Over on Twitter, sdv_duras, joepdx and I have been having an interesting discussion about OOO and human emancipation. For me, my interest in OOO revolves around what I believe to be its potential for social and political thought. Thus, while OOO is a posthumanist ontology that seeks to decenter the primacy of humans and, especially, the place that correlationism or the subject-object correlate enjoys in theory, this posthumanism aims not at the banishment or exclusion of humans, but out of a reflection on the very practical inadequacies of correlationist social and political thought. On the one hand, I believe that correlationist social and political thought (ideology critique, cultural Marxism, discursive and semiotic constructivism) is inadequate to explain why social systems hold together as they do and therefore to effectively strategies ways of changing oppressive regimes. In my view, the failure to take nonhuman agencies into account as part of the glue that holds social systems together dooms us to ineffectual critique and practice. The point is not that semiotic and ideological elements aren’t part of that glue, but that they don’t exhaust the glue that accounts for why social systems hold together as they do. On the other hand, I want an account of being that is robust enough to make room for a viril ecological theory. The tendency of much cultural theory over the last sixty years –and there are notable exceptions among folks like Deleuze, Latour, Haraway, Barad, Bennett, certain Marxists, Serres, the Whiteheadians, etc; yet they have, overall, enjoyed rather marginal status in discussions –has been to treat the things of the world as mere screens upon which humans project their meanings. In other words, there’s a tendency to treat nonhuman entities as contributing nothing save their status as vehicles for the transport of human meanings, intentions, aims, goals, signs, etc. Just as the value of the dollar bill resides nowhere in the paper and ink of that dollar bill, but is rather projected by us, just as there’s nothing intrinsic to the “Mens Room” and the “Ladies Room that makes it a mens room or a ladies room, but rather it is our language that diacritically produces this difference in things, much of the project of “critical theory” (broadly construed) has consisted in following Feuerbach and Marx in showing how the “sortals” of the world are really our work and not from amongst the things themselves. In my view, a robust eco-theory and politics cannot rest content with this thesis, but must also recognize the agency and independence of all manner of nonhuman entities.
read on!
What I thus seek is a theory rich enough to both integrate the momumental and important discoveries of what I’ve called critical theory above (I outline this in the introduction to The Democracy of Objects as well as my CUNY Wilderness talk last week). In other words, for me, agencies like ideology, signifiers, etc., are agencies. It’s not a question of excluding these agencies and the modes of critique we’ve developed for responding to them, but of recognizing that the cultural, the semiotic, the normative, the ideological, is only a part of the story. What I wish to think about are– following Karen Barad’s pathbreaking work in Meeting the Universe Halfway –the entanglements of the signifying/representational and the material in such a way that while both domains mutually perturb and modify one another in all sorts of ways, they are nonetheless irreducible to one another.
For me, part of this mode of thought consists in flattening being. Rather than striving to reduce one type of being to another as in the case where we try to show that something we took to be material was “really” a constellation of signifiers in ideology (social constructivism) or rather than trying to show that what we took to be a constellation of signifiers was “really” genetically determined (sociobiology), I instead treat signifiers, genes, microbes, animals, persons, armies, buildings, cities, bits of paper, etc., as existing on a single flat and immanent plane where these entities are entangled with one another in assemblages where all the elements mutually modify and transform with one another without any entirely being reducible to some other element. As my friend Joseph Schneider might put it, for example, the body is both a cultural construction (the way we’re metabolized by a larger-scale cultural system modifies us in all sorts of ways) and a biological system. The body cannot be reduced to a constellation of signifiers or how it has been written over by signifiers as Lacan might try to have it in his discussions of hysteria and conversion systems, but those signifying dimensions of the body cannot be reduced to the biology of the body either. As Schneider suggests in his analysese of Yoga, we get, in Yoga, something that is both biology and a constellation of cultural practices where the final “phenotype” of the “disciplined” body is the result of the entanglement and interaction of these elements together. These entanglements and the affective-material-semiological processes of becoming they involve are incredibly difficult to describe and analyze. We only have the barest rudiments of a language for doing so.
At any rate, rather than thinking of a diacritical structure of signifiers as the glue that holds society together, I instead suggest that we should think in terms of metaphors of gravity as developed in Einsteinian theory. There is a gravity of things whether those things be signifiers, nonhuman material objects like rice, persons, telephone lines, and so on. Part of our job as critical/emancipatory social and political theorists should consists in the cartography of this gravity. The following video clip gives a beautiful account of the basic idea behind relativity theory:
Within Einstein’s framework, gravity is not a result of an attractive force, but rather of the way in which an object bends and curves the space about it. As a result of this curvature of space, other objects fall towards the object along the trajectory of the curve, being trapped within that curvature just as a surfer might become trapped in a particularly vicious current. But note well, the curvature of space is not the exclusive domain of the object around which the other object orbits. The orbiting object, as well, produces its own curvature of space. In other words, we don’t get unilateral determination.
In his sublime Sublime Object of Ideology, Zizek raises the profound question of just why, after a potent ideology critique, people nonetheless continue to do what they do. How is it that they can know that x is an ideological mystification while still continuing to behave towards things as they did before? In psychoanalytic terms, why doesn’t the symptom always disappear after it’s been interpreted? Zizek’s answer is two-fold: On the one hand, he contends, ideology resides not in our beliefs but in our practices. I might not believe anything of the theology of my church, I might believe that it’s all nonesense, yet the fact that I still kneel with everyone else or that might voice becomes hushed when I’m in a grave yard indicates that I’m still in the grips of this ideology. Ideology resides not in our representations or what we believe, but rather, according to Zizek, in our doing or action. You might be the most tolerant, multiculturalist at the level of belief, but if you still clutch your purse tight when the young black man enters the elevator you’re still deep in the grips of ideology. On the other hand, Zizek contends, cynicism is the dominant ideology today. In cynicism we maintain a cynical distance from every belief, seeing all of them as shams of one sort or another, while nonetheless behaving exactly as we did before.
It’s curious that Zizek gives two explanations for the persistence of the ideological symptom, rather than just one. Do we not here encounter something like the phenomenon of overdetermination in the unconscious suggesting that something else might be at work. The possibility that Zizek doesn’t entertain is that perhaps nonhuman things have a gravity that organizes our action in a variety of ways that aren’t a matter of ideology in the classic sense of a “system of deceptive representations”. The things of the world bend and curve social space in all sorts of ways that lock us into particular modes of existence. While these things are certainly entangled with ideologies, they are not themselves reducible to ideology nor are they mere representations, deceptive or otherwise.
Let’s face it, the things of the world are sticky and like Serres’ quasi-objects or operators in The Parasite, our actions are stuck around these things in all sorts of ways. Take the example of rice production in Asian countries during the 13th century. Rice had a number of advantages over other grains favored in Europe. Unlike grains like wheat and barley, it was fairly reliable and not as susceptible to the vicissitudes of climatic variation. Unlike wheat and barley, you could get two to three harvests out of rice each year. However, rice is also extremely labor intensive in terms of its planting, harvesting, and preparation.
This labor intensiveness of rice has a certain gravity to it with respect to the actions and social relations of human beings. Rice encourages and invites collective forms of farming as well as social stratification. On the one hand you get the peasants that work the fields, while on the other hand you get an elite class of priests and kings that preside over when to plant, how much to plant, when to harvest, and how the grain is to be distributed. Moreover, because so much labor is put into rice, you increasingly get mono-diets and mono-cultures where other potential forms of cultivation (other plants, livestock, etc.) are more or less foreclosed as time and energy must be devoted to the sure thing.
All of this gets entangled in ideology and religion, but we can imagine our cultural critical theorist (he who emphasizes representation to the detriment of all else) expressing Zizekian shock after carrying out an entertaining and widely recognized critique of the ideology and superstition that represents these social relations. “I’ve shown that the King is really not a god, yet the peasants continue to do things as they did before! Are they cynics that know what they’re doing yet still do it?” Why not the simpler alternative explanation that the reason the peasants continue to do it –even though they know that the ideological representation of the king and the priestly class –is because they really have no other alternative. They are caught in the gravity of rice. Without another viable food alternative or another way of harvesting rice, and with the persistence of the need to feed themselves and their families, they have little alternative but to continue doing things as they did before. They can overturn the king, of course, yet another “manager” arises in his place as someone still has to determine when to plant, harvest, how much to plant, and how to distribute the crop among the people. A stickyness of life.
I do not wish to resurrect the old base/superstructure relation as signifiers, like everything else, have their gravity as well. However, all too often ideology critique is a triple insult to people. First, it is always undertaken on the premise that people are stupid and duped and therefore in need of being shown the truth by someone who truly knows. Second, to add insult to injury, it tends to ignore the very real gravity of things that people contend with daily. Third, it blames them for not recognizing that they are duped even though real alternatives aren’t available. The rice and nature of rice, the way in which it becomes entangled with human social systems, is not itself ideological. It is not a representation of social relations, but a real actant among humans that beckons certain forms of activity and relations.
Yet oddly this dimension of sticky objects forming regimes of attraction is oddly invisible to so much cultural critical theory. Zizek reduces toilets to semiotic vehicles of ideology, never raising the question of how waste disposal might organize social relations in particular ways and especially for those who don’t have toilets (cholera anyone?). Moreover, the explanations of social change we often get from cultural critical theorists are often strangely circular. We ask “why did attitudes towards the Catholic Church change during the Rennaissance and the Enlightenment?” The answer becomes “because people’s beliefs changed?” Well sure, but why did those beliefs changed? There’s little discussion of the role that a little microbe like yersinia pestis, coupled with rats and fleas might have played in these changes. After all, the Church was unable to avert the disaster (strike one) and Bishops began advising the people to give each other the Last Rights because the priests were either dead or had fled (hmmm, might this have something to do with the emergence of a belief in the lack of a need for a mediator between lay and God through the Church or a priest?). If we wish to understand why the patterns we fight hold together as they do it’s not enough to evoke ideologies and signifiers. We must also make room for all sorts of nonhumans like rice, rats, flees, streets, rivers, mountains, cows, fields, bacteria, telephone lines, and so on. There’s no harm in increasing our strategic conceptual tool box and we might very well discover all sorts of other paths of intervention that don’t simply reside in endless demystifying interpretation.
September 20, 2011 at 12:41 am
I had not seen this overdetermination in Z, lying in plain sight. It would be interesting to figure out exactly how this symptom eludes the third reason (objects).
September 20, 2011 at 2:51 am
on an individual level don’t cognitive biases go a long way in explaining the enduring power/resistance of habits?
as for institutions, parties, markets, sects, etc. to the degree that they might be characterized as momentarily singular/focused they are changing all the time, ask the folks who track their histories/development, or better yet the people who try and manage them. Or pick a handy project, say teaching, and try and create/maintain a standard of practice/content. This is why in experimental practice one tries to artificially strip down the number of interactants and if we should try and include/account-for the whole panopoly of everyday agents/elements, things just get exponentially messier in a blooming and buzzing kind of way.
September 20, 2011 at 7:37 am
I suppose the obvious question is this: What opens the conditions of possibility needed for an object, or group of objects, to reach ‘escape velocity’, to continue your metaphor? When the people DO overthrow the king – take the Arab Spring, for example, what allows this to happen, given the lack of alternatives your describe? Entanglement cannot be exhaustive, or change (to refer to my previous question) could not happen.
After reading this post, I tried to raise some of these points in a graduate seminar on Continental psychology/philosophy I’m taking (not Kris Coffield’s class), and the response I got was that this line of thinking runs the risk of naturalizing inequalities. The idea was that it is fine to rehistoricize objects and focus on how nonhuman objects spurred shifts in social relations, but in denying the primacy of signification one is driven toward ambivalence, at best, and nihilism, at worst, because no agent of social change is posited in its place. Thus, relations between real things are taken as ‘natural’ products of a given environment, and the roles that arise in conjunction with these relations are ‘performed’ as if they are the consummation of an ordered system that cannot be any other way.
I probably wasn’t being clear in my presentation, but that seemed a misunderstanding of what you were saying. At the same time, you do mention the “sitckyness of life” in a way that seems to foreclose other possibilities barring external stimuli. I agree that the entanglement of one object with the gravity of another is not itself ideological, but ideology, I think, remains a feedback loop for maintaining a system’s ordering. In other words, I don’t think that ideological critique has to be condescending, since pushing back against an ideology can be a powerful, and even necessary, means of unveiling a system’s forms of domination. When I, as a Native Hawaii, critique the tourist ideology of Hawaii, I’m not trying to condescend to anyone, but am rather trying to open space for indigenous claims to be articulated on the assumption that those claims are like the new technology needed to displace entrenched forms of domination. I don’t take my marginalization as a given. Does that make sense?
You just wrote this wonderful reply to my prior question and now I’m challenging you. So sorry…:(
September 20, 2011 at 10:18 am
To start with of course I have to accept that for Object Orientation Philosophy I am the classic enemy which most philosophers have to define and name to legitimise their sophistic terrorism, in this particular instance declaring them in the infantile way of philosophers to be the enemy ‘a correlationist’, just as for Badiou I am as he describes it a ‘Democratic Materialist’ or sometimes in that stupid way of his ‘aristocratic’, or as was once fashionable the ‘dialectic’.
Nonetheless, and of course in some senses there is nothing in the summary statement at the beginning of this with which I see any violent disagreement, we are all supposed to be for the post-human with its partial critique of humanism, the argument for an understanding of objects, the decentreing of post-humanity along with humanity, the argument for materialism and against sophistry and so on.
Object Orientation is simply not being careful enough for it is behaving in as any other fashionable philosophical and ideological proposition does, making a case for its position within the academe, establishing a place for itself within the spectacle. The ideological proposition, the idea that ‘the failure to take nonhuman agencies into account as part of the glue that holds social systems together dooms us to ineffectual critique and practice’ is impossible to accept in an unquestioning fashion when I am reading the representation from within the network heart of the spectacle, when the network society is beamed inescapably into our lives. Because there is nothing nonhuman about the human constructed network.
So let’s be clear apart from its position within the spectacle as the latest in a long line of fashionable and spectacular philosophical concepts – the underlying belief that there is a truth at stake here, that Object Orientation is truth is rejected. Because we have to reject the irrelevant proposition that OO is “adequate to explain why social systems hold together as they do and therefore to effectively strategies ways of changing oppressive regimes” because what OO defines as “correlationist social and political thought” including such useful concepts and tools as ideology, cultural Marxism, discursive and semiotic constructivism) – is simply to useful and usable to be replaced by a materialism founded on an unnecessary misnaming of human constructed objects as “nonhuman”. All the examples that were produced in the discussion were human constructed objects, rice, grain and even if I extend the list into objects not constructed by human beings – this does not help support the underlying implication raised yesterday: That Object Orientation is the means of obeying Marx’s famous requirement that we change the world, not that we need to stop philosophizing.
Equally significant is that the list of names – consists entirely of what we should, with some admiration, call the anti-dialectical line of thought. Though it is questionable even a little laughable to call them ‘marginal’. Is this because the dialectical line of thought including such luminaries of the total critique of capitalism as Debord, Lefebrve and so on sit so uneasily within the philosophical and academic world, within the spectacle itself ? Or is it that the straw man presented again here is based on something more problematic – that the nonhuman is to vague a concept, not reductionist enough, unable to differentiate between something constructed by human beings and something which isn’t. Perhaps it would read better for me if, as Hallward told me once, Object Orientation brings equivalence into the foreground – because in philosophical terms it does this insufficiently for me. You may argue that in the sections where you speak of ‘single flat and immanent plane’ this is sufficient, and I would probably consider it in those terms but the discourse, the discourse as it begins – the banal labelling, the use of human constructs to justify the plane and the supposed purpose contradicts the theoretical concept of the plane which requires more overt equivalence and a greater generosity and less stereotyping than the ‘correlationist’ labelling allows.
Naming your enemies in such an inherited fashion carries a cost… you refuse us even when in our anti-humanism we go much further than you are doing.
September 20, 2011 at 1:00 pm
@SDV – First off, it’s ‘OOO’, not ‘OO’. Our ‘O’s’ come in threes. I say that not to be snarky (though I don’t particularly care if it comes across that way, given your hostile tone), but to point out that object-oriented thought is speaking ontologically, as in the branch of metaphysics investigating the nature of being and existence. You make a series of allegations regarding the ethics of ‘OOO’ – we create artificial enemies and invest ourselves in academic spectaclization – without providing any rationale for how we supposedly do this. To the first assertion, I think you’d be hard pressed to find any evidence of object-oriented thinkers speaking ill of those who come from other schools of thought and, instead, will repeatedly read (including in this post) about the “monumental” insights gleaned from Continental thought. To the second, I’d argue that the opposite is true: ‘OOO’ developed largely over the Internet, away from the Ivory Tower, and its proponents – especially Levi Bryant – actively engage with anyone who stops by, not just peers and grad students. We may be caught in the “gravity” of academia, at some level, but we do our best to achieve “escape velocity,” to use Marisol Bate’s term.
Your animadversion mirrors another that I heard today: “Object-oriented ontology doesn’t elude the correlationism it critiques, but radicalizes it for all objects, such that the subject-object correlate is fashioned into complete, utter representational inaccessibility, in which reality devolves into not just one experiential vacuum, but an infinite number.” Both that disagreement and your own fail to take into account that ‘OOO’ is a realist ontology, one that rejects, wholesale, the post-Kantian inability to decouple thought and being. To cite your example of the cybernetic network, yes, there is something nonhuman about it. Here’s a list to get you started: Your computer, power cables, routers, IP addresses, hypertext, optical networking technologies, Facebook. While you maintain that these objects are fully human along post-Kantian lines (I assume, unless your keyboard has been talking to you), we maintain that the distinction between objects constructed by humans and those formed by natural processes is irrelevant at an ontologically level, as the ‘being’ of neither kind of object can be completely exhausted by its relations with any other object (for us, the keyboard can ‘speak’ under certain circumstances). Why do you need to assert human dominance over the world, privileging human existence above all others at the most fundamental level?
Debord and Lefevbre are awesome sauce. I find them very useful in my political thought. And? Why shouldn’t I? What object-oriented commitments do you think prevent me from appreciating Debord’s critique of ‘the spectacle’? Maybe you’re put off by Levi’s statement that ideological critique always involves an aspect of intolerance, feeling like this devalues the contributions of critical theorists. That’s not what he meant, in my reading. Instead, he was elucidating the distance between ideological critique and reality that is inhered in the post-Kantian, correlationist predicate of critical theory. No offense, but much of critical theory literally doesn’t deal with everyday reality because it doesn’t accept reality as accessible to humans. Ironically, this is where Lefevbre, coupled with ‘OOO’, becomes a major philosophical player for me. It’s not that ideological critics are saying, “You’re stupid, so I must teach you, fool!” Rather, the notion of ideology assumes a crepuscular character – it’s always veiled, such that people are blinded both to and by it. Okay, cool. Unveiling ideology can set the stage for challenging political policing. I’m all for that. To collapse all interactions into ideology, however, is problematic, in that a) ideology is itself, or at the very least productive of, objecthood, and b) reality exists in excess of any individual or ideological thoughtworld, as do relations. Objects don’t cease to exist simply because a given form of ideology is exposed or overturned. Relations may change, but what then? In other words, ideological critique doesn’t necessitate political action because action transpires at the level of real objects and real relations, which deal with real circumstances in real environments. Even if the rice farmer establishes a participatory economic system with no master, she still has to feed her child. So, you have to fill in the missing link, to be cliche about it. ‘OOO’ does that, or tries to.
As for your incessant, almost ad hominem, attack on the use of human constructs, I don’t see how that applies. We tweet and blog, therefore that undermines our ideas? No, our blogging is merely one way of relating with the objects engaged in the act, objects that, in my view, act concurrently with our usage. This comes up over and over again, this accusation of quasi-nihilism. Just because we flatten ontological inquiry to include all objects doesn’t mean we stop relating to those objects. I do not see myself as ontologically more significant than the chair in which I sit, as my sitting doesn’t exhaust the potential, or “powers,” of the chair. Yet, I still sit in the chair. This is doable, believe it or not. If you want to make normative judgements from this point of view, rock out. Before you do, though, please explain why you’re more ‘real’ than climate change, which is what your tract implies.
Also, I urge you to read Marisol Bate’s comment for an example of how to disagree without sounding pejorative.
September 20, 2011 at 1:05 pm
Hi Marisol,
I can see how that concern might arise, but I think this line of criticism misses three points: First, the environment is not a fixed container but is an assemblage composed of heterogeneous elements that are constantly changing. Nothing entails that these regimes of attraction must be fixed, though there are extreme examples like Easter Island where cutting down all the trees, the rats that ate the seeds, and the consumption of all the birds made escape nearly impossible. Second, and more importantly, we must not forget that we too are things and have agency. In other words, the point isn’t that people can’t do anything because of material circumstances, but that in many instances ideology critique isn’t the appropriate way of producing change. Rather, there are other instances where changing material arrangements can contribute to producing that change. It’s very difficult for me to get to Chicago if roads, trains, and planes don’t exist. This is not ideological, but it does sort people in particular ways (those of us here and those of us in Chicago). What changes in material arrangements can we introduce through our agency to do change these circumstances? Finally third, signifiers are things too and as such have their own gravity. Take the Black Nationalist movement. Black identity as conceived by the Black Nationalist movement does not pre-existent the formation of these signifiers, but comes into existence with these signifiers. Before that you have a bunch of heterogeneous people disconnected from one another and limited by the stickyness of the world. However, the formation of this signifying constellation can diminish the stickyness of the world by creating communities and collectives that provide alternatives for people and allow them to begin contesting current arrangements. This seems to parallel your remarks about Native Hawaii. Off to teach!
September 20, 2011 at 9:26 pm
September 21, 2011 at 1:28 am
Thanks! It’s easy to forget that signifiers are objects, too, when I’m so used to thinking of them from the vantage point of the very ideological critique you’re discussing. I guess I’m a little confused about how an identity doesn’t pre-exist the signifying objects (I’m using that phrase to keep my thoughts straight), but habits pre-exist their formalization into laws. The habits that comprise an identity do pre-exist the systematization of an identity, but the identity only comes into existence through the formalization of signifiers, so that identity is always constrained to signifying objects…? People opposed lactification before the Black Nationalist movement (habit), but establishment of the movement and its signifiers allowed for visibility to occur…I guess I’m getting hung up on the concept of identity here, since it would seem that an object-oriented politics would disavow traditional “identity politics,” which eschews difference in favor of pre-determined collectivities. And now that I consider it, I suppose that brings me into agreement with you, since you’re saying, in some sense, the same thing Kris said about ideological critique always distancing itself from material conditions. It’s a total escape, in that changing one’s relation to a signifier is also a change in one’s material environment because signifiers are every bit as objectal as cats and tables. So, I, as a Native Hawaiian, can argue against a tourist ideology to open space for material changes, but there’s nothing wrong with flipping the equation and arguing for material changes first, like less militarized space in the islands or fewer hula caricatures, since those objects have a gravity that trap people – and other objects – in relations that effectively marginalize indigenous relations. Am I even close to getting it?
Sorry, I know my comments are uber-basic and irksome. I feel badly for my instructors.
September 21, 2011 at 3:01 am
Marisol,
That’s pretty much on mark. I’m not opposed to either “identity politics” or ideology critique. For me it’s a question of expanding our tool boxes, not of limiting them. As for identities of groups not pre-existing signifiers the idea is that people can be grouped in any number of ways: ice cream preferences, sexual kinks, religious affiliations, the street they live on, taste in cars, etc, etc, etc. Just because people share the same skin color or come from the same place it doesn’t follow that they have a shared identity. Consider, for example, the racial tensions in Rwanda between people of the same color. For an identity to exist, something additional must take place: a signifier or act of naming. At this point, a new object emerges that can begin to act on the world around it. I am not at all suggesting that this is a negative thing or something to be avoided. It can often he an extremely potent force that renders new possibilities available to those that identify with the signifier. For example, the naming of the “proletariat” was an extremely potent event during the last century. Clearly workers laboring under similar conditions pre-existed this signifier, but it didn’t follow from this that they had a shared identity or common cause. Indeed, they were pitched against one another in competition for limited jobs, thereby driving wages down as one worker would take a lower wage than another worker for the same job so as to get that job. The signifier “proletariat” doesn’t simply signify “worker” or “wage-earner”, but named a political subject organized around solidarity, common cause, justice, etc. It became a unifying point that brought a new kind of collective entity into existence. Absent these signifying points political movements often can’t get off the ground at all as they generate no collective agential object. It sounds like you’re talking about something similar with Hawaiian struggles.
September 21, 2011 at 3:17 am
Where does human practice fit into how we get caught up in the stickiness of things? I mean, rice cultivation as a kind of institution and suite of practices is a human construct that took time and choices motivated by need, opportunity and values to get to the point it sounds like you take for granted in your example.The rice plant itself underwent significant changes (along with the human cultivators) before we get to that point too. People forced themselves and those nonhuman actors into certain arrangements before those arrangements could decidedly exert the gravity you speak of and which I take very seriously. I’m not sympathetic to the snarky tone of svd_duras, but I think he has a point (maybe not the one he intends) in suggesting (and this is now my interpretation) rice as a nonhuman participant in society is still a kind of human construct.
September 21, 2011 at 3:26 am
Joe,
Those humans are as much constructed by rice as the rice is constructed by humans. I’m not sure where you see me ignoring human practice and all of this. I do, after all, point to labor and cultivation of rice. That doesn’t change the fact that certain constraints emerge as a result of these assemblages. The Irish cultivated a single species of potatos. This mode of cultivation made them dependent on them as their primary source of food (alternatives were foreclosed). This is what rendered them open to the potato famine when the blight hit. People seem to perpetually forget that humans are things too. It’s not a question of objects determining humans where humans are something other than objects. It’s a question of assemblages of objects that include humans as one type of object among others.
September 21, 2011 at 5:05 am
I didn’t say you ignored human practice. I just asked when and how it comes into play as part of how such an assemblage achieves “stickiness”. The invitation to collective farming only comes after generations of people returning to re-engage and hone undeveloped cultivation practices, being encouraged by successful varieties of rice and discouraged by less successful ones, as well as neglecting other ways of getting food to the point where they are not going to give a ready way out of the rice-oriented arrangement. I’m interested in how what you’re saying bears on that initial, probably protracted condition when and where contact between actors isn’t that sticky.
September 21, 2011 at 5:47 am
Joe,
That’s really not the issue this post is dealing with. Rice is evoked as an example to illustrate a set of circumstances where a form of life is deeply locked into reigning material conditions. If you don’t like this particular example we can talk about the bubonic plague or the period on Easter Island once the trees had all been cut down. What’s important here is to see how material circumstances can become sticky and how what holds people in place is not always or even predominantly a madder of ideology or deceptive systems of representation. The point here is not that people have no options in such circumstances. They are, after all, themselves agents. The point is that perhaps debumking ideology isn’t always the best way of changing things. Rather, sometimes it’s more effective to begin building material alternatives that free people from this stickiness. If you want a theory of how patterns or forms of life emerge, I refer you to Marx or Braudel or DeLanda. Again, that’s not really the issue in this discussion and is not something that can be responded to in a blog comment.
September 21, 2011 at 8:09 am
The key, for me, is to remember that the gravity of objects is mutual or multilateral. Rice exerts gravity in a certain ‘environment’ (I’m using that term loosely), just as other objects, humans included, exert their own gravity. Assemblage is repeated like a mantra in this line of thinking. To say that the conditions of possibility giving rise to a rice culture necessitate generations of anthropological honing is problematic in that it anthropocentrizes the rice culture, privileging the gravity of humans above all other objects. Situating objects upon an immanent plane, instead, radicalizes Connolly’s agonistic pluralism by multiplying factions to allow for all forms of agency, human and nonhuman, thereby opening the political field to new forms of differentiation and, thus, contestation.
Okay, my turn to ask a question: Do temporally discontinuous objects exert a striated gravitational pull, or does the topological consistency of such objects imply a contiguous gravitation? To be a bit reductionist for a second, a class (your previous onto-cartographical example) can meet once or twice a week, but many of the relations and acts comprising or produced by a class (for example, involving scholarship) bridge the temporal gaps. Does the temporal continuity impact gravitational force?
September 21, 2011 at 4:49 pm
If rice encourages hierarchy just as much as economic relations, what prevents us from lapsing into bourgeois reformism? If malarial mosquitoes are just as privileged as third world debt or the international division of labor, why not forget the IMF and just send more nets?
September 21, 2011 at 4:55 pm
Jordan,
It seems that you’re elaborating quite a non sequitor here. Paraphrasing you with a twist, “if economic relations encourage hierarchy as much as rice, what prevents us from lapsing into bourgeois reformism?” Clearly the recognition that economic relations encourage hierarchy doesn’t necessitate bourgeois reformism. Why would recognizing that rice encourages hierarchy be any different? It’s curious sort of Marxism that fails to recognize material conditions. Marx certainly does.
September 21, 2011 at 5:40 pm
Thank you for responding! I probably should have expanded a bit more. My point is not that your ontology necessitates bourgeois reformism but that it leaves the door open. I agree that material conditions are important, and even that rice is just as “real” as feudalism, but we can easily change rice while preserving exploitation. The Green revolution did just that: agriculture that requires less labor but, crucially, more capital. The imaginary bourgeois reformist would be happy to hear that better agricultural practices or different crops can strike a blow against hierarchy and immiseration because those can be carried out without any (immediate) redistribution of wealth or power. To quote Jodi Dean: “Goldman Sachs doesn’t care if you raise chickens.” That is not to say that we should completely abandon local interventions or reforms, but that they often provide an alibi for maintaining the status quo. So, to put this another way, how does your ontology demand radical political and economic change? Or does it?
September 21, 2011 at 5:55 pm
Jordon,
Is there any political framework, including Marx’s, that doesn’t leave the door open to bourgeois reformism? As for ontologies, they don’t demand anything one way or another politically because not all being is about politics. As for my political theory, yes, it does demand radical political, economic, and ecological change.
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