I’ve just begun Cary Wolfe’s What is Posthumanism?. So far, despite its interest from the perspective of debates surrounding post-structuralism and second-order systems theory, I can’t say that it is getting off to a very auspicious beginning. Here’s the problem: Cary’s argument seems to proceed by way of the signifier, signs, information, and second-order systems. In short, he proceeds by way of phenomena that are nonetheless human. His introduction, for example, makes a lot of Foucault’s Order of Things announces the end of man. But how does Foucault do this? Foucault does this by championing discursive structures and power in history. Yet these are still human phenomena. Here we’re still within a correlationist framework that pitches the issue in terms of specifically human phenomena.
In my view, the claims of anti-humanism, post-humanism, and those forms of theory that claim to be overcoming anthropocentrism are all too often highly overstated. Until you have an ontology capable of thinking objects without any reference to the human or human phenomena, you still remain in an anthropocentric and humanist orbit. Foucault in his discussions of power and discursive structures, Lacan in his discussions of the signifier and the real, Derrida in his discussions of the play of the signifier and the trace, Luhmann in his discussions of social systems as communication systems, all remain nonetheless all too human in their focus on the primacy of human phenomena with respect to everything else. Of this group, Luhmann is probably the best of the bunch insofar as he at least recognizes the existence of other systems that are not human or social in nature. But still he insists on tracing everything back to the distinctions our systems make in observing these systems.
The point here is not to reject Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, or Luhmann. Not at all. The point is to recognize that they conflate regional ontologies with ontology as such, treating modes of access as determinative of what things are. But the questions of how we have access to entities and the question of what things are are entirely distinct and are not to be confused with one another. Until we overcome our tendency to make that confusion we have not attained a posthumanist philosophy. But like I said, I’ve only just begin reading Wolfe’s book so perhaps I’ll be surprised as it proceeds.
UPDATE: As I get further in Wolfe’s book I’m finding that it’s much more interesting and complex than I initially thought. In the introduction Wolfe writes:
To return, then, to the question of posthumanism, the perspective I attempt to formulate here–far from surpassing or rejecting the human –actually enables us to describe the human and its characteristic modes of communication, interaction, meaning, social significations, and affective investments with greater specificity once we have removed meaning from the ontologically closed domain of consciousness, reason, reflection, and so on. It forces us to rethink our taken-for-granted modes of human experience, including the normal perceptual modes of human experience, including the normal perceptual modes and affective states of Homo sapiens itself, by recontextualizing them in terms of the entire sensorium of other living beings and their own autopoietic ways of “bringing forth a world”– ways that are, since we ourselves are human animals, part of the evolutionary history and behavioral and psychological repertoire of the human itself. (xxv)
Towards this end, Wolfe deploys the second-order cybernetics of Luhmann, Varela, and Maturana. Luhmann, especially, is one of the undiscovered gems of theory. If you’re interested in his work start with The Reality of Mass Media, and then proceed to Social Systems. In discussing “different perceptual modes” of humans and animals, Wolfe is simultaneously quite close and exceptionally far from object-oriented ontology.
First Wolfe’s proximity to object-oriented ontology. One of Harman’s most significant contributions to contemporary debates has been to note that the difference between the mind/object gap and any other object/object gap is a difference in degree, not a difference in kind. In other words, the gap pertaining to relation is, for Harman, ontological, not epistemological. As Harman so nicely puts it,
…there is no object at all, whether animal, floral, or mineral, capable of caressing the skin of another object so perfectly as to become identical with it or otherwise mirror it perfectly. When a gale hammers a seaside cliff, when stellar rays penetrate a newspaper, these objects are no less gulty than humans of reducing entities to mere shadows of their full selves. To repeat, the gap between object and relation is inherent in the nature of things, and not first generated by the peculiarities of the human mind. The fact that humans seem to have more cognitive power than shale or cantaloupe does not justify grounding this difference in a basic ontological dualism. (Guerrilla Metaphysics, 81)
In evoking different modes of perception in different critters and in drawing of the second-order cybernetic theory of Luhman, Maturana, and Varela, Wolfe appears to make a very similar point. Indeed, in chapter 4 or 6 of The Democracy of Objects (I haven’t yet decided where to place the chapter), I draw on similar resources to discuss the “interior of objects” and their relations to other objects. My move here is to ontologize Luhmann’s and Maturana’s essentially epistemological claims about systems and their environments, information, and self-referentiality. This strikes me as a direction Varela is moving in as well. What Wolfe wishes to draw attention to are the unspoken anthropocentric biases that govern our discussion of a host of issues. He argues that second-order cybernetic systems theory significantly challenges a number of these assumptions and allow us to discuss modes of perception that aren’t human.
However, if Wolfe’s thought is nonetheless remote from object-oriented ontology, this is for two reasons: First, Wolfe still seems to think these issues in epistemological terms. Rather than seeing selective relations entertained towards other objects as a general ontological feature of each and every object or as a fundamental feature of the world itself, Wolfe seems to adopt the pessimistic thesis that this marks the impossibility of our knowledge. Yet this thesis only follows if one worked from the premise that knowledge is a matter of representation or adequatio intellectus et rei. If, as Harman has argued, withdrawal is a general ontological feature of the world, this model of knowledge was mistaken from the outset and we need to significantly rethink our epistemology as a consequence. Here the skepticism that has characterized post-structuralist thought is ripe for a Zizekian “healed by the spear that smote you” move. Far from being a limitation of specifically human knowledge, withdrawal is a general ontological feature of the world. It’s the very nature of being. This Wagnerian move is at the heart of Harman’s ontology.
Second, while Wolfe indeed makes advances by extending thought to the domain of the animal and those with disabilities (he has an inspired reading of Temple Grandin), nonetheless he suffers from illicitly restricting these claims to the living. That is, a non-living/living dyad still seems to function in his thought, restricting these “modes of perception” to the living. Yet if Harman is right, these points are every bit as true of rocks and cotton as they are of aardvarks and humans. Here, I suspect, Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology will be especially interesting. For if I’ve understood Bogost correctly, Alien Phenomenology wants to raise questions like “what is it like to be a rock or a computer circuit”, thereby opening discourse to nonhuman and inanimate domains.
Over at Amazon I notice that Wolfe’s book has received some negative reviews. It appears that one of two (or maybe both) things are going on here. Either Wolfe’s reviewers lack a background in theory and are frustrated with a book that presupposes some knowledge of theory, or Wolfe’s reviewers harbor anthropocentric sentiments and are irritated at his dethroning of humans from the center of being. At any rate, if you’ve read his book and received it favorably consider writing a positive review to offset these unfair reviews.
Larval Subjects . 
May 29, 2010 at 2:00 am
Hopefully I have more to say in a bit (and I’m happy that you’re reading this), my guess at first blush is that Wolfe would say that discourse, information, etc, are not merely human phenomena. But for all of that, I’m not sure that non-animal objects do have these qualities. So, this probably still doesn’t allow us to think the object in a flat ontology, as such. (Except maybe Luhmann does, but I’m not too invested in that question).
Tell me/us what you think of the rest of the book as you go on with it.
May 29, 2010 at 2:48 am
I think Scu is on point here. Wolfe’s project is to decenter the idea that “the animal” is fundamentally “lacking” some capacity or access to language, rational, discourse, etc. As you astutely point out, this leaves him in a bind when it comes to nonliving…
However, I don’t think you are quite right about Wolfe being stuck in the epistemological. I don’t know how far along you are, but in Chapter 2 p45 Wolfe critiques Dennett’s animal rights argument he makes essentially the same point as Harman.
“My point is that the difference between “pain” and “suffering” in Dennett turns out to be not just a difference in degree but a difference in kind, an ontological difference, one that simply reproduces on a nother level the difference between thinking and knowing you’re thinking, having thoughts and having represented thoughts, and so on.” [this is a Derridian paraphrase, I think, but I couldn’t find it]
It seems like there are possibilities for alliances here, but because Wolfe is fully engaged in critique (which Latour and it seems some OOO thinkers are wary of) it seems that this type of work might be written off. I am not sure where or how Wolfe/late-era Derrida’s ethical/political critiques would fit in with OOO if they are in fact ontologically oriented. I seem to remember Peter Gratton being sympathetic to Derrida…?
I found What is Posthumanism? to be somewhat inconsistent. Chapters 1, 2, and 4 were particularly rewarding, while I found the second half of the book to simply be a collection of short essays that mostly just touched on earlier points. That said, I am profoundly in love with the Posthumanities series that Wolfe has curated. (check this list). There is certainly more room for engagement with some of these thinkers (Serres, Haraway, Esposito, Stengers, etc.) and OOO.
May 29, 2010 at 3:31 am
I posted a mostly favorable review of the book. Also, I’d love to hear more from Scu, who I am sure is more well-versed in animal studies than me.
May 29, 2010 at 4:21 am
[…] 29, 2010 Here is LEVI’S TAKE on Carey Wolfe’s […]
May 29, 2010 at 4:40 am
I think you misconstrue Derrida regarding the primacy of the human. See “The Animal That Therefore I Am.”
Thanks for your blog. I enjoy it quite a lot.
May 29, 2010 at 9:04 am
I think that the the ‘critical posthumanism’ that Wolfe represents ignores the distinction Derrida draws in ‘The Ends of Man’ between transcendental humanism and anthropological humanism. We can ‘deconstruct’ the unity and self-sufficiency of the transcendental subject and its various avatars without effacing ethically and politically significant differences between human and non-human animals. For example, the fact that ‘meaning’ and ‘sense’ supervene on relationships between affective bodies rather than some Cartesian realm (as Dan Dennett or Andy Clark might aver) does not make these activities less evaluable as rational or reasonable. To properly address the status of radically non-human entities (such as AI’s or synthetic life forms) posthumanism needs to attend to anthropological specificities without muddling these up with transcendental claims. There’s nothing incoherent about ‘Cyborg Humanism’ in other words.
By the way, I think most Derridean scholarship would reject the claim that Derrida is a philosopher of signification. One could describe his ontology as ‘regional’ insofar as it addresses conditions of possibility for thought and representation as such. But this interrogation is pretty broad. Take his discussion of Freud’s proto-theory of neural networks in ‘Freud and the scene of Writing’. I’ve addressed that here, together with its broader implications for the transcendental critique of naturalism:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/n80120114j322313/
May 29, 2010 at 12:09 pm
A quick response to Kai’s point re: Dennett. The difference between ‘thinking’ and ‘thinking you’re thinking’ is a difference that makes a difference. A creature able to deploy recursively structured representational systems has cognitive, social and affective capacities well beyond the reach of non-recursive cognizers. It can make promises, be subjected to certain humiliations, consider the consistency of a formal system and the reasonability of a value system. Dennett’s distinction is only ontological in the boring sense that it attempts to capture a real difference of genuine explanatory significance. It’s not intended to be categorical or transcendental. Of course, if Dennett’s theory of consciousness is on the right track, then it has implications for whether non-human animals should be attributed subjectivity. But so what? Dennett’s multiple drafts theory needs to be addressed on its own terms not on the grounds that it fails to level species differences in an ethically palatable manner.
May 29, 2010 at 12:16 pm
Hi Levi,
After reading the first part of your post, I was quite ready to write a rejoinder. After reading your “Update,” I was happy to see the revision in your position, but was left wondering to what extent you still stand by the first part.
You write:
“Cary’s argument seems to proceed by way of the signifier, signs, information, and second-order systems. In short, he proceeds by way of phenomena that are nonetheless human. His introduction, for example, makes a lot of Foucault’s Order of Things announces the end of man. But how does Foucault do this? Foucault does this by championing discursive structures and power in history. Yet these are still human phenomena. Here we’re still within a correlationist framework that pitches the issue in terms of specifically human phenomena.”
As a couple of commenters have alluded to, it’s not clear why such things as “signifier, signs, information, and second-order systems” would at all have to be “specifically human phenomena.” There’s a long tradition in semiotics, information theory, etc., that treats these things well outside their human manifestations. Peirce, who is the acknowledged founder of semiotics, was quite clear about that — signs, for him (and for the fields of biosemiotics, ecosemiotics, zoosemiotics, et al.), are a feature of the world that have little to do with humans, except when they do of course.
On the other hand, to speak of rocks and cotton as if they have “modes of perception” risks, to my mind, being both anthropomorphic and anthropocentric — i.e., risks attributing human-like qualities, or at least living-like qualities, to non-living things at the same time as it assumes that OUR experiences of those non-living things (as ‘rocks’ and ‘cotton,’ rather than as the many possible ways that they might be experienced by everything from amoebas to galaxies) are the thing in its essence.
How, for instance, is cotton an object, unless you are referring to a single spool of cotton, a woven sweater, etc.? And at what point does rock start being “a rock”? Or, to use a more obvious example, at what point does water start being “a water” (a river, a cloud, an iceberg, a single flow out of a faucet, a speck of perspiration, etc.)? Does our perception of it as such define the thing itself?
When an ant is walking along some soil and then suddenly begins to climb what turns out to be a rock cliff, which may have tufts of grass, moss, bits of sand, and other sorts of things on it, does it perceive this as a “cliff,” a “rock,” or some kind of extended landscape, relatively continuous/discontinuous with the other parts of the landscape it had been walking across? Isn’t all of this relative to a perceiver and enactive agent? (We name it a “rock cliff”, which suggests distinct objecthood, but something else doesn’t see it as a thing at all but as part of other objects, or as having objects on it?) Does “a rock” or “cotton” at some point become an enactive agent? If not, then how are they in the same ontological category as humans, crows, ants, and amoebas?
That’s why I prefer a process-relational ontology — because all these things CAN be described in terms of the relational (enactive, semiotic) processes that make them up, and because describing them in terms of such processes gets us out of our conventional, habitual assumptions (based in our specifically human perception/embodiment) about what constitutes a thing and what doesn’t…
I haven’t read What is Posthumanism?, but I’ve read a few of Wolfe’s other books, and I understand how you would get the idea that his ontology is anthropocentric “correlationist,” however I think that if you push the semiotic, cognitive, and systems-theoretical approaches he uses far enough, they need not be that at all.
May 29, 2010 at 12:38 pm
Two more things:
(1) All of what I just said about signs, etc., also goes for a Foucauldian notion of “power.”
(2) You write:
“[Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, and Luhmann] conflate regional ontologies with ontology as such, treating modes of access as determinative of what things are. But the questions of how we have access to entities and the question of what things are are entirely distinct and are not to be confused with one another. Until we overcome our tendency to make that confusion we have not attained a posthumanist philosophy.”
I’m not sure if I follow this. Is “access”, i.e. how things interact with other things, not part of ontology? If we are to keep these two questions separate, then we would have to ensure that OUR (human) modes of access do not become the ONLY modes of access we assume to exist in the universe. But we, of all creatures – and philosophers most of all – are the ones most prone to sitting around and describing things “as they are” rather than as we get involved in and with them in our projects of living. So if we are to develop an ontology that is not human-centric, it seems to me that we should start with those modes of involvement (access) that are common to everything, and not with those modes of abstract, “objective” description that are “all too human.” Heidegger, of course, proposed that kind of move, but he didn’t go far enough beyond the human way of being “involved.” Whitehead, on the other hand, did better. At least that’s where my thinking has led me. I’m curious to know your thoughts on that, but I’m willing to wait for The Democracy of Objects to read them.
Thanks, as always, for such a provocative blog.
Cheers,
Adrian
May 29, 2010 at 5:30 pm
David, why is subjectivity morally relevant? The BP oil disaster is morally harmful whether it affects the recursively self-aware or not–it seems trivial to point out the obvious: possible permanent ecological destruction of the entire Gulf, possible spread to more of the Atlantic, destruction of coastal regions, and the ensuing environmental destruction of the plants and animals inhabiting them. Whether the recursively self-aware are affected by the disaster or not doesn’t seem to mitigate its moral evil. But isn’t this a version of the post-humanist position? Why limit ethics to the recursively self-aware wherein humans are the prototypical model? Why ethically (or otherwise) privilege the possession of a given capacity?
Dennett’s point is certainly relevant to the philosophy of mind, but is bearing on ethics can only be cynical and anthropocentric.
But perhaps I miss your point.
May 29, 2010 at 7:33 pm
Why are ‘signifier, signs, information, and second-order systems’ necessarily human? Sebeok would say no.
May 29, 2010 at 8:39 pm
Very interesting! A small point which may just have been an oversight: Francisco Varela died in 2001.
I recently saw a joke idea to write a paper entitled ‘What is it like to be a philosopher’? You can imagine what one could do with that. And I guess Maurice’s point about Thomas Sebeok is perceptive.
I still find the Latour of Pandora’s Hope (p.61) different from Harman’s absolute withdrawal. We really do get to know ‘something’ about the rainforest (a partial knowledge of a whole).
“When I read the field report, I am truly holding in my hands the forest of Boa Vista. A text truly speaks of the world.”
This is not possible for a rainforest that is totally withdrawn?
But for Latour the transformations keep something constant.
I note that you ‘oscillate’ (to use you expression) on this question of partial access. Your potential reserve is not quite absolutely withdrawn?
I still wonder whether Graham Harman’s way of setting up the question creates the problem. There is this ‘whole’ that can not be partially related to. It’s not a collection of sensible qualities etc. So Latour is mistaken. He doesn’t hold Boa Vista in his hands. And he never will…Just thinking. Excuse my ramblings.
May 30, 2010 at 5:01 pm
Craig, I don’t believe it is anthropocentric to distinguish entities according to their capacities or the structures that explain those capacities (that’s realism). By extension, if moral status supervenes on capacities, then neither is it anthropocentric to ascribe differences of moral status on the basis of of differences in capacity. Caring differently about how things stand for conscious, recursively self-aware moral subjects follows from a recognition that the states to which they are prone are morally salient in certain ways. It doesn’t follow that there couldn’t be morally salient states that don’t instantiate the form of first person subjectivity or linguaformal recursion.
May 30, 2010 at 5:29 pm
Hi Levi – I’m glad to hear that the book is growing on you. The argument that “signifier, signs, information, and second-order systems” are indicative of anthropocentrism/correlationism is, I fear, a common misunderstanding of semiotics, which since Peirce (the field’s main founder) on through the development of biosemiotics, zoosemiotics, ecosemiotics, etc., has dealt with signification as an activity of things (i.e. the universe), and not at all exclusively of human beings. Sebeok is a key figure there, as a few commenters have noted. I think the same could be said of Foucauldian “power.” (I made this point yesterday in a much longer comment that seems to have gotten lost somewhere between my ‘submit’ click and this page.)
I agree that the living/non-living divide is an important one to think through, but at the same time I can’t help thinking that there are differences that one shouldn’t ignore (and that are theorizable using second-order cybernetics, agential realism, and with other approaches). Neither a computer chip nor a rock responds to events in the way that an autopoietic organism, such as an amoeba, does. The former are objects in our (human) world, but not necessarily in the worlds of ants, bats, or stars, where they might be part of some other kind of surface or ‘stuff,’ or just nothing much at all (for a star). An amoeba or an ant, on the other hand, actively self-regulates its responses to other things, even as its ‘selfhood’ overlaps and intermingles with other things (the ant with its colony, etc.). To assume that things we (humans) think of as ‘things’ (such as computer chips or balls of cotton) are the same kinds of things as are things that think of themselves as things (because they recursively maintain themselves in a world of interactions) is, to my mind, an error. That’s not to say that all those things don’t contribute to the reshaping of networks (as Latour would argue) – they’re all actants, but to say that is to remain agnostic about what type of actancy they are capable of. For ANT to become a full-fledged ontology, it would need to be able to say more about that.
May 30, 2010 at 7:52 pm
Hi Adrian,
Yes, I’m intimately familiar with semoticians like Sebeok and Deely. To be sure, they discuss semiotics outside the domain of the human, but by and large semiotics, I believe, tracks towards the cultural in its actual practice. That’s the problem.
May 30, 2010 at 8:27 pm
Hi Adrian,
A couple of remarks. You write:
“Modes of perception” is not a term in my own ontological vocabulary, but is drawn from Wolfe. That said, the point is apropos. Speaking of “modes of perception” in relation to inanimate objects is not a way of anthropomorphizing, but of emphasizing that all objects, whether animate or inanimate, relate to other objects in the world in selective ways. That is to say that no object is ever open to interactions with all other objects. That’s all. I don’t see anything particularly problematic about that claim.
You write:
One of the key criteria for something being a substance is that it must be discrete and capable of acting as a unity. Whether or not something is a substance has nothing to do with our perception or anythings else’s perception. It is entirely possible for us to perceive certain things as substances that are not, in fact, substances, just as it is perfectly possible for us to not perceive certain things as substances that are substances. This is one reason why the ontological and the epistemological are distinct.
A couple of points here. First, I’m curious as to whether or not you’ve actually been reading the works of object-oriented ontologists as one of the key claims of object-oriented ontology is that each object relates to the world in highly specific and selective ways. As a consequence, what you say about the ant really comes as no surprise to the object-oriented ontologist as the object-oriented ontologist has being saying as much all all along. However, second, at the risk of sounding repetitive, whether or not something is a substance has nothing to do with whether or not some other object does or does not perceive it as a substance. If the cliff face is a substance or object– I’m skeptical, believing it instead to be an element of an object, i.e., the earth –then whether or not the ant perceives it as such is irrelevant to whether it is an object. This is the whole problem with philosophies of access. They believe that ontological questions can be dissolved by epistemological questions.
And I believe that it’s a tremendous error to believe that substances are made up of the actions of other substances such as the ant in your example above. Indeed, I believe that it’s this very way of thinking that provides the ground for the exploitation of the earth that I presume you oppose, for the thesis that objects are how other things relate to them opens the door to the thesis that objects are nothing more than the use we make of them in giving them form. Finally, there is nothing about OOO that leads to habitual or conventional assumptions about what objects are or that privileges human conceptions of objects. Quite the contrary. The point about how objects grasp one another selectively and differently should be enough to disabuse you of this charge, not to mention OOO’s claims about mereology. There is a place for process and relation in OOO– as I’ve repeatedly pointed out to you, yet oddly you continue to suggest that somehow OOO is rejecting these things –but process and relation do not entail the rejection of substance.
May 30, 2010 at 9:30 pm
David,
I think it’s rather difficult to ignore the obvious fact that Derrida writes not about the world, but about texts. “Freud and the Scene of Writing” is not a text about neurology, but about Freud’s texts. To miss this, I believe, is just to have an incoherent notion of both the scope of deconstruction and what deconstruction is up to. More broadly, I think this is one of the central problems with some discussions of posthumanism. They conflate antihumanism with posthumanism. However the two are entirely different. Antihumanism arises out of thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, and Althusser. However, these thinkers all remain profoundly humanistic in that their critique goes no further than a critique of the subject and a demonstration of how the subject is constructed or produced by broader cultural, social, or linguistic actants. As such, they remain thoroughly within the domain of the human and are basically variants of Kantianism, as Ricouer put it, without a transcendental subject. Posthumanism can certainly embrace these critiques, but goes further in rejecting this anthropocentric bias altogether. Language, culture, society become elements of the regional within being, not grounds of being as such.
May 31, 2010 at 1:06 am
“I think it’s rather difficult to ignore the obvious fact that Derrida writes not about the world, but about texts.”
And this is why I find Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am so much more inspiring than most other Derridian works. For although it works through thinkers like Levinas, Lacan, and Heidegger, it does through through these thinkers inability to deal with a grounded situation: Derrida’s encounter with his cat in the bathroom. I don’t think this redeems Derrida’s earlier works, but it potentially points to the complexity and utility of some of his later works.
May 31, 2010 at 9:58 am
Hi Levi. I suppose if Derridean texts are intensional entities of some kind or bleached-out transcendental subjects, then it’s correct to say that Derrida was not writing about the world. But while infrastructural terms like ‘iterability’ and ‘trace’ are certainly topic neutral, it doesn’t follow that they must apply to the abstract or ultramundane. In the Freud essay Derrida is, among other things, exploring the implications of the Freudian precursor of the Hebb rule in the modern theory of neural networks for the localization of the memory trace. The logic of his argument, as Paul Cilliers shows in Complexity and Postmodernism, extends far beyond Freud’s steam-age cognitive science.
May 31, 2010 at 12:24 pm
Thanks, Levi, for your clarifications, which I understand and appreciate. I think the only disagreement between us in much of this exchange is really quite trivial, arising out of my reaction to the use of examples like rocks, cotton, and computer circuits. (Graham also sometimes comes up with examples of things that, to me, do not seem to be “discrete and capable of acting as a unity,” as you put it.) But as long as the issue is not the example used but the point made about it (that all objects relate selectively, etc.), then there is no problem.
I do have some difficulty with your final paragraph, however:
“And I believe that it’s a tremendous error to believe that substances are made up of the actions of other substances such as the ant in your example above. Indeed, I believe that it’s this very way of thinking that provides the ground for the exploitation of the earth that I presume you oppose, for the thesis that objects are how other things relate to them opens the door to the thesis that objects are nothing more than the use we make of them in giving them form.”
I’m not sure how this relates to what I said. I certainly wouldn’t have intended to suggest that the relationship between things could be one-way and exhaustive – i.e., that some things are (i.e., are defined by) “how other things relate to them,” but that those other things aren’t similarly defined. So I’m not sure how this leads to the “thesis that objects are nothing more than the use *we* make of them” – unless, of course, “we” are “nothing more” than the “use” they (and other objects) make of us. To me, that suggests that things are defined by the relational processes that “make them up” – and, of course, by the differences between some of those processes (e.g., the ones that render an “object” more consistent and persistent over time) and others. If this view takes the ground out from under one object’s feet, it does that with all other objects as well. The relational processes, on the other hand, are left in place – and can be evaluated as being, e.g., caring, exploitative, and so on. So I don’t see how this view “provides the ground for the exploitation of the earth.”
Finally, I didn’t mean to suggest that OOO rejects objects and processes altogether (and I’ve said as much before). But I can see, in retrospect, that a statement like “That’s why I prefer a process-relational ontology” could be taken that way. I’ll accept responsibility for that confusion.
Respectfully,
Adrian
May 31, 2010 at 2:31 pm
David,
I’m not sure what you mean. I’m being quite literal: Derrida only ever treats texts as his objects and his claims are quite literally restricted to the texts that he takes as his objects. This is part and parcel of his linguistic idealism. Overcoming ontotheology requires strict restriction to the discourses of the history of philosophy, not what these texts are about. There is no referential dimension in Derrida’s thought. That’s why it’s odd to believe that Derrida really is talking about neurology or brain in a text like “Freud and the Scene of Writing”. There Derrida is exploring not a “Freudian precursor of the Hebb rule in the modern theory of neural networks”– which, from the standpoint of deconstruction, would be a naive, referential –reading but a certain disruptive logic at the heart of Freud’s signifiers. A good deconstructive reading remains at the level of the surface of texts, i.e., the play of the signifier, not what the signifier is about or the referential dimension. And a central reason for this is that one of the axioms of this discourse is that reference is an effect of the signifier or a sort of transcendental illusion produced by the play of language.
May 31, 2010 at 2:58 pm
Hi Adrian,
As I see it, you can’t have it both ways:
If you’re claiming that the relationship isn’t one way, you’re claiming that in addition to relations there are objects or substances that are independent of their relations or that cannot be reduced to relations. But if this is the case, you’ve arrived at the thesis of OOO, which states that there must be something to relate and that therefore there is an ontological distinction between relations and objects. For OOO objects can enter into relations but are never the same as their relations. That said, we can say all sorts of interesting things about what happens when objects do enter into relations.
This point can be illustrated with respect to Marx. With Harvey, I don’t think OOO has any trouble acknowledging that capital only exists in processes. In order for capital to be produced you have to have processes of production, distribution (exchange), and consumption. Without these three processes, capital doesn’t occur. This is why the Bush administration was so freaked out immediately following 9-11 and encouraged people to go shopping because without that activity the system would come grinding to a halt. Consequently, production alone isn’t enough because if I produce fifteen widgets and they just sit there in my warehouse, capital doesn’t get produced. However, the key point is that while capital is produced only in a set of relations and processes, it doesn’t follow that the entities which capital pertains to are themselves constituted by their relations. Those goods are still there just as before. What is absent in these goods is a particular quality, i.e., value. It is the quality that is relational, not the entity. We can say all sorts of interesting and important things about these processes and qualities, but the whole machine can’t get off the ground without entities to relate and without entities that are independent of their relations such that they can enter into other relations.
Returning to my original thesis about exploitation, my thesis about the exploitation of the world follows as a matter of course if relationism is true. Why? Because if entities are nothing more than their relations, if their being consists in their relations alone, then entities are nothing more than their use for us. In this respect, utilitarianism and pragmatism are both forms of correlationism because they reduce objects to vehicles of human uses or intentions, refusing to grant them any being of their own independent of this relation. Here, despite a number of reservations about his analysis of technology, I’m referring to something like Heidegger’s “Question Concerning Technology”, where entities are reduced to enframing and standing-reserve. It’s important to note here that entities, according to Heidegger, have been reduced entirely to relational determinations for humans. It is ontological relationism that makes this attitude towards nature possible. We also get the further problem that Harman has noted. If we say that objects are their relations, then we get a game of “hot potato” where entities disappear altogether because there’s nothing left to relate.
The key distinction here is the distinction between entities being constituted by their relations and entities entering into relations. OOO advocates the latter thesis for the reasons I’ve outlined. It is the former thesis that OOO rejects.
May 31, 2010 at 4:48 pm
Levi. If deconstruction were a linguistic idealism it would be a systematically incoherent one. A linguistic idealist believes (at the very least) that ‘language’ or inter-significative relations (inferential, differential, etc.) suffice to determine the contents of thoughts and texts in an autonomous fashion.
For Derrida, on the other hand, semantic content cannot be fixed by any finite context, linguistic or otherwise, since the representation and sense presuppose that any text has ‘a force of breaking with its context’ (Margins, 317). No context suffices to determine or fix the function of a text.
This entails that no ‘super-context’ like a language or a culture could fix it either. Indeed, were Derrida a linguistic idealist, his claim that every mark can be ‘severed from its referent or signified’ would be incoherent also (Ibid, 318). Since there would be no referents to be severed from, and no non-linguistic difference to account for difference between repetitions of an iterable mark. Derrida’s readings are much less like a formalist reduction of philosophical texts to signifiers than a exploration of inferential possibilities (the disruptive logic you talk about) that are underplayed by their original authors. If so then the implications of a deconstruction must be consequential for the ontological domains addressed in those texts, even where they have topic neutral application elsewhere, as I have argued.
May 31, 2010 at 5:03 pm
David,
I find this understanding of linguistic idealism and language more generally extremely perplexing:
On the one hand, it’s precisely the differential nature of the signifier that prevents it from being fixed by any context. As Lacan liked to put it, “the signifier cannot signify itself”. It is precisely because the signifier cannot signify itself, that it always requires a +1, that it’s meaning is never able to be fixed. On the other hand, it is the iterability of the signifier, its repeatibility, that allows it to break with all contexts. Derrida is quite clear on both of these points in Limited, Inc. and “Signature Event Context”, as well as in numerous other texts. Both of these features of the signifier are features of language, and hence Derrida’s position is a form of linguistic idealism. Moreover, Derrida is quite clear that both the referent and the signified are effects of the signifier. Instead of a transcendental subject functioning as the condition for experience and the world, language becomes the transcendental condition. These are pretty basic and elementary points of deconstruction and post-structuralist theory. C’mon David, we’re talking about the author who claimed that there’s nothing outside the text.
May 31, 2010 at 6:01 pm
Brief response to Adrian:
“(Graham also sometimes comes up with examples of things that, to me, do not seem to be “discrete and capable of acting as a unity,” as you put it.)”
That’s because you’re confusing me with the early Latour, for whom there is only one kind of actor: anything that has an effect on anything else.
For me, there are exactly *two* kinds of objects– the real and the sensual. And when we’re talking about the sensual realm, pretty much anything goes for objecthood. There, anything that is *recognized* is an object is in fact a sensual object.
In the realm of real objects there is nothing corresponding to many of the objects we take to be real in the sensual realm.
If I ever give a Latour Litany such as “stones, buildings, clarinet trios, etc.”, you can be sure that some of these are merely objects in the sensual sense.
However, I think you’re also being much too quick to assume that many of these things (such as rocks) are real only for us. And I happen to think that this is a bias of your relationist standpoint.
May 31, 2010 at 6:59 pm
Levi. Derrida’s claim is more accurately translated as ‘there is no outside-text’ (hors-texte). In other words, there is no privileged reference function which fixes the content of terms like ‘mother’ and ‘nature’ in Rousseau’s text since its supplementary structure eludes such identification. None of this implies that there are only linguistic texts. Davidson’s doctrine of referential inscrutability states something similar. The fact that formal relations of reference are underdetermined does not entail that there is nothing outside language.
Lacan’s structuralism is a distraction here – Derrida isn’t a Lacanian after all and his iterability argument obviously doesn’t presuppose a structuralist account of meaning but a certain conception of signs as ideal, repeatable objects (Husserl is more evident here than Saussure). If iterability were only applicable to a defunct and outdated semantics it would be of little philosophical interest.
As in the Freud essay, Derrida is explicit about generalizing the structures of textuality (or generalized writing) beyond ‘semiolinguistic communication’ to experience and visual representations (M, 316).
May 31, 2010 at 9:21 pm
Levi,
When you write this . . .
“I’m not sure what you mean. I’m being quite literal: Derrida only ever treats texts as his objects and his claims are quite literally restricted to the texts that he takes as his objects. This is part and parcel of his linguistic idealism. Overcoming ontotheology requires strict restriction to the discourses of the history of philosophy, not what these texts are about. There is no referential dimension in Derrida’s thought.”
. . . are you serious? I mean that in all sincerity. Do you truly believe this characterizes Derrida’s project?
If so, just read p. 148 of Limited Inc. It’s on Google books. If that page doesn’t convince you, ask for more. There are literally hundreds of examples like this.
May 31, 2010 at 9:52 pm
Matthew,
Yes I understand that Derrida’s concept of writing refers to arche-writing which isn’t to be confused with writing on a page. However, we can’t ignore that Derrida only ever engages with texts of other authors, not with the world directly. This says something important about how he conceives his practice. That was my point. However, returning to my original point about realism and correlationism, let’s look at what Derrida actually says on page 148 of Limited, Inc.:
This is a basic variant of the correlationist argument insofar as it treats all questions about the referent (sic.) as questions of access to the referent. For Derrida, the question of access comes to replace the question of the referent (sic.). I place “sic.” behind “referent” in each of these cases because the referent is a signifying function and questions of how reference is possible are irrelevant to ontological questions of what substances are. These questions are entirely distinct, yet Derrida, like all of the post-Kantian anti-realist tradition, runs them together on the premise that it is necessary to have access to being to talk about what being is.
My thesis is that you can’t characterize your position as posthumanist so long as you remain within the framework of correlationism and anti-realism. Only realism marks the way out of humanism, and indeed, only realism has ever been posthumanist. So long as you remain within the correlationist or anti-realist framework your position, explicitly or implicitly, remains humanist. This is more than evident in Derrida’s actual discussions of the trace, writing, differance, and text. With Derrida we get a much more interesting form of correlationism, but a form of correlationism nonetheless. And let’s not forget that the referent (sic.) is one of the primary avatars of presence and philosophies of presence for Derrida.
May 31, 2010 at 10:37 pm
Levi writes:
It is entirely possible for us to perceive certain things as substances that are not, in fact, substances, just as it is perfectly possible for us to not perceive certain things as substances that are substances. This is one reason why the ontological and the epistemological are distinct.
Far from saying that we perceive objects as they really are — some sort of bland, naive and safe realism — this kind of realism is a near Lovecraftian realm of horrific, hidden pools and secret societies; a world populated by shadowy corners and tenebrous veins creeping everywhere; of a sci-fi horror where an ordinary, household object becomes the monstrous Thing, spilling its tendrils out when you least suspect it; a haunted world of spectral, wispy ghosts. It’s the thinking of the being of the breathtaking surprise of objects.
That is how I am reading Graham, Levi, et al, anyway.
May 31, 2010 at 11:07 pm
David,
I’m unclear as to the ultimate point you’re trying to make or what it is that you’re trying to defend. You write:
I never made the claim that there are only linguistic texts. I made the claim that for Derrida language is the ground of our access to all other things. That is quite a different claim. I simply don’t think the omnipresent importance of Saussure and Derrida’s reading of Saussure can be ignored in Derrida’s thought. Additionally, I did not make the claim that for Derrida there is nothing other than language. That would be Berkeleyian idealism or the thesis that esse est percipi, with language in the position of perception. Few anti-realists have ever advocated such an extreme position. Rather, Derrida seems to hold, with Kant, that there is a thing-in-itself but that we never have access to these things or what they might be. Rather, like Kant, we can only speak of objects in terms of their givenness. However, where for Kant this givenness is effected through transcendental subjectivity and the a priori structure of mind, for Derrida it is language under the moniker of trace, differance, arche-writing, etc., that serves this function.
Fair enough, although it would be wrong to suggest that Lacan wasn’t a major influence of Derrida’s thought. Most of the concepts that Derrida develops in texts such as Speech and Phenomena, Writing and Difference, and Of Grammatology can already be found in Lacan’s seminars between 1961 and 1967. For example, Lacan was already developing the concept of trace, writing, and the iterability of the sign in his 61-62 seminar L’identification. Lacan introduces the non-self-membership thesis (“the signifier cannot signify itself”) with respect to the signifier in Seminar 14, La logique du fantasma in 1966. Your characterization of Lacan’s psychoanalysis as “structuralist” is here peculiar, as Lacan had already developed a hearty critique of the pretensions of structuralism in 1961, drawing heavily on Cantor’s and Russell’s paradoxes with respect to the signifier and developing a logic of supplementarity (nearly a decade before Derrida, I might add). If you know anything about Lacan’s seminars, you also know that they were distributed throughout Paris and were heavily attended by various Parisian intellectuals (let’s not forget that Derrida’s wife was herself a psychoanalyst).
However, if you don’t like the reference to Lacan, we need only refer to Derrida to make the same point. As Derrida writes in his “Differance” essay,
First, this just is Lacan’s thesis that the signifier cannot signify itself. That is precisely what the diacritical nature of the signifier means. Second, this thesis only holds if one adopts the diacritical or differential conception of the signifier (which I do) that Derrida draws from Saussure. Derrida’s critique of “the” transcendental signified (which can hold equally for God, concepts, and the referent) is dependent on his diacritical notion of the signifier drawn from Saussure and the play of differance to which the signifier is necessarily subject. Consequently, you can perhaps claim that Derrida’s thesis is not dependent on an “outdated and defunct semantics” (which is odd, because semantics is about truth-functionality and reference, not language within the context of structural linguistics), but it cannot be tenably argued that Derrida’s critique is not dependent on the diacritical nature of the signifier and that this diacritics doesn’t play a key role in his argument.
You go on to write:
The fact that you would take Derrida’s extension of this thesis to experience and visual representation to be about something other than language– I, incidentally, did not say semiolinguistic communication, which is itself dependent on writing or language as its condition of possibility in Derrida –suggests to me that you’ve missed a key point of Derrida’s overall argument. To get the rest of this argument it’s necessary to turn to his reading of Husserl in Speech and Phenomena. Remember that for Husserl a key dimension of his argument is that experience is meaningful. There Derrida is particularly interested in Husserl’s distinction between indication and expression, because Husserl’s phenomenology presupposes the possibility of transcendental signifiers (purely present concepts or givens) that are not subject to the diacritical play of language or differance. What Derrida effectively shows is that the domain of consciousness is itself structured by this play of differance, thereby bringing about the collapse of Husserl’s “principle of all principles” as presented in Ideas I. Put differently, Derrida shows that experience and visual representation is itself structured by language. This is exactly what we would expect from a linguistic idealist that places language in the position of the transcendental condition for the possibility of experience. And if you doubt that Derrida’s argument is transcendental in character, let’s not forget his injunction, in Rogues, to be “…responsible guardians of the heritage of transcendental idealism” (134).
It appears to me that we’ve gotten into a rather dreary discussion about how Derrida is to be interpreted, and that this is quite far afield from the original issue. My original point, and I still hold to it, is that Derrida remains within the correlationist circle and that his thought is a variant of philosophies of access. Philosophies of access and correlationism reduce questions of ontology or of being qua being to questions of our access to being. In this connection it matters little whether we’re discussing the manner in which language conditions access to beings or whether we’re discussing how various neurologies condition access to being. The point remains that questions of being have been elided by questions of access to being when, in fact, the two questions are entirely distinct (notice, I’m not rejecting or dismissing Derrida, merely claiming that he’s not doing ontology and that he is confused about what ontology is).
With that said, however, I do believe that Derrida remains within an anthropocentric orbit. This is based, I believe, on the privileged role he gives to language and the signifier (and I’m confident that I’m correct in this reading). So long, I believe, as one gives a privileged place to language one still remains within an anthropocentric or humanistic framework, even if one has deconstructed the subject as both Lacan and Derrida do. It doesn’t help to claim, as Derrida does, that you have deconstructed the nature/culture binary, for this deconstruction of the nature/culture binary amounts to little more than giving the culture side of the binary the upper hand. This is the same gesture as those idealists who try to claim that the idealism/realism binary is meaningless, all the while advancing a thoroughly idealist structure of argument that ultimately asserts that the being of the world apart from humans is unthinkable. This is why I believe you don’t get a genuine posthumanism from antihumanisms.
Here, I think, Wolfe is to be applauded for championing Luhmann over Derrida. Luhmann is able to integrate all of Derrida’s major lines of argument about the trace, differance, arche-writing, the signifier, etc., while recognizing the existence of systems that are neither human nor cultural or social in nature. He goes further.
May 31, 2010 at 11:30 pm
Levi,
To get anywhere with Derrida, you simply have to give up this claim:
“However, we can’t ignore that Derrida only ever engages with texts of other authors, not with the world directly.”
I see you (and Graham and others) make this kind of remark frequently, but it’s patently absurd. Seriously.
And once you drop that misreading (that Derrida only ever talks about texts of other authors), then you can clearly see that Derrida is not a correlationist or anti-realist of any sort. These claims, too, are patently absurd, and they can be easily undone by a charitable reading of nearly any one of his books/major essays.
Now, if you can make it to that point with Derrida and read him a bit more charitably, you’ll find something else of interest to your discussion.
The question of how to move beyond humanism and the question of how to move beyond anthropocentrism are related but two distinct issues. It is because *you* are running *those* two things together (you call them both humanism, when humanism means one thing and anthropocentrism means another) that you are missing the stakes of the Derridean project.
Simply put, Derrida’s concepts of the trace, ex-propriation, and so on are not intended to apply solely to the question of the human subject’s access to the referent (as you suggest). They are intended, as he says ad infinitum, to apply to “life” as such–that is, to responsive, affected beings and structures that go well beyond the human. As a consequence, he is suggesting that the issues of reference and access are *complicated* throughout all of “life,” human and non-human. The only referent that is an “avatar” of metaphysical presence is the naively empirical concept of human access to the referent. To complicate that concept of the referent (as Derrida does) is not to abandon reference as such (which Derrida never does).
*That* is Deconstruction 101.
Now, it is by extending the concepts of the trace, differance, and so on to include but also go beyond the human subject that he seeks to move beyond humanism and at the same time tries to open up a non-anthropocentric space for thought and relation.
If you want to gain a critical edge on Derrida for your work, it lies there–in the passage from post-humanism to post-anthropocentrism.
Oddly enough, I think if you read Derrida a bit more charitably, you’ll find that he is one of OOO’s best allies. He is not doing ontology in your sense, but he is indeed doing the proto-ontology for OOO. He’s the one who’s laying out the conditions of possibility for a radically non-anthropocentric ontology of your and Graham’s sort.
Now, I say this not as a defense of Derrida–I happen to think his approach on these issues is fundamentally mistaken. I think his proto-ontology of life is a mistake as is OOO’s attempt to hold onto objects. But if we’re going to discuss how to move out of humanism and anthropocentrism and toward a realist ontology, it’s important at least to understand that Derrida has traveled this terrain with exceptional rigor.
May 31, 2010 at 11:32 pm
Joseph,
This is exactly right. One of the key claims of OOO, shared by both Graham and myself, is that objects never encounter one another at all. Now Graham and I arrive at this conclusion, I think, for different reasons, but we end up in largely the same place. For Graham this is because objects are completely withdrawn from all relations. As he likes to put it, being is populated by all sorts of vacuums such that these vacuums are objects withdrawn from all other objects. As a consequence, objects never directly encounter one another but only encounter, as it were, sensuous avatars of one another. At the risk of irritating Graham, his position can be described as a sort of “hyper-Kantianism” or as an “ontologized Kantianism”. Perhaps one of the key consequences of Kant’s transcendental idealism is that our apprehension of objects as phenomena distorts the thing grasped, such that we can never grasp the thing as it is. Part of Harman’s move is to argue that this “distortion” is not unique to the mind-thing relation, but to any relation between objects (regardless of whether humans are involved). The flame no less distorts the cotton than the mind distorts the burrito. This is a general feature of being as such, not an epistemological peculiarity of mind.
I’ve never quite understood Graham’s non-relation thesis (though I’m trying to!), but I end up in a similar place. I agree with Graham’s thesis that objects aren’t constituted by their relations to other objects, but I don’t see why this entails that objects can’t enter into relations of some sort or another. In chapter 4 or 6 of The Democracy of Objects entitled “The Interior of Objects” (I haven’t decided whether or not to place it after the chapters on flat ontology and mereology), I treat objects along the lines of autopoietic systems. There I try to develop an ontologized version of systems theory, in contrast to the highly epistemological model of systems theory we tend to get from systems theorist (Maturana being the most extreme, Varela and Luhmann having departed from the ultra-idealism of Maturana). Without going into too many details, a couple of the key claims of systems theory are that 1) autopoietic systems are self-referential, and 2) that they are operationally closed.
Each system exists, argues the systems theorists, by effecting a distinction between system and environment. The key point here is that this distinction is self-referential. It is the system itself that draws the distinction such that we cannot say that a system is in an environment. As such, systems constitute their own relation to their environment and are therefore only selectively open to the world (much of the world being entirely invisible to every system). I take it that this thesis of the self-referentiality of objects/systems comes very close to Harman’s thesis that objects are behind firewalls. As a consequence of the self-referentiality of systems or objects it follows that objects are “operationally closed”. To say that objects are operationally closed is to say that information is never something that is floating about the world in and of itself, but that information is always information for a particular system or object. In other words, objects constitute their own information out of perturbations from an environment, and information is never information apart from a system or object that constitutes it. Like Harman, I thus end up in a position arguing that no object or system ever grasps or encounters other objects as they are precisely because it is systems that constitute information by virtue of their own endo-structure.
Your remark about realism and naive realism gets right to the point. Naive realism is the thesis that the world is as we perceive it. For both Graham and myself naive realism is clearly foreclosed because all objects are necessarily withdrawn from other objects, including those objects we refer to as humans. Here Harman’s distinction between “sensuous objects” and “real objects” is all important. Real objects can never be perceived because they are completely withdrawn from other objects. Sensuous objects are objects for another object and on the interior of another real object. They are, as it were, the distorted objects that are encountered when real objects meet at the level of their qualities.
May 31, 2010 at 11:58 pm
Matthew,
Yes, I understand all of what you’re saying here, but my point pertains to Derrida’s actual practice. Maybe you’ll understand my point more clearly if I put it in Hegelian terms. Take Hegel’s critique of sense-certainty at the beginning of the Phenomenology of Spirit. The initial position of sense-certainty wants to treat the immediate concrete givens of the senses as the real. This is its theoretical claim, its conceptual position. What it desires is absolutely concreteness and to treat the concrete as what is most real of all. However, what happens when the proponent of the concrete world begins to actually speak? The speech of the defender of sense-certainty is riddled with abstract universals– the here, there, now, etc –that indifferently apply to any here, there, now, and so on.
What Hegel reveals in the thesis of sense-certainty is a performative contradiction. At the theoretical and conceptual level, the proponent of sense-certainty advocates one thesis but ends up doing something quite different. Now I am not accusing Derrida of falling into the paradox of sense-certainty (thought would be absurd), but rather am suggesting that Derrida falls into a performative contradiction between what he says he wants to do and what he actually does.
At the level of Derrida’s explicit theoretical claims you’re quite right. Derrida wants to formulate a series of concepts that go beyond the human and any sort of anthropocentric bias. However, what do we witness Derrida actually doing in his concrete practices? We witness Derrida only engaging with human texts and artifacts. We might think about this in terms resembling a neurotic symptom in psychoanalysis. At the level of his speech the obsessional might speak a good deal about duty, his devotion to his wife and work, etc. However, at the level of his actual action, at the level of his symptom, we witness the obsessional committing all sorts of “bungled actions” that reveal dissatisfaction with his marriage, his work, etc., quite at odds with his specific claims. Derrida’s actual textual practice reveals quite a bit as to what he, perhaps unconsciously, takes to be really real. It stands in performative contradiction to the sorts of points you’re making and I would expect that a good deconstructive reader, adept at plumbing the contradictions in texts, their symptomatic nodes, and multiple strata and thread, would quite readily notice this.
Now a couple of additional points here. First, Derrida and deconstruction (I think I differ from Graham here) do hold an important place for me. One of the things that’s led me in the direction of OOO is that I believe that it is the first genuinely non-ontotheological conception of being (Graham makes a similar point somewhere). OOO’s conception of objects simply cannot be comprehended in terms of presence and a number of the debates that rage around OOO arise from critics conceiving objects in terms of presence, when all of us are quite clear in our arguments that objects simply cannot be thought in these terms. I am not rejecting Derrida, but merely pointing out that his claims about the trace, arche-writing, differance, and so on belong to a regional ontology and cannot be treated as “non-primordially primordial” or as a ground.
Second, however, it’s clear that claims about “life itself” won’t work for OOO. Life is still a regional determination within being and doesn’t get at being as such, i.e., OOO doesn’t advocate the thesis that all beings are living beings. In this connection, Derrida potentially has a lot to teach us about those objects that are living objects (I don’t deny this at all), but it doesn’t get us to the level of pure ontology or being qua being.
I suppose I’ll finish this response with a remark about the nature of my criticisms. When, within the framework of onticology, I level a criticism at another thinker it’s seldom with the intention of rejecting that position or dismissing it, but rather with the intention of softening the claims of that position. Here I’m with Whitehead and his thesis that philosophies seldom suffer from being false or from bad arguments, but rather suffer from overstatement. Philosophers tend to discover one interesting feature of a domain of being and then want to elevate it to the principle of all being. I’m particularly interested in critiquing any form of philosophy that develops a position along the lines of “being qua transcendental subject”, “being qua life”, “being qua language”, “being qua signs”, “being qua Dasein”, “being qua economics”, “being qua power”, etc. because I believe that all of these lines of argument are correlationist in character. However, this in no way entails that I believe we should reject talk of signs, life, language, power, mind, etc, only that these are regional considerations and that questions of ontology cannot be reduced to questions of access.
June 1, 2010 at 12:30 am
Inevitably I am interested in these thoughts!
It does seem that Harman’s thesis does end up with an inferred thing-in-itself (in fact it is explicitly acknowledged? – and discussed by Shaviro).
I am no Kantian scholar but isn’t there a K school that argues against this dualistic reading of Kant.
The phenomenal is the noumenal under an aspect and we do interact with it. I remember Horst Ruthrof once kicking a rock and saying ‘that is the noumenal’! Doesn’t look like these competing interpretations are going to vanish any time soon.
Harman’s move is like trad kantianism in which there really is no relation with what has been posited as the thing-in-itself. That thing that there must be – a necessary inference…just like causality.
Your position seems different. There are distorted relations – but there are relations with the real object which is not completely firewalled. There is a filter not a firewall.
The object’s potentiality is just not manifest all at once. The question of ‘time’ – or endurance has to be included.
Your appeal to autopoietic theory is interesting but I wonder how it will pan out…
Some objects aren’t autopoietic. Maturana (still alive and kicking) liked to give the example of a cyclone which is defined by relational flows and does not create a boundary of its own making…
Anyway I’m sure you will have fun with it!
Perhaps another approach entirely would be ‘ethological’.
An ethologist worthy of the name does not try to say what the animal is, but what it is capable of. As you do…and the deleuzian school.
Stengers talks about this in relation to ethologists of ‘capitalism’. Recognizing the beast and what it is capable of rather than defining it…pragmatism
See the forthcoming ‘Capitalist Sorcery: breaking the spell.’
As you know I am still tempted by the approach of Poinsot/Deely in which there are relative beings (which are not relations) and their relations. These relations are genuine relations with that object – they just never exhaust it. And that’s a good thing – a little mystery (Lewis Mumford). My own tentative was focussed on showing how some of the assumptions of Kantianism could be dealt with the resources of late latin semiotics – but I think the approach still has merits for inter-object relations.
June 1, 2010 at 12:44 am
Levi:
When I first started reading object-oriented ontology here and over and Graham’s blog (and elsewhere), I, too, had this immediate reaction to read everything as epistemological claims. It takes a bit before really absorbing the fact that this isn’t an epistemological thesis, and that to say, “well, when we have access to objects, it is still a perspective on those objects,” etc, etc, is to completely miss the point. Of course we have a perspective, but the question of ontology is not what our perspective is, but what, if anything, must things be like in the first place to have any kind of perspective on them. It’s a really very different conceptual realm. It’s a very nice shift that can occur when reading your work or Graham’s, that suddenly you feel like your through the looking glass, seeing epistemological questions through ontology and not ontology through epistemology. And I think it totally works. In turning this obsessive, even fetishistic, interest in perspective inside out, it suddenly opens up a whole different kind of philosophical discourse. For those Derrideans here, just look at the breadth of ontological heterogeneity you see in Graham and Levi — you see things being discussed philosophically that would never be possible for Derrida, or that would never seem to be of interest to him. This is one of, if not the biggest pay-offs of OOO, as I see it: the ability to recognize otherwise mysterious and hidden agencies both in our life (biological, historical, technological, cultural, political, economical, etc, etc) as well those alien societies and ecologies of beings which populate the vast majority of the universe. If you want, the self-referential system of much of the textual, hermeneutical and deconstructive philosophies so selectively determines the world that its informational yield has been pretty well saturated. Which is not to say, as you do, that they reveal nothing in their excess or overstatement, but it is to say we aren’t doomed to endless — even morbid — discussion about human limitations. (I say morbid, as I recall when first reading Badiou, then going back to Zizek, how rather depressing Zizek’s Act really seems.)
June 1, 2010 at 12:53 am
Just a correction:
I wrote:
“Which is not to say, as you do, that they reveal nothing in their excess or overstatement, but it is to say we aren’t doomed to endless — even morbid — discussion about human limitations.”
By this I meant that I agree with you when you quote Whitehead saying much of philosophy isn’t fundamentally wrong as much as it overstates its case. (The “as you do” above read a bit too ambiguously.)
June 1, 2010 at 1:20 am
I sense we’re moving the goal posts a bit here . . .
Derrida was first presented as a linguistic idealist who believes there’s nothing outside the text and who only ever reads other people’s texts, but now we agree that, *of course*, he is a non-anthropocentric realist at the level of his theoretical claims but still remains a performative anti-realist at the level of the style of his written texts? OK . . .
Derrida was also first presented as a correlationist in the post-Kantian idealist tradition but now is coming up short because you suggest he is offering a merely regional ontology that includes the vast majority of non-human actors? OK . . .
I guess I’m at a loss at this point.
Ultimately, the stakes of this discussion lie elsewhere, and I’d rather talk about those things (post-humanism, non-anthropocentrism, realism, different modes of practice, etc.), but I think the thread’s been lost at this point.
Thanks for replying. I hope you enjoy the rest of Wolfe’s book.
MC
June 1, 2010 at 1:25 am
Paul,
Yeah, I’ve been worrying myself over this problem:
I agree that not all systems are autopoietic systems. It seems to me that in order for a system to qualify as autopoietic it must constitute its own elements. Roughly, I want to argue that the substantiality of an object (in the Aristotlean sense of “individual thing”) is not its matter, nor its qualities, nor its parts (Aristotle makes all of these claims), but its systematicity, which I treat in terms of a modified account of Deleuze’s virtual (I reject the thesis that the virtual is a whole that is then partitioned into discrete objects, and the thesis that the virtual is “pre-individual” (here I think Deleuze conflates qualities with individuals)). So what you get, is a distinction between systems and then autopoietic systems, with the latter constituting their own elements. However, both types of systems share the common feature of entertaining only selective relations with respect to other objects in the world. The rock can’t interact, for example, with color.
I’ve never understood why Maturana believes that things like tornadoes, whirlpools, and hurricanes are autopoietic systems. On these points, I just think Maturna is rather arbitrary. To be sure, these types of systems aren’t particularly long lived, but it doesn’t seem to me that duration should be the criteria for whether or not something is an autopoietic system. It seems to me that substances like tornadoes (this example shows just how dynamic my conception of substance is) do indeed constitute their own elements and form boundaries. Maturana, however, is rather literal minded when it comes to talk of boundaries anyway. For example, he vigorously rejects Luhmann’s thesis that societies are autopoietic systems. Then again, I confess that Maturana is a “bad guy” for me. I think he is far too idealist (and in an incoherent way) in his version of autopoietic theory. Put in Luhmannian terms, Maturana seems to fail in distinguishing between the environment of a system (self-referentially constituted by the system) and the systems in the environment (which are distinct substances of their own irreducible to other systems). It’s this, I think, that leads him to the idealist thesis that all other objects are constituted by the distinctions of a particular autopoietic system and that there is no world apart from systems. I describe this thesis as incoherent because if it’s true, then it turns out that Maturana, in his biology, is quite literally studying nothing but his own mind. Here I think Bhaskar’s arguments for transcendental realism (especially as I outline in the second manifesto in my sidebar, but more extensively in the second chapter of The Democracy of Objects) point the way out of this sort of impasse while still preserving these sorts of insights. Maturana seems to fall into the rather sophmoric fallacy of arguing that because we can’t directly see infrared light but only see translations of infrared light into the radiant color spectrum we have access to, that infrared light doesn’t genuinely exist on its own. Again, I really don’t like Maturana (he makes me break out in hives!). Of course, you’re far more an expert on these matters than I. I come at Maturana and Varela via Luhmann and only have a passing interest in the former two thinkers.
I get the sense that Maturana is here confusing different issues. On the one hand, there’s the epistemological issue of how one system apprehends another system. Here Maturana is entirely right to claim that systems do not represent other objects, but constitute them through its own organization and distinctions. On the other hand, there are systems in the environment of other systems that are themselves entirely real, that are what they are, and that aren’t constituted by any other objects. The problem with Maturana is that he immediately jumps from the epistemological thesis of how one system constitutes other objects for itself to the thesis that there are no objects in themselves.
In this regard, its not correct to suggest that I don’t advocate the existence of objects in themselves. For me, every system, whether autopoietic or otherwise, is a thing-in-itself and is what it is regardless of how anything else relates to it. The point is that no object ever represents or relates to another object as it is because every object “withdraws” from every other object. In short, I’m thoroughly committed to the existence of substances. It just so happens that these substances are systems of one variety or another and they are all withdrawn from one another, encountering one another only under the aegis of their system-specific production of information. Joseph Goodson, in the post above, very nicely describes both my position and the position of OOO more broadly on these issues.
Incidentally, I cite The Primacy of Semiosis in the chapter dealing with these issues.
June 1, 2010 at 1:36 am
Matthew,
Apologies for that, I do believe that Derrida is a linguistic idealist and that his argument is advanced based on his conception of language. Perhaps the confusion lies in our respective conceptions of language and antirealism. As I understand it, many of the antirealists undermined the primacy of consciousness through an argument about the nature of the signifier and language. What they attempted to show is that the subject and consciousness is an effect of language, not the reverse. They called this “antihumanism” because the play of language is now no longer conceived as centered in consciousness and the subject, but is decentered and this, in turn, led to a decentering of the self-presence of the subject. My point is that this is still a humanist conception because language is a human phenomena (despite those who occasionally try the “cute” Lacanian style argument about how the signifier is something “alien”). As I see it, Derrida treats language and these properties of the signifier as the transcendental, thus placing him in the Kantian tradition as he himself remarks and as outstanding interpreters of Derrida’s work like Gasche argue.
I will partially concede that a number of the features Derrida attributes to language are characteristic of other types of nervous systems. However, here I think it’s important to be cognizant of arguments of the sort Hayles advances in My Mother Was a Computer where she points out the problem with treating features specific to language as specific to all forms of code. I also think that you can’t so easily dismiss my claims about performative contradiction as you appear to wish in this post. It’s significant that Derrida focuses so exclusively on texts (in the vulgar sense) in the way that he does.
I agree, however, that what’s important are the actual issues (post-humanism, non-anthropocentrism, realism, different modes of practice, etc). More broadly, I have problems with Derrida, certain aspects of Heidegger, and hermeneutics because I see them as having contributed deeply to an institutional climate in continental philosophy where continental philosophy is practiced almost entirely as commentary on other philosophical texts. While I believe that it is valuable to be acquainted with the philosophical tradition, I also believe that “continental philosophy” would do well to learn a bit from how Anglo-American philosophy is practiced and depart from the primacy of philosophy as commentary. Graduate students, for example, shouldn’t be writing dissertations on other philosophers (which isn’t to say they shouldn’t refer to and engage with other philosophers) and should instead be dealing primarily with issues and problems.
June 1, 2010 at 3:39 am
Levi, I’m with Calarco on Derrida, but I have a question related to the clash between ontology and epistemology, probably due to my negligible amount of OOO reading: what is your definition of being as such? Just so I know what you’re talking about. Thanks.
June 1, 2010 at 3:54 am
Hi J,
When I talk about “being as such” my only point is that what constitutes the substantiality of a substance (its being) is entirely distinct from how any other entity access that being or entity within the order of knowledge. What an ant or rock or planet or galaxy is has nothing to do with how humans talk about ants, rocks, and galaxies, how they experience them, or how any other entity experiences them or encounters them whether these entities be animal or inanimate. It is my view that contemporary philosophy continuously conflates these issues. It conflates questions of access to entities with what entities are or substance. This conflation comes from an honest place. The premise of the argument first seems to be that we must first know what beings are to talk about being as such. This seems like an obvious move. But it’s really not. I outline the reasons for this in my second manifesto in the sidebar of this blog and more extensively in The Democracy of Objects. I find it perplexing that anyone interested in posthumanism would advocate the primacy of questions of access and epistemology over ontology because if you begin from this place you’re never going to escape anthropocentrism because you’re still going to be stuck with the primacy of your access to entities. Humbly I’d suggest that if you side with Calarco on this you haven’t thought through what Derrida is actually claiming and are conflating what you find useful in Derrida with your posthumanist aspirations. Take what you find useful and move beyond that line of thought.
June 1, 2010 at 4:03 am
I really do understand and see and validity of posing the question of being as such as separated from questions of access. They are, indeed, two different questions. But question is: what is, then, the actual being as such of a star? And of an ant?
June 1, 2010 at 4:04 am
Levi – Your reply to my comment is much too rich for me to respond to in full. (And there are now so many other great comments here, which unfortunately I can’t keep up with, since I can’t seem to be able to get WordPress to send the comments/replies directly to my email, and I’m at a conference for the next few days in any case.)
But just briefly – I think that what you’re calling an “object” I’m calling a certain kind of relational process, and what your calling “relations” I’m calling a different kind of relational process. (In fact, each of these can be distinguished into many other kinds. And from the meeting and interaction of different kinds of such processes, the full richness of the world emerges.) Once we get past this basic semantic preference, I’m not sure that there’s a great difference in what we would say about those relations (and objects).
However, I simply can’t follow what you mean when you write: “Because if entities are nothing more than their relations, if their being consists in their relations alone, then entities are *nothing more than their use for us*.”
Where does this “for us” come from? Who’s talking about an “us” and (presumably) a “them”? Do you mean humans? If so, why? I can’t help feeling that you’re reading something into my words that isn’t there. Why should attending to things in terms of their processual nature – their temporalities, their changeabilities (and stabilities), their *development* as entities with certain capacities that unfold within certain kinds of relations, etc. – result in the sort of horrific situation you describe whereby one set of relational entities (humans) hold all other sets (everything else) hostage?
Clearly I’m not communicating something properly, but I’m not sure what it is…
Cheers,
Adrian
June 1, 2010 at 4:08 am
Read the books and posts on this, mon Ami. Lots of zeros and ones have been spilled on these issues. I’m not going to expend my time on someone who hasn’t bothered to read the ooo lit on this issue when it’s readily available on this blog and elsewhere.
June 1, 2010 at 5:57 am
I don’t want to sound like a broken record here, but I really think that the Derrida of The Animal That Therefore I Am is quite different than that of Limited, Inc. or Of Grammatology. Since this is the primary Derridian text that Wolfe is referencing, shouldn’t we give that some weight? If Foucault is given three “stages” or “periods,” why can’t we think of Derrida’s work as progressing from, what I would describe as a “boring engagement with THE text/trace” to a more ontological-ethical-political engagement? (these three terms being entangled in each other, as per Annemarie Mol’s “ontological politics”) I really have absolutely no idea whether this is accepted or promulgated in Derridian circles, but it seems like that is one distinction Wolfe is making…
June 1, 2010 at 6:17 am
Yes, Maturana is blatantly a kantian in his ‘constitutive ontology of observing’ – on the web.
But in spite of all that, and his undiluted arrogance in any debate, he still had some interesting things to say about simple and composite unities that could be made use of.
See his essay in ‘Autopoiesis, Dissipative Structures and Spontaneous Social Orders’, ed. Milan Zileny.
I’m no ‘expert’ and stopped looking at that stuff 10yrs ago. What’s amazing is that this kind of work even exists!
However, I am sure there are some theses out there (esp in french) on Varela’s school of husserlian ‘naturalized phenomenology’:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Varela
There’s also the ed. vol ‘Naturalizing Phenomenology’ for the historian…
I have a suspicion that only ‘logically’ is there a completely withdrawn being. As Deely argues, existentially a being is only so long and thru the actions (and resulting relations) it entertains with its surroundings. Only ‘logically’ do beings exist apart from actions.
I did meet Varela once in Paris and he certainly distanced himself in conversation from M’s later work…
I still occas. look at Stanly Rosen’s ‘The question of being: a reversal of Heidegger’. There is something there that intrigues me but I would need many years to pin it down.
Good luck with the bk. It will be a valuable resource! Hope we all keep a sense of humour.
June 1, 2010 at 6:45 am
Levi. We seem to have established that Derrida is not committed to the linguistic idealism you attributed to him earlier and that, as Matthew points out, general textuality (if you now want to call this ‘language’, fine) characterizes life at all levels. I suspect that the outstanding issue is whether all this implies that Derrida is a correlationist. This is a genuinely interesting question, which I can’t explore at length here. Derrida makes both correlationist and anti-correlationist noises at various points in his vast corpus, so I’m more concerned with whether he ought to be one, given his other commitments. I’ve argued in ‘Naturalising Deconstruction’ that textualizing experience undercuts the resources that the correlationist (though I don’t use that term, there) requires to enforce a transcendental/empirical distinction. Experience becomes, in effect, just another empirical datum with all object-constituting privileges rescinded. Even if Derrida is a correlationist, his correlationism is so shaky, so feeble that it would be more productive to consider other appropriations of his work.
June 1, 2010 at 1:02 pm
kai wrote:
I really think that the Derrida of The Animal That Therefore I Am is quite different than that of Limited, Inc. or Of Grammatology. Since this is the primary Derridian text that Wolfe is referencing, shouldn’t we give that some weight?
Just as a point of information, Haraway critiques this text in When Species Meet in a manner that is very similar to Levi’s, i.e. Derrida’s heart’s in the right place, but he really can’t get beyond his own philosophical dead-end which is tied up with texts, or whatever you want to call them. I don’t think she’s right, but it’s worth looking at.
I have read Wolfe’s book and I disliked it intensely for all sorts of reasons that I’m not going to bore people with here. I just wanted to point out that you need to be very wary of moving from what Wolfe is doing to making general statements about posthumanism or the posthuman (which are not the same thing). Wolfe’s ‘posthumanism’ is rather idiosyncratic and unlikely to be accepted by a lot of people working in the field. He admits as much in his introduction.
June 1, 2010 at 2:18 pm
Johneffay,
Are there any texts in particular you would recommend on posthumanism?
June 1, 2010 at 4:05 pm
Levi
‘Recommend’ is probably a bit strong as I’m very ambivalent about the various posthuman/ist projects which are out there; not least because I worry a lot about whether it is either desirable or possible to escape humanism.
That said, I particularly like N. Katherine Hayles How We Became Posthuman, which I believe you have mentioned here before and you will have noticed that Wolfe does not like at all. I also find Chris Hables Gray’s work interesting, and am looking forward to Rosi Braidotti’s forthcoming book, although I doubt I will agree with it. Your commentator David Roden also has an interesting and sensible grip on some of the issues.
Still, as a good Warwick boy, my real interest was always in the more Millennial batshit approaches to the posthuman which sadly seem to have been recuperated to a large extent by the academy now.
June 6, 2010 at 2:52 am
[…] ontologies without the need for a fundamental ontology or an ontology as such (contra one of Levi’s recent comments). But then, to dive in and flesh out, articulate, and defend this seems like it would require more […]
June 7, 2010 at 7:06 am
Hi Levi
My article ‘Deconstruction and Excision in Philosophical Posthumanism’ is just available in the Journal of Evolution and Technology, Nietzsche and European Posthumanisms (Volume 21 Issue 1). I’ve linked it from my blog:
http://enemyindustry.net/blog/?p=65
Any comments – especially critical dissections – would be welcome.
June 12, 2010 at 12:59 am
Why is everyone so ensconced in “Academic Chic”…Foucault, Deleuze, were no where without Spinoza… if you want to talk about deconstructing ‘humanism’ go back to Spinoza. The Ethics is the starting point of constructing a plane of immanence. Literally “God and Nature” are one and the same. Plus, God is totally indifferent to human wants and desires. Actually the starting point for a post-humanist discourse should not begin with anything ‘chic’ like The Order of Things, etc. But actually do some digging into Spinoza.
Post-Humanism: Spinoza via Deleuze and Negri. A marvelous title for a book to discuss the plane of immanence between God, Nature, and all of existence.
June 12, 2010 at 5:15 pm
johneffay,
I don’t think Wolfe dislikes Katherine Hayles that much. He sure compliments her work in more than one occasion, especially her critical stance towards the posthuman which seeks to disembody itself. I think he only points out the need to not think of the posthuman within a progressive line of historical evolution, or as a product of mutation which is not immanent.
June 12, 2010 at 7:22 pm
J Rodolfo
Whilst Wolfe is generally polite about Hayles, I think that the gulf between his work and hers is fairly explicit in their writings.