Larval Subjects .

Robert Jackson has a nice post riffing on my recent discussion of Bogost. As Jackson writes:

He argues that cultural commentators tend to decode images, games, texts from the result of immanent distinctions. Cultural philosophers; those concerned with ‘what something ultimately means in cultural value’ are basically invested in keeping the subjective ontology going, and distracting themselves with the ‘real ideological issue’. Consider Grand theft Auto for example (as a nod to Bogost);

“When we analyze that video game, […], we are to analyze the stories and signs that appear on the screen. Likewise with nearly all cultural theory. Analysis consists in approaching the world as a text to be decoded. The problem with this mode of analysis is that everything in the unmarked space of the distinction becomes invisible. Returning to the example of Grand Theft Auto, the way the game is programmed, how it is put together, the hardware that runs the game, the production teams that produce it, and many other things completely fall off the map.”

Its interesting Levi chooses Grand Theft Auto over any other contemporary example. I don’t want to presume the reasons as to why, other than its an obviously well known game. But Grand Theft Auto (or any other Sandbox genre) has always interested me for the missions it cannot do, ontologically speaking.

Levi’s point here is that when analysts decode “whats really happening”, or in Zizek’s case, the ultimate “lesson” of a cultural aftfact, their analysis holds for what is present to them in the game. This ringfencing, or capturing, comes from the result of a ontological distinction prior to the value. i.e, why we should be concentrating on this bit, rather than that bit. By focusing solely on the elements which are important for humans, Levi’s point is that we run of risk of alienating relations with other equally participating elements; ethernet wiring, the limiting choices of developers, the heavy use of clipping used to render screen graphics (which is interesting in itself).

Jackson really gets to the core of what I’m trying to argue and develop. Read the rest here.

Over at Deontologistics, Wolfendale has posted part 1 of his response to me. I just wanted to mark a few quick points in response to this post. These remarks are abbreviated, so hopefully Wolfendale will be charitable with them, though he generally is.

1. Withdrawal. Within the framework of onticology, withdrawal refers to two things. First, it refers to the excess of any object over its local manifestations. In many respects, this is a very trivial point. All it means is that the being of any object is never exhausted by any of the actual states it happens to be in, such that therefore the being of an object cannot be equated with its qualities. For example, the water currently sitting in my glass is not boiling. Pretty trivial, right? If the water sitting placidly in my cup is a local manifestation, then this is because it occurs at a particular time and under particular circumstances. If local manifestation is a local manifestation, then this is because it is the actualization of a quality, property, or state in the world.

The lesson I draw from this is that the structure of substance must be different from any of the qualities it happens to embody. Put differently, substance cannot be equated with its qualities. As a consequence, I need an account of substance that accounts for its structured nature (thereby avoiding Locke’s critique of the bare substratum) without treating this structure as consisting of qualities. Such a structure is what I call virtual proper being. Virtual proper being, composed of the powers of an object and relations among these powers, is structured without being qualitative. Moreover, it disappears behind any qualities or local manifestations the object happens to embody.

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Are we among the final generations of humans to walk the earth? One Australian scientist says yes, and he’s not just another 2012 doomsday believer. Professor Frank Fenner, who announced the eradication of smallpox to the World Health Assembly in 1980, says overpopulation and climate change are just two of many reasons why humans won’t survive much more than a century into the future.

In fact, Fenner declines to speak about climate change because he believes there’s no use — our fate is sealed.

“Homo sapiens will become extinct, perhaps within 100 years,” he said in an interview with The Australian. “A lot of other animals will, too. It’s an irreversible situation. I think it’s too late. I try not to express that because people are trying to do something, but they keep putting it off.”

Thanks to the population explosion and “unbridled consumption”, Fenner says food wars and global droughts will intensify problems like malnutrition and poverty.

Read the rest here.

Another lively discussion has begun to unfold surrounding OOO and politics over at Bogost’s blog, with David Rylance writing monster comments that I have a hard time getting through in one setting (David, start a blog!). Here I wanted to focus on two remarks Ian makes in his post, as I think they get to the heart of what interests me about OOO in relation to politics. Ian writes:

…the consequence of realism is that the world isn’t particularly concerned with us. As such, it’s wrong to construe realism as an imperative in the first place. Rather, it must be cast as an invitation: if things exist in multitudes, then perhaps it might be interesting and productive to consider them.

In this connection, we might ask why it might be interesting and productive to consider this multitude of things. I don’t think there is one answer to this question, but I do believe that political concerns are among the answers. Ian goes on to write that,

when Nick Montfort and I suggested the platform studies approach, one of our motivations was that of curiosity. The systems underlying digital media artifacts seemed often to be overlooked. What insights might we derive if we acknowledged them and paid them greater attention? The results were interesting on multiple registers: historical, material, aesthetic, cultural, economic, and even political.

Here I think that Ian gets at something really important. While Ian probably wouldn’t put it this way himself, one conclusion I think we can draw from Ian’s observations about curiosity is that we don’t know the boundaries of the political. I sometimes get the sense that upon first hearing about OOO people take the critique of correlationism and the decentralization to be a call to exclude the human and the cultural altogether. At the level of “meta-ontology”, however, I think something quite different is going on.

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Building on my last post, the BP oil disaster is a good example of how Marxism is a particular way of approaching the world. All over the media you see this portrayed as a lack of responsibility on the part of particular corporations and workers. In other words, the event is individualized. What Marxist analysis reveals is how such apparently individual events are effects of the systematic functioning of capital (likewise with our environmental problems). This difference in perspective is not without concrete consequences. The first perspective leads to legal action against individuals, the latter to new regulations. The financial collapse has largely been discussed through the perspective of the greed of banks, rather than a systematic tendency of capital accumulation. This has had a profound impact on how governments have responded.

In comments to my last post, Mikhail has made a number of interesting points. In particular he points out that revolution is never expected. With this I agree, with the caveat that Marxism attempts to formulate a four-dimensional topography of the present that maps attractors, bifurcation points, or tendencies within the social field through which change might be produced. By “four-dimensional” I am referring to the unfolding of time in the present. Through such a topography of tendencies it hopes to strategically intensify these tendencies through political practice.

Bogost has a terrific post up reflecting on the recent politics and ontology debates. Check it out here.

In Reassembling the Social Latour draws a distinction between sociologists of the social and sociologists of association. In Latour’s framework, sociologists of the social treat the social as what explains, thereby treating it as some sort of entity that is already there, exerting formative forces of its own on other entities. By contrast, sociologists of association treat society as what must be explained, refusing to treat it as something that is already there.

One of Latour’s critiques of Marx is that he is a sociologist of the social insofar as he treats entities like class as agents in history. Over at Aberrant Monism Jeffrey Bell nicely articulates this critique. Bell writes:

I think it is correct to say one is not a Marxist if by that one means that Latour is not a Marxist. Latour is explicit on this point in his recent book, The Science of Passionate Interests, where he wonders how the 20th century might have unfolded had Tarde’s approach to understanding capitalism been more influential than Marx’s. Latour’s critique of Marx is much the same as his critique of Durkheim (you could substitute Durkheim for Marx in the previous sentence). Rather than presuppose the existence of class and society, Tarde examines the myriad ways in which society is composed. Latour follows a similar approach, of course, and in an essay he wrote with Shirley Strum, ‘redefining the social,’ he explicitly claims that society is not a given but needs to be composed, and composed by way of things – i.e., our human/nonhuman interactions.

Between Bell’s comments here and the discussion of Marx over at Bogost’s blog, I find myself very perplexed as to how Marx is being read. With respect to Bell’s criticism, it’s difficult for me to see how any careful reading of Capital can portray Marx as a sociologist of the social. In Capital Marx does not appeal to either the social or class as an explanatory force. Indeed, class only appears very late in Capital. Rather, it seems to me that Marx practices an exemplary form of actor-network analysis throughout both Capital and Grundrisse. Marx seeks to explain society in the manner of a sociologist of associations rather than appeal to society to explain the world around us. The actants that Marx appeals to in this story are wage-labor, the money form, factories, trade routes, the availability of resources, various technologies, etc. Here class does not serve an explanatory function, but rather is an emergent effect of how wage labor functions. Class is something that comes into being through a variety of different processes.

In this respect, we can think of wage-labor in much the same way that DeLanda– who is bafflingly ferocious in his critiques of Marx –thinks about how seashells of fairly consistent shapes and sizes come to be distributed on a beach. Here the average power of the waves and the extent that water comes up on the beach distribute sea-shells of particular shapes and sizes along a narrow band on the beach. Likewise with wage labor and capital. And where the pursuit of capital goes largely unregulated, we witness, over time, a massive disparity in wealth where the lion share of wealth comes to be concentrated in the hands of a few. In other words, we get the formation or emergence of class. When class comes into being, certain additional consequences follow. If the machine of capital is to continue running, not only is it necessary for goods to be produced, but it is also necessary for goods to be consumed so that the production of additional capital can take place. How can that occur, however, when such a system is prone to depressions and recessions that limit the amount of available money for consumers? And so on.

I’ve been even more baffled by some of the comments on Marx over at Ian’s blog and here. In this connection, a number of folks have suggested that Marxists believe primarily in revolution and that the proletariat will overturn the capitalist mode of production. However, in my experience, Marxism is far less a political theory or a theory of revolution, than a way of approaching and analyzing the world around us. By and large, Marxists tend to be a pretty pessimistic bunch, deeply sensitive to the constraints of the self-organizing system of capital that functions today as the “concrete universal” of our age. To be sure, Marxists are deeply attentive to the role that capital plays in all aspects of our society and life, and Marxists look for those “catastrophe points” (Rene Thom) or bifurcation points where such a form of social life might be able to mutate into something else, but this doesn’t entail that we naively believe in revolution or an immanent uprising of the proletariat. More than anything, Marxism is a way of analyzing the present and why it is the way that it is. Marxism is historico-material analysis. At the level of the political, such a perspective on the world takes less the form of struggling for revolution, but engagement with systems of governmentality that disproportionately benefit the capitalist class to the detriment of both everyone else and the environment.

A lot of people have complained that no new political theory has been invented and that Marxism is the default position of the academy. Likewise, there have been complaints that there is no place for liberals, neo-conservatives, and conservatives in the academy. I’m of a divided mind about this. On the one hand, it is my view that the academy is dominated by liberals. Just think about the disproportionate place of thinkers like Rawls or Habermas in the academy and political theory. On the other hand, I’m really not sure that there’s much of a place for neo-liberals and conservatives in the academy (there I said it) as I think their positions are just plain false. That said, it’s important to note that the neo-liberals dominate economics departments and hold the top seats in the halls of our government. Finally, however, I’m perplexed by the call for new political theories. It seems to me that Marx gives the best description of the present that we yet have available. However, I say this with the caveat that like Lacanian psychoanalysis, Marxism is an open theory. It doesn’t pretend to be exhaustive, it doesn’t pretend to know everything. Like any good empiricism, it responds to new formations in the present and attempts to comprehend what these mean.

Responding to my post on Shaviro, Jeffrey Bell makes a series of interesting remarks on Latour. Bell writes:

I’d like to add a question or thought to this mix. Shaviro would be right to question an intepretation of Latour that reduces objects to being nothing but their relations. If objects are systems, however, as I understand Levi, then in the end I think Levi is (potentially) in agreement with Shaviro. The question I’d like to add concerns Latour’s concept of relative existence, which he uses to argue that an object is more autonomous the more constructed it is. As I read this, and I’m simplifying greatly, an object only is to the extent that it is networked and translates other objects, which are themselves translations and relations to other objects, and so on. This is what I take Shaviro to mean when he says that “actants do not precede their relations, but neither are they reducible to their relations.” An actant does not precede its relations for it only acquires autonomy as it becomes constructed and enmeshed in an expanding network of translations and relations (or systems); but objects are also events (in the manner of Whitehead and Deleuze) and hence they always exceed established relations and are consequently not reducible to them. This allows for the historicity of objects (a point Latour stresses repeatedly) – or it allows for their relative existence as the relative strength of the networks wax and wane. My question, in short: to the extent that this is Latour’s argument, does Latour believe in objects as is argued by OOO? It seems that OOO gives more autonomy to objects than Latour would accept. With Latour’s notion of relative existence, it would seem that an object could lose autonomy altogether – such as spontaneous fermentation did as it gave way to the autonomy of Pasteur’s microorganisms. If Latour ultimately does not believe in objects as OOO does, then perhaps Shaviro and Levi do disagree in the end (or at least I would tend to disagree with OOO).

In my view, Latour conflates two distinct issues with his principle of relativity. One issue is the durability of objects. Another issues is the existence of objects. Within the framework of onticology as well as Harman’s object-oriented philosophy, the existence of an object is binary. Objects either are or they are not. And here temporal determinations are irrelevant. A substance need not long lasting to count as a substance. It can exist for the blink of an eye and then pass out of existence. It is no less an object for all that. With that said, I do agree that objects can become more durable by entering into “alliances” or relations with other objects. Objects tend to be pretty pathetic things when divorced from relations to other objects.

From his comments above I get the sense that Bell uses the term “system” in a slightly different way than I do. I make no distinction between objects and systems, but rather treat all objects as systems. Systems are constituted by what I refer to as their “endo-relations”, which refer to the internal structure of an object. In many respects, you could say that for me– with reference to Aristotle’s distinction between form and matter –the substantiality of an object is its form, not its matter. In many instances, however, this form is an evolving and developing thing that can lead to new endo-relations or endo-structures. One of the marks of endo-structure is that no all elements composing the endo-structure are related to one another. Rather, they are related in a specific ways. This is why, as Luhmann observes, systems with very similar components can nonetheless be very different, i.e., they relate their elements differently. The example of the brain is here a good one for illustrating how a form can nonetheless evolve while remaining that particular object. Neurons can come to be linked in new ways, while old paths can atrophy and die. Here it is the continuity in time that presides over the identity of the object (a point, I think, which resonates nicely with Bell’s own meditations on system in Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos).

At any rate, I therefore draw a distinction between networks and systems. Systems are objects, whereas networks are relations among objects or systems. There’s a tendency these days to talk about brains as networks, but I don’t think this quite works. When we talk about networks, we’re talking about exo-relations among objects such that these objects do not constitute or produce one another. To be sure, they influence one another but they do not produce the other objects in their vicinity. By contrast, in autopoietic systems like the brain (it’s different for allopoietic objects) the brain produces its own elements through its elements. All of this becomes even more complicated when we recognize 1) that networks can pass a threshold where they themselves become systems or objects rather than relations among elements, and 2) we note that often the elements of an object can themselves be independent or autonomous objects (the strange mereology of OOO).

While the situation is far from being unambiguous, Latour’s tendency is to reduce objects to their actions. As Latour writes in Pandora’s Hope,

Why is an actor defined through trials? Because there is no other way to define an actor but through its action, and there is no other way to define an action but by asking what other actors are modified, transformed, perturbed, or created by the character that is the focus of attention. (122)

Remarks like this can be found all over the place in Latour. Thus in Irreductions Latour remarks that “[w]hatever resists trials is real” (1.1.5). He goes on to remark that “[t]he real is not one thing among others but rather gradients of resistance” (1.1.5.1). Likewise, in Reassembling the Social, Latour writes,

…in the first approach [the sociology of the social] every activity– law, science, technology, religion, organization, politics, management, etc. –could be related to and explained by the same social aggregates behind all of them, in the second version of sociology [the sociology of associations] there exists nothing behind those activities even though they might be linked in a way that does produce a society– or doesn’t produce one. (8)

When Latour gets around to defining what an actor is in the same text, he remarks that “[a]n ‘actor’ in the hyphenated expression of actor-network is not the source of an action but the moving target of a vast array of entities swarming towards it” (46). Latour’s tendency is to treat objects as the sum of their effects on other objects.

Here I think we encounter what is problematic in Latour’s ontology. In the first quote from Pandora’s Hope we encounter Latour raising the question of how we can know anything of objects except in terms of how they perturb other objects. In my view, such pronouncements indicate that Latour is commiting what Bhaskar calls “the epistemic fallacy”. I readily grant that we can know nothing about objects except through how they perturb other objects. But the fact that we can know nothing of objects except through how they perturb other objects is entirely different than the claim that objects are their perturbations of other objects. Perturbations of other objects are traces of objects, not objects themselves. This is a thesis that cannot be arrived at through epistemology or our access to objects precisely because objects withdraw from all their traces. We never directly encounter them, but nonetheless objects are the transcendental condition for the production of these sorts of traces. The problem is that Latour tends to elide this distinction between objects and what objects effect, reducing objects to their effects.

I came across this picture by Eric Yahnker over at Scribble Scribble Scribble. Somehow it’s perfect, at least for my mood today.

I’ve always been fascinated by the appearance of the signifier “dude” in intellectual and academic debates. The appearance of this signifier in intellectual discussion is relatively new in the order of things, but it seems to appear at very specific points in a discussion. How are we to understand the semiotics of “dude”? I’m not entirely sure. But the specificity of the appearance of “dude” seems to occur only at a very specific point in any dialogue. Here I think we can best understand the appearance of “dude” in terms of animal ethology and, in particular, the ethology of wolves. As is well known, there are fairly well defined hierarchies in wolf packs. At one extreme you have the alpha wolf that leads the pack and gets to eat first. On the other hand you have the poor omega wolf that is at the bottom of the pack, getting tormented by the other wolves in all sorts of cruel ways and that is the last to eat (if it gets to eat at all). Between the alpha and the omega wolf you have all sorts of gradations expressing the social hierarchy.

“Dude” strikes me as a signifier that is highly reflective of masculinist wolf hierarchies. Occasionally you will hear women play with the “dude” signifier, but whenever this occurs it seems to have a sort of parodic function, poking fun at masculine behaviors and masquerading in a particular way in the masculine form. I might be mistaken here, so I’d be interested to hear what members of the other species might have to say on this issue. In the masculine context, “dude” seems to occur in two instances. On the one hand, it occurs as an expression of “pack” comradery. Dude functions as a term of affection, indicating connection or brotherhood. It is an informalism that violates a broader social rule of formality so as to bind men together.

In the course of heated debate, however, “dude” seems to serve a very different, yet related, function. The appearance of “dude” in the course of debate is somewhat equivalent to a wolf showing its belly during a tussle. Dogs and wolves show their bellies to show subordination in a wolf social hierarchy. The showing of the belly is an expression of submission and friendship to the other wolf. The appearance of “dude” in a highly heated intellectual debate seems to signify something similar. When “dude” appears the interlocutor is simultaneously baring his belly, saying “uncle!”, and expressing friendship. The incredulity of the “dude” says something like “man, don’t you know I’m your friend! don’t kill me!” Masculine debates are always difficult to end because, insofar as masculinity is always a semblance, masquerade, or semblance of being, concession is incredibly difficult because it reveals the “$” that lies behind any masculine identity and its will to mastery or S1. I can, perhaps, say this as my sexuality is so much all over the place and, as my partners have always said, I am such a bitch, that I am oddly outside of masculine discourse even while being in it. A hysteric by nature, I’ve never much liked boy games even though I play them endlessly. Perhaps, in this regard, I’m like Freud’s hysterics, challenging every master that comes my way. But perhaps the appearance of the signifier “dude” is as good a place as any to recognize where a discussion has completed itself.