation of politics has nothing to do with ethics and everything to do with power … and that it might be easy to write a book called We Have Never Been Ethical …
February 23, 2010 at 7:29 pm
John,
Flat ontology is an ontological thesis, not a prescriptve thesis. Additionally, it in no way asserts that there aren’t all sorts of inequalities among objects with respect to each other, only that if something is it is. The point is not to treat all objects as equal but to include them all in being without reducing them to some other being like Platonic forms, atoms, neurons, social forces, etc. That is treated as the really real. Ontology has ethical implications but the two domains of inquiry are distinct.
February 23, 2010 at 7:45 pm
Dr Bryant, I understand that ontology isn’t prescriptive. And I certainly don’t intend to suggest that a flat ontology = no inequalities.
My problem is that I don’t understand how ontology can have ethical implications, as you state, as I believe, without rendering the distinction between ontology and ethics as domains of inquiry at leaat a little bit moot.
I mean, what’s the point of including all objects in being without reducing them to some other being, etc, if I can still behave towards them as I’ve always behaved?
You write above, “The point is not to throw Marx, or talk of sign-value, use-value, and exchange-value out the window, but to make room for these nonhuman actors. And the rationale for making room for these nonhuman actors lies in the fact that we can’t possibly give an adequate analysis of situations in the absence of including such actants in social relations in a manner that’s in excess of their status as vehicles for human intentions.”
I just assumed that the point of an adequate analysis is to help me live a juster life. Which would help the other real objects that make up this godforsaken universe thrive.
February 23, 2010 at 8:28 pm
John,
Ontology has ethical implications because ethics makes ontological claims. When we talk about things like what constitutes an agent or actor, what an intention is, what will is, etc., these are all ontological claims. Therefore, part of evaluating an ethics lies in evaluating the ontological categories it’s presupposing. I’ve written quite a bit on this on this blog (in the last couple of months, in fact), so I won’t repeat all these points here.
It seems to me that we have very different conceptions of what ethics is after. You claim that ethics is concerned with living a juster life. If by this you mean making judgments and assigning debt and blame, I just don’t throw in with that. I see ethics and politics as closer to medical science than the legal system. That is, ethics is concerned with how to form flourishing collectives of nonhuman and human actors. I believe that these questions and vital human concerns can’t properly be addressed without taking into account how we are among other actors besides the human. This involves questions of hierarchy or how entities are to be ordered in collectives.
The point of maintaining a distinction between ethics and ontology is that we shouldn’t allow our ethics to regulate or dictate questions of what is and is not, just as we shouldn’t all ontology to dictate questions of what sorts of collectives promote flourishing and what do not. In other words, ethical questions just aren’t relevant to all ontological questions just as ontological issues aren’t relevant to all ethical questions. The question you seem to be posing pertains to what I called, in this post, the hard questions of OOO where ethics are concerned, i.e., do we have duties and obligations to nonhuman actors in their own right, or does is ethics purely restricted to the human realm such that our only consideration of nonhuman actors pertains to how they promote or diminish our flourishing. I alluded to this at the end of the post when referring to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy. The character of Ann Clayborne holds that the planet of Mars itself has certain rights and that therefore we have duties and obligations to Marx. As a consequence, she believes that an injustice is being done to Mars by terraforming it so it is habitable for humans and by exploiting its natural resources. In Clayborne’s view, any human impact on Mars should be minimal. Clayborne’s character is thus treating the planet Mars as itself being a moral agent. She advocates an “inhuman ethics” in the sense that nonhumans are placed on equal footing with humans.
By contrast, if moral agency isn’t attributed to nonhuman actors as Clayborne does, then we won’t see any injustice in terraforming Mars and in terraforming the planet so that it will be habitable to humans. To be sure, we will have to take nonhuman encounters into account, but here in a way different from Clayborne’s character. Our concern with nonhuman actors will be in terms of how they impact us. For example, as we produce global warming on the planet Mars so that humans can move about it in ordinary clothing and plants and animals can thrive, we’ll want to make sure that this heating doesn’t spiral out of control and go the way of the planet Venus, but this will be because such excessive heating would thwart our aims and desires to live on the planet. Here no moral rights are attributed to the nonhuman objects themselves, but rather our only consideration of these nonhuman actors will be in terms of how they’re bound up with our own aims and intentions. The problem with Clayborne’s position is, as you observe, that it seems to render all object-object relations unethical because there’s no way that any animate or inanimate object can avoid exploiting other objects to maintain its existence.
I find this discussion interesting because I think it lies at the heart of ecophilosophy. On the one hand you have the moderate position that holds that we should be concerned with nonhuman actors like the planet, forests, animals, and so on because if we are not proper stewards of these things, then we undercut our own means of survival and thriving by destroying the shell (the environment) we require to sustain ourselves. Here the ethical claims are human centered. They take into account nonhuman actors but only with respect to human aims and concerns. Ethics here is exclusively the domain of the human or human interests. On the other hand, the radical position attributes moral rights to nonhuman actors themselves. Under this view, the reason, for example, it is wrong to strip mine a mountain for a cold has nothing to do with the impact this operation has on rivers and streams, the climate, etc., but because the mountain itself has rights or a right to exist as it does exist. It seems a number of ecotheorists are nodding in this direction in their discussions of the environment, the planet, animals, and so on. The question is whether a coherent or livable position can be generated on the basis of this way of viewing these issues.
February 23, 2010 at 8:57 pm
Dr Bryant, thanks for thinking with me.
I don’t think we’re as far apart vis-a-vis ethics as you seem to think. Whenou write, “That is, ethics is concerned with how to form flourishing collectives of nonhuman and human actors” I say: Exactly. I don’t give a damn about assigning praise or blame, a juster life is one which enables flourishing.
You write, “This involves questions of hierarchy or how entities are to be ordered in collectives.” What I was getting at originally is the hard time I have reconciling a flat ontology with hierarchy.
I seem to think (your work here is drawing this out of me) that not only to ethics imply an ontology but an ontology that insists on flatness kinda sorta maybe implies certain uh reciprocities in terms of how I’m supposed to behave. I know you say ontology’s not prescriptive, but … well, Ann Clayborne seems to think because Mars is, it has rights. You note later that so do other ecotheorists.
When you write, “The problem with Clayborne’s position is, as you observe, that it seems to render all object-object relations unethical because there’s no way that any animate or inanimate object can avoid exploiting other objects to maintain its existence” well, that’s what I was trying to say at first, when I wrote “given an utterly flat ontology as I understand it, any action would be unethical. Any action would presume an unflattening of the playing field, a privileging of one object over another. Any action, all action, would be more or less “barbarous, truncated, and inadequate”.”
In your lats paragraph you describe the radical view. That’s what I’m trying to explore. The question for me is, to quote you once again, “whether a coherent or livable position can be generated on the basis of this way of viewing these issues.”
And what if one can’t? As you note, ethics can’t be allowed to dictate the shape of an ontology.
So here’s my question, which I will ask myself if I’ve taken too much of your time: if a livable position can’t be generated on the basis of the most comprehensive ontology (let’s call it OOO), do I just give up on ethics? Because I’m the kind of animal, after all, that will gnaw off my leg to get out of a trap …
February 23, 2010 at 9:26 pm
Dr Bryant, let me restate a bit of the above (luckily the virtual world has lots of space). It’s probably true that ontologies are ethics-free. I think I’m bringing in an ethics under the table, so to speak. TYhat’s because something OOOntologists’ passion for a flat ontology reminds me very much of the Buddhist’s notion of dependent co-origination. Which, in itself doesn’t imply an ethics, perhaps, but since it’s presented in a Buddhist context, the obvious implication is that it’s just a misunderstanding to privilege one object over another. So, sorry ’bout that.
In any case, I’m left in the same place, with the same problem. But at least you don’t have to roll your eyes and attempt to explain to me once again how ontology doesn’t imply ethics.
February 24, 2010 at 12:05 am
‘The character of Ann Clayborne holds that the planet of Mars itself has certain rights and that therefore we have duties and obligations to Marx.’
I guess they call it the red planet for a reason ;)
February 24, 2010 at 12:41 pm
I’m trying to understand what a flourishing community composed entirely of non-human actors would look like. The first image that pops to mind is Zarathustra’s “over rich sun,” providing essentially unlimited energy with everything around it. Is this too metaphorical?
What about other levels? Do we apply the term flourishing community to the nuclear reactions within a star?
An entirely new vocabulary would be required for this task, wouldn’t it? I can’t imagine applying human ethical terms to relations between, say, Jupiter and Ganymede. Why would Jupiter have rights or duties in relation to Ganymede? What about the asteroids that impact Titan? Nothing in the current ethical vocabularies can be used for these relations.
If we completely evacuate the discussion of all ethical terms, if none of them are retrievable, does it even constitute an ethical theory anymore?
None of this is a problem for the “easy” OOO ethical question, of course.
I’d wonder if part of the problem is using the term “agency” rather than “cause.” Should we use the term agency when describing the tides? I suppose this merely dismisses the hard question, which means it isn’t a very useful thought.
February 24, 2010 at 3:35 pm
The idea of flourishing of collectives and assemblages keeps us circling around the idea of a virtue ethics, and I think that this approach is the most rewarding given our other concerns (the agency of nonhumans, the a priori doubt about what is an actant in any situation).
The question for virtue ethics however is always: on what grounds do we prefer the flourishing of the rainforests over the flourishing of, say, the capitalist war machines? This is the slightly blasphemous question when it comes to post humanist ethics.
And on this question of preference, I look to Zizek and Badiou, and to the past, to history. Whatever you think of Marx’s treatment of nonhumans in his conception of history, I think it’s right to marshal his narrative of the gradual emancipation of collectives and subject-groups, the struggle for a classless society. I don’t see any reason why this can’t be mapped onto a re-conceived humanity.
February 24, 2010 at 4:57 pm
AMM,
You write:
I don’t see why this would be a blasphemous question for post-humanist ethics. However, within the framework of post-humanistic ethics it would just be we (presumably you mean humans) that would be determining these preferences. Nonhuman actors would have a “say” as well in these collectives. That’s the weirdness of the radical variant of post-humanist ethics: It’s not just a matter of humans and their interests.
A couple of points here. First, let’s not forget one of Marxisms central aims is “releasing the forces of production”. Here Marxism fares little better than capitalism where the exploitation of nature is concerned. That said, I’m certainly all for the emancipation of collectives and struggling for classless society, and think this is an element of Marx’s thought that should be preserved. However, we do have the question here of what constitutes a collective and a subject-group. Is a collective just composed of humans? Or do collectives include rocks, stars, trees, forests, fish, fiber-optic cables, bits of digital code, etc? Likewise with talk of subject-groups. What composes these subject-groups? Are they just humans, or do they include nonhuman actors like the ones I just listed? This is a big part of Latour’s “deconstruction” of our distinction between nature and culture, as well as our standard concept of the social. For Latour sociology is not the study of human associations or relations, but rather is the sociology of associations simpliciter, such that collectives are always collectives of humans and nonhumans, or nonhumans and nonhumans, but never of humans alone. Latour’s thesis is that we can’t even begin to understand human social relations without taking these nonhuman actors into account and that these nonhuman actors are not just passive “tools”, means, and impediments to human aims, but are genuine active actors in their own right.
There is thus, as I’ve tried to outline in some of these posts, a weak and a strong reading of the role to be played by nonhuman actors in collectives and questions of ethics and politics. The weak reading is that we can’t make sense of human social relations without taking into account the role played by nonhuman actors in their collectives, but that the aims of ethical and political action are still human in character. The radical reading is that nonhuman actors themselves have rights of their own (and not just as means for human aims) such that when we talk about things like emancipation, that can’t be restricted to humans but also has to be the emancipation of nonhuman actors.
As a side note, I don’t think Marx’s actors can really be thought of as humans… At least in his later works. For Marx a person working in a factory is not the same thing as a peasant working the land. They are genuinely two different species that resemble one another in a number of respects but which affectively and in terms of their powers are different types of entities. So if this is true, we have the additional question here of “emancipation of what?”
February 25, 2010 at 2:33 pm
Great post, and very insightful. I am wondering how these ideas relate to the “ontological politics” that ANT folks like Annemarie Mol and John Law have been developing. It seems from a similar thread.
February 26, 2010 at 12:04 am
“The problem is that we just never see the sort of analysis in any sustained form in Marx that you’re proposing. What you say is what Marx should be doing, but not what Marx is doing.”
I do not know ho to say this in a less harsh way… but… either you have not read Marx or you are being deliberately obtuse.
I suggest that you take a look at the chapters in Volume One on manufacturing and large-scale industry. Or the sections in the Grundrisee on machines and technology. In both these texts, and elsewhere, you will see Marx repeat the same line. And this line is so far removed from the conception of things as ‘passive screens’ that it is not funny. Indeed, Marxists who write on technology are often concerned with ‘defending’ Marx from the charge of technological determinism.
Just one example: “In handicrafts and manufacture, the worker makes use of a tool; in the factories, the machine makes us of him. There the movements of the instruments of labour proceed from him, here it is the movements of the machine that he must follow.”
Actually here is another, more general, quote: “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.”
If these don’t convince I am happy to supply more.
February 26, 2010 at 12:42 am
Limitationsandshorcomings,
I have read Marx and I do not believe I’m being willfully obtuse. Marx does indeed have examples such as this sprinkled throughout his thought– in fact, I’ve often emphasized some of those passages here on the blog myself –but by and large I don’t think he tends to develop their implications (which would require a number of revisions to other claims he’s making), and his tendency is to occlude the domain of nonhuman actors reducing them to passive screens for the human or social relations. I think this is even more evident in subsequent appropriations of Marx (especially in German and French thought) where even political economy begins to disappear and get replaced by analyses of sign-value. Again, to emphasize, the point isn’t to reject Marx. I consider myself broadly Marxist in my political orientations. Rather, the point is to broaden Marxist thought to include these other dimensions.
February 26, 2010 at 3:08 pm
I was reminded of this sentence in the last chapter of Moby Dick:
” Would now the wind but had a body; but all the things that most exasperate and outrage mortal men, all these things are bodiless, but only bodiless as objects, not as agents.”
February 28, 2010 at 1:44 am
Levi,
I feel that we might be talking past each other.
My point not that there are isolated comments of that sort in Marx but that he makes these comments in the context of a sustained argument. That is why I gave reference, among other things, to more than 1/5th of Capital. I, myself, would call that a sustained analysis. Perhaps you mean something else by the term sustained.
March 11, 2010 at 12:11 am
Dr. Bryant,
Greatly enjoying this discussion, I’ve been on the edge of my seat every time Larval Subjects enters my newsreader. I can’t help but feel this is the foundational ethical- and to a large extent, as you’ve already mentioned, ontological- question of this era.
I wanted to refer you to an essay by Jairus Victor Groves in Democracy and Pluralism: the political thought of William E. Connolly titled “Must we persist to continue? William Connolly’s critical responsiveness beyond the limits of the human species,” which does a lot of labor toward answering the “strong” formulation of the question. Connolly has published with Bennett before (“Contesting nature/culture”), and I know from conversation that Jairus is well aware of the speculative realists and Latour, if not the object-oriented wing itself.
March 11, 2010 at 12:46 am
Thanks for the reference, Christian. I’ll have to track it down.
April 14, 2010 at 1:33 pm
Hi Levi and others,
I’ve just started reading this blog so am coming very late to the discussion. So first of all thanks for this amazing blog, not to mention the comments sections which are just as spectacular to read (I’m starting to realise that Graham Harman is right when he says that all the interesting stuff is largely happening on blogs these days). I’m not a philosopher but have been following Jane Bennett’s work for the last few years as she has been publishing drafts of Vibrant Matter in journals and books (which is how I came to discover Larval Subjects, i.e. via googling for reviews of Vibrant Matter, and am now utterly delighted and excited about the fact that the OO philosophers and the so-called Hopkins School of political theory are suddenly engaging with one another now that JB’s book has been published).
Second of all, I had some thoughts about this thorny question of whether nonhuman objects have ethical rights, and thought I’d run them by you all. Maybe this is a question to which we can apply the programme or “algorithm” that Bruno Latour sets out in Politics of Nature in such detail?? i.e. the answer to the question “do nonhuman objects have rights?”, the answer is Yes and No. Yes if one of these objects has taken the trouble to make the case in the Parliament of Things for its rights. No, if it hasn’t. Not to mention that we should also realise that there is always the potential for those things that haven’t yet obtained rights, to do so at some future point. The Collective is utterly unpredictable. Those persons and objects without rights always have the potential to obtain them via due process. We cannot establish in advance via “ethical” reasoning which entities have rights and which don’t. In other words, my take on it is that we can’t get very far if we consider this question as an ethical one. We do much better if we think of it as a political one. I’m with Steven Shaviro in thinking that we should displace all ethical questions into questions of politics and aesthetics. Ethical thinking establishes principles in advance, which is perhaps what all of you are individually trying to do here, i.e. analytically solving the problem of whether nonhuman objects have rights. But my concern is that if we try to think these sorts of questions in ethical terms, we end up with exactly the kind of hard unanswerable questions that John put to us, i.e. “if nonhuman objects have rights, then surely I am infringing even on the rights of an apple if I bite into it? And isn’t that going to make life really really really hard?” However, if we think of these questions in terms of politics, the answer becomes clear — i.e. we get a *political*-style answer: “Whether or not apples have rights depends on how everyone votes on the issue (and whether or not it comes to a vote depends on whether apples are willing to ascend to the podium and start making the case that they have rights that we should respect”). Ethics demands a single answer, i.e. a single principle, that you can get from analysing the problem. Politics doesn’t, because it understands that all answers are contingent upon how the collective votes (and you can never predict how the collective will vote or what new entities will come forth to call a referendum). Politics says: “until the day that apples stand up in the Parliament of Things and demand that its rights be recognised, there is no need to recognise apples. Go ahead and take a bite!”. Latour has a much more real-world example in Politics of Nature — I think it was somethign like the question of whether we should all have the right to drive a car given that cars kill thousands of people everyday — the answer is that it depends on how the collective votes, and the collective up till now has effectively voted that we ignore the rights of all potential victims of car accidents because we prefer at the moment to value our right to get around speedily more than we value their rights. And that’s OK because no one yet has made a really strong enough case to ban cars which the collective has voted in favour of, so we will just have to wait for the day when that happens before banning cars. (There’s a whole other discussion to be had here of course, i.e. about the supposed irrationality of the voting public, etc, but that’s another story…)
But I’d also add that ethical reasoning is important (I don’t want to dismiss ethical reasoning entirely) because it is the stage before the referendum goes to a vote — i.e. all of you are individually trying to work out, using your substantial combined philosophical training, whether nonhuman objects have rights. And because of your efforts, the eventual result of the election in which you are taking part is going to be strengthened. The collective is really really strenghtned by what is happening on this blog. Or to put another way, politics is taking place right here on this blog owing to ethical reasoning, i.e. because all of you are making up your minds about how you are going to vote in the referendum about whether nonhuman objects should be given rights (and as someone said in some comment on this blog, this may possibly be the key question of our day).
I’d also add that framing this question politically rather than ethically circumvents Fabio’s proposal to rethink subjecthood. I personally wouldn’t want to go in the direction that Fabio suggests. Wouldn’t a return to the concept of the subject also effectively reinstitute the primacy of the subject-object relation, i.e. the human-world correlate?, which is precisely what OOO is trying to avoid? If we think of the question politically, it’s no longer about who is an “ethical subject”. Rather, at the most minimal level, we only need to know who or what can stand up in the Collective and demand to be heard and call a referendum (either speaking for itself or speaking through a translator, e.g. a scientist). That is, we only need to know who is a *political* subject. And objects *can* be political subjects. Via the translation of scientists, methane, for example, is currently a very important political subject because of its greenhouse properties.
OK, so after all that, my vote is: No, nonhuman objects should absolutely not be given rights in advance! they should only be given rights after we’ve taken a vote in the Parliament of Things!
Finally I’d add (speaking of the “key question of our day”) that this isn’t merely a philosophical issue because, in 2008, Ecuador became the first country in the world to grant constitutional rights to nonhuman objects, for “environmental” reasons. To which my response is: “Really??? You guys are going to give rights to viruses???” Totally misguided, in my opinion — I think it means that, in Ecuador, I could sue John on behalf of that apple that he bit into. One step forward for environmental politics but three steps backwards. One more ludicrous thing that gives environmentalists a bad name. This is what happens when people try to frame this question ethically (i.e. in advance of due process) rather than politically :-) See http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/29/ecuador-constitution-grants-nature-rights/
April 14, 2010 at 3:34 pm
Dear Eu Jin Chua–
Thank you for considering my question, and my apple-eater’s and my apple’s plight(s).
Please pardon my relative ignorance of the procedural ins and outs of Latour’s Parliament of Things. But: how does appledom make its case? And by the time it does, mightn’t it be too late? I mean, what if the last apple gets up to speak and says “all my brothers and sisters are gone!” Isn’t a vote moot at that point?
I guess I’m worrying about the efficacy of a Parliament which demands that those without power empower themselves (HOW?) before they have the right to speak …
And beyond that: what necessitates a Parliament of Things? or, better, what necessitates its being thought into being? It seems to me that something precedes politics, say, maybe an “advance” decision that all things “deserve” a forum in which to make their case?
I do have my doubts that the answer is necessarily ethics. I realize that we’re not Kantians here, but Kant was on to something when he didn’t make ethics the subject of his first critique. I can’t answer my question, at least not with any (Kantian!) “apodictic” certainty.
But I can’t say that “it’s politics all the way down …” with any apodictic certainty either. Any ideas? What underpins politics? Does anything?
May 17, 2010 at 10:16 pm
Dear contributors,
I find it very inspiring to read all your bright comments. To combine Latour and Marx I would like to take a step back to the basis (“being determines consciousness”), from politics and ethics to economy, because I want to show that Latour’s theory, considering his statement “We have never been modern”, can be read – if the author likes it or not – as an anti-capitalistic argument: capitalism itself is (so to say in an anachronistically way) utterly modern, based on the Great Divide between humans and nonhumans, between humans and machines. The human being is paid for selling his labour-power as a commodity, because he has to reproduce himself as a wage-worker, he has to eat, drink, dress and so on and has to raise the next generation of wage-workers – traditionally the woman’s (unpaid) domestic labour. If the human wage-worker produces a machine, which will do his work in the future, he will be unemployed, not be paid anymore and therefore not be able to reproduce himself furthermore (and, by the way, not be able to buy all those nice goods offered by consumer capitalism), even though his contribution to the assemblage in Latour’s sense is now as ever incorporated in the machine. On the other hand profits could be maximized by decreasing the labour costs. (It’s a simplification, but I hope you can see the argument!) In his book “Pandora’s Hope” Latour describes as a socio-technical collective of humans and nonhumans the example of the speed bumps, acting (in combination with the car and its driver) in a way to slow down car traffic. Such a speed bump is also known as “sleeping policeman”, and that exactly is the point: the real, i.e. the human policeman is not needed anymore, but he is still alive and has to eat… With the electronic revolution, machinization and rationalization the number of “unnecessary” humans is increasing rapidly, which leads to poverty for the people concerned, and, generally speaking, to the well known crises of overproduction and overaccumulation. Thinking of overcoming the Great Divide of capitalism, which seperates humans and nonhumans resp. humans and machines, the conclusion could be more or less radical (in the meaning of “radix” = to get down to the root): a less radical solution for now would be the implementation of a basic income for everyone, regardless whether someone is able or not to sell his or her labour-power at the market and what is his or her part of acting in the various collectives.