In response to a discussion unfolding in an earlier post, the always thoughtful Dan remarks:
Levi, you write: “Invariably I find some variant of the hylomorphic assumption in every argument against materialism. It’s always the same old saw: matter is un-form-matted or unformatted and thereby in need of form.” I am not even sure I share the terms of this discussion, so it’s hard to think that I will fall into this invariance even though I do not share all your convictions about ontics. “Form” is used here as if it had clarity and certainly the philosophical tradition seems largely in this mode where the arguments become — as here — about its existence or not or the relations between supposed “things” and forms. Since this site valorizes science, it might be worth mentioned that there are — depending on whom you ask — 3, 4, or 5 states of matter (solid, liquid, gas, plasma, helium 2/Einstein/Bose condensate) and only one — a very unlikely one — corresponds to what individuals usually refer to under form. Indeed, some physicist comedians see the solid as just slow liquid. I am NOT contending — before I get help — that form is unavailable in the non-solid BUT that its attributes are more complex, dynamic, and open than most of the models that haunt philosophy. Further, I have followed to some degree your versions of more flexible form notions though they seem to share an intrinsic commitment to abiding integrity/coherence I see as imposed. If — as I believe — form “in nature” is transitional and interactive, permeable and unstable, and these are its usual characteristics, then the emphasis on a choice between form and formlessness is unhelpful.
Nicely put. I agree with all of this save the suggestion that I valorize science. I take science seriously and give it a place as something other than mere social construction. That’s different than privileging it or valorizing it. An interesting moment occurred with the final keynote speaker, Roland Breeur, in Holland on Thursday. He was giving a talk on Sartre, Bergson, and Flaubert on the phenomenon of stupidity. His thesis was that stupidity occurs when the living becomes material and mechanical. For example a cruise ship crashes overseas and the police officer won’t let anyone step on land until they show their passports. Clearly a law has become mechanical in rigid here in a way that is both inappropriate to the circumstances and that is stupid. At the end of his talk I objected to his use of the term materiality to describe this phenomenon. I claimed that it was perfectly appropriate to refer to this way of behaving as mechanism, but that mechanism and matter are not the same thing. In other words, he was working with a 17th century of matter that has been thoroughly abandoned in the last few hundred years as a result of findings in quantum mechanics, complexity theory, chaos theory, and dynamic systems theory. What we have seen, by contrast, in these last hundred years is the way in which matter is both dynamic and creativity (the emergence of life being the most notable example, but there being many other examples besides, viz. chemical clocks). He rather gruffly responded to me that he’s a philosopher and that as a philosopher he is working with a philosophical concept of matter. I asked him whether he believed life evolved from matter and he said yes, but never consciousness because consciousness, following Sartre, is “The Nothing”. I’m not sure what this could possibly mean, nor why I should embrace this idea of The Nothing (though I concede that I need to give an account of it).
At any rate, it seems to me that saying that one can simply ignore these developments in our understanding of matter because “one is doing philosophy” is intellectually dishonest. As a Portuguese architect– Francisco Vasconcelos –put it to me afterwards, this response was a a bit like claiming one can happily continue claiming that the world is flat or that the Earth is at the center of the universe after Copernicus. The point is not that science should trump philosophy, nor that science can replace philosophy. The point is that we can’t simply ignore scientific findings, continuing on as we did before, pleading that we’re working with a “philosophical concept of x”, rather than a scientific one. If science shows us that that philosophical concept of x was thoroughly mistaken, then this calls for us to revise our philosophical concepts. This, I think, is one of the strongest insights of Badiou. Badiou forcefully argues that truths never come from philosophy, but rather always come from elsewhere in other fields of practice and thought: science, art, love, and politics. The task of philosophy is to think these truths and the compossibility of truths. While I don’t follow Badiou completely in this thesis– I think philosophy has its own domain of concept creation following Deleuze –I do think philosophy always unfolds in dialogue with its others. Why continue to treat the concept of matter in terms of passivity, inertia, and brute mechanism when we live in an age that has discovered that it is anything but these things? If the task of philosophy is to think the present and the new truths that have appeared in the present, why not completely abandon this tradition of thinking matter that has been thoroughly refuted? Mechanism and inertia exist, to be sure, but they are the lowest degrees of matter; they are matter in its least energetic and creative state.
Larval Subjects . 
April 22, 2012 at 4:34 am
Clearly a law has become mechanical in rigid here in a way that is both inappropriate to the circumstances and that is stupid. At the end of his talk I objected to his use of the term materiality to describe this phenomenon. I claimed that it was perfectly appropriate to refer to this way of behaving as mechanism, but that mechanism and matter are not the same thing. In other words, he was working with a 17th century of matter that has been thoroughly abandoned in the last few hundred years
You are SURPRISED hearing this in the world capital of Calvinism, where the violent split between body and soul cuts right down to the goddamn DIKES and the whole country has chronic anal constipation syndrome!!!
Stupid cat!!!
April 24, 2012 at 2:54 pm
I am sorry I have been ill or might have responded to your post earlier. I was flattered that you characterize me as thoughtful but worry that I appear in a post about flat world fans. IAC, the central point you make is something like philosophers must account for or respond to developments in science, and I have no problem with this assertion. However, the reason I said you valorize science is that you import into your discussions lendings from science without — for my taste — enough circumspection as to their context sensitivity: that is they are not transportable into other purposes without enough reaccounting that qualifies their applicability. This “transportation cost” is — I think — often so high that the import may not be worth the attempt. However, recontextualization without this tarfff may be unfair as it gives science in a different context a power without qualification it may not deserve. I do not think you, Levi, always pay the fee and my suspicion- sometimes — is that this bill could not be paid. That is what i meant by “valorization.” I am also less a fan of Badiou than you or some others in OOO seem to be – though I am in awe of him — for reasons not unrelated. Thus, for instance, I did not think his reading of Deleuze – in The Clamour was fully fair. Thanks for the response.
April 24, 2012 at 4:09 pm
dan,
I think you need to be more specific here as your charge is completely vague. It’s impossible to respond unless you point to specific instances. In the absence of such specificity your remarks come across as a mere immune system response, rejecting something a priori and out of hand without providing any concrete reasons or instances. Moreover, I simply don’t think that the claims I make require the sort of “transportation cost” you seem to believe they do. The claim that matter is no longer understood mechanically is well-established, commonplace, and a settled matter. I don’t need to go into all the details of quantum mechanics, complexity theory, evolutionary theory, etc., to establish that point. The fact that we as philosophers continue to characterize matter as without creativity and dynamism reflects our disciplinary provincialism and ignorance and is the equivalent of criticizing medicine for being based on a theory of the humors or suggesting that mind/body interaction resides in the pineal gland.
April 24, 2012 at 4:16 pm
Additionally, the Nietzschean in me wants to say that remarks such as these are symptomatic of the trend of all philosophy towards idealism or the desire to master and determine the real through thought. One of the things, I think, that makes philosophers so uncomfortable with science– especially in the Continental tradition –is that it categorically shows that the real cannot be determined in advance through thought, whether that determination of the real be through phenomenological intuition, textual analysis (the world as a text), Hegelian dialectic, etc. Science again and again undermines the philosophical dream of being a little dictator of being by showing how we must go to the things themselves for them to show themselves.
April 24, 2012 at 10:50 pm
Levi, Your responses strike me as odd or tendentious relative to what I attempted to place in the subjunctive and suggest was only preliminary. Still, I will try in regard to specificity to address your repeated use of the speed of light in a way I find problematic. Second, I have always thought you were the one closer to thinking that thinking things has much to do with things themselves. So to me, this charge feels ironic. I am fascinated to find myself a symptom of all philosophy especially since my remarks on your site have always been in the opposite direction. Where in my remarks here do I betray a sense that I bring “mastery”? FurtherI find it odd that this remark seems to take place in a dualist frame thought/real that I did not think was yours or mine, but perhaps you employ it fictionally? I am not – BTW – uncomfortable with science though I am sometimes horrified by scientific hubris.
April 24, 2012 at 11:09 pm
Dan,
You don’t speak of any specific use of science where I am failing to do the pass work, you just make vague gestures. As for the speed of light, this is a stable of all information theory and what can and cannot be transmitted. This is a simple fact of the world as to the upper threshold of causal relations. It’s not somehow sloppy to point that out or remind ourselves of that. As for idealism, I think there’s a tendency in philosophy to try to transform everything into ideas or pure concepts out of a will to mastery. This can be seen as early as Parmenides with his claim that being and thought are identical, but also finds expression in Hegel, Husserl’s way of talking about intentionality, Badiou’s deployment of mathematics, etc. I see this as a will to mastery or control that what have the world in advance (insofar as thought is what is given to us). Again and again you will see philosophers and theorists privilege the ideational element over material elements. For example, we’ll talk about society is held together by ideologies, beliefs, and norms, ignoring the role played by rivers, roads, and telephone poles. Or we’ll talk about scientific paradigms and not lab equipment and the engineering that goes into a super collider. I think there are a couple reasons for this. First, every discipline tends to take what it deals with as what as most real and important. Rhetoricians will take rhetoric as foundational, physicists particles, etc. Philosophers work with ideas and therefore tend to take ideas as the real. Second, I think there’s a sociological reason. We don’t tend to work with material things but texts and ideas, and therefore come to see those as the fabric of reality. We see this trend start as early as Plato in the Meno where he literally derides and mocks the servant (the handiworker) treating the liberated proposition and form as the most real and important. This idealist tendency in philosophy generates a hostility to everything anterior to thought that might surprise and disrupt conceptuality: science, technology, engineering, cooking, gardening, etc. All of these are cases where thought can’t determine reality in advance but must work with the surprising singularities of matter. Matter here is a full blown interlocutor. I very much see this tendency and hostility very much in your remarks. This is not a dualism for I am not suggesting that thought is a distinct substance. Thought is material as well. But it doesn’t follow from this that other material beings don’t disrupt the a prior is that we thought presided in our concepts and intentionality.
April 25, 2012 at 8:56 pm
Thank you for this generous response. It seems odd that I agree with almost everything you say and yet you sum up by saying you find in me this tendency and hostility. I cannot say what I do without intention or conviction but I would say that such a stance is opposite that which I think I hold. I sometimes think you mistake me but that may well be my failure to express myself better. It always makes me seriously unhappy when I think I have irritated you and/or when I think you are upset with a position I do not hold — or at least do not think I hold. If fact, I have always tended to think that you are more idealistic and platonic than I am. I do not however think that is what you think about yourself but it is what I believe about your positions. That too is very vague and I am reluctant to try to say at greater length as this seems not the place but I will say a little though a little is likely to be further muddled and likely again to draw your charge that I am not being specific enough. Let me play off your statements — I hope without distortion — so we have a shared ground. You say “As for idealism, I think there’s a tendency in philosophy to try to transform everything into ideas or pure concepts out of a will to mastery.” In another response to me you say something like “Of couse, language and thought are material too.” Between these two some tension appears which is not “yours” but has something to do with how the conversation might be difficult. If everything is material (I think you believe this But IAC I do) then ideas and concepts are too. So to be an idealist cannot be “unreal.” I bother with this not because i think it should need explicit statement but because I would rather try to mark or find where we part in the string that makes it possible for you see me in a way unlike how I see myself (this may be pointless to you though). This ubiquity of materiality does not however disable you from using in your condemnation the vocabularies of thought and concept (nor am I saying should it). However, one might wonder more pointedly what is going on when in an all material world we can with either positive or negative connotaion talk about “idealism.” What and how is happening? There are many ways to go but you have touched on the trace before so that seems helpful. In Derrida’s trace, it is not just that thought of/about the sign is not of its material nature but that it cannot be since to “think” the sign in its semiological structure must be to forgoe it as extension. Thus the problem of idealism may be (I know this too is way too fast) is the problem of signs or intelligibility. Indeed, Derrida’s mapping of this problematic is itself a reduction of reduction as the substitution at both the semiological and material ends is not one to one nor is it coordinate. In part, I think this is what Deleuze is dealing with in the LoS. However, this problematic is not undone by shifting the scene of our traces. ”
For example, we’ll talk about society is held together by ideologies, beliefs, and norms, ignoring the role played by rivers, roads, and telephone poles. Or we’ll talk about scientific paradigms and not lab equipment and the engineering that goes into a super collider.” Discussions of and within science are no less subject to the reductionism — the idealism — of the default modalities of representation. You, or Latour or Spengers can try to emliorate this problematic by linking more closely to “historical” “scientific” or “factually verified” modalities. However, not only is this subject — and in part by the very history of those cures — to an irony but even those modes themselves in their various practices are filled with “idealistic” displacements. Such notice — in itself — may seem trivial, unhelpful, evasive, or at odds with the “common sense” of the effectivity of science anyway. Most normals at this point either gesture off (as Dickinson puts it “AS housewives do a fly”) or “point” — that is narrate — the progressive, that concept which with equality forms the axiomatic set of the modern. Still, one (I) can hold this thought and derive from it some consequences and qualifications that are not necessarilly trival. Most of these do not belong here but as you are concerned with ecology and in constant contact with Morton, it might be worth noting that the scientific hybridization of thought and extension needs necessarily function by reduction into traces of experimentation and that that modality has led in 200 years to the destruction we allnow must see. In short, one might glean from this problem the opposite of the master tendency you seem to see in me, that is an atheist and active humility and a call to greater cognition of the immediate, of the material feedback of the at hand, and of then of an attentiveness to the very reduction extaent in any act of sense. This then might also have consequences in regard to one’s sense of mereology, the place of the semiotic, the impossibility of an epistemic/ontological separation, etc, But I am out of time. Forgive my additional fuzzy blathering.
April 25, 2012 at 9:29 pm
Dan,
As I see it, the problem with idealism is the way in which it covers over so many other things, rendering them invisible. If concepts are material (which I believe they are), this doesn’t prevent them from nonetheless obscuring all sorts of things. In other words, the materiality of intentionality and concepts and the way in which these things effectively function in practices and discourses are two distinct issues.
One of the things I’m trying to draw attention to in my work is the role played by nonhuman things (living and nonliving, “natural” and technology” in organizing relations. The relations of concern here are, of course, relations of humans to the world, but also of humans to humans. Philosophy and theory has spent a good deal of time discussing how norms, laws, ideologies, beliefs, values, and so on organize our social world, but with the exception of a few theoretical orientations there’s a huge tendency to overlook the way in which nonhumans structure our relations to each other and the world. A while back I wrote a post on this issue entitled “The Gravity of Things”:
https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2011/09/19/the-gravity-of-things/
My idea is that all things analogically have a sort of gravity. That is, things bend the space of relations. They play a role in what is related to what, how and when we are related to each other, what forms societies take, etc. For example, rice is an extremely hardy grain that is labor intensive to plant and harvest but from which we can get two to three harvests a year. These features of rice are going to play a role– which is different than saying determine –in the form societies whose primary source of food is rice. Rice will favor collective work due to the labor intensiveness of planting and harvesting it. It will encourage social stratification as people will be needed to organize the farmers and keep track of the grain reserves. Because of the time intensiveness of rice, development in other areas of life will become difficult for those segments of the population that labor in the rice field. As you hopefully see, rice exercises a sort of gravity and is onto-genetic of particular types of social relations. Examples could be multiplied endlessly.
One of the reasons I’m so insistent on the time of relation is because the mediums through which people relate (speech, writing, internet, television, phone, telegram, etc) will themselves exercise a tremendous gravity with respect to what form societies can take. For example, we find far more cultural diversity among so-called “primitive” oral cultures because of geographical isolation and the way in which oral messages undergo random variation in passing from person to person making it difficult for the society to maintain its organization or stave off entropy when it reaches a particular size. There are topological limitations here as to what form oral societies can take. Similarly, without satellite technology and internet economy as global economy wouldn’t be possible today. These are all issues of time, the time it takes for two things to interact or relate, how why our social relations come to be organized as they do.
So what’s the point of all this? The point is that we spend a lot of time saying that societies are held together because of such and such beliefs, ideologies, laws, identifications, etc. We then think that if we were to simply debunk these ideologies and beliefs and undermine these identifications we would change things. We’re then constantly surprised when we’ve done all that work and things remain as they were before. While it is certainly true that these things contribute to forming these social relations, what if the gravity of nonhuman things plays every bit as significant a role? What if whether or not your food system is organized around cows and corn plays a decisive role in the way in which urban and surburban environments are formed and continue? What if a system dependent on fiber optic cables locks us into particular modes of relating and living like a spiders web? If this is the case, then it’s not enough to simply debunk. We have to go to the world and change material arrangements because of the gravity they produce. But this means that we have to get out of our books, armchair, and reflections and learn how situations are concretely put together or organized… What’s there? How are the things that are there related to one another? What is the time of relay and interaction between these things? What gravity do these networks exercise? These are things that can’t be done through conceptual analysis, a priori analysis, or phenomenological analysis. We have to go to the world for them. Philosophers as a rule don’t like that.
April 26, 2012 at 12:04 am
I do not wish to overstay whatever welcome I have left specially since I again agree with most of this. Further I think these are good questions. Nonetheless, I feel some tension in your ending. You say “These are things that can’t be done through conceptual analysis, a priori analysis, or phenomenological analysis. We have to go to the world for them. Philosophers as a rule don’t like that.” The “with” here I translate as “alone” or “solely,” but I find it hard to think you mean “in their absence” and — if they must be at hand — what is their “weight”? Further, this “going to the world” seems odd as a general statement as there is no where the world is not. Certainly the world is not the same in every location but I would not say it less real here or there. So then, the site preference must reflect a protocol and/or material practice “there” that makes the real more available? Where is that? Are there neutral meta-axioms for such a determination? To take a pressing example, is science innocent of ontological deformation in its practices? I think not. The abstraction and mastery that you say marks most philosophy has its versions in science: for instance, in purification in production meant to align with extant commitments in idealization and reduction of ontic mapping. Some of this might better appear “at home.” The diagrammatic (like that exploded car) tendency of philosophy and science is an indulgence of those who are impowered to realize their positions but the poor — the “feminine” — must give right of first refusal to the matrix of complexity that they find between concept and execution and that in every instance. Bricolage is not conceptual but executive in light of each given complexity: each is not standardized like the metrics of SI and no place/time has priority over others except for an extant purpose that preceded it imperfectly. Each time/location has its diversity and each thus makes our methods anachronistic and out of place.
Thanks for talking to me.
April 26, 2012 at 12:31 am
Dan,
But I don’t disagree with any of this! As I make quite clear in the introduction to The Democracy of Objects, I see beliefs, norms, ideologies, signifiers, concepts, etc., as real actors in the world. My aim is not to exclude these things, but to broaden the field of what can be analyzed. I don’t think science is free of power and ideology and agree with the critiques of the science studies critiques. But I do not feel that is grounds for the rejection of the entities discovered by the sciences (though sometimes it is). For me all of these things are bound up in a mesh. As I argue in that introduction, both the humanities and the sciences are guilty of reductions. The humanities reduce things to the signifier, power, concepts, norms, etc., effacing the “voice” of the nonhumans and treating them as if they were mere carriers of human meanings and intentions. The sciences too often reduce things to neurons and atoms and the like. I want a third way.
With that said, don’t you feel that in our field, Continental theory, we’ve had plenty of the humanist analysis of power, ideologies, signifiers, etc.? Isn’t it time to open up our discourse a bit, to temporarily suspend hermeneutic analysis, power analysis, ideological analysis, the analysis of the signifier and so on so as to explore the power or gravity that the nonhumans exert? Don’t you think that we might be missing a huge part of the equation here and that it might be helpful and beneficial– especially in this age so dominated by technology and in the midst of climate crisis –to open up this inhuman world and see what it contributes to our social assemblages? As a final note, I think you should note that in my post on phallusophy to which you responded, I was doing a more traditional kind of Continental ideological/structural analysis. I don’t simply talk about things like the speed of light or evolutionary biology, but range over these more traditional cultural issues as well.