A friend of mine and reader of The Democracy of Objects recently expressed displeasure over the harsh treatment I give to Lacan over the thesis that “the universe is the flower of rhetoric.”. My friend’s rejoinder was that Lacan maintains a place for the real and is merely pointing out that we must relate to the world through language. This point is so fundamental and so basic that nothing about what motivates the new realisms can be understood without understanding it. The new realisms are not charging correlationisms with not believing in and independent real. With the exception of Berkeley who claimed that being is perception and Hegel who claimed the identity of substance and subject, such a thesis is exceedingly rare. Rather, correlationisms argue that we can only speak of the being of beings in terms of our modes of access to beings. In this regard, Lacan is an arche-correlationist. What Lacan teaches is that we cannot speak of being as such, but only of signfiers that express beings. Indeed, Lacan repeatedly refers to any reference to the pre-symbolic as mythological and Zizek refers to the idea of the real apart from the symbolic and the subject as a fetishistic illusion. While Lacan clearly endorses the existence of a real apart from language (and is therefore Kantian), Zizek goes all the way with Hegel’s absolute idealism. Both positions are correlationisms.
Rorty famously said that a number of philosophical problems are never really solved, but rather we just cease asking these questions. No philosopher has yet refuted the solipsist, nor has anyone ever refuted Berkeley. If you’re worried about how we can escape language perhaps you should just stop asking the question and move on. More importantly, you should attend to the methodological consequences that follow from a gesture like Lacan’s. If it is the signifier that falls into the marked space of your distinction, you’ll only ever be able to talk about talk and indicate signs and signifiers. The differences made by light bulbs, fiber optic cables, climate change, and cane toads will be invisible to you and you’ll be awash in texts, believing that these things exhaust the really real.
Anyone who knows me also knows that I’ve learned a lot from Lacan and wish to retain a rich place for talk about talk and the analysis of texts. However, Lacanianism and it’s linguistic idealist cousins needs to be castrated. We need forms of theory and practice capable of both talking about talk, signs, the signifier, narrative, and discourse capable of indicating the non-semiotic and approaching the non-semiotic on its own terms as best we can. Absent this we are missing a massive dimension as to why our social world is as it is. If your first instinct is to talk about talk, text, narrative, signifier, and discourse, it’s likely you’re a correlationist. If you speak of the real as resistance or a twist in the symbolic, it’s likely you’re a correlationist. What we need is a realist rhetoric. For me, it’s not so much Kant that is the enemy, but the linguistic and semiotic turn. I wish to retain a place for these things, but to overcome the hegemony they currently have in the world of Continental theory. Reference to the real does not a realism make. It is only when you abandon the thesis that any entity constructs another entity that your position is deserving of the title of realism.
Larval Subjects . 
July 30, 2010 at 10:17 am
Hi!,
“We need forms of theory and practice capable of both talking about talk, signs, the signifier, narrative, and discourse capable of indicating the non-semiotic and approaching the non-semiotic on its own terms as best we can. Absent this we are missing a massive dimension as to why our social world is as it is.”
The point is, that our social world is “the flower of rhetoric”. E.g. i’am at this moment in a certain relation to you, the reader, qua communication, i.e. blabla. That means society is another ‘thing’ than consciousness, the latter functioning qua perception, the former qua communication (following Luhmann). And the clou is precisely, that language has two ‘versants’: singnifiant et signifie, which allows selfsreference as well as REFERENCE to an external world(but not the external world itself). The external world as such is probably only accessable neither through thinking nor through blabla, but through work, labour. If you really want to a materialist, you dont need a theory of matter, but a theory of its transformability through work(this is really the negative, therefore revolutionary principle). Im asking myself if Deleuze & co. haven’t written a theory of working power. In this regard, it would be connectable to an marxist ‘political economy of labour power’, yet unwritten.
wishes
July 30, 2010 at 12:26 pm
I’m interested in that final line: “only when you abandon the thesis that any entity constructs another entity that your position is deserving of the title of realism.” This post focuses on issues of symbolic behavior, so I understand this statement in that context as meaning that objects are not constructed through their relation to humans and language. However, if a chemist says water is constructed of hydrogen and oxygen, does she become a correlationist? Perhaps the answer is to say that such a statement isn’t the whole story. That is, water may be H2O but it is also demonstrates characteristics in excess of those attributable to hydrogen and oxygen on their own (e.g. it can fill a swimming pool). Of course those characteristics are also dependent on water’s relations with other objects. Water can’t fill a pool without gravity (or a pool).
So setting aside the entire question of language, to what extent does one imagine an object’s characteristics as being intrinsic to the object and to what extent are those characteristics emergent in the object’s relation/exposure to other objects? It would seem here that one might suggest that the virtual potentiality of any object is wrapped up within it. However I would think objects are in continual flux, becoming other, becoming different objects with different potentials.
In other words, it isn’t the objects v. language that interests me. In trying to develop a realist rhetoric or discourse; the question for me is the relationship between object and process. Your final statement would seem to suggest there is no process by which objects become. How does an object become an object? When does it cease to be that object? Are objects made up of other objects? How far down do the objects go? All the way? How big do objects get? At one point, you’d mentioned in a comment to me that you didn’t think the universe was an object. How about a galaxy? Is it a temporal question? That is, was the universe an object at the instant of the big-bang and then at some point cease to be an object?
Or perhaps such questions are pedantic and unnecessary. Maybe we can just cease to ask these questions. We can say these questions are problems in language and rhetoric or even in our little monkey brain’s ability to conceptualize rather than problems in reality beyond that.
So the rhetorical (and compositional) challenge isn’t to develop a discourse that reveals the real but rather one that allows us to speak in new ways about the world, to see new possibilities, to develop new relations (with both human and non-human others), and maybe invent a way of living (which is maybe humanocentric but given our impact on the planet, maybe not).
July 30, 2010 at 1:14 pm
You have probably already answered this questionany times, but if you have patience for one more time I would be grateful: how do you account for the division of the world into discrete objects, which seems to be a linguistic division? In other words, just talking about objects seems to take for granted that the world is full of already-distinguished objects, but aren’t there lots of different possible ways one could distinguish objects?
July 30, 2010 at 3:05 pm
[…] Posted by larvalsubjects under Uncategorized Leave a Comment In response to my recent post on correlationism, Alex Reid raises a number of critical questions. Alex begins by remarking that, […]
July 30, 2010 at 3:22 pm
Very important and clear statement on the importance of a full-blown realism Levi – thanks.
July 30, 2010 at 9:17 pm
” If it is the signifier that falls into the marked space of your distinction, you’ll only ever be able to talk about talk and indicate signs and signifiers. The differences made by light bulbs, fiber optic cables, climate change, and cane toads will be invisible to you and you’ll be awash in texts, believing that these things exhaust the really real.”
This reads hyperbolically. I understand you’re attempting to underline the actual practice of academic scholars when you say things like this, but it’s nevertheless important to me to say that there isn’t so much the mutual exclusivity you imply or that the kind of foci on language you’ve described exhaust the position.
I’m more interested in your criticism vis-a-vis non-Western peoples for whom words cannot be parted from the very being of a thing. Levy-Bruhl goes a long way in illustrating how our signifier/signified split has no force in such cultures. But perhaps I overestimate their difference…
August 2, 2010 at 4:26 pm
Thanks your post gives room to thought.
I think the point you are missing is that with Lacan Zizek talks about *the subject*.
Your searched-for “realist” view which CAN talk about everything Lacan/Zizek “can’t talk about” might be no subjective one (not belonging to a subject).
The objective-empirical view achieves it however excludes any relation to a concrete person (the proposed realist philosopher), which means he/she is out of the game).
Doesn’t the realist notion come back by asking “What can/should/must I do?” ? Zizek has this conecpt of “authentic act”, regarding Lacan I admit I don’t know about his concept. The think what Lacan shurely DID was that through his theory he questioned the then-contemporary ruling order – and like Zizek he accomplished a *political act*.
August 2, 2010 at 4:39 pm
Matze,
The realism of OOO is not of the “objective-empirical” sort you suggest, nor does it exclude something like the subject (the subject is merely one type of object among others). There is more than enough room for reflexivity within this framework. What OOO rejects is the shackling of all other entities to the subject in the manner proposed by Zizek.
August 2, 2010 at 10:08 pm
As I read Zizek (and Lacan) their aim truly never was to develop a philosophy of ontology or objects. Why would you blame them for not accomplishing what wasn’t in their focus anyway ?
You write OOO seeks to integrate the human subject as an object among other objects into its realm. Subject-Philosophics in itself stands in no opposition a priori to any new philosophical concept like OOO.
This means all what’s been said by Lacan (or anybody else) on this specific topic-slot remains initially true until proven otherwise.
As I understand the OOO concept it seeks to achieve a reformulation of object/object-specific relations into a more general context – the OOO realism.
So not Lacan “needs to be castrated” (as you write) but you would have to prove where OOO findings profoundly contradict Lacan. You will need to provide evidence about where the OOO concept generates different implications in the specific field of (human)subject-world relationships ..
August 2, 2010 at 10:24 pm
Matze,
Zizek is quite explicit in his ontological pronunciations in The Parallax View as well as a number of other texts. He treats objects as merely a twist in the symbolic with no existence of their own apart from the subject as he understands it. Likewise, in Lacan’s later work, reality (not the real, he distinguishes them, cf. the open of Television for example) is treated as an effect of the symbolic and the imaginary. Once again, we here have all objects being shackled to the symbolic and the imaginary. It’s especially difficult to reconcile your portrayal of Lacan with the Borromean knots of the later seminars or RSI. I’m not sure if you know anything about my own intellectual background, but I was a practicing Lacanian analyst for a number of years and have written fairly widely on both Zizek and Lacan. In other words, it’s not as if I’m coming at these things from out of the blue or have an outsiders perspective of the finer points of Lacanian theory having read and worked through nearly all the seminars, both published and unpublished, and having spent more time with the clinical and theoretical secondary literature than I care to remember. I have no problems with your more moderate reading of what Lacan and Zizek are up to. This is precisely what I would call castrating Lacan and Zizek, i.e., limiting the scope of their theoretical claims. However, I don’t think your portrayal of Lacan and Zizek are reflective of the letter of their text.
August 3, 2010 at 12:04 pm
Levi, this is getting interesting.
I am lacking a strict academic background, therefore I may be in danger to disrupt any academic effort by a rather too innocent stance (a “too moderate reading” of Zizek/Lacan, as you say). I hope that will not be the case.
Let me pick up the notion of “reality” from your answer to me.
A proposed “OOO realism” gives a double notion to the concept of reality since on the one hand “reality” clearly must be a kind of object in OOO, by the same time OOO realism claims a new totality of reality.
I see your demand for the requirement that OOO realism will have to go beyond any psychoanalytical or “linguistic” conception of reality, what I would conceive as a more substantially grounded ontological reality (what is substantial there?).
To the split-subject view there again you have a double-binded requirement of academic anti-subjective (“ontological”) reality on the one hand, on the other hand OOO is proposed to be more profound against any subjective reading and especially in contrast to reality/object concepts by Lacan/Zizek.
I would ask you to show how OOO is more free from what appears to be the split-subject view on it. I think I can challenge OOO on this ground since it is being claimed as the necessary foundation of “OOO realism”.
Then there is this equalizing generalizing notion of “democracy of objects”, which I understand to the effect that an abstract mathematical concept has the same “rights” as a stone, a light bulb, or a human person in OOO realism.
As a consequence the OOO theory – as an object – cannot possibly have more rights over any theory (may that theory be true or false or just nonsense).
SO – I am coming here back to my ealier comment – any goal of “limiting the scope” of Lacan and Zizek clearly has self-defeating consequences for the reality concept of OOO realism.
To put it in more harsh words: exempting OOO from subjective reading is that what Zizek calls “post-politics”, the ideological idea of “administrating” social affairs appears to evolve to the academic sphere – administering the thought objects (“democracy of objects”).
And Zizek’s critique of “identity politics” may well apply to “ontological objects”.
You see I could now pull on the whole string of argument which is laid out in “The Ticklish Subject”.
August 4, 2010 at 2:31 am
Levi, anyway, don’t take my politcally remarks and the bottom personally it mainly reflects what I have been reading lately.
You wrote I maybe would not see what Zizek/Lacan “are up to” and about “the letter of their text”. Could you elaborate on that?
I would like to hear what might be the hidden supplement of their own philosophy.
August 8, 2010 at 3:01 pm
[…] what the new realists are objecting to. As I have pointed out on a number of occasions (for example here), the new realists are not charging anti-realists with rejecting independent reality. Very few […]
January 20, 2012 at 3:46 am
When I read Lacan — and wasn’t this Miller’s fascination with Lacan — I do, in fact, see a person interested in formulating a response to problem of thinking being. He confesses, time and again, in Seminar XI, and in other places, that what he is going on about is certainly ontological (he does call it naive and I get the sense he thinks it speculative). Bruce Fink, in his easy to follow book on the Lacanian subject, makes the distinction clear when he draws two concentric circles and maintains that either I am not thinking or else I am not. The choice here is one or the other without the one colonizing the other in a correlationist sleight of hand. Yes, he does advance into other directions that problematize this (even in the same book), but problematize does not mean refute.
It seems to me that Lacan is the anti-correlationist par excellence.
January 23, 2012 at 1:04 am
[…] to leap into Lacan’s metaphysics. My aim is make headway into the claim, originally made by Levi Bryant, that Lacan was an “arche-correlationist.” Levi Bryant rejects the claim, made by his […]
January 23, 2012 at 6:17 am
[…] Stage as Formative of the I Function.” I will admit that I was provoked by a recent blog from Levi Bryant on the topic of Lacan and his so-called ‘ache-correlationism’. In this blog I will read […]
May 8, 2013 at 1:57 am
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