Larval Subjects .

In response to my black ecology post, Ben raises an interesting question. Ben writes:

Insofar as for Marx humans are supposed to eventually achieve agency over their own social formation by destroying its basis in capital and transforming itself into the simultaneous subject-object that autonomously ‘makes’ its own history, shouldn’t humanity also seek to liberate itself from the heteronomous bonds imposed on it by nature and seek to remake nature as well?

First I must apologize for taking so long to get back to Ben. His posts keep going to spam and I don’t notice them until later (Ben, if you’d like to email me to let me know when you’ve posted, I’ll get back to you more quickly). In response to his question, my answer is “yes and no”. Yes, I believe we should strive to be self-directing as much as possible. But that’s really the issue. Who and what is the human that’s doing the directing here? Ben’s conception of our aims seems to be premised on the existence of a transhistorical essence of the human that remains the same and invariant throughout history. The idea here would be that since the beginning of time there’s been a telos operative in human history, such that all human action has been directed to the sake of some goal that would finally come to actuality. I just don’t think this is the case, nor do I believe that such a transhistorical essence of the human exists.

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I’ve been rather hard on Adorno lately, so it is high time I discuss the other side of the coin. Opening Adorno’s Negative Dialectics is always like listening to a jarring and brilliant symphony or enjoying a fine bottle of wine. In his conception of negative dialectics I think he gets at precisely what I’m trying to articulate, though not nearly as well, in my critique of representation and development of onticology. At the outset of Negative Dialectics, Adorno writes,

The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy… It indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived. (5)

If object-oriented ontology is anything it is an attempt, I believe, to bear witness to, to tarry with, those remainders that elude the manic drive to identity embodied in conceptualization. If I itch, experiencing an almost allergic reaction whenever questions of representation, truth, and norms arise, then this is precisely because I encounter a sort of drive to identity, a reduction of alterity and heterogeneity, an eradication of queerness, nascent in all discourses that focus on these questions. The point is not that we don’t represent, make true and false claims about the world, etc., but rather that discourses focused on these things tend to erase the remainder, the different, the heterogeneous. Here I’m reminded of a passage from Augustine’s De Ordine I wrote about long ago in 2006, before OOO came along in my thought. There Augustine writes:

The soul therefore, holding fast to this order, and now devoted to philosophy, at first introspects itself; and– as soon as that mode of learning has persuaded it that reason either is the soul itself or belong to it, and that there is in reason nothing more excellent or dominant than numbers, or that reason is nothing else than number– soliloquizes thus: ‘By some kind of inner and hidden activity of mine, I am able to analyze and synthesize the things that ought to be learned; and this faculty of mine is called reason.’… Therefore, both in analzying and in synthesizing, it is oneness that I see, it is oneness that I love. But when I analyze, I seek a homogenous unit; and when I synthesize, I look for an integral unit. In the former case, foreign elements are avoided; in the latter, proper elements are conjoined to form something united and perfect. In order that a stone be a stone, all its parts and its entire nature have been consolidated into one. What about a tree? Is it not true that it would not be a tree if it were not one? What about the members and entrails of any animate being, or any of its component parts? Of a certainty, if they undergo a severance of unity, it will no longer be an animal. And what else do friends strive for, but to be one? And the more they are one, so much the more they are friends. A population forms a city, and dissension is full of danger for it: to dissent– what is that, but to think diversely? An army is made up of many soldiers. And is not any multitude so much the less easily defeated in proportion as it is the more closely united? In fact, the joining is itself called a coin, a co-union, as it were. What about every kind of love? Does it not wish to become one with what it is loving? And if it reaches its object, does it not become one with it? Carnal pleasure affords such ardent delight for no other reason than because the bodies of lovers are brought into union. Why is sorrow distressful? Because it tries to rend what used to be one. (chapter 18, paragraph 48)

The implication is clear. In its drive to the one, to identity, that which is heterogeneous and different is to be destroyed, eradicated, erased. In a similar vein, we find Plotinus remarking that “If a man has been immersed in filth or daubed with mud, his native comeliness disappears and all that is seen is the foul stuff besmearing him: his ugly condition is due to the alien matter that has encrusted him, and if he is to win back his grace it must be his business to scour and purify himself and make himself what he was” (Ennead I, sixth tractate, paragraph 5). At the psychological and social level, of course, we see exactly how this will play out. Here “dirt” is the remainder or that which refuses to be integrated as one or under identity. While cleaning the body of dirty is a fairly innocent thing– although cleaning the soul of “dirt” will psychologically be another matter entirely –cleaning society of dirt often leads to grotesque and brutal results. In society dirt will always be the Jew, the immigrant, minorities, people who live alternative lifestyles, etc., etc., etc. We get a disciplinary matrix that implicitly strives to reduce to the same and erase the remainder.

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Much to my surprise, a number of people seemed to have a problem with my discussion of concepts in my post entitled On the Function of Philosophy. There, I wrote,

Concepts are not representations, nor are they ideas in minds. Rather, they are lenses and tools. They are apparatuses, every bit as tangible and real as hammers. It makes as much sense to ask “is this concept true?” as it does to ask “is a hammer true?”

The crux of the criticism seemed to revolve around my reference to concepts as tools. Somehow this got assimilated to many as the thesis that the status of a concept is to be defined in terms of its usefulness. Here it would be claimed that I am suggesting that we are to evaluate concepts in terms of whether or not they are useful. Yet clearly, for me, this won’t work because evaluation of concepts in terms of usefulness requires a pre-existent domain of uses, yet I reject the notion that there are pre-existent fields of ends, aims, or uses. Ends must be constructed and articulated. They don’t come ready made like some sort of Aristotlean telos that governs beings and that draws them to a particular end.

If, then, tools ought not be thought in terms of their usefulness, if the toolness of tools is secondary, as people like Stiegler and Bogost in Alien Phenomenology argue, to its being as a tool, how should the being of tools be thought? It seems that tools should be thought less in terms of what they are for than in terms of what they do. Put differently, we can say that whether or not a tool is useful is an accidental or secondary characteristic of its being as a tool. Uses are found for tools and machines, they don’t constitute the essence or being of tools and machines. Minimally we can say that a tool is an entity that acts on another entity so as to produce something else. The burners on my stove act on the eggs in the pan producing scrambled eggs. If we wish to understand the burner, we don’t ask “is it true?”, but rather “what does it do?” The sorts of productions produced through a tool can be endogenous or exogenous. Endogenously a tool can bring about a transformation in the thing it acts upon as in the case of the burner acting on the eggs. Exogeneously a tool can produce a new entity as in the case of hammers and nails fastening boards together.

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Ecology has been tainted by belief in an alleged wisdom of Nature. We see this ideology, above all, represented in the film Avatar. Nature, we are told, is harmonious and is governed by negative feedback loops. Where positive feedback loops refer to some process spinning out of control as in the case of the capitalistic pursuit of surplus-value that always pursues excess, negative feedback loops are governed by self-correcting activities that always seek harmony and balance. Like the thermostat on an air conditioner that turns on the AC whenever the temperature gets too high and shuts off whenever it gets too low, Nature, we say, is homeostatic, seeking a particular balance. This constant pursuit of balance is perhaps cruel, killing off some individual entities so that others might live, but it is a balance nonetheless.

As depicted in Avatar, especially in the theme of the sacred tree, nature is thus a sort of divine Wisdom. There is, we are told, this Wisdom to Nature that always balances things out, returning them to order. And, of course, it is not difficult to detect the neo-liberal ideology of Capitalism at work in this thought. Within neo-liberalism we are not to interfere with markets because markets will always right themselves, being the homeostatic or negative feedback mechanisms that they are. So too when we speak of self-organizing systems. There is a Wisdom to the crowd that necessarily rights itself if left alone. At this point, the narrative becomes predictable. If systems don’t right themselves, then this is because of the hubris of humans that intervene in the Natural ™ dynamics of systems, pushing them out of kilter. We attribute a divine Wisdom to these systems that is corrupted by human intervention, thereby speaking as if humans are something other or outside these systems, corrupting them from without. Just as the Nazi speaks of the Jews as a corrupting outside or alien invader of society that, were they eradicated, would allow society to achieve the organic community that is natural to it, we speak of Nature as this wisdom beset by a parasite that need only to be eradicated to harmoniously balance itself.

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I’ve been sick as a dog for the last couple of days as a result of some sort of stomach bug. The good news is that I’ve received the offprints for The Democracy of Objects. I have about two more chapters to read through, so it shouldn’t be long now. I’m pretty pleased with the book.

Harman has a great interview up with Mute magazine. Morton will be presenting at the Royal College of Art in London at the end of this month.

Alex Reid has a great follow-up on my post on concepts, as does David Roden. I’m not sure I’d characterizine ideas like “jelly fish” as concepts in the sense I mean the term, but interesting stuff nonetheless. Now back to moaning.

Kant’s greatest contribution to thought was the recognition and rigorous articulation of the thesis that thought is creative. When Kant asks the question “how are synthetic a priori judgments possible?” he is asking “how is it possible for thought to generate something new?” To understand this, it’s necessary to understand the difference between synthetic a posteriori judgments, analytic a priori judgments, and synthetic a priori judgments. In a synthetic a posteriori judgment, I am making a judgment of experience that relates to my sensations. If I say “oranges are sweet” I have made a synthetic a posteriori judgment. I synthesize my concept of those substances known as “oranges” with the quality of “sweetness”. The concept of oranges does not, in and of itself, contain the idea of the quality of “sweetness”. For this reason, Kant will say that synthetic a posteriori judgments are “ampliative”. They expand the concept, “orange”, by adding something new, sweetness. In an analytic a priori judgment, by contrast, I think nothing new. If I make the judgment “all bachelors are unmarried men”, I have not amplified my concept of “bachelor” in any way, but am merely thinking what is already contained in the concept of “bachelor”. Yet Kant introduces a third category of judgment: synthetic a priori judgments. If I make, to use Kant’s example, “7 + 5 = 12”, I have made a judgment that is ampliative and that is independent of experience. The concept of “12”, says Kant, is not already contained in my concepts of “7” and “5”, but rather my understanding must engage in a creative act that synthesizes these two concepts, bringing something new into thought.

What is remarkable is that I have done this independently of experience. We can see very well how, in experience, new thoughts are generated as a result of receiving new experiences and then combining or synthesizing them in the mind. There isn’t any great mystery here. What’s remarkable are those modes of thought that do not come from experience, from some alterity that we receive, but from us where some new thought is thought in the thought as a result of the activity of thinking. For in the synthetic a priori judgment, we have an instance of thought transforming the thinker as a result of the thinking. And this is what makes synthetic a priori judgments so bizarre: We are the ones making these judgments, yet in the process of thinking these judgments something that wasn’t already in us is thought or, more importantly, produced. Moreover, it is not only that something new is produced, it is that the thinker herself is transformed in the activity of the thinking in these forms of thought. At the end of such a thinking– as is readily evident in the axiomatic adventures of mathematicians –the thinker becomes something other than she was at the beginning of thinking. Us realists can think what we like about Kant and the way in which he resolved these questions– there’s plenty to criticize him for –but there can be no doubt that he’s hit on something profound in his question of how thought, independent of world, is capable of producing something new. This, I believe, is the concept of freedom or autonomy is groping towards, not the idea that we are already autonomous.

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It would be a mistake to restrict bodies to the domain of the animal or living. Rocks are bodies, neutrinos are bodies, cats are bodies, corporations are bodies, planets are bodies. Bodies, as it were, come in a variety of forms, some of which are organic, some of which are social, some of which are inorganic. Moreover, bodies can be entangled with one another in a variety of ways. Bodies are what object-oriented ontologists refer to as “objects”, “things”, or “substances”. In his extraordinary forthcoming book, Plastic Bodies: Rebuilding Sensation After Phenomenology, Tom Sparrow, while focusing on the human body, treats plasticity as the fundamental ontological determination of what makes a body a body. As Sparrow writes,

A body whose integrity is plastic is definable by its thresholds. This means… that its identity is constantly shifting and constituted by an indefinite and fragile disposition. This disposition will display typical effects or the potential for these effects will be virtually present, harbored in the body and actualizable under certain conditions. Shifts in identity or the compromising of bodily integrity can be induced by a breakdown in the body’s own maintenance or by pressures exerted by external force. In both cases what gets compromised is an alliance maintained between a collective of bodies functioning together as a singular body (a friendship, neighborhood, or soccer team) and working together to reciprocally determine each individual body’s identity.

In the language of my variant of object-oriented ontology, onticology, these “indefinite and fragile dispositions” are what I call the “virtual proper being of an object”, the actualization that an object undergoes is what I call “local manifestations”, and these collectives of bodies or external forces interacting with the body are what I call “regimes of attraction”. If local manifestation is local, then this is because the properties or qualities a body comes to embody at a particular point in time are a function of the relation that body entertains to other bodies as well as processes going on within the body. For example, when a cool gust of wind passes across my body or my beloved playfully and teasingly caresses me, my skin prickles and gets goose bumps. My prickled skin is a local manifestation of its virtual proper being– those powers or dispositions to act in particular ways –while the cool air or teasing caress of my beloved are the regime of attraction in which this quality is actualized.

Sparrow thus emphasizes the essential elasticity of bodies or objects. As Sparrow writes, bodies are

…akin to the mechanics of elasticity. Elasticity can be understood on the model of the rubber band. The rubber band is flexible and deformable, but in the absence of resistance or external force it tends toward a specific formal state. Accordingly, it is not open to permanent deformation. Permanent deformation means breakage and the elimination of the precise disposition which constitutes the rubber band’s elasticity.

Better than even the analogy of the rubber band is the literal example of the stress ball that I discussed in a post on my beloved blue mug in March.

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AHB announces an OOO/SR workshop in Cyprus. Wish I could attend! The always great Alex Reid has a post up on potentiality. Ditto with Tom Sparrow on all counts (y’all are in for a real treat when his book comes out). Michael has two nice posts up on pragmatism and the wilderness. Graham slams the epistemology police. Somehow these guys always seem to ignore the process of learning and inquiry and then they formulate strawmen suggesting that you reject the need to justify your claims, when it’s the superficial model of justification you’re rejecting. At any rate, there’s always something obscene about this crew as they position everyone as being a defendent at an inquisition and then proceed to commit the fallacy proof by verbosity(and of boring the interlocutor to death!). As articulated by the wiki entry on fallacies:

Proof by verbosity (argumentum verbosium, proof by intimidation): submission of others to an argument too complex and verbose to reasonably deal with in all its intimate details

For those in the area, Notre Dame’s English department is offering a course on SR/OOO/Dark Ecology this Fall.

I’m not sure whether I’ve linked to this article before or not, but here Dennett provides a good naturalistic, yet sympathetic, critique of Brandom. This is pretty much where I stand vis amvis the need to take learning more seriously in the genesis of norms, the thesis that appeal to “community” as the ground of norms is a “skyhook”, and the need to provide an evolutionary/naturalistic account of intentionality.

I already began to develop this thesis somewhat in an earlier post yet didn’t completely drive it home. Some people seem to think that the function of philosophy is to rigorously ground claims so as to get at The Truth(tm). As an empiricist that values actual concrete empirical research whether it be the political activist engaged in affecting the social assemblage in which they’re entangled, the artist experimenting with a new style, the ethnographer or sociologist investigating a social assemblage, the person in the humanities plumbing the archives, the engineer working at the invention of a new technology, or the biologist, physicist, or chemist doing laboratory work. Indeed, I’m even fascinated in the young person exploring the affects produced in a rave or a rock band, or two lovers inventing a new form of singular relation between one another. These are all empiricisms in their own fashion. They’re all explorations of the wilderness of being.

For me philosophy is a parasitic discipline that is without an object beyond the Present of its historical moment. It is beyond truth or falsehood in the referential sense, instead striving to think the sense of its Time. With Badiou I thus hold that Truths always come from elsewhere, outside of philosophy, from politics, art, love, and science. Philosophy has no Truths of its own and is thus a sort of empty square that travels an aleatory course throughout history. In this regard, there are no “questions of philosophy” that could be summed up in a textbook for all time. The questions of philosophy will always be a function of its Time or the eternity of its Present. Nonetheless, philosophy strives to think that which is singularly eternal and concretely universal in its Time or the Present. With Deleuze and Guattari, I thus hold that philosophy is a creation of concepts. As they write in What is Philosophy?, “…philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts” (2). Concepts do not fall ready made and fully formed from the sky, rather they must be built.

Concepts are not representations, nor are they ideas in minds. Rather, they are lenses and tools. They are apparatuses, every bit as tangible and real as hammers. It makes as much sense to ask “is this concept true?” as it does to ask “is a hammer true?” Drawing a concept from Ryle, this question constitutes a category mistake. And it is a category mistake that constitutes some of the most tiresome and fascistically terrifying attitudes in all of philosophy. Everywhere with this question of whether a concept is true, whether it represents the world, we encounter the desire to police, dominate, subordinate, and render subservient. Like Kafka’s Court or Castle, these philosophical technologies everywhere seek to trap, ensnare, halt, and limit. They create the illusion of free movement and autonomy, while everywhere weaving a semantic web about engagement seeking to fix it. The question “is it true?” is the insecure and narcissitic fantasy of academic philosophy wishing to redeem itself by functioning as master discipline, legislator, and judge of all other disciplines, practices, and experiences. The artist, physicist, ethnographer, and activist get along just fine without this type of “philosopher” to examine their papers. The proper questions when encountering a hammer is not “is it true?”, but rather “what does it do?”, “what can I do with it?”, “is it put together well for these tasks?”, and so on.

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