Vitale has another post up responding to recent discussions. There Vitale, echoing Ivakhiv, remarks that, “Like Adrian, I believe that OOO and procesurralism-relationalism-whateveryouwannacallit are like two sides of the same coin…” For Ivakhiv, the differences between OOO and his process-relational approach are merely differences in nomenclature or vocabulary. This is a pleasing development because apparently it means that there will be no further frustrating debates over these issues given that Ivakhiv and Vitale now claim to accept the basic premises of OOO.
All this aside, on a few occasions now Vitale has expressed concern about SR and OOO rejecting the linguistic turn. Unfortunately, however, Vitale hasn’t articulated just what he understands or means by “the linguistic turn”. As far as I’ve been able to tell, it’s an empty and floating signifier within his discourse, having something vaguely to do with signs and language and questions of “who gets to decide”. I’ll have more to say about this question of “who decides” in a moment, but for the moment it’s worthwhile to articulate what I understand by the linguistic turn to see whether Vitale and I are talking about the same thing. The wiki article on the linguistic turn more or less outlines what I take the linguistic turn to be. As the article remarks,
The view that language ‘constitutes’ reality is contrary to intuition and to most of the Western tradition of philosophy. The traditional view (what Derrida called the ‘metaphysical’ core of Western thought) saw words as functioning like labels attached to concepts. According to this view, there is something like ‘the real chair’, which exists in some external reality and corresponds roughly with a concept in human thought called “Chair” to which the linguistic word “chair” refers. However, the founder of structuralism, Ferdinand de Saussure, held that definitions of concepts cannot exist independently from differences between words, or, to put it differently, that a concept of something cannot exist without being named. Thus differences between word-meanings structure our perception; there is no real chair except insofar as we are manipulating symbolic systems. We would not even be able to recognise a chair as a chair without simultaneously recognising that a chair is not everything else – in other words a chair is defined as being a specific collection of characteristics which are themselves defined in certain ways, and so on, and all of this within the symbolic system of language. Thus, everything we think of as ‘reality’ is really a convention of naming and characterising, a convention which is itself called ‘language’. Indeed, anything outside of language is by definition inconceivable (having no name and no meaning) and therefore cannot intrude upon or enter into human reality, at least not without immediately being seized and articulated by language.
The linguistic turn is that position that argues that language constructs reality. Although a wiki article, this is nonetheless an accurate picture of the linguistic turn. See, for example, Lacan’s discussion of the two doors in his “Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious” in Ecrits for a variation of this thesis. As such, the linguistic turn is a variant of correlationism. Here there would be a weak and a strong variant of linguistic correlationism or the linguistic turn. The weak version would acknowledge that there is something other than language, while arguing that we can never say anything about what this non-linguistic existence might be insofar as all our experience and cognition is mediated by language. The strong version of linguistic correlationism would argue that there is nothing other than language and that reality is linguistic through and through. This would be the linguistic variant of absolute idealism.
The practical outcome of the linguistic turn in either of its variants would be the conclusion that we can never investigate the world as such, but only discourses about the world. For example, when discussing the bombing of Hiroshima the advocate of the linguistic turn is committed to the thesis that we aren’t talking about the city of Hiroshima, bombs, humans, dogs, cats, trees, the radioactive decay of atoms, etc., but are really analyzing a discourse about Hiroshima, bombs, the radioactive decay of atoms, people, animals, etc. Because language can only ever refer to language it follows that discourse can only ever be about discourse.
Now clearly no variant of SR or OOO could accept such a thesis because it shackles all of being to language. Vitale is thus quite right to point out that SR and OOO rejects the linguistic turn, for the linguistic turn is the core variant that correlationism takes in contemporary philosophy. As a consequence, OOO is obligated to take account of the reality of language and signs, while rejecting the thesis that language and signs structure all reality. I have done a lot of work contributing, I hope, to precisely this project.
Now, returning to Vitale’s monotonous question of “who decides”, I have always gotten the sense that he is an outlier in the debates between me, Graham, Bogost, Shaviro, Morton, and Ivakhiv. The six of us have been involved in an ontological discussion. All six of us are engaged in the question of how best to characterize true reality. And insofar as this debate is genuinely ontological, it hasn’t been a question of how we know or perceive but of how things really are. Is reality better characterized as relations, events, and processes (Ivakhiv, Shaviro), or is reality better characterized as objects independent of relations (Morton, Bogost, Harman, Bryant). I suspect that it wouldn’t occur to Ivakhiv or Shaviro to ask who decides whether a mouse as a mouse because they understand themselves to really be talking about the being of mice (whatever that might be, we all concede we’re not sure), rather than about human representations of mice. And since the sixth of us understand our questions to be ontological and therefore independent of the existence of humans– which are contingent –we all recognize that questions of how we represent the being of mice is secondary to these ontological questions.
By contrast, it seems to me that Vitale is asking a very different set of questions. When Vitale asks who decides that a mouse is a mouse it’s clear that he hasn’t understood the nature of the debate and therefore is no participating in the discussion but is off dealing with some other set of issues. Here I’m reminded of a remark that Robert Duvall’s character makes in The Road. Viggo Mortensen and Duvall are talking about the horror of being “the last man” in the post-apocalyptic world in which they live. Mortensen’s character, echoing Vitale, asks “how would you know if you’re the last man?” To this Duvall’s character responds, “you wouldn’t know, you would just be the last man” (Shaviro, Ivakhiv, Bogost, Morton, Harman, Bryant).
This is what Vitale keeps missing, this difference between being and knowing. As such, his questions are always posed from the outside looking in, and never from the standpoint of the being itself. His philosophy unfolds within the field of an objectifying gaze, always reducing beings– whether they be events, processes, objects, or all of the above –to beings-for-gaze. Thus, in his follow-up post today, he will write,
Here’s what I know. Firstly, when I pick up a mouse, I link a lot of sensual qualities together (furriness, tail, ears, sniffing) together at one space-time durational juncture. What’s in my hand is relatively distinct from the rest of what is in my perceptual field right now. I also know that in my culture, this thing is called a ‘mouse.’ We could have chosen another word, like meece, if we wanted. We could also call it a ‘gray’, and link it as one huge hyperobject with every other gray thing in the world, ‘oh, this is a gray’!.
This is how it always is in discussions with Vitale. The question was never about what we perceive, but about what objects are.” The question of how Vitale grasps the mouse is irrelevant to the question of what the mouse is. And the question of what the mouse is is the topic of the debate between Ivakhiv, Harman, Morton, Bogost, Shaviro, and I. It’s difficult to have a discussion with someone who doesn’t even understand the issue being discussed.
Now predictably Vitale will ask what allows me to decide what the mouse is. Why, he will ask, is my word or the biologists word more valid than the word of his eight year old nephew. Again, however, this question will reflect that he’s failed to both understand the debate and my own philosophical position. I have never claimed to have true knowledge of the mouse. Indeed, I argue that such knowledge is impossible because objects withdraw. I have only spoken of the being of withdrawn objects. I have also argued that all objects translate one another in their own peculiar way (a dimension of OOO that Vitale conveniently ignores again and again). In this regard, I claim no greater validity for my perspective, the biologist’s perspective, or Vitale’s nephew’s perspective. They are all translations. All I’ve ever argued is that beings cannot be reduced to their translations.
December 11, 2010 at 11:22 pm
[…] Levi: It’s not that I don’t understand your argument, it’s that I disagree. I’ve said that many, many times! When I discuss the mouse, I discuss him in my hand, because to an electron whirring by, the mouse is not a mouse! What I call a mouse interacts with what I call an electron. But electron and mouse know neither. The electron experiences the mouse electronly (which involves no words), and vice-versa. […]
December 12, 2010 at 2:38 pm
[…] a response to Chris, Levi summarizes a piece of the debate as follows: Now, returning to Vitale’s monotonous question […]
December 12, 2010 at 9:18 pm
i wonder how we would ever be able to make the claim that there exists something ‘behind’ our translations if we weren’t basing those claims on what we translate objects to be?
Ontography as methodical investigation (translation) precedes Ontology (speculation) doesn’t it?
If Descartes did anything, he surely taught us that.
December 12, 2010 at 9:33 pm
That’s certainly the correlationist argument, Michael.
December 13, 2010 at 4:22 pm
I think it goes further than correlationism Levi. Putting human translations on the same ontological footing as any other object-translations (which I fully advocate) calls into question what we purport to know for certain – that is to say, transcendentally – about the structure of reality.
For example, I don’t consider myself a correlationist, as I believe the world exits quite independently of any human presence, but I also argue that we are unable to know any-thing independently of how we know it. Our being determines our knowing.
You seem to make the same claim, albeit from an ontological angle, in terms of how every object translates its encounters.
But if we truly hold that standard to ourselves then it follows that in order to have any sense of what’s going on outside our skin we must translate the world into our own (human) terms. Therefore every claim we make or insight we purport to know is derivative from these translations.
Again, if every contact is translation then all knowledge outside ourselves must be translated knowledge. And if everything we know is translated then how do we know what the Real world is like ‘in-itself’ – that is, unless those translations have some sort of direct but partial access to what is Real. And if direct but partial (partial because it is still translated) contact sometimes occurs then objects can be said to be only ‘partially withdrawn’.
We simply must have at least some kind of ‘direct but partial’ access (or ontographic capacity) in order to claim to have knowledge about the metaphysically Real nature of ‘objects’. If objects remain totally withdrawn, and our experiences mere translation, then our speculations (ontology) remain be pure anthropocentric fantasy or projections.
We must be granted some kind of access to withdrawn objects/world or we simply cannot pretend to know (or claim) what is behind the veil of withdrawnness. Things must be able to “speak” to us, but we must have “ears” to hear them as well… And in “hearing” speculate about them.
December 13, 2010 at 7:05 pm
Hi Michael,
Correlationism is not the claim that there is no external reality, but rather that reality can only ever be talked about in terms of human access. Thus, when you write,
This is the basic formulation of correlationist thought. What you get here is a vertical ontology in which the human is necessarily included in any discussion of beings, such that to analyze any being we must also analyze how humans relate to that being.
December 13, 2010 at 7:25 pm
Michael,
Why must we have “direct but partial” access? It seems that triple-o says we translate them, not necessarily that we make them up — though this is also possible. The point is we don’t know if know means absolute certainty. I don’t think anything is absolutely certain — illusion, delusion, hallucination, simply being wrong, that’s all possible when talking and experiencing objects. I think we are pretty weak epistemological instruments.
No one claims to know what is beyond the veil of withdrawnness because that is the domain of being, not relation. It is simply transcendent, and not in a theological sense, just in the sense that whatever we grasp is not being, is not the real object. This is why we have to speculate and use induction. We can only ever have a tentative model of objects.
It all hinges on the very definition of object that triple-o puts forward: an object is not its own parts. The object is a unified one, and either you access it or you don’t. This is why the idea of phenomenological or intra-system information is so necessary for any relation at all. An object relates inasmuch as it comes into contact with another object within a larger operating or procedural system or unit. We fuse together with objects in knowledge within larger ones, in a sense, knowledge itself is yet another object produced in which we become interior pieces. But, the implication here is that, even then, we can’t access the being of that knowledge, that relation, either. Basically, in triple-o, nothing is simply transparent, pure and simple, because everything is also an object of some sort. Looking at it epistemologically, it’s a very dark thesis. There is no direct but partial “clearing” where we can step back even slightly to get a sense of things in their actual reality. To say in a more Levi-esque way, we can only produce more and more local manifestations, certain clues and qualities as to the virtual being of the object, but we can never see the virtual proper being itself. Everything is buffered and mediated. Even if we wanted to call our knowledge “true,” the truth of the thing and the thing itself are not two sides of the same coin — they are…different coins.
I think that we are uncomfortable with the idea that there is no direct communication between things — it works against some of the most basic philosophical intuitions since Kant (since in Kant, the subject is what is directly accessible, if not the things-in-themselves).