Larval Subjects .

The Democracy of Objects is coming along nicely. I’ve written the first three chapters, and just hit about 40,000 words. At present, the chapter breakdown is as follows:

Introduction
1. Grounds for a Realist Ontology
2. The Paradox of Substance
3. Split-Objects
4. The Interior of Objects
5. The Time and Space of Objects
6. Flat Ontology
Conclusion

I’m excited. There’s lots of entirely new stuff here. Hopefully it all holds together!

Over at Cogburn’s blog I noted that there’s a debate brewing over whether or not Kant advocates the thesis that we can know things-in-themselves. Of course, Kant’s thesis is that things-in-themselves exist, but that we can never have knowledge of them. Consequently, any knowledge we do have only applies to appearances or phenomena, or how things are given to us. Whether things exist in this way apart from us, the Kantian contends, is something we can never know. For example, things-in-themselves might be merely “thing-in-itself”, or a single unitary being without discrete entities. Sometimes it’s suggested that while Kant is a transcendental idealist, he is also an empirical realist. From the thesis that Kant is an empirical realist, it is then argued that Kant endorses the existence of the objects discovered by science as things-in-themselves. This severely misconstrues what Kant means by “empirical realism”. Let’s have a look:

I understand by the transcendental idealism of all appearances the doctrine that they are all together to be regarded as mere representations and not things in themselves, and accordingly that space and time are only sensible forms of our intuition, but not determinations given for themselves or conditions of objects as things in themselves. To this idealism is opposed transcendental realism, which regards space and time as something given in themselves (independent of our sensiblity). The transcendental realist therefore represents outer appearances (if their reality is conceded) as things in themselves, which would exist independently of us and our sensibility and thus would also be outside us according to pure concepts of the understanding. (CPR, A369)

Having carefully distinguished between transcendental idealism and transcendental realism, Kant then goes on to introduce the concept of empirical realism:

The transcendental idealist, on the contrary, can be an empirical realist, hence, as he is called, a dualist, i.e., he can concede the existence of matter without going beyond mere self-consciousness and assuming something more than the certainty of representations in me, hence the cogito ergo sum. For because he allows this matter and even its inner possibility to be valid only for appearance– which, separated from our sensibility, is nothing –matter for him is only a species of representations (intuition), which are call external, not as if they related to objects that are external in themselves but because they relate perceptions to space, where all things are external to one another, but that space itself is in us. (A370)

All “empirical realism” means for Kant is that objects (in the Kantian sense, i.e., as opposed to things) appear in space. However, here we must recall that for Kant, space is not something that belongs to things-in-themselves, but rather issues from mind as the form of intuition. Whether or not things-in-themselves are spatial is, for Kant, something we can never know. Clearly, then, Kant’s empirical realism is certainly know metaphysical realism about objects in space. Whether the world in-itself is anything like the world we know is, for Kant, something that we can never know. The claim that Kant was an empirical realist is not a rejoinder to the sorts of charges the speculative realists are leveling against correlationism.

I just began The Ecological Thought by Timothy Morton and am finding it compulsively readable. If anything else, Morton is a vivid and talented stylist. It’s likely that Morton, if he’s familiar with it at all, thinks that object-oriented ontology and onticology are a part of the problem. As Morton says early on, “…the form of the ecological thought is at least as important as its content. It’s not simply a matter of what you’re thinking about. It’s a matter of how you think” (4). A little further on Morton remarks that “[e]cology shows us that all beings are connected. The ecological thought is the thinking of interconnectedness” (7).

It is here, no doubt, that the most radical difference between Morton’s ecological thought and onticology/object-oriented ontology is to be found. Onticology begins with the premise that being is fundamentally composed of substances or objects and that these substances are both independent of one another and autonomous from one another. On the surface, then, nothing could appear further from ecological thought. Nonetheless, either I am schizophrenic and believe that I can square the circle, or I am correct in arguing that onticology is profoundly relevant to ecology and is deeply ecological in spirit.

While I applaud Morton for his investigation of relation and his attentiveness to relation, it is my view that ecological thought is doomed to go astray so long as it asserts an ontological relational internalism, or the thesis that beings are their relations. This, for two reasons: First, ontological internalism generates a theoretical pessimism, for insofar as it holds that beings are constituted by their relations it is also necessarily committed to the thesis that beings cannot be otherwise. This, I believe, is among the profound implication of the concept of split-objects and Harman’s withdrawn objects. Within the framework of my onticology, the point is that beings can never be reduced to their actuality, that they are always in excess of their actuality, and that it is this actuality is a product of the contingent relational networks into which a substance enters into. The paradox is thus that far from leading us to ignore context and relations, the thesis that objects are independent of their relations, that they withdraw from their relations, that objects are never identical to their local manifestations or actualities, actually leads us to become more attentive to contexts and relations precisely because these play a key role how objects actualize themselves in a local or contingent context and because lurking in the back of our mind is the knowledge that objects can always actualize themselves differently in other sets of relations.

In this regard, the concept of split-objects accords very nicely with Morton’s concept of “strange strangers”. As Morton writes,

The ecological thought imagines interconnectedness, which I call the mesh. Who or what is interconnected with what or with whom? The mesh of interconnected things is vast, perhaps immeasurably so. Each entity in the mesh looks strange. Nothing exists all by itself, and so nothing is fully “itself.”… Our encounter with other beings becomes profound. They are strange, even intrinsically strange. Getting to know them makes them stranger. When we talk about life forms, we’re talking about strange strangers. The ecological thought imagines a multitude of entangled strange strangers. (15)

While onticology takes leave of the thesis that nothing can exist all by itself– while certainly acknowledging that such disconnection can produce radical change for the worse in an entity –it heartily endorses the thesis of the strange stranger that goes even to the heart of the entity itself. And if this is the case, then it is because each entity is split between its local manifestation and the volcanic excess it harbors within itself at the level of the virtual. As Spinoza famously said, we do not know what an object can do.

The second reason ecological thought is doomed to go astray without a robust concept of substance is that genuinely ecological thought requires us to think the difference that substances make when they enter new collectives or regimes of attraction. Drawing on my favorite example, we need to be capable of thinking what happens when cane toads are introduced into the ecosystem of northern Australia or Queensland. The point here is that while it is indeed true that entities often come “interconnected”, these relations are external to the objects they connect. Entities can shift in and out of these relations and when they do not only are their changes in the new regime of relations into which they enter, but they themselves undergo transformations as a result of these new relations. My point, then, is that substance and connection alone are not ontologically sufficient. We need to retain a central place for substances within ontology.

Morton is at his best when he tears the concept of nature to shreds. On the one hand, nature has always been thought in a relation of exteriority to the human. We are told, there is the domain of culture or society, the domain of freedom and history, the moral realm, belonging exclusively to the human. By contrast, we are told that there is the mute, passive, and dumb domain of nature outside of the realm of the cultural. Already, in tearing down the nature/culture divide in the way that thinkers like Latour and Morton attempt to do, a fundamental shift in perspective begins to take place. On the other hand, tremendous damage has been done to ecological thought and the environmental movement as a result of new agey chants about holism, spirituality, the divinity of nature, and the wisdom of nature as some sort of self-balancing harmonics that always equals out (as if there aren’t numerous black holes in various galaxies that do not daily devour beautiful ecosystems). The soon we get away from these conceptions of nature, the sooner we quit divinizing nature, the sooner we can begin seriously thinking ecologically.

A great deal of the anguish I feel over the BP oil catastrophe lies not only in the ecological damage it has wrought, but in what a missed opportunity this is turning out to be. As I remarked in a previous post on the disaster, this is a prime moment to enact a progressive version of what Naomi Klein calls “the shock doctrine“. The Obama Glee Club has focused on how he’s doing everything he possibly can to stop the link and ensure that clean up proceeds apace. However, this misses the point. Discontent with Obama’s handling of the oil spill revolves not so much with how he’s dealing with the spill itself– though there’s plenty to be discontent with there as well –but with his failure to seize this opportunity.

One of my central reasons for voting for Obama was his profound rhetorical ability. It is my view that we exist at a point in history where it is of crucial importance to shift the reigning commonplaces underlying American politics. For thirty years our airwaves have been filled with neoliberal propoganda, convincing us that the primary function of government is to create an optimal business environment and that the best way to achieve this goal is through the privatization of government functions and through the deregulation of all markets and industries. On the one hand, the thesis runs, the private sector knows best how to run things and government botches everything it puts its hands on. As Reagan famously said, “government is not the solution, it’s the problem.” And indeed, in the late 70s when neoliberalism began to ascend from a wacky fringe position defended by only a few cranks to a hegemonic ideology constituting the common sense of the American public, there was good reason for being suspicious of the government. On the other hand, the argument runs, where business flourishes money will trickle down to average people, improving their standard of living. As the old saying goes, “a rising tide lifts all boats”.

The BP oil disaster is not simply an ecological and economic catastrophe, but is a symptom or a symbol of all the failures of neoliberal ideology. And this is precisely what has been largely missing in Obama’s handling of the issue. What we need right now is not someone who seeks bipartisan legislation, nor someone who works quietly and competently behind the scenes. No, what we need right now is a Lacanian master.

Perhaps the best way to understand Lacan’s discourse of the master is in terms of the moment of kairos in rhetoric. In Greek, kairos means the “right or opportune moment.” The rhetor is the person who is adept at taking advantage of the opportune moment to generate action that leads in the right direction. Situated in terms of Lacan’s discourse of the master depicted above, we see the top portion of the graph pointing from S1 to S2. S1 refers to the master-signifier, whereas S2 refers to the battery or collection of free floating signifiers. The function of the master, the kairotic act of the master, lies in unifying the chaotic and free floating battery of signifiers (S2’s) under a master-signifier that renders them structured and intelligible.

And this has been precisely what is missing in Obama’s presidency so far. If Obama has failed to step up to the plate, this is not because he is dealing with a recalcitrant congress or an obstructive opposition party, but because he has failed to step up to the plate and perform the kairotic act. Here we have an event that is going to have massive economic and ecological impact that will reverberate for years, an event is a direct outcome of deregulation and corporate greed, an event that will, in one way or another effect all Americans, and we have an administration that refuses to quilt this event into a whole series of events that have buffeted both the country and the world. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze speaks of repetition in terms of resonances, echoes, and reflections of the past. In repetition the present actuality somehow is haunted by all sorts of other past events.

It is precisely something like this that is the case with the BP oil catastrophe. The oil catastrophe echoes and resonates not only with past oil catastrophes, but with the financial collapse, the West Virginia mining disaster, the exploitation of American tax payer dollars by contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, the exploitation of American citizens by insurance companies, and on and on. If there were ever a moment to quilt together our economic woes, the impending environmental apocalypse, and rampant corruption among the corporations and government as a result of neoliberal ideology, this is that moment. Obama needs to step up to the plate and take advantage of this moment, performing a Kennedyesque moment not unlike that of persuading the American people to go to the moon.

The point isn’t that Obama will necessarily be successful in all that he asks for, but that asking for it plays an important function in structuring the dialogue and changing popular consensus as to what the function of government is and whether or not corporations truly are the best at running things. Now is the time to ask for big things. While I am aware that he has put more money into funding public transportation, why is he not linking the use of public transportation to patriotism? Here he would have a way of quilting the use of public transportation to the war in the Middle East, the death of soldiers and innocent civilians, massive expenditures on that war, and the environment. And here, also, he could make a call for boosting public transportation in the suburbs, encouraging us to take the bus or a train to work, rather than drive our cars. And while he’s at it, he could address highschool kids, who are much more environmentally minded than the older generations, and encourage them to take the bus to school rather than driving their car. He could work to make this a “cool” or “hip” thing to do for the environment.

In addition to public transportation, he could call for a radical shift in the trucking industry. In the United States alone trucks travel trillions of miles a year. Now is the time to call for a shift from diesel to natural gas in trucks, or, ideally, some environmentally friendly, biodegradable fuel. It is also the time to call upon congress to give large tax cuts to families that buy hybrid cars and who do things to make their homes more energy efficient.

These are just a few things that come to mind. Once again, the point is not that Obama will get all that we want. We won’t. The point is that things have to be put out there to get anything. As a result of all that’s taken place in recent years, I believe Americans are gradually waking up to the devastation wrought by neoliberalism economically, environmentally, in terms of political instability throughout the world and so on. However, we need a kairotic act that links these things together and that registers them for the big Other as a sort of force field in the symbolic order. Nor can we drag our feet at this time in history. We are not living in times of business as usual where incrementalism and political pragmatism is an acceptable way of proceeding. As the environmental apocalypse continues to intensify we will witness massive economic instability as the result of food shortages and the scarcity of water and fossil fuels, more pandemics unleashed as a result of the world heating up, and political instability and war as a result of the scarcity of these resources. Perhaps Obama will find the courage to engage in such kairotic acts if he is lucky enough to be elected for a second term, but it’s increasingly difficult to see him getting re-elected. There is nothing pragmatic or realistic about proceeding in such a wishy washy manner where winning the support of the electorate is concerned. The damage is largely done in the Gulf, but perhaps something good can nonetheless come of this catastrophe.

In response to my post on individuation, Paul Reid-Bowen of Pagan Metaphysics raises an interesting and difficult question on object-oriented pedagogy. Paul writes:

If you have a moment, a practical and pedagogical question. I quite appreciate Bhaskar’s epistemic fallacy, but do you have any useful advice or strategies for shifting students back to ontological questions and away from epistemological ones. It seems to me that most of my undergraduates are epistemologists, correlationists and subjectivists by default. Sometimes I’m successful in pulling them around to the ontological questions, but there is a real tendency for them to (a) engage in the epistemic fallacy and (b) wholeheartedly embrace various kinds of correlationism when asked to reflect on metaphysics. I realise that this could easily balloon into a very big topic, namely how one teaches OOO, but any thoughts would be much appreciated.

In many respects I believe that correlationism is the spontaneous ideology of our time. It is so deeply ingrained in our thought that whenever questions of what being is are raised we immediately gravitate towards questions of how we perceive or know beings. Here the Marxist in me wants to link the correlationist way of thinking to the rise of capitalism and the information revolution (is it a mistake that the correlationist argument largely finds its seeds in the 17th century?), though I’ll save this analysis for another day. If I had the courage to do it, I think I would do something similar to what Bateson describes doing in one of his classes in Mind and Nature.

read on!
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Graham has a post up responding to mine and discussing Meno’s paradox. Graham writes:

That particular passage in the Meno is important to me, so I’ll just say that I interpret it differently. I don’t think that’s Socrates saying that knowledge comes before being. I think it’s Socrates saying that an eidos is prior to its qualities. In other words, the point is not that we have to know a horse before considering its being, but that we have to know a horse before asking about horse-qualities. So I read the paradox differently: namely, how can a thing be prior to its own qualities? There’s a bit about this early in The Quadruple Object.

No disagreement here from me. I did, however, want to make one further point about Mitsu’s argument from perception. Does Mitsu really wish to claim that the amoeba constitutes his being? This conclusion follows directly from Mitsu’s argument about how the amoeba encounters the drum set. If he doesn’t wish to arrive at this conclusion, then why? There are only two possible conclusions here, both of which lead to the collapse of Mitsu’s argument. The first possible conclusion would be that it is not possible for the amoeba to constitute Mitsu’s being because humans are somehow special in the order of being by virtue of being the only beings capable of constituting other beings from a primordial flux. The second possible argument is that the amoeba doesn’t constitute Mitsu’s being through perceiving Mitsu, because Mitsu is a substance or independent being in his own right and how something perceives another being has nothing to do with that being’s status as a substance.

Now, one might expect me to argue that the first possibility is mistaken because it is anthropocentric. However, while this is true, this is not my argument. If we follow Mitsu in the first counter-argument (which really is the disavowed, yet fully embraced, premise of all correlationisms), we have to note that Mitsu has conceded the existence of at least one object: Namely, Mitsu himself. From here it’s but a short step to asking why humans or Mitsu should have this privileged status within the order of being? Moreover, it’s quite remarkable that any being should be able to perform this feat like Atlas holding the world on his shoulders, carving up a structureless world, a pre-individual flux, into discrete packets or units. If we grant the second argument, then, of course, we’ve conceded the existence of withdrawn substances that have their own being regardless of how other substances perceive them.

And here I get to the basic point of this brief post: Those who advise us to observe the observer– and readers should know that chapter 4 of The Democracy of Objects is devoted to precisely this –somehow seem to miss the point that the very act of observing the observer or observing how observers observe, presupposes the existence of an observer that is doing the observing of observers. Far from undermining the thesis that substances or objects exist, in other words, this move presupposes the existence of at least one substance or object. And as a consequence, this move is incapable of consistently maintaining the thesis that the world is a product of how observers perceive other objects.

In response to a previous post responding to Christopher Vitale and my post on OOO and Epistemology, there’s been some interesting discussion of precisely how objects are individuated. Responding to a remark by Graham Harman, Mitsu lays his cards on the table and remarks that,

In response to your question about why I don’t want to go so far as individual objects, I would reverse the question and ask, why bother going so far as individual objects? The idea that there is some sort of ground with properties or patterns which are in some sense independent of perception or perspective it seems to me gets you everything you need to have a speculative realism without the complication and bother of positing independent objects.

The first question that comes to mind in response to Mitsu is that of how patterns differ from objects. In Mitsu’s comment I note that he pluralizes the term “pattern”, suggesting that he believes that there are a multitude of different patterns in the world. Are these patterns different from one another, or are they all the same pattern? If Mitsu suggests that patterns are different from one another, he’s already come very close to conceding the existence of objects. If Mitsu holds that there is only one pattern, I would like to know how closed settings in the experimental setting are ever formed. For if everything is one and interconnected, then it seems that it would be impossible for anyone to ever isolate things in the way we do in scientific experiments.

Mitsu goes on to argue that,

Again I want to make it clear that what I am objecting to is not so much the idea of independence as the idea of objects. (1) The most fundamental objection (no pun intended) I would have is that there doesn’t seem to me to be any objective (again, no pun, etc.) criterion for establishing the boundary of an object, or a way of dividing the world into these supposed objects. (2) An “object” it seems to me is by definition a separated out part of the world which has some kind of boundary defined in some way… but how do we define such a boundary, except in reference to a perceptual convention of some kind? I might consider this aggregate over here to be a “drum kit” as an object, but the amoeba certainly doesn’t interact with a drum kit as an object. In some sense, the whole idea that the world ought to be thought of in terms of objects brings us back to the human-centric fallacy which I understand SR to be critiquing in the first place.

The first point to note here is that Mitsu’s concept of pattern is no less immune to the sort of criticism he’s advancing in point 1, than the concept of object. It’s difficult to see how the concept of pattern avoids the sort of problem of cognitive individuation Mitsu is leveling at OOO than the concept of object. I make this point not to reject the notion of patterns, but to point out that if Mitsu is evoking the existence of patterns, he must do so on ontological grounds, not epistemological grounds. This point is of such vital importance that nothing in OOO can be understood absent a clear grasp of this argument. I have outlined this argument in two previous posts (here and here) and invite Mitsu to read these posts carefully, especially the second one.

read on!
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In response to my recent post where I offhandedly remark that object-oriented ontology does not advocate a representationalist epistemology or a correspondence theory of truth, Jim expresses some worries:

Representationalism, crudely construed, is the thesis that we can represent the world as it is. Thus representationalism is both an epistemological thesis (a thesis about the nature of our knowledge) and a naive realism (the thesis that the world is like the manner in which we perceive it). This is the only way I can understand Vitale’s questions: Vitale seems to be working on the premise that OOO is a representational realism that argues that we can represent objects as they are.

Please help me out here. I am a big fan of OOO, but now I am a bit confused and a little bit worried. I am also very, very frustrated!

Primarily, I’m worried about your rejection of ‘representationalism.’ Maybe I just don’t understand your critique.

If we start saying things like: “We can never really hope to know the world as-it-exists,” then what is the point of doing science? We might as well just stop studying physics, chemistry, astronomy, biology, etc.

Seriously, I am looking for a reason to study these things.

If we can never hope to come to ‘represent’ the world as-it-exists, then what is the point of carefully measuring things–e.g. taking blood samples, core samples, urine samples, etc–and putting all of our observations and measurements into notebooks, etc? What a waste of time!

If we can never hope to understand and represent objects ‘as they are,’ then why should anyone study the (so-called) natural sciences? We might as well just stop pouring money into these silly, naive disciplines. That money would be better spent elsewhere.

I hope I am just misinterpreting your views; but, I thought OOO was different from social constructivism, which is also sceptical about science, and feminist critiques of science, which make it seem as if science is somehow evil, wrong, ‘patriarchal’ and ‘masculinist,’ etc.

Seriously, who wants to study something that is either ‘horribly, horribly evil’ or hopelessly naive?

If we can never hope to represent things as they REALLY exist, then what the hel* are we doing?

I’m in a bit of a hurry to get out of the door right now, so I’ll have to keep my response brief, but a couple of points are in order. My rejection of representation is not a rejection of knowledge. One of the central distinctions in my version of object-oriented ontology is the distinction between the virtual proper being of an object and the local manifestations of an object. The virtual proper being of an object is what is withdrawn and is that which can never be directly touched, encountered, or represented. The local manifestation of an object is the particular manner in which an object actualizes itself in the world in the form of qualities and properties. The point of this distinction is that an object can locally manifest itself in a variety of ways depending on the relations it enters into with other objects. However, none of these local manifestations exhausts the virtual proper being of an object.

Local manifestations take place by objects interacting with one another. A rock encounters flowing water in one way when it sits at the bottom of a stream. It encounters water quite a different way when it’s falling from the sky towards that water at hundreds of miles an hour. Right now British Petroleum is discovering that objects behave quite differently when they’re under thousands of feet of water.

When we’re doing science what we’re doing is placing objects or generative mechanisms in particular contexts or relations to other objects to discover how they act or what they do. That is, we’re acting on objects to provoke actions in objects so as to see how objects act under these conditions. And in doing this, we are placing objects in relations. I’ve written about this in my post entitled The Mug Blues.

So here’s the nub of the matter: Objects are independent of their relations and withdrawn from their relations. Knowledge-production always consists of placing objects in relations or acting on them to provoke actions in them. Consequently, what objects are independent of these relations is something we can never know precisely because we only ever encounter objects in relations and objects only ever encounter one another in relations.

Does that entail that knowledge is useless or an illusion? No. It just entails 1) that knowledge is a description of actions within these relational networks, and that 2) other actions can be provoked in objects when placed in different relational networks. Think about cooking. What is the being of garlic? Can you really say? No, all you know of garlic is how it behaves in a variety of different ways when cooked in a variety of different ways and related to a variety of different ingredients.

Jim seems to have a problem with feminist and social constructivist critiques of knowledge. If these critiques are taken to entail that knowledge is illusory or a fabrication, then I quite agree. Unfortunately, because of distinction between the natural and the artificial that haunts the tradition of Western thought, our tendency is to hear the word “construction” as implying “artificial” or “false”, rather than entailing the arduous work of assembling diverse objects together in a formation that manages to stand or persist. However, if feminist epistemology and social constructivism is understood as the careful investigation of networks of relations among objects in the production of local manifestations, then I’m all for these sorts of investigations as I believe they follow directly from my ontology. All manifestation or actuality is local manifestation or actuality. In this connection, I’m quite in agreement with Donna Haraway’s concept of situated knowledge.

The point is not to confuse objects with their local manifestations or actualities. These actualities or local manifestations are produced by objects, but objects always harbor a volcanic excess and the power to surprise when placed in different networks of relations to different objects. When I reject representationalism I am rejecting naive realism’s tendency to equate the being of objects with what is essentially local or a situated manifestation. As a consequence, I am drawing attention to the relations in which an object enters in producing a manifestation and the manner in which we act on objects to produce particular manifestations.

I haven’t been paying much attention to the blogosphere lately as I’m busily writing The Democracy of Objects. At any rate, Graham has a nice post up describing his position vis a vis Meillassoux. Paul has a post up announcing the first issue of Speculations. Over at Critical Animal, Scu has a post up riffing on my earlier post on the new scholasticism. At the risk of having caused confusion, I hope I didn’t there give the impression that I don’t believe we should engage with other philosophers. The Democracy of Objects is replete with detailed discussions of Bhaskar, Badiou, DeLanda, Deleuze, Harman, Lacan, Zizek, Aristotle, Kant, Locke, Hume, Luhmann, Maturana, Varela, and a host of others. The point is not that we shouldn’t engage with other philosophers, but that we shouldn’t allow this to place us in the position where we find ourselves forcing these figures to say what we wish for them to say, and that we shouldn’t deny ourselves the authorization to freely assume responsibility for our own positions.

Over at Networkologies, Chris Vitale has a post up raising questions about OOO. Unfortunately I can’t respond to Vitale’s post in detail right now because I’m busily working away on The Democracy of Objects, but I did want to address one point. Vitale writes:

All of which brings us back to the issue of ‘who gets to decide’ if an object is a cane toad or a froggie. Obviously, the toad itself does not know whether or not it is one or the other, because it doesn’t have language. The ideas we call ‘froggie’ and ‘cane toad’ are in fact ‘objects’ that were invented by humans. A toad does not know if it is a cane or not. Yes, there is a real amphibian there in front of us, but humans decide whether or not the objects ‘cane toad’ or ‘froggie’ apply in a given case. They can be mistaken, obviously, and this is what Graham means when he discusses the lamp-post example in Prince of Networks. But what is the toad in itself, beyond the ideas we give of it?

A Whiteheadian approach would be that it’s all a matter of perspective (not that there is something there, but what type of something), and this is where Levi accuses me of the ‘epistemic fallacy’. I think the toad IS a cane toad for the expert, and a froggie for my nephew, and these are both equally ok from their points of reference. But is this the dreaded correlationism?! So it might seem at first. But in the post in question, I gave an additional example, namely, the perspective of my nephew, the expert, AND THAT OF AN ELECTRON, which Levi doesn’t mention when he goes at me in that last post for being correlationist.

But this addition is crucial. To an electron, the cane toad is most certainly NOT a froggie or cane toad, but simply a pattern of sub-atomic particles, some more dense or differently composed than others. That is, the electron has a perspective, and makes decisions, but this is NOT old-fashioned correlationism simply because Whitehead uses the terms ‘perspective’ and ‘decision’. Whitehead is trying to radically rework what these terms mean. This is why Whitehead uses the term ‘prehension’ rather than ‘perception,’ because he doesn’t think that entities like electrons are conscious, even though they do have a form of proto-perception, called ‘prehension.’ Its correlationism, but not quite, in fact, it really deconstructs the correlationism/non-correlationism binary as a false one. That is why at times I’ve referred to this as what Meillassoux has called ‘absolutizing the correlation’ – but with a multiplicitous twist. Just saying this is an example of the epistemic fallacy doesn’t really say much more than we disagree on the border between epistemology and ontology. My sense is it shifts the terrain of the question.

I get the sense that Chris is getting frustrated with my protestations that he’s not “getting it”, but Chris, you’re not getting it! Before explaining why, first let me say that the object-oriented ontologists more or less agree with Chris. We share the thesis that the nephew, the expert, and the electron grasp the frog differently. As Graham put it in his post yesterday,

Some critics have accused OOO of 1, naive realism. But that’s clearly not the case. Position 1 on Meillassoux’s Spectrum doesn’t just entail belief in a world outside human access. It also entails a correspondence theory of truth, since it holds that the world not only exists outside of us, but that we can know it.

But the core of Object-Oriented Ontology is that we can only translate it, not know it. And translation is a feature of Kant as much as of Latour and Whitehead (Shaviro will be pleased by that remark, and possibly Cogburn as well).

Here’s where I think Vitale is going wrong. If I am following his questions correctly, Vitale hears the word “realism” and immediately jumps to the conclusion of representationalism. Representationalism, crudely construed, is the thesis that we can represent the world as it is. Thus representationalism is both an epistemological thesis (a thesis about the nature of our knowledge) and a naive realism (the thesis that the world is like the manner in which we perceive it). This is the only way I can understand Vitale’s questions: Vitale seems to be working on the premise that OOO is a representational realism that argues that we can represent objects as they are. Working on this premise, he then points out that different persons (his nephew and the expert) and different objects (the electron) perceive the frog differently and that therefore OOO must be mistaken.

What Vitale is missing, I believe, are the two core claims of OOO: First, OOO claims that objects are radically withdrawn from one another. Insofar as objects are radically withdrawn from one another it is impossible to represent an object. In this respect, OOO entertains a polemical stance against naive realism to the same degree that it entertains a polemical stance against correlationism. OOO vigorously rejects the thesis that other objects are anything like they are perceived by us or any other object; and this for the precise reason that objects are withdrawn.

Second, and more importantly in this context, OOO argues that objects relate to one another through translation. Translation is a radically different relation than representation. If this is the case, then this is because there is no translation without transformation. Where representation is based on metaphors of mirroring where there is purported to be a resemblance between the reflection and the reflected, translation is a relation of difference. A translation is not a faithful representation of an original, but is rather a transformation of the original in terms of the system specific structure of the entity doing the translation. Here we get all the perspectivism that Vitale might like. Vitale’s nephew translates the frog in one way, a snake translates the frog in another way, the expert in yet another way, and the electron in yet another way. These are all ways in which one entity grasps another entity, the frog.

There are thus two claims that OOO rejects in this context. First, OOO rejects the correlationist claim that somehow there’s something special about the human-object relation and the way in which the mind “distorts” the thing-in-itself. OOO does not reject the thesis that the mind distorts the thing-in-itself in particular ways precisely because OOO endorses the thesis that all objects relate to other objects through translation. What OOO rejects is the thesis that this is somehow unique to humans. Rather, OOO holds this is true of all objects in their relation to other objects. In this respect, OOO can claim that all objects have a unique perspective on other objects.

Second, however, OOO rejects the thesis that objects can be dissolved in these perspectives or reduced to these perspectives. This is what OOO is objecting to in Vitale’s formulation. Vitale appears to be claiming that the object is the other object’s perspective on that object. If this is indeed what he’s claiming, he is rejecting the autonomous existence of the object being perceived. As such, he falls into Berkeleyian idealism which holds that esse est percipe or that being is perception. OOO is more than happy to endorse the thesis that different objects grasp other objects differently and therefore have perspectives on different objects. However, OOO also holds that each object is an autonomous withdrawn existence of its own and that no object can be reduced to another object’s perception of it. Were this the case we would fall into the game of hot potato Graham is talking about because there would be no instigator of these different perspectives in the first place, nor would there be perceivers because they too would be but effects of being perceived by other objects.

This morning Manning drew my attention to James Williams’ review of Difference and Givenness in Parrhesia. Given my admiration for Williams’ work, I’ve been afraid to read it so far.