Reflecting on the Georgia Tech Object-Oriented Ontology Symposium, one of the moments that I’m less than pleased with was an exchange with one of the members of the audience who was defending the analysis and critique of ideology. If I’m bothered by this exchange it’s because I cut the participant off mid-sentence without allowing him to fully articulate his point. This was rather rude on my part and for that I apologize.
So what was at issue in this discussion? In my paper, “Being is Flat”, one of the key points I sought to make is that social and political thought has focused entirely too much on content, fetishistically revolving around beliefs, ideologies, signs, narratives, and discourses found in groups. My thesis is that if social and political analysis focuses on ideologies, narratives, signs, signifiers, discourses, beliefs, etc., in its analysis of why social formations are organized as they are, it is doomed to go astray. Following Latour, I thus propose that the concept of society should be replaced by that of collectives. A society is composed entirely of humans, human relations, and human phenomena such as discourses, narratives, and ideologies. A collective, by contrast, includes all of these things when it is a collective involving humans, but also includes nonhuman objects like technologies, resources, roads, cane toads, bacteria, etc., etc., etc. The concept of society should be abandoned, I believe, in favor of the concept of collectives. And if this is the case, then there is no such thing as human relations that do not also include all sorts of nonhuman actors. Moreover, these nonhuman actors are not simply passive resources that people use as tools (a form of overmining with respect to objects), but rather introduce all sorts of differences that deeply influence what sorts of associations between humans come to exist.
Latour underlines this point nicely in Reassembling the Social. Latour writes:
Between a car driver that slows down near a school because she has seen the ’30 MPH’ yellow sign and a car driver that slows down because he wants to protect the suspension of his car threatened by the bump of a ‘speed trap’, is the difference big or small? Big, since the obedience of the first has gone through morality, symbols, signs posts, yellow paint, while the other has passed through the same list to which has been added a carefully designed concrete slab. (77)
Latour tirelessly emphasizes that mechanisms of organization that pass through morality, symbols, and signs are incredibly weak and are very difficult to maintain. To be sure, they make their contributions, yet it is odd that entire schools of social and political thought seem to attribute these actants or objects an iron clad omnipotence and place their eggs in the basket of producing social change through a critique of this order of “morality” and signs. By contrast, the speed bump out there in the world is a real physical constraint. As Latour emphasize, the speed bump is an actant or object entangled with semiotic actants, but it is far from being a mere vehicle or carrier of these actants. Your car slows down whether you like it or not when you pass over that speed bump.
read on!
The example that led to the remarks on the part of my interlocutor revolved around bridge overpasses built too low in a city for public buses to pass underneath. Suppose we are presented with a public beach and wonder why the population that enjoys this beach is primarily composed of middle class and wealthy people. An ideological analysis might focus on the beliefs that middle class, wealthy, and poor people have and how these beliefs function to regulate certain social relations. An object-oriented analysis would not discount these sorts of semiotic objects or actants in this assemblage– in Deleuze-speak, that which belongs to the plane of expression –but would point out that the bridge overpasses are too low for the public transit to pass through and that therefore the movement of people from the poor portion of town are deeply constrained in their possibilities of movement. Carl DiSalvo tells me that this famous example from sociology turns out to be false, but the theoretical point, I believe, still holds. What we have here is a set of nonhuman actants or objects significantly organizing human associations.
It was in relation to this example that the audience member– sadly I didn’t get to meet him after the talks –posed his question. His thesis was that while the bridges are certainly physical constraints on the sorts of associations possible between humans, it is ideology that accounts for why the bridges are low. It is here that I rudely cut him off, and for a very simple reason. While there are, no doubt, instances where ideology dictates these sorts of design decisions, this thesis assumes that this particular sorting of human bodies between the wealthy and poor was already operative when the bridges were built. In this way, the audience member hoped to reduce the bridges to a vehicle of ideological content or beliefs. But what this misses is that in just as many other instances these sorts of design decisions took place in situations where such distributions did not yet exist. The sorting of human bodies, under these circumstances, is an unintended consequence, an aleatory result of a prior organization, not the cause of the design decision.
And here I’m tempted to suggest that ideology and belief follows rather than precedes forms of association among humans. In other words, an ideology is a retroactive rationalization of certain human social relations, not the cause of these social relations. But if this is the case, then ideological analysis is really beside the point. It’s like limiting one’s discussion of a cappuccino to the foam, entirely ignoring the java. An important point here is that if one wishes to understand cappuccino, we cannot restrict ourselves to the java, but must also understand the foam as well. In other words, we must think the entanglement of these agencies. The problem, however, with so much contemporary social and political analysis is that it focuses on the foam alone.
If one doesn’t like the example of low bridges, we could just as easily talk about rice production in China between the 14th and 18th centuries as described by Braudel in his magnificent Capitalism and Civilization. What difference, we can ask, does the production of rice rather than other grains like wheat, barley, rye, etc., make to a collective involving humans? Quite a bit. The advantage of producing rice compared to these other grains is that you get three or four harvests a year. Consequently, rice buffers a collective against famines that are common with the poor harvests and blights of other grains. The drawback is that rice planting and harvesting is labor intensive, back breaking work. You literally spend hours every day planting the rice and harvesting the rice. This nonhuman object or actant thus organizes humans in particular ways. Labor becomes much more collective and is unable to devote itself to the cultivation of other food sources such as livestock. It’s not by mistake that the highlands went largely uncultivated during this time period. On the one hand, rice was abundant and readily available, diminishing the need to cultivate the highlands for other foods and livestock. On the other hand, people were collectively engaged in the cultivation of rice. Do Chinese ideologies of collective relations precede this sort of production or do they follow from it? It is the latter that is likely.
Too much social and political analysis focuses all too much on the dimension of content to the detriment of everything else. This can readily be discerned in the work of the early Frankfurt school theorists. It can be discerned in the social and political theorists arising out of Althusser and Lacan, and how they think the political. It is pervasive throughout deconstructive thought and literary theory. And in this these forms of theory implicitly say that social relations are as they are because of what people believe, because of the “moral” dimension, because of the semiotic, ignoring the affordances and constraints engendered by all sorts of non-semiotic and non-signifying relations that characterize human relations to nonhuman actors. In many respects I believe this is an occupational hazard of theorists coming from the humanities. We deal primarily with texts and like the proverbial donkey that believes God is an omnipotent donkey, we come to believe that the world is written in signifiers and that societies are structured primarily by beliefs. But what we miss in all this is the difference that fiber optic cables or a humble paved road can make.
Our social and political theory needs a theoretical apparatus capable of thinking the entanglements of all of these sorts of actors or objects without treating nonhuman objects such as technologies, rocks, resources, plants, cows, etc., as mere vehicles or carriers of significations. What we need is a theory such as Deleuze and Guattari’s Helmslevian “semiotic” organized around machinic assemblages (arrangements of nonhuman actants and the differences they produce) and the plane of expression (all that belongs to the domain of the semiotic or what I call “content”). And above all, what we must think is how these different actants are entangled with one another in sticky networks. Zizek approached this point when he noticed, in The Sublime Object of Ideology, that it is not what people believe that matters, so much as what they do. But having broached the blight of ideological analysis he simply repeated the textualist gesture of treating signifiers as the principle of “doing”, treating our relationship to money as a fetish based on a misrecognition, rather than exploring this sub-textual domain of entangled objects and how they afford and constrain action, up to and including money. It is precisely this move that is to be avoided and here the first regime of recommended medicine is Bourdieu’s Pascalian Meditations, followed by a healthy dose of Latour’s Science in Action and Marx’s “Working Day” in Capital, coupled with the diligent study of Braudel’s Capitalism and Civilization.
Larval Subjects . 
May 1, 2010 at 4:11 am
Braudel is mindbendingly awesome. A hundred pages was enough to make me realize I had to rethink everything I assumed I understood about politics and economics. Was Mike Davis influenced by Braudel? His Late Victorian Holocausts is of that cast–weather patterns, social structures and political notions all work on an equal level as actants–and the best primer for the historical conditions of neo-liberal globalization I’ve read.
May 1, 2010 at 6:15 am
[…] emerges from assemblages, not the other way around as Lucero seem to believe. Levi Bryant at Larval Subjects has this to say about rice production in China between the 14th and 18th […]
May 1, 2010 at 1:54 pm
hey Levi.
thanks for the post. long-time-reader-finally-become-blogger here. I agree with you, Latour and many others in that a fixation on what you call content and I would call language/text/utterance is a huge problem. not only for the humanities and social sciences that were built on that preoccupation, but anyone thinking in ready-made subject-object binaries and their many expressions. theories built with problematic reality-demarcators like phenomenology, scientific naturalism and so forth. not only do they delegate a narrow grasp of the real, but import an unpalatable politics (example: The Politics of Nature).
you wrote:
“Our social and political theory needs a theoretical apparatus capable of thinking the entanglements of all of these sorts of actors or objects without treating nonhuman objects such as technologies, rocks, resources, plants, cows, etc., as mere vehicles or carriers of significations. What we need is a theory such as Deleuze and Guattari’s Helmslevian “semiotic” organized around machinic assemblages (arrangements of nonhuman actants and the differences they produce) and the plane of expression (all that belongs to the domain of the semiotic or what I call “content”). And above all, what we must think is how these different actants are entangled with one another in sticky networks.”
I believe a notion that could help articulate that concern is material-semiotics or semiotic-materiality. if [think Latour litany here] all are actants then “content” should be thought as obstinately consequential as any other thing-in-relation. I would say that words/text/language can only productively be thought not as domains of reality, but only in their material specificities, among other actants. so “ideology” makes no sense in a mercilessly immanent universe, except if localized in words, utterances and texts. BUT those are potentially powerfully consequential and can be traced like any object. meaning-making thought with brutally humble ANT (Law: Making Mess) needs to be accounted for in historical times and spaces, like any other practice.
so in theory I agree with you: we need to work towards productively imploding the politically irresponsible division between forms thought as things to bump into) and contents thought as meanings to have in minds. I would hold that both are always made consequential in real-time(s) and sites. the question then would be: how are they done? and I’d go on to assume that if nobody will know how people and things will enact each other in the future we shouldn’t preclose what and how a real object/thing (word, text or any other figuration of force) may be made and turn out to count in practice. the turn to (and from) ontological politics in STS marks that concern.
so having gotten to politics allow me a question regarding how you stand on the philosophers role here: how do you see an only anecdotically-empirical philosophy (as I perceive speculative realism/OOO to be [please correct me if I am mistaken!]) fit to respond to the generativity of things, if a word, a text, an utterance are all players caught up in contingent practice that is always world-ordering (political)? I think Latour said somewhere something along the lines of “no serious philosopher can justify not working empirically anymore”. pretty heavy stuff (and I’d be thankful if someone could direct me to the quote if it exists and is not “only” a figment of my imagination hurr), but if collectives are indeed made in real spaces×, what would/should be the political project of OOO? because surely it is (inevitably) “doing stuff” in the world, just what the “stuff” will be is always at stake. even more to the, perhaps uncomfortable, point: shouldn’t OOO especially, as taking material agency seriously, have to commit to empirical exploration? (and by that token maybe another political relevance?)
this is certainly not intended to be an attack, just a friendly venting of ideas I’ve been thinking with precisely because actant-network-ontology influenced STS and OOO seem to share so many concerns. I look forward to being a bit more active around here. cheers.
stefan
May 1, 2010 at 2:54 pm
I think the problem with your interlocutor’s argument is less one of discourse vs. objectivity/realism or the overemphasis of signification as, to borrow a Latourism, argumentative ‘short-circuiting’. The argument certainly over-privileges ideology but I think that this is less to do with the character of ideology versus whatever else as with reductionism (which can itself take various forms besides ‘ideology’ per se).
So, there is a bridge on the road leading to a beach. The bridge is too low to allow buses past. Poor people tend to take buses therefore poor people’s access to the beach is unfairly limited by the bridge. No problems here.
Your interlocutor suggests that the bridge is somehow a materialization or encrustation of ideology – you stipulate, quite rightly, that, as it stands (so to speak), it is a bridge! No more, no less. It is not a canvas, or a cinema screen and human cognition is neither the paint nor the projection required to make these ontological tabula rasa ‘come alive’. The bridge needs construction and maintenance by human hands but it wants for nothing in the moment. In other words, its being subsists in the short term apart from ideology, though it relies upon humans to exist in the long term.
Does this mean that the bridge’s shortcomings (pun intended) have nothing to do with ideology? Not at all – but nor does it mean the contrary. To establish this one way or the other requires substantially more labour – one must interrogate the bridge’s history; go and find planning records, interview the architect (if still alive), find out who and what was involved with the planning of the height of the bridge. Perhaps it was the work of a cabal of right-wing politicians, perhaps it was the result of a negligent planning process that excluded the voices of poor people, perhaps it is a very old bridge and the materials it was built from limited its size. None of this is known a priori; to short-circuit the argument by attributing a pre-established, pre-fabricated cause is insufficient. Ideology may well have played a part in this situation, it may not have.
One could equally short-circuit the argument with ‘objectivism’ (of various sorts) rather than ideology yet all of that is to be established and it is always open.
The bridge is ideological and it is objective – which aspect of its being becomes relevant in any given moment requires labour.
So, the question for me is not so much whether the bridge is an ideological construction or an objective one so much as what connections can be traced and how much labour one wishes to put into the investigation. Its shortcomings may be ideological or not – it is an empirical question in the Latourian sense of that word.
That said, the act of reducing this situation to ideology clearly indicates a preference for idealism! But this cannot be countered with objectivism of whatever sort without what I would call, again with M. Latour, ‘experimental metaphysics’!
May 1, 2010 at 9:05 pm
What Abon said.
May 1, 2010 at 9:29 pm
Very nicely put, Abon!
May 2, 2010 at 9:44 am
I agree Abon. the STS point here would precisely be that. the bridge should be approached as the sedimentation of such diverse, heterogenous histories. of the (in principle)uncountable trajectories that congregate to give the bridge shape and durability, minds, thoughts, words and texts were some, but never the a priori privileged kinds of actants. intentional racist city planners might have had a big say, but that is up to historical investigation.
and once the bridge is built nobody knows what it will do either, and with whom. attending to how the bridge will be mobilized in collective action would again be possible to find out empirically. but for that you’d have to take serious the negotiations it is going to be involved in. perhaps with cars, hateful thoughts, a city council, acid rain and relentlessly pink elephants. but the decisive import of the notion of “experimental metaphysics” would be that in that politics all concerned should be counted. beyond modernist ideological preclosure (politics of nature)and regardless of the crazy ontology that someone will mobilize. never knowing what that may be makes the whole setup experimental. it is here that I could repeat the question I asked above.
cheers.
stefan
May 4, 2010 at 10:05 am
All good points. At the same time, I wouldn’t quite phrase the question as whether or not the shortcomings of this fictional bridge are “ideological.” All bridges, all human endeavors, have an ideological component inasmuch as those activities emerge from some sense of the thought-out possibilities of a situation. I.e., here’s a situation. One possibility is that we build a bridge. What kind of bridge should we build? The answer is always ideological, and the bridge is informed, though obviously not determined, by the answer. That is, if we think of ideology as our capacity to imagine possibilities, which is how I would see it in Deleuzian terms, then you one kind of answer to the role ideology plays. (Though it is important to note that for Deleuze there are possibilities but there are also potentialities and the virtual, which are quite different and I would say not ideological.)
The telling point of this question/example and the theory of ideology that it presupposes is that one does not have to know the particularities of the situation. Of course this is the kind of business that Latour opposes directly.
Even still, one cannot say that the bridge isn’t an ideological assault upon the poor, even if one cannot find the kind of evidence described above. The bridge can become an assault on the poor, even if, once upon a time, it was created to help an earlier generation of poor people who lived in a different part of town. Part of the bridge’s context is the city’s real/perceived class hostilities. When the protests begin, who can say the bridge is not implicated in class conflicts?
June 21, 2010 at 9:05 am
Thanks a lot for this post.
It is very useful in my actual PhD on develop project!