Responding to my post on Diamond, Yant writes:
One way of approaching the, I think, quite legitimate reservations that Johan raises is to recognise (and this should be quite obvious really) that just because we’ve got a noun for something doesn’t mean we should take it to be an object!
To use words like ‘European, Inca, Maya, European maritime technology’ do not necessarily make a work ‘object oriented’ – this is too hasty a conclusion. Whether a ‘culture’ or a ‘nation’ or a ‘state’ can be legitimately referred to as an ‘object’ at all I think is a very important point.
I study international relations and it is of the utmost importance to the theory of this discipline whether one accepts the state and thus the international system to be closed, black-boxed ‘objects’ (as the dominant, mainstream neo-positivist theories hold) or whether it is actually necessary to insist on opening up this black-box and actually denying it closure (both for ontological and ethical reasons). Similar concerns are routinely raised about Diamond’s histories and I think an OOO driven social science needs to address these problems as problems head on not just accuse critics of correlationism.
I think the problem with Diamond’s work is not that it is oriented towards objects (which is good) but that it is (like Braudel and McNeill certainly) overwhelmingly macro-oriented; this is not necessarily a bad thing but it is certainly something with a lot of problems attached to it.
If we are to advance object oriented theory into the humanities and social sciences further (and this is very much my intention) we need to square some circles. For example, are not the histories of Diamond et al. not the absolute anti-thesis of Latour’s ANT? (And is not Latour’s ANT somewhat the cause celebre of object oriented approaches in the social sciences so far?)
Being ‘object oriented’ doesn’t necessarily forgive one all other sins. I don’t think one need be ‘correlationist’ to recognise the problems of macro-history. That isn’t to dismiss its relevance, however, just to insist on the recognition of its problems.
I initially misunderstood the problem that Jonah was alluding to (here and here). My mistake. Yes, this is all absolutely correct. We cannot assume that just because there is a noun for something that something is an object.
With that said, I think it’s important to exercise some caution where Latour is concerned. OOO and Latour are not identical. Graham already shows some major divergences in Prince of Networks, where Latour falls into the internalist camp pertaining to relations, while OOO is externalist. To this, I would add that Latour, in my view (Harman need not be guilty of this criticism) is often confused with respect to mereology.
read on!
In many respects I think Latour is guilty of a problem opposite to that of Diamond’s. Where, as Yant and Jonah point out, Diamond tends to be too hasty in treating things like “Mayan culture” as entities in their own right, thereby leaving unquestioned whether or not these are genuine entities, Latour, in my view, is too hasty in undermining larger scale objects. In short, despite his principle of irreduction, Latour nonetheless proceeds in many instances as a great underminer. Howso?
Let’s recall what undermining is as understood by Harman. Both undermining and overmining are operations whereby objects are dissolved. The overminer argues that objects are falsely deep and reduces them to something more immediate like bundles of sensations or impressions, or effects of language. The underminer, by contrast, argues that objects are too superficial and that, in fact, they are effects of a more fundamental stata of reality such as subatomic particles, the One, water, pre-individual fields, internal relations, and so on.
The suggestion that Latour is guilty of undermining initially appears counter-intuitive because Latour shows so much respect for the agency of actants. However, it is paradoxically Latour’s deep respect for actants that causes him to tend towards undermining. And, in this connection, I am suggesting that hidden in Latour’s analyses and ontological claims, there is often hidden an asterisk to the effect that only a particular type of actant counts as an actant. Here I have in mind mid-sized actants such as persons, technologies, buildings, roads, electric lines, etc.
How does this occur? Latour’s favored critical strategy (and it is a critical strategy despite his scathing critiques of critique) is to undermine larger scale objects by reducing them to effects of mid-scale objects. In both his practice and his theory, he treats only the mid-level objects as being real objects or actants. Suppose, for example, Latour were to conduct an ANT analysis of my college. We can imagine how he would proceed. Latour would, no doubt, proceed by first declaring that the college does not exist. That is, he would denounce the naive who believe in the existence of an entity like the college.
Next Latour would proceed to show how the college really is an effect of a number of smaller scale actants such as administrators, faculty, students, the technology stations in the classroom, eraser boards, fiber optic cables allowing for distance learning, etc., etc., etc. The college would be dissolved and reduced to the activity of all these other actants. These other actants would be coded as the real whereas the college would be treated as a sort of fetish or illusion.
If we followed Latour to the letter of the ontology he proposes in Irreductions, then it is precisely this sort of move that should be prohibited, for there is no compelling ontological reason to treat these mid-level objects as more real than larger scale objects. There is no reason, for example, to treat an army as less real than the soldiers, horses, officers, uniforms, guns, etc., that make that army up. In my view, Latour therefore perpetually wants to claim that objects are their parts. Thus he generally fails to capture one of the central ways in which objects are split: the split between objects as a totality and unity and composed of parts. Yet for onticology, objects are one thing and parts are other objects.
Latour’s undermining of objects in favor of parts has a whole cascade of theoretical consequences. For example, I suspect that many of Latour’s scathing denunciations of Marx arise from his confusions about the mereology of objects. Lurking in the background it is likely that Latour is regarding, with disdain, objects like class. Instead, no doubt, Latour would like to analyze smaller level actants alone and to reject the existence of class altogether. But here Marx is closer to the truth. As any careful and fair-minded reading of Capital or Grundrisse will reveal, Marx does not begin with categories like class, but 1) shows how class is an emergent object from the actions of many smaller level actants, that 2) being aware or knowing that one belongs to a class is not a necessary condition for being a part of a class, that 3) class, once it has come into existence, exercises downward causation on its parts, and that 4) nonetheless these parts are independent of the larger scale object to which they belong in the sense that they can struggle against it.
The proper onticological thesis is thus not that larger scale objects are not real and that only parts are real, but rather that both parts and larger scale objects are real actants in the world, and that they are independent of one another while the larger scale object requires the smaller scale parts or objects in order to exist. In this respect, I believe that Deleuzian concepts like the molar and the molecular and sociological concepts like the macro- and the mico- are less than useful and are even a hindrance to sound analysis. Generally these concepts are deployed with an implicit morality and theoretical decision. The molecular and the micro are coded as the “good” and the “real”, while the molar and the macro are coded as the “bad” and the unreal. This leads to theoretical attitudes where the reality of larger scale objects is denied from the outset. But in denying or ignoring larger scale objects we end up missing one of the most interesting things we would like to understand in our social analysis: the tensions, antagonisms, and struggles that emerge between larger scale objects and their parts. For every larger scale object struggles against its own parts because, insofar as parts are independent objects in their own right, they’re always striving to go their own way and do their own thing while the larger scale object is attempting to herd cats so as to sustain its own existence.
With all of that said, Yant is absolutely correct in pointing out that we can’t assume that just because there is a noun for something, that something must exist. Part of a good object-oriented analysis will consist in determining what the real objects are. And here, it is above all necessary to show that there is an endo-consistency or set of endo-relations among parts establishing the existence of an object. Absent that you’re guilty of grouping a set of actors together as parts of a single larger scale object, when in fact there are no endo-relations grouping these objects together. We sometimes hear this, for example, in discussions of atheists as analyzed by some religious folk. The suggestion is that there is some macro-level entity that one might refer to as “atheists” on par with organizations like a church. Yet this is to posit an object where no object exists, because while there are many individual atheists, there is no larger scale organization linking all these atheists together as parts of a single object. Suggesting that such a larger-scale object exists is a bit like suggesting that there is a larger scale object called “coffee drinkers”. To have such an object you need endo-relations striving to regulate and maintain the parts, but no such set of endo-relations exist. I take it that this is what Yant and Jonah are trying to get at when criticizing supposed entities like the “Maya”.
Larval Subjects . 
May 14, 2010 at 3:01 pm
There’s a reading series in Philly called “Moles not Morlar.” I suspect this has more to do with WC Williams “No ideas but in things,” than Deleuze, but the tension inherent in that formulation has been a major goad to my poetry. “Recorded church bells/aren’t real bells/no more/than what they signify/ real/ nonetheless/ in what they are… ”
–and hey, M~Morar has a reading tonight: Philly’s anarchist collective bookstore: Wooden Shoe, 7th & South: 7:30. See yous there!
May 14, 2010 at 4:33 pm
[…] 14, 2010 Here he is, with A NEW POST RESPONDING TO THE COMMENTERS on his previous […]
May 14, 2010 at 5:18 pm
In my view, Latour therefore perpetually wants to claim that objects are their parts. Thus he generally fails to capture one of the central ways in which objects are split: the split between objects as a totality and unity and composed of parts. Yet for onticology, objects are one thing and parts are other objects.
In other words, all objects are gunk, in David Kellog Lewis’s sense.
Perhaps if “onticology” denies all atomic objects, then it should be rebranded as GOO, for gunk-oriented ontology.
May 14, 2010 at 5:37 pm
Not sure what you mean Cameron. OOO doesn’t reject smaller level objects, just the claim that they’re the really real objects. Unlike Leibniz, it rejects the thesis that aggregates are unreal, or that something must be simple to be a substance.
May 14, 2010 at 5:41 pm
I’m not quite sure what to make of Yant’s points; I think you get them right at the end of your summary of them, Levi, I’m just not wavering between whether Yant thinks:
(a) in history and the social sciences it is crucial to have methods at one’s disposal for distinguishing between real objects and pseudo-objects,
or
(b) all large-scale objects are pseudo-objects; the macro-levels of historians are just parasitical off real micro-levels.
If (a), then I totally agree, because some objects are in fact just pseudo-objects. But if (b), then I think Yant is unfairly trying to shift the burden of proof by simply proclaiming in advance that things like “Mayan” *might not* exist (agreed with that) but that they *cannot*. It would then become a sort of sandbagging nominalist position claiming that it’s up to realists to prove that such larger objects exist. But again, I find it hard to interpret Yant just from these few passages. (S)he at least seems serious rather than flippant, which is already a lot.
Also Levi, I’m not sure if I agree about atheists and coffee drinkers. I’m agreed with your endo-consistency concept when it comes to large-scale individual objects. “The New York Knicks” might be such a case; one would expect to find some endo-consistency here.
But if we’re talking instead about “NBA player”, while I agree that this is not a real object, you could probably still call it a “general object.” Science deals with general objects constantly: “electron,” for instance. No one thinks the sum total of all electrons lakes up an object, but science has to be able to talk in general about things like electrons, genes, geological faults, etc., even though no one case of these things perfectly embodies them. And I think general objects (such as electron, tree, rodent) need to be treated differently from large-scale individual objects with endo-consistency (such as New York Knicks, Levi Bryant, the Delhi Metro).
Hope that makes sense. I’m dashing this off in between grading final exams.
Anyway, I think your recent posts have been great, and I think your commenters have also been intelligent in response– I was simply disappointed in the last post that most of them were giving assessments of Diamond as a historian. That’s their right, of course, but I’d really like to see a good discussion of your “one third” remark. Why? Because that’s probably the most concrete thing about methodology that’s been said in OOO circles so far (not very concrete, admittedly, but people should remember that we are ontologists and not social scientists; we have our own problems to work on first).
May 14, 2010 at 5:43 pm
Sorry, major typo at the beginning of my last comment:
“I’m just not wavering between whether Yant thinks”
Cross out the word “not”!!! I’m wavering all right.
May 14, 2010 at 5:50 pm
“In other words, all objects are gunk, in David Kellog Lewis’s sense.”
cameron is wrong, for just the reason you gave.
In fact, OOO is the ultimate ANTI-gunk ontology, since no matter how far down you go, you never get to gunk. There are always discrete objects, all the way down.
May 14, 2010 at 7:57 pm
Graham and Levi,
“Gunk” refers to a whole whose parts all have parts of their own. In other words a gunky object is made up of other gunky objects “all the way down” – and can never be reduced to atoms.
When you say “there are always discrete objects”, do you mean all objects are atomic – with no parts? I don’t think you do . . .
May 14, 2010 at 8:16 pm
I’m a bit in a hurry here [sloppy thinking danger disclaimer]
in defense of Latour’s ANT position: the approach is made for taking seriously the entangling moves in assemblages that have humans in them. it allows a kind of ethnography or at least to take serious humans-among-others with their practical metaphysics. to go in and a priori have a conception of what the objects one will find playing active roles in those equipped peoples’ assemblings (verb) would make you insensitive to differences that will make differences in practice. talking about words: you should be ready for any words to exert force, no matter how unreasonably “big” they might be. as I read Latour’s argument any of those “big” nouns that someone utters could be undermined, but opening that object would not only include bringing into view what some object that the noun refers to is like BUT also all tributaries that have allowed it to become efficacious in the site where it is uttered.
I think for his own work he’d say that there are abstractions that do specific kinds of work and that one should be alert to the jumps they facilitate (Stenger’s Constructivist Readin of Process and Reality is a great way to think this). the challenge for that historian would be to tie back his abstractions rigidly to empirical process and to make sure that they are good, ie. do not gloss unduly over important differences.
not assuming the a priori efficacy of “college” when doing ethnography in such an organization could then be read as not a priori committing to something that has not yet become efficacious in empirical inquiry. that preempts freeze-framing object-entanglements, which can become a costly exercise. you’ll start asking what an object is not it is done/makes do. that is to me also a danger of trying to do ontology as an unempirical academic practice. out there ANY thing can become consequential, make a difference, be figured as an actant etc. I see OOO in a tension between those two poles:
you’re (laudably!) committed to seeing a more-than-human object-populated world, which is wildly processual and even more madly generative.
you’re committed to doing academic ontology, which tends to live on freeze-framing operations.
May 14, 2010 at 8:18 pm
Wow, a lot to respond to!
I should perhaps clarify my claims in response to Levi’s and Graham’s comments: I am certainly not claiming that large/macro/generally big objects are less real or necessarily unreal – not in the slightest, though my comment earlier was brief and unclear (I had to get back to work!) so I can see why it might have come across that way.
Take the planet. What is more of an object than that? And it’s pretty big! My previous post was intended to pick up Johan’s points and try to re-phrase them in such a way as to further the conversation – I felt that they had been swept aside a little too quickly, that is all.
I will say a little more too about my particular perspective on this coming from outside philosophy: in academic international relations (IR) the overwhelming (perhaps even the founding) ontological assumption has been that there exists at the highest spatial scale of human existence an international ‘system’ comprising discrete, rational units: modern nation states. Their interaction is taken to be entirely irreducible to their components (to perform this reduction is called the ‘domestic analogy’; this is not to be taken as a compliment!). The system is said to have an anarchic structure due to there being no overarching sovereign; states thus interact through diplomacy, trade and war in accordance with the structural imbalances inherent in the system and their own nature. (From here we descend into haphazardly rehashed neoliberal economics where actors can only be envisaged as rational, self interested maximizers of their own wealth and security.)
In mainstream IR, then, we are dealing with kinds of objects: the states and the system(s) they reside in. This perspective remains dominant and since the late 1970s (and certainly since Kenneth Waltz’s’ Theory of International Politics’ was published in 1979) this ontology has been propped up by a neo-positivist epistemology which tends to claim that ‘of course states aren’t really perfectly unitary, rational actors but this hypothesis affords the theorist the most explanatory power’ (or words to that effect). The greatest problem with this theory is that, first of all, it is contradicted by a great deal of history; secondly, it has a profound tendency to reify and naturalise the state and the states system as lamentably but unavoidably structured to be violent (thus letting governments, arms companies, warlords, etc. off the hook). So, the largest, most powerful elements within this academic discipline depend for their theory, their jobs and their funding on assuming that states and the states system are closed objects – and so they defend their ‘hypothesis’ fiercely, regardless of the evidence. Equally, this ontology benefits bigots and war mongerers as it fits perfectly with nationalism, militarism and so on; and so these people defend this ontology, fiercely.
… Hence my particular concern over reifying cultures and nations. So, now perhaps you can see more clearly: it is not that think that nations or states or cultures don’t exist (I don’t think that these are simply nouns without objects, signifiers without signifieds), it is just that I am very keen to warn against this as yet inchoate (but, in my opinion, enormously exciting) school of political theory making the same mistakes as its predecessors. As it happens I do think that we should take states, nations and cultures to be objects of some kind but as of yet we are lacking the vocabulary to do this properly. It is to that end that I am trying to pose these comments.
Now, I don’t mean to suggest that any object oriented people would tolerate the above described ontology for a moment; it wouldn’t last ten minutes – I add this detail to describe where my scepticism of these particular sorts of objects comes from.
I can’t really think what more to say about that right now, although there is a lot left unsaid so I’ll just try to respond more specifically to the points Levi and Graham raised.
Levi, your above post is a good point well made. I didn’t mean to imply that OOO=ANT or anything but rather more basically that if we drew up a provisional list of presently available empirical works in the social sciences and humanities that conformed more or less to what we might hope an object oriented social science might look like in future then Latour’s work would probably be among the first on the list. ANT is so different to the works of Diamond, Braudel, McNeill, etc. that I thought it deserved mentioning. It wasn’t trying to throw a spanner in the works, I was just trying to point out that we might need to tighten that nut a little!
On Latour’s attitude to larger objects: I’m not sure I agree with you completely about this. Certainly he has a tendency to concentrate on more or less human sized objects (people, cars, pens, files, paperclips, etc.) but, to take your example of your college, he certainly doesn’t deny the reality of such objects – it would be more accurate to say that he is sceptical of larger objects; these objects invariably emerge in the last chapter of his books; they are an achievement; they require much more labour to ‘make speak’ than the more or less human sized objects he starts off with. So, he gives larger objects a hard time, but I don’t think he denies their reality.
Take his book ‘Aramis, or The Love of Technology’; this is a book about a fairly large object – an urban transporation system. It eventually transpires that Aramis does not fully exist, but not because it is large; rather it is because its parts, in one way or another, conspired to thwart its coming into being. This should not, however, imply that Latour reduces Aramis’ fate to its parts; Aramis itself enters the dialogue as a character and pleads to be allowed to exist (this sounds like a really weird way to write a sociology book but in Latour’s prose it is thrilling); this is more than an eccentric (and brilliant) narrative device – it really is a book about Aramis; it really is a painstakingly precise account of how this object could not become fully real, why it had to remain on paper and in boxes not fully deployed, being doted on by maintenance staff and relied on by thousands of commuters. It would make no sense to write a book like this if such an object could not possibly become real – it is this very possibility that motivates it.
Similarly, I just this morning finished reading Latour’s book ‘The Making of Law’. While he approaches law through files, bodies, hallways, paperclips and so on he does eventually more or less arrive at the conclusion that law has an autonomous existence. He is not 100% clear on whether he attributes it complete independence (and admittedly his account is written through thoroughly human eyes) but its reality is certainly not denied.
The important point with regard to Aramis and the law, of course, is that Latour’s realism is incremental (this is my favourite thing about it) and things can be more or less real, more or less objects, and there is room for ambiguity about the extent to which any given noun refers to something with an independent existence or whether the noun is the beginning and the end of the matter. We should also remember his heavy debt to ethnomethodology and thus to (unHarmanised) phenomenology. I read earlier today (just before my earlier post actually) that Harold Garfinkel’s PhD supervisor was Talcott Parsons and his ethnomethodology was in some part a reaction against (but at the same time inspired by) Parsons’ structural-functionalism. A point worth considering, perhaps.
So, it is the difference between scepticism and denial that is the matter at hand here. I am on Latour’s side, personally, but if we accept this distinction then we can certainly have a conversation.
Graham, yes I am trying to be serious rather than flippant. I am very much arguing for option A, as you are. I am very excited by the discussions taking place on this blog and read your blog daily also. As you yourself remark in one of your books (I forget where), there are two sorts of critics: those that want you to succeed and those that want you to fail. I’m trying to be a friendly critic wherever possible!
So, while I don’t have much to add right now about what the other 2/3 might look like I’m as keen as anyone on finding that remainder. A dose of considered, educated scepticism isn’t the worst starting place; that is what I’m hoping to offer.
Gosh, anyone who reads all that deserves a medal or something!
Oh and p.s. Levi, I am with you on Latour’s attitude to Marxism 100%. I’ll try and say something intelligent about that another day.
May 14, 2010 at 8:40 pm
[dear god. that was sent off without intention, way too early and unfinished. I’ll trust that you can read over the spelling errors that have snuck in. to finish the thought:]
in ANT an actant is the figuration of a force. the problem is that forces are named depending a everything that bears on a site of naming. they will be figured in language, which is a different move from any “orginal” thing in history they wish to bring into presence. that is not a bad thing, it is a way of getting intimate with things. the problem imo starts when one takes the words for the forces themselves – they are translations. to take the actant, a figuration of force, for the force itself might be a move of misplaced concreteness. the practice of undermining or overmining “nouns” from the philosophers chair could then be construed as a speculative inquiry into some ontological imaginary of the present by people’s terminology as langue and not parole. it assumes a system of things hanging together and not a vibrantly unfolding history where objects will become efficacious.
this might sound highly irreverent, but it is really meant in the best of friendship: maybe “kinds” of objects might be better cartographed empirically, by their efficacies and not by nouns that are far removed from their usual agencies in day-to-day practice?
ok, I might be way out of my depth here and my head is spinning from a day of writing. I hope I haven’t stepped to hardly on anyone’s toes, but after all what is there to loose in the negotiation of ideas?
stefan
May 14, 2010 at 8:52 pm
Yant,
It sounds like we’re very much on the same page. It’s a real mess (though I detest John Law’s term “mess” while generally admiring his work )and extremely difficult navigating through all these different levels of objects! I think I was trying to make a similar set of points in this post. Although he’s not the most reputable of historians, Howard Zinn’s remarks about nations are always in the back of my mind whenever I think of mereology:
What fascinates me in this passage is the allusion to other bubbling and antagonistic objects beneath larger scale objects like Nations. It seems to me that this is something like what you’re getting at in your critique of IR theory that treats things only at the level of Nations. There’s a sort of fallacy of division here where parts are treated as having the same characteristics as the whole when, in fact, there is quite a bit of tension between parts and wholes.
May 15, 2010 at 5:36 am
cameron, thanks for the clarification. I had it backwards. Yes, I’m a pro-gunk person then.
May 15, 2010 at 8:28 am
Levi,
I like that quote very much. Howard Zinn is much missed. This is a pretty good starting point actually. In the above we were asking whether states, etc. are real; of course we can always conclude that they are real but that we should try to make them less so! This quotation from Foucault’s biopolitics lectures always sticks in my head: “The state is that which is real but is never real enough.” If states aren’t fully real it isn’t for want of effort…
Another nice analogy that springs to mind right now is from David Eagleman’s book ‘Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives’ – a collection of short stories imagining different theological realities. In one God is a microbe and is unaware of humans’ existence because He exists at the wrong spatial scale. A parable for onto-beings?
May 17, 2010 at 1:07 am
A couple of points leading to a question concerning ANT, OOO and Diamond:
–Point 1: in “Guns, Germs and Steel,” Diamond argues that certain combinations of objects have a tendency to produce similar or even uniform effects in different geographical and temporal contexts.
Specifically, he claims that the presence of high numbers of domesticatable animals and plants in regions conducive to high-yield agriculture is likely (or perhaps guaranteed) to produce complex, stratified societies possessed of writing, state religions, urban centers, and relatively advanced levels of technology. And if such societies emerge on a continent with a latitudinal axis (e.g. Eurasia), there will also be a diffusion of crops, livestock and technologies, whereas civilizations that develop on longitudinal continents will prove less diffusive (e.g. Mesoamerica).
–Point 2: the combination of objects discussed on Diamond’s index of civilizational preconditions does not seem strictly definable in ANT terms, for instance as an asseblage, collective, or netork. This for a couple reasons: a.) because the effects are not provisionally limited to a unique dispersion of networked actants (such as Pasteur’s techniques for producing microbes). On the contrary, they crop up in multiple times/places but produce similar results; and b.) because they aren’t on a level playing field with the rest of the collective, but can rather be seen to possess a disproportionate share of determining power vis-a-vis the other objects that are nested within it (i.e. cities and subsurbs, sovereigns and subjects, plows, scythes, stables, fields, and gardens– all of which are dependent upon Diamond’s set of cardinal preconditions for their existence). Thus Diamond’s account does not seem to involve a democracy of things that are causally irreducible to each other, but rather a sort of conditional hierarchy comprised of semi-substitutable elements (e.g. oxen or lamas, grain or maize) that have a tendency to produce similar social and historical effects on other objects (including humans).
–Question: granted that it accepts Diamond’s arguments as at least worthy of consideration (which seems to be the case on this blog), how would OOO define this set of preconditions? Can they be unified as a sigular object? If so, would the specific configurations of crops and animals that ostensibly produced Sumer, Egypt, China, the Aztecs, Incas, etc. count as as one ultimate object that keeps cropping up in different times and places, involving different qualitative substitutions from place-to-place? Or would something like the term “bundle” be more appropriate here?
(Btw, I just wanted to add that the discussions and disagreements between Levi Bryant, Graham Harman, Steven Shaviro and now Yant have been a fascinating spur for my own thinking as I struggle my way though graduate school. Maybe this isn’t the best place to thank everyone in that list–but for those of them who do read this comment: thanks!)
May 17, 2010 at 1:45 am
Hi Aaron,
Thanks for the comment. You write:
I think it’s important to note that I did not endorse or advocate Diamond’s argument in either of my two posts. Rather, I praised Diamond for attributing an important role to nonhuman actors in collectives involving human beings. That is very different than claiming that nonhuman actors make the defining contribution to the sort of structure a collective later comes to possess. I think it’s also important to be clear as to what the concept of a democracy of objects does and does not entail. The idea of a democracy of objects is not equivalent to the idea that all objects make an equal contribution to a particular collective. For example, as I understand it there are a number of microorganisms that live in the eyelashes of each person. However, while there are currently microorganisms living in my eyelashes and your own, these actants don’t make any significant contribution (as far as I know) to the collective defined by this blog discussion. Here actants such as wordpress, fiber optic cables, wireless connections, internet servers, the people participating in the discussion, etc., etc., etc., have a far greater impact on the collective in question. Flat ontology does not dictate that beings make equal contributions to collectives (they don’t), but 1) that existence is a binary (something either exists or it doesn’t, regardless of how insignificant it might be), and 2) that beings cannot be reduced to other beings, e.g. true reality isn’t “really” subatomic particles, nor is money simply a “figment of people’s minds”.
My point, then, is that a good OOO analysis will involve a good deal of work identifying what, precisely, are the major actors in any collective, what contributions these actors make and in what way, and the extent of these contributions. However, as I suggested in my original post, Diamond’s analysis only gives us a sense of what 1/3rd of an OOO social analysis would look like. He’s to be commended in the crucial role he attributes to nonhuman actants and the attention he plays on what differences these actants contribute beyond simply their function as tools for humans or vehicles of human representation. However, we find nothing of the withdrawn or excessive aspect of objects in Diamond’s analysis, nor do we find much analysis of semiotic objects like laws, signs, myths, etc., etc., etc. that are also actants in collectives.
May 17, 2010 at 2:00 am
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May 17, 2010 at 2:50 am
Thanks for the response, Levi.
Just to clarify: I didn’t mean to characterize your praise of Diamond as a flat-out endorsement of his views–sorry if it came off that way. Your point that an object democracy is not causally egalitarian is also well taken–that was a clumsy characterization on my part. I should have focussed that comment more on the issue of irreduction, and the way in which Diamond’s assertions regarding causal preconditions seems a bit at odds with Latour’s notions on that front.
But my final question was actually premised on a suspension of scepticism or disblief–i.e. if we hypothetically accept Diamond’s characterization of the preconditions that lead to the emergence of complex, stratified civilizations (for the sake of the speculative insights that can be thereby derived), then should this set of preconditions be considered an object? Or is some other term preferable?
The reason I ask is that there seems to be a particularly high level of qualitative contingency or substitutability in this case. The specific ingrediennts can differ widely, but the preconditional form remains the same. If it falls on the real side of the ontological binary (other than as a theory in Diamond’s book), is such a form an object with a high level of substitutable elements, manifesting in a multi-local and multitemporal manner? Or are the terms “bundle” or just plain “Form” preferrable?
May 17, 2010 at 3:23 am
Re: Aaron’s question about the set of preconditions for the emergence of complex societies, can’t we regard this set as a product of the study of the specific assembleges of ancient Europe, Mesoamerica, Africa, etc? In other words, the preconditions identified by Diamond are a semiotic-type object related to, but ultimately independent of/irreducible to, the cornfields and llamas studied by anthropologists?
In a comment above, Graham talks about physicists studying electrons and how we don’t want to say that there is an object identical with the set of all electrons. Instead, scientists, in their study of really-existing electrons, create models, theories, statements, descriptions, explanations of how the next electron they come across should behave under such and such condition. In this process the physicists are helped along by precisely calibrated instruments, colleagues in allied disciplines, their families, and non-human actors of all sorts. I am reminded again of the “Circulating Reference” chapter from Latour’s Pandora’s Hope. The scientists studying the forest ultimately create a research paper, an object wholly distinct from the forest, but also bound up with it. Is this not a similar case to the one Aaron’s talking about?
Also:
The sets “NBA players” and “coffee drinkers” aren’t general descriptions produced by scientific practice, but they are certainly bound up in other practices, namely the NBA and the coffee industry, both of which definitely pass the existence test.
May 17, 2010 at 7:57 am
As a researcher with a vested interest in Latour’s ‘sociology of associations’ I took great interest in Harman’s discussion of Latour in his ‘Prince of Networks.’ It seems to me that what Harman was saying was that Latour gets things mostly right, but that his approach begins to show some gaps when one is confronted with the very basic problem of the ‘relations’ between things. I have to admit as a non-philosopher I had some trouble following this line of argumentation, partly because I think that there is yet so much empirical work that remains to be done when considering the activity of tracing actual networks and that the work of finally deciding what a relation really is composed of just seems entirely too esoteric. It is the work of philosophers who have the time and inclination to work on such things, but as a researcher looking at international development it simply isn’t all that useful to me. So if Latour fails at ultimately deciding the nature of relations, then for me the response is ‘so what’? There still remains a great deal of work that can be done at the level of understanding actual, traceable networks. It strikes me as being like the difference between physics and quantum physics, one can carry on doing carpentry without an appreciation for the quantum level physics that might underwrite the whole affair.
It seems to me that part of my problem with your characterization of Latour is your insistence on size as an already meaningful category. What makes one a mid-size actor? It seems to me that one can only have mid-size actors if on pre-supposes that there are both larger and smaller actors. As I recall, Latour’s argument is that objects are not larger or smaller but more or less densely/intensely connected, for Latour size is irrelevant.
As a scholar who finds himself working against the critical stance of post-development studies, where authors in that tradition repeatedly insist that they have a better position to view phenomena than do their research subjects, and that such a view affords them a better, clearer kind of knowledge – and who continuously accuse development actors of misapprehension, of having ideologically informed fetishes, and getting their facts wrong, I find myself somewhat offended at your characterization of Latour as guilty of the same set of sins.
Latour would declare that ‘the college does not exist’? That seems pretty damn unlikely. Would Latour problematize the existence of the college? certainly, but that is something different than declaring that it does not exist. Instead I think Latour would ask, how does the college exist?
First, Latour would not begin any argument by pre-supposing the size or scale of something. Latour would not reduce the college as such to activity but rather treat it as a peculiar assemblage that has the shape of a network and is composed of people, objects, etc, etc. Latour guilty of accusing others of fetishism, seriously? That is a tremendously cheap shot that doesn’t appear, to me at least, to be supported by what Latour actually writes. Latour would be deeply interested in how other actors describe the existence of the college, including the administrators, students, janitors, etc, and also interested in how the sociality of the college is underwritten by the materiality of the college and what must be its vast concatenation of actors – each of which would form its own society.
Finally, I believe that Latour would simply not accept the division you propose, and this is perhaps where you part company with him. I’m not sure if Latour would deny the unity of the college, but rather ask how such unity is achieved. I think this is where we will also part company as well. I reject completely the notion of large-scale actors such as society, or class – these things exist, in my estimation, as artifacts of attempts to describe the world in such terms. They have a peculiar existence, they are not part of the order of things but it seems to me are constructed by sociologists of the social, and others. At any rate, if I were asked to look at a large scale actor such as class, what I would come away with would be one of Latour’s litanies. As Latour says, if class exists, in which office, in which building, by which people, using which technologies, is it being produced? Also, It seems to me that Latour’s focus on so-called ‘mid-size actors’ is really an artifact of your own insistence on large-scale actors.
Indeed, Latour would reject out of hand the Durkheimian notion of Society, or Class as an emergent reality that acts back upon individual actors. Again, investigate these so called emergent actors and what do you come away with? Insert a Latour litany. It is not by accident or misunderstanding that Latour claims Gabriel Tarde as the father of his sociology of associations. For Tarde the whole is explained by its parts, whereas it seems that you want to explain the parts by its whole, after this we can only disagree.
I can only relate to my own experience with larger scale actors. Post-development studies treats Development as one of these large scale & unitary actors and in doing so they tend get most things wrong. They insist on things like discourse existing as a kind of field that causes development actors to act ideologically and that they do so unconsciously (this is the whole acting on its parts), at least that is the argument made by Arturuo Escobar. At this point then, the game is up, we should all go home and consign ourselves to being unwitting intermediaries for larger scale actors -over which we have no control. I cannot imagine a worse position to be in. If you want to insist on emergent actors that act back upon individuals than you must also significantly re-work what it means to be an actor, and if you you’re actors turn out not to be Latour’s actors than it seems to me you are simply arguing from incommensurable positions with the both of you being guilty of heinous crimes from your own unique perspectives.
Perhaps I’ve missed something subtle in your discussion that perhaps exceeds my ability to understand your position. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve made such a mistake.
Now I will return to my mid-sized development actors and leave you philosophers to your work.
May 17, 2010 at 2:12 pm
John,
You seem to misunderstand the intent of my post. I am not trying to tear Latour down through cheap shots, nor am I a detractor of Latour’s work. If you explore this blog you will discover that I am a strong proponent of Latour’s sociology of associations. There seems to be something deeply schizophrenic in your argumentation here. On the one hand, you argue that it is ridiculous to suggest that Latour has a bias against larger scale actors, yet you then go on to reject larger scale actors such as class. Additionally, from the perspective of Latour’s own work and methodology, you seem to fall prey to the very sort of Platonism and rejection of voices that he denounces in works like The Politics of Nature, Pandora’s Hope, and Reassembling the Social. You will recall that Latour denounces Plato for striving to silence the rabble and enacting the philosopher as the only voice legitimate to judge. Yet here, in this post, you are proceeding exactly as Plato, albeit by treating the developmentalist as the only valid voice in collectives and by exiling the philosopher. Given Latour’s advice on how to conduct empirical work or interviews in works like Reassembling the Social this is a highly perplexing move on your part.
Throughout your post you attribute claims to me that I have not made, and therefore I would say that you have missed something not so subtle in my discussion. For example, you suggest that I claim, along with post-developmentalists, that discourse is the only legitimate actor or factor in a collective. Nothing could be further from the truth. Here again your empiricism seems to be wanting. Because you have fallen into the grips of a theory you are led to construct straw men out of positions you oppose. When I claim that something like class is an actor I am not claiming that class is the only actor. I am claiming rather that class is something real. It is the emergent effect of the actions of many smaller level actors, yet when that actor emerges it also functions as an entity that these actors must themselves contend with in their day to day lives. If you can take off your theoretical lenses for a moment, perhaps you will notice that I have not dissolved the agency of these other actors or, in any way suggested that class is the overdetermining factor. I have said that wholes are parts alongside other parts, actors alongside other actors, that must struggle for its own existence as well. Why you would suggest that this entails that the game is up and we should just go home is beyond me. Moreover, why you would deny that economic dynamics take on a life of their own and that those born into the wealthy and those born into the poor and middle class tend to land there once again is beyond me. The question is how to contest, challenge, and change these entanglements of actors. At any rate, thanks for a great screed. It is interesting to see a so-called Latourian jumping into a discussion midway and not bothering to listen to the actors involved.
May 17, 2010 at 5:35 pm
I may have come off a bit too antagonistic, but I wanted to strongly object to your characterization of Latour as wielding the same sort of criticisms that he rejects. That is he is either accusing others of being naive or of having fetishes. I simply don’t see the evidence for this. It really does seem antithetical to Latour’s overall project.
Your evidence for this is that Latour ignores or claims that large-scale actors don’t exist. Thus, as you say, he would start his analysis of a ‘college’ by denying its existence. That seems off base. Again I think Latour would problematize it’s existence. I think that Latour would describe your college as a concatenation of actors and the question of size would be set aside in favor of density/intensity of connections.
Latour would, however, point out that there is a great deal of work that goes on to stabilize ‘the college’ as such, work that would seek to represent the college as a unity, so I think perhaps rather than denying its existence Latour might deny its unity.
It seems to me, that to insist on it being a larger-actor is to insist on reducing it, or stabilizing it, as a ‘college’ and I’m not convinced that de-stabilizing that unity is the same as denying its existence. I am also not convinced that larger-actors act, 1) because I am unconvinced of the argument relating to size, and 2)once we begin to examine any so called larger-actor we come back to a network that is more or less densely/intensely connected. And it seems to me it will always be a part of the whole that is doing the acting rather than the whole itself. And wholeness itself must be a kind of effect…
Also I think there is a difference here between a college and class, they don’t strike me as perfectly analogous. I can walk through the halls of a college, I can sit in its classrooms and thus denying its existence seems extremely foolish. I can’t however walk down the halls of class, it has no halls, no classrooms.
I had thought that this was part of what it meant to render the social flat. To deny size in favor of a model of connectivity. So I simply don’t understand how size plays a role.
As for class being its own actor acting back upon people. Again I don’t see it as existing as anything other than an artifact of work to stabilize it as such. Certainly people are entangled in a mess of connections that very often work to keep them in place, but the question is, is it something large and emergent that is acting on them, or is it, for instance, labor policy, labor markets, administrative systems, schooling, where one is born, and there are many more examples (all of which are sort of black boxes that need to be ripped open), these are all things that can be traced as networks (the ripping open). Why make the jump to an emergent reality that must operate as some sort of overarching context when one can do the work of tracing the connections that must be there.
I apologize for being unclear and attributing to you the characteristics that I see in the post-development studies literature. The point that I was trying to make was that from my perspective, Post-development studies’ insistence on the existence of an emergent actor (in this case development discourse and Development itself) seems to lead them away from the work of analyzing actual discourse in its own terms and tracing its iterations in actual sets of practices by actual people working for actual organizations, etc, etc. Their insistence on discourse/development as an emergent actor allows them juxtapose any discourse that uses similar language (for example economic development) next to the overarching ideology of capitalism without ever having to do the work of demonstrating an actual connection apart from similarity, and often even the similarity is missing.
Thus even using the language of economic development automatically puts one in the category of supporting an overall capitalist ideology, in spite of differences in the way language is used or differences in practices, for PDS difference is simply set aside. From this perspective one is simply damned even before speaking because the emergent actor capitalism has acted upon our very subconscious. The reason for this, for me, seems to come from their belief in an emergent actor. Thus Development exists much like your category of class and acts back upon actors down the chain rendering them as mere intermediaries that faithfully relay this capitalist ideology, thus stripping them of agency and closing many possible openings for change. What I want to know is this, when you say the large-scale actor ‘class’ acts back upon us, how does it do so?
I did not mean to suggest that you see discourse in a particular way. I did mean to suggest that I see some similarity between your insistence on a larger, emergent actor and post-development studies insistence that development is an emergent actor, and thus I also see some of the same dangers in ascribing actions to an emergent actor rather than doing the work of tracing what is actually acting. I’m somewhat ambivalent about whether or not ‘class’ exists as a larger thing, perhaps it does, but perhaps it is only an effect… but that doesn’t mean that Latour would believe your sense of it is naive, or a fetish, your sense of it is but another risky account that is open to discussion and possibly amendment.
I also see your point about my schizophrenia, and I suppose this puts us back to the point where we differ, is there a larger actor? I think that one can do the work of stabilizing class as an overarching category, but I believe that the seeming existence of class is an effect of local actors, and that ‘class’ only retrospectively exists as an emergent actor. I think it only seems that way. What would replace ‘class’ in our investigation of it, would again be an concatenation of actors…
Also, I’m not a Platonist. I would not want to silence the rabble. I would instead allow the voices of those who do development not to be prematurely silenced by those who adhere to the perspective of post-development studies, I would rather bring the development managers perspectives to the fore and have them taken for what they are, not fetishes, but risky accounts, sometimes these are poorly done and done in bad faith, but other times they are well done and done in good faith. But you are clearly not a member of that tribe and my critique of them does not apply to you, or applies only insofar as you both insist on emerging actors. I really think that one of the main reasons for doing a sociology of associations is to move decisively away from the notion of emergent actors as an explanatory category.
Latour suggests that when we do research that we become ants and trace connections, but perhap this leaves open the question of emergent reality and the only conclusion that I can come to is that Latour would argue that the whole, such as it is, lacks explanatory value and he cautions against making the jump from tracing local interactions to the larger thing(s) they are supposedly embedded in without first demonstrating an actual connection. I am myself not certain of the ontological status of something like class, or society either as an emergent reality or as as an emergent actor, it violates my sense of actor-network theory, and my sense of Latour’s sociology of associations. But if you can somehow reconcile Latour’s work with your own sense that there are emergent actors I would be extremely pleased to read it and perhaps even be persuaded by it.
Finally I didn’t mean to suggest that you believe ‘class’ is the only actor, clearly you believe class becomes an actor, emerges from a series of local inter-actions- but then what? How is this different from Durkheim, and why is it necessary to believe in such a monstrosity?
May 17, 2010 at 6:55 pm
John,
Of course you’re a Platonist and in precisely the sense Latour describes in his essay at the beginning of The Politics of Nature. The rabble you seek to silence is philosophers who engage, as you suggested, in questions that are far to abstruse and remote from the empirical. You’re just a Platonist who has dressed himself up as an actor network theorist. What’s notable about your initial post is how remote it is from the empirical methodology Latour describes and how filled it is with a priori assumptions about what is and is not.
You write:
I gave a college as an example. Ultimately what I am referring to is Latour’s rejection of beings such as class and capitalism in works like Reassembling the Social. A couple of points are in order here:
First, in claiming that the college exists I am in no way denying your point about all the work that goes into the existence of a college. This is the subtle point you’re missing. The college both exists and it requires the work of many other smaller actors to exist. Do I have reason for holding that colleges exist in addition to the actors that help colleges to exist? Why yes I do! Colleges can do things that the actors making up a college cannot do. They can grant degrees. They can get and distribute funding, etc., etc., etc. Perhaps an analogy will help you to understand my point. My body cannot exist without the activity of my cells. However, it would be a mistake to suggest that my body is identical to the activity of my cells. My body can do things that my cells cannot do. For example, it can engage in research leading to insights into DNA that, in turn, modify the activity of my cells and how they behave. My body is thus one thing and my cells are another thing.
Second, I am problematizing the unity of objects. I am not sure whether you have been following the discussions that have been unfolding both here in the internet and in a variety of publications for the last year or so, but if you have you know that my position is that objects are split. One way objects are split is between their status as unities and the parts that compose them. Objects can neither be reduced to these parts, nor can these parts simply be reduced to elements in a whole. Rather, there is always a tension between these dimensions of objects. The faculty, for example, can rise up against the college. The difference between your position and my own is that you want to say objects are the activity of these lower level actants. I say that objects certainly involve the activity of lower level actants, but that they are always something in addition to those actants.
Third, I simply think Latour is unfair to Marx. In texts like Grundrisse and Capital we see Marx painstakingly trace the activities of actants in the production of various higher level objects. Marx is much closer to an actor-network style analysis than Latour lets on. His work is populated by the analysis of legions of news paper clippings, the analysis of workers and investors, the analysis of the role played by nonhuman actants like various technologies, factories, resources, weather, shipping routes, the analysis of legal institutions and the actants that enforce them, the analysis of nations and cities and how they come to be produced by the activity of other actants and on and on and on. It is his rejection of this style of analysis and its findings that I’m objecting to, and rightfully so, I believe.
In your superior a prioristic empiricism you seem to assume that talk of larger scale objects necessarily entails the reduction of all other actors. Yet this move is precisely the move that OOO rejects. In no way is OOO rejecting the other actants that contribute to the production of a larger scale network. And here I would suggest that you’re failing to think through your own premises. You want to claim that something like a college is nothing but the activity of these other actants, yet you seem to forget that these other actants that you evoke to explain the college are themselves composed of smaller, densely/intensely connected networks and so on to infinity. Without some account of objects that makes room for objects that are autonomous at all levels of scale you’re going to find yourself in an infinite regress that very quickly leaves you talking about nothing.
No, an entity like class will have to do with how wages are structured, whether or not labor is sold, who has access to the means of production and under what conditions, how money flows both in a city and nationally, etc., etc., etc. If you both I suspect you’ll find a number of “concrete entities” that contribute to the production of class.
Flat ontology is aimed at rendering being flat, not the social flat. The social– a concept I, along with Latour, find suspect anyway –is but a subset of being. Given your remarks on size, I again find myself wondering whether you’ve been following these discussions. Part of rendering being flat consists in granting beings at all levels of scale equal status and existence. Within a flat ontology atoms are granted no more ontological privilege than cells or burritos or persons or womens auxiliary groups and yes, colleges. Elements, within a flat ontology, are not treated as merely being parts of a whole, nor are wholes treated as being aggregates of elements. Rather, actors at all levels of scale are treated as being full-blown actors in their own right, autonomous and independent of other actants.
I largely agree with most of what you say here. Did you imagine that anyone who deploys the category of class, including Marx, was ever suggesting otherwise? However, there’s good reason to treat these realities as emergent and having autonomy. No one actant can displace them, nor are they up to the agency of any one actant. They acquire an ontological solidity of their own within which people find themselves entangled. Note that what is entangled also opens the possibility of disentangling. That is, the actants that contribute to the formation of the larger scale entity are also autonomous in their own right and can contest that structure and seek to destroy it.
I agree, this is a bad thing. Your criticism here is similar to a criticism I’ve been passionately leveling against a good deal of French social and political theory coming out of the Althusserian school. What interests me is not so much the emergent actors themselves but the tensions and conflicts between these emergent actors and the smaller scale objects out of which they emerge. It sounds to me like you are condemning post-development theory for ignoring this aspect of objects as split between parts and totality and thereby ignoring the conflicts that larger scale unities have with lower scale objects. That’s exactly what I wish to avoid.
And this is what I reject, again on the grounds of mereology. Only someone who has erased the being and autonomy of parts could make this sort of claim. This sort of erasure is endemic to contemporary theory. And here I fully agree that it denies smaller level actors of any sort of agency because it’s reduced them to being nothing more than parts in a whole. OOO rejects this thesis.
It’s this talk of something “only be an effect” that strikes me as deeply problematic. My body is not “only an effect” of my cells. It’s able to do a variety of things that my cells cannot do. Likewise with other emergent entities. It seems to me that you go in the opposite direction of the PDS folks you criticize. They erase all smaller level actors in favor of emergence, you erase the autonomy of emergent entities in favor of smaller level actors. OOO adopts neither position.
Durkheim, as I understand it, believed that all relations are internal such that there is nothing but social totalities or wholes like organisms where all parts are interdependent. OOO vehemently rejects this thesis. It argues that all actants are independent of one another, including the relationship between a larger scale actant and the smaller scale actants of which it is composed. There are a few good reasons for this thesis. First, the actor-network theorist himself cannot consistently adopt this position on “effects” because the actants of which larger scale entities are allegedly “effects” are themselves “effects” of smaller scale actants and so on to infinity. Without any structure in your ontology you get a universal goo that simply arbitrarily chooses which nebulous clouds to grant the exalted title of “actant” to. OOO resolves this problem within ANT with its account of objects. Second, OOO makes room for these emergent actants because, well, they’re real forces in the world and therefore are actants that need to be taken into account as they relate to the actions of other actants. Finally, in rejecting the thesis that actants are their relations while readily endorsing the thesis that actants enter into relations, OOO is a far more optimistic doctrine than what we find in most social and political theory for it affirms the real possibility of actants breaking with oppressive relations and organizing collectives differently.
May 17, 2010 at 8:03 pm
Levi,
My sincere thanks for your explanation. I think I may have gotten better than I deserved.
One quick point about being a platonist, perhaps I am and don’t see it. But from my perspective, it strikes me that there are two kinds of outer limits to my understanding of flat ontology and perhaps also to what Latour has already outlined. These are, the actual nature of relations, and the status of what you refer to as larger-actors, or the whole. This is where my status as a non-philospher begins to reveal my own ignorance on the subject. This is where I begin to feel like a carpenter in the presence of quantum-physicists.
I can carry on with my work tracing the connections that I find in my research and working against the project of ‘critical sociology’ using Latour and ANT but I am finding it difficult to incorporate some of the more subtle arguments in OOO into my research into development. Much of this work seems to move well beyond actor-network theory and Latour and I am, obviously, just not there yet.
May 17, 2010 at 9:37 pm
John,
I don’t agree 100% with Levi’s reading of Latour either (see above) but even the most cursory glance at Levi’s work makes clear his profound respect for Latour’s ANT. He certainly is not trying to attack Latour, nor anything of the sort. Disagreement is not only healthy, it’s mandatory for any sort of intellectual environment but if that disagreement becomes confrontational rather than congenial then we might as well not bother.
Anyway, I think the important thing to realise is that large actors such as classes and states can be real, very real, without these entities attaining the status of all-determining super-organisms or anything of the sort. What’s more, things can be real, very real, without that being the end of the story; we can say ‘X is real’ and then hatch a plan to bring it down. Forget both the moderns and the postmoderns: the real is malleable, but you’ll need strong hands to bend it!
Take the humble bee-hive: A bee-hive is an organism with clear divisions of labour, regimented classes of beings and an intelligence (of sorts) that emerges only at the collective level. There are clear similarities and differences between this sort of society and any given human society. Differences: A bee-hive is much more close knit than any human collective, human life is far more messy; human beings are much less disciplined and infinitely more capable of innovation, dissent and radical change (i.e. change from the roots rather than change occurring at the higher emergent levels).
(If Levi was saying that human collectives are exactly like bee-hives then I’d join you in criticising him!)
However, this should not suggest to us that human collectives are nothing like bee-hives. Just because our collectives aren’t such neat, self-reproducing organisms doesn’t mean that there aren’t emergent qualities that are irreducible to individuals or other lower level collectives. The advantage we have over bees is that we are more or less self-aware, self-reflective and able to deliberately (I like to make this word imply both ‘intentionality’ and ‘deliberation’) reconstruct our collectives.
As I said above, one may accept that something is real and still seek to change it, even to destroy it. This is the power granted humans in an object or actant oriented philosophy; no longer is the real either transigent or intransigent – it’s both and neither depending on the situation and how much force can be gathered toward any particular end.
May 17, 2010 at 9:46 pm
EPIC THREAD. John wrote:
But not everything that acts on our subconscious has total control over our speech, acts, or thoughts. And capitalism is far more than ideology. In fact, following Zizek, I’d say that ideology might be capitalism’s weakest aspect. He often does a little modification of Marx’s saying: in today’s world, “we know it’s bad, but we do it anyway.” Ideology is weak it is the financial institutions, government regulations, militaries, wage labor practices, etc. that are strong.
Aren’t we in agreement here regarding the obsession with Discourse and ideology? It seems that we are.
I think it’s possible to imagine a scenario where capitalist ideology disappears altogether, but a very similar economic arrangement still obtains. Indeed, I believe we’re moving in that direction. An analogous situation obtained when everyone believed the world was flat, but the actual current round-earth arrangement still obtained.
My excitement with flat ontology has always been escaping this obsession with the Symbolic as the only arena of political contest, as the only Thing that really matters, as some kind of mind-control device that denies the very existence of the rest of the world.
So, yes, a progressive politics should deploy all manner of discourses, methods, sciences, and arts to achieve the safer, healthier, and more equal world that we desire. And we must have an ontology that (correctly) recognizes that there are things outside and/or independent of the exploitative networks. And furthermore, we’ve got to understand that those exploitative networks are not exhausted by the concept “ideology”. Ideology doesn’t even come close.
Check out this post from last year. The progressive social scientists of the future must be like Jackie Chan, who deftly uses the objects at his disposal to change his environment to his advantage. That metaphor has always stuck with me.
Also, Jackie Chan kicks ass.
May 18, 2010 at 5:41 am
clearly I misunderstood what Levi was saying in his original post (as well as misunderstanding his overall project)… the split nature of objects – and the nature of relations – and it would seem that Latour does eschew larger scale actors for his mid-size favorites. I guess I had thought that was a feature rather than a bug. But from Levi’s perspective bringing the whole back in means significantly re-thinking the notion of scale and size, and the relations between parts and whole.
I am still having some difficulty with this. I can quite easily identify where the work of development (understood here as a part but not yet the whole, though to be fair it does seem fractal) takes place, and I can identify associations and actual linkages between a particular project and what I would call its discursive commitments and these tend to differ enormously from the various accusations leveled against development by post-development studies. But this non-explicit relation with the whole, with Devlopment as an industry or global movement, I have a bit more trouble with because I don’t see the connections. That is, if PDS accuses a development project of adhering to neo-liberal economic principles one would think that it would require that particular development project to explicitly link their work to some sort of neo-liberal discourse, which as it turns out, in the case I am studying, they do not.
So far, in my own research, I’ve focused on the processes that development managers and assorted others engage in to secure social settlements via materiality – simply put having documents (and also a set of organizing methodologies that form the basis for writing documents) that circulate is much more effective than say being a chimpanzee who has to daily re-enact whatever social settlement he managed to secure just yesterday… for me documents exist as a kind of technology for development that underwrite the social, and they work to stabilize a particular development project and its narrative, but so also do things like canals, water systems, a new transformer, etc, etc.
At this point I think the connection to Develpment – understood globally – comes through shared methodologies, what Latour describes as forms and metrics – things that are somewhat isomorphic across a variety of development projects – logical frameworks, participatory rural appraisals, community mobilization methodologies, accountability and transparency and how they are realized through a set of administrative procedures, and other fairly standard documentary/administrative practices.
This provides a kind of connection to the whole but the connection is not necessarily ideological (ideology implies false consciousness and fetishized knowledge which under the modernist constitution is suspect) but it is often normative (which implicates a kind of political stance by making communities and their associations the fulcrum point in taking decisions about the distribution of resources, etc). However, the organizations that use these same forms and measures all have their own set of discursive commitments that differ both from each other, from one NGO to the next, but also within the same NGO, but also differs from their donors (USAID, DFID, EU, etc). This is important because these NGOs and their various actors possess agency, they are not simply faithful intermediaries transmitting ideology from point A to B. Furthermore, a donor like USAID is also not monolithic, so that USAID’s regional office in Almaty might have a different set of goals than its headquarters’ in D.C. (and the same is true for every actor down the line, but actors differ in their ability to create durable settlements) and so it is important that every actor is treated as a mediator and not a intermediary.
With a focus on forms and measures and trying to connect a part to a whole I feel like I’m falling back on a form of analysis that Foucault describes as mentalities of government. And I worry a bit about substituting my own panoramic view in place of another view (post-development studies) -or in place of the actors themselves. But maybe all of this is as simple as arguing against a perspective that was never that well thought out to begin with. It seems to me that post-development studies is somewhat easy to defeat because empirical evidence always seems to work against it.
but there remain fundamental problems, with what John Law calls ‘obduracy’ and the ‘asymmetries of power’ and it seems to me that questioning this obduracy means turning my attention to development writ large. I read somewhere where (a thousand plateaus?) Deleuze says that all stories are essentially a variation on the theme ‘a stranger comes to town’ and that strikes me as the fundamental problem with development. However, arguing that this particular stranger (development) should stay home suggests that we should be forbidden from forming a common world, that the other is too ‘other’ to withstand entering into relations with the stranger (though this perspective ignores the extent to which we have already entered into relations and here I’m thinking of Eric R. Wolf’s work in ‘Europe and the people without history’). Ironically it seems that PDS often does this work of othering more effectively than those it accuses of orientalism.
The other problem that remains is what does bid D Development do that little d developments cannot? what does the whole accomplish? For PDS the answer seems to be that Development forces sets of undesirable relations. But what else does it do? The only answer that I can come up with at this point is that Development provides a normative format to smaller developments, that is, it provides a (shifting) set of isomorphic forms and measures and it does so through a process of constant comparison between the parts and the whole.
Again my thanks to Levi for taking the time to explain his position and for having the patience to deal with my initial and possibly continuing misunderstanding of his position. And my thanks to Yant and anxiousmodernman for your thoughtful comments.
I’ve taken up too much space here with my own set of problems. My apologies for hijacking this thread on Jared Diamond.
May 18, 2010 at 2:25 pm
John,
You’re more than welcome! Glad we could all find some common ground. Also, Nick Srnicek’s recent article on Latour and globalization studies might be of interest to you if you haven’t seen it already; he deals specifically with many of the issues raised in this thread:
http://lse.academia.edu/NickSrnicek/Papers/137901/Conflict-Networks–Collapsing-the-Global-into-the-Local
May 19, 2010 at 2:57 am
Yant – thanks for the paper. My research concerns a conflict mitigation development program in the Ferghana Valley. It will be interesting to see how nick approaches the question.