With too many talks to give in June and July, it’s likely that my postings here will be less frequent for the next few weeks. Yet having finished the initial draft of my “Black Ecology” article for Jeffrey Cohen’s Prismatic Ecologies collection, I’ve found myself reflecting a lot on “nature” of late. Just as I consider myself a materialist (of a particular sort), I also consider myself a naturalist. Now, as is often the case, I’m often surprised to find that I use words differently than others. When I evoke the term “materialism”, for example, I mean that I’m committed to the thesis that there is only matter (whatever that might turn out to be), interactions, and void. For me materialism just means that there are no incorporeal entities, nor any incorporeal interactions. If an entity exists, then for me it must be material. If there’s an interaction, then there must be some sort of material connection between the two entities. This leaves completely unspecified what kind of entities exist. All it says is that if an entity exists it will have the common ontological feature of being material as is the case with all other entities.
I was thus surprised to discover that others take the term “materialism” in a very different way. It seems that the more common usage of the term– in the humanities and social sciences, anyway –entail reductionism. To be a materialist is to be a reductionist. Thus, for example, if you’re a materialist this means that you would ignore things like systems of signification or meaning, instead reducing these things to neuronal events and perhaps genes. Well that’s certainly not a position I endorse, and the reason that I don’t endorse it is because I think it’s the wrong level of explanation. I think it’s the wrong level of explanation because I don’t believe that signifiers– for example –are restricted to single brains, but that they are transpersonal entities defined by their relations to other signifiers and that can’t be reduced to any particular brain. While signifiers can’t exist with brains (or computers) of some sort, they are social entities (meaning that can’t be restricted to any particular individual). All I’m committed to is the thesis that if signifiers exist– and I certainly believe they do –they are material entities. This is entirely different than claiming that they can be reduced to neurons or genes. In other words, my materialism is firmly wedded to a theory of emergence. Discussions like materialism discussion are one of the reasons I blog. In discussing things with others I learn a lot and discover things and ways of thinking that would have never occurred to me in the solitude of my study.
After the materialism discussion, however, I find myself a little more cautious. Naturalism seems obvious to me, but am I using the term in the same way others use it? I don’t know. Minimally, for me, naturalism means that 1) there is nothing outside of nature, 2) that everything is natural, 3) that, therefore, humans are a part of nature and “societies” (or what I prefer to call “hominid ecologies”) are a part of nature, 4) that there are no incorporeal entities (i.e., to be a naturalist is to be a materialist), and 5) that all causes are natural causes (whatever “nature” might turn out to mean). To claim that there are no natural causes is just to say that there’s no magical causation, no supernatural causation, that there’s no causation through mysterious entities like “forms”, and that there’s no action at a distance. For anything that takes place there has to be some sort of physical connection or relation. In this regard, culture is not something outside of or other than nature, but is one more natural formation among others. As Deleuze might put it, “there’s nothing out of field”.
read on!
Nonetheless, I also believe that “nature” must be denatured. If I’m here led to place “nature” in inverted commas, then this is because I believe that there’s a dominant concept of nature in the humanities, social sciences, and popular culture that reflects nothing of the true nature of nature. In other words, by placing “nature” in inverted commas, I am trying to suspend that concept of nature. In other words, I am trying to suspend a particular way in which the concept of nature has functioned rhetorically and ideologically throughout Western history.
Before getting to this, there are a couple of things worth noting about my inverted commas. For those who are about to denounce the thesis that “everything is natural” on the grounds that such a thesis is essentialist or reductionist, I would invite you to pause and reflect on what I’ve just said about inverted commas, rhetoric, and my use of the logical functive “all” or “everything”. In making a point about inverted commas, I’m acknowledging the reality of how signifiers function in hominid ecologies. I am saying that concepts, ideas, signifiers, and ideologies are real entities and actors in the world. They circulate throughout the world, they do things, they influence people, they influence thought. So the first point is that I cannot be committed to the thesis that the rhetorician, the critical theorist, and the critic of ideology should reduce these things to discussions of neurons and genes. If such a reduction is what immediately comes to your mind when you hear the word “naturalism”, that’s your problem, not mine. I’m committed to the thesis that signifying complexes and ideologies are every bit as much real and material things as neurons and genes. You’re the one who hasn’t made the leap to seeing these as natural, real, material beings– and I realize my tone sounds hostile here, but I’ve encountered these unconscious assumptions so often that I have to underline them –not me. Second, in saying that everything is natural, I’m including all the formations of “culture”, along with their historical and contingent nature. As Latour has so compellingly argued, we like to divide culture and nature and treat the natural world as the domain of essence and causality, while we treat the cultural world as the domain of freedom, history, and contingency. Birds, we say, are “predetermined” to build nests, humans invent ways of building buildings. Birds have no history. Humans, because they invent, have history. But Darwin blew this entire thesis out of the water. What Darwin demonstrated is that species are historical and contingent, that they could have been otherwise under other conditions. After Darwin we just can’t sort the world in this way anymore.
What we need to see, I think, is that nature is a lot more like culture than we thought (it is inventive, contingent, and historical), and that culture is a lot more natural than we thought (it requires all sorts of material connections and is a physical, material thing). And it is here where I get to the point that we must “denature nature”. We find ourselves confronted with a paradox with the concept of nature. On the one hand, the concept of nature– especially during the Modernist period –was a potent signifier promoting emancipation. It was the concept of nature that allowed us to fight superstition and the despotic grip of ecclesiastical authority. This wasn’t just because– as thinkers like the blessed Lucretius, but also the saintly Spinoza argued –the concept of nature allowed us to see that there was no divine and moral dimension to natural disasters like hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions, but because political power was dependent on a particular supernatural concept of existence. Kings and Popes were to subjects as God is to creatures, Fathers were to women and children, as God is to his subjects. Patriarchy was a fractal pattern inscribed in both the metaphysics of the time period– we call it “ontotheology” today –and at every level of the political structure. At every level of the political structure there was inscribed a patriarch– whether God over creatures, King over subjects, or father and husband over wife and children –that presided over everyone else. It was naturalism and materialism– not Christianity as so many American reactionaries would like to claim –that allowed this structure to be contested. Rather than seeing this structure as a part of “the great chain of being” where everyone has a divinely decreed place in “the order of things”– an ontological place such that it is possible, as Hamlet said, for “time to be out of joint” because someone has violated this ontology –the secularists, atheists, naturalists, and materialists showed that social positions are constructed.
They showed that no hominid is essentially different from any other hominid, and they showed that it is society that makes a hominid what it is, not God. The king is the king not because God decrees it, but because his subjects recognize him as a king. The father is a lord over the wife and children not because God decrees it, but because the wife and children recognize him in this position of authority. In other words, what the atheists, secularists, naturalists, and materialist showed was that the power of power always flows from outside the powerful, that it never originates from within the powerful, and therefore that it is a cultural phenomenon, not a divine phenomenon. And if it is cultural, not divine— the opposition here is not culture/nature, but culture/divine –it is historical, contingent, and therefore capable of being otherwise. We, not the Big Poobah fascist dictator God, are the ones calling the shots. And we can do it otherwise, because, above all, the power of the assholes came not from the assholes, but from us. We gave them this power, this power did not originate from them or from God. It was the naturalistic hypothesis– especially in Lucretius and Spinoza –that made such a critique possible, for naturalism demanded that we give an immanent, social explanation for social positions and social formations, refusing all divine or essential prescriptions. And here I can’t help but wonder at the motivations of some of my object-oriented “colleagues” who perpetually fail to see the political significance of religion. I guess when you live in certain places it’s difficult to talk about these issues, lest you lose your job.
But then there was another side to the concept of “nature” (again, inverted commas). No sooner than naturalism became a line of flight, than it was reterritorialized on the powers of oppression. Thinkers like Lucretius and Spinoza had found a way of completely contesting Platonic and Aristotlean concepts of “nature”– that would later be picked up by Heidegger in his Black Forest yammerings about “phusis” –by showing how nature was about inventive and constructive “naturings” that produced ways of being that were contingent, historical, and without divine ordering or decree. Their concept of society and culture was naturalist in that it showed that there was no Cartesian coordinate system, that there was no divine decree, but that was simply the result of contingent natural beings capable of being otherwise. But then in a move that I don’t hesitate to call “Heideggerian”– even though this is somewhat anachronistic –we get a return to “nature” as essence. In other words, where we get the radical contingency of nature in Lucretius and Spinoza where peoples are invented, in the Heideggerian counter-reaction we get the sorting of peoples as expressions of an essence. Heidegger will talk of the “spirit” of a people and make claims that philosophy can only be done in German and Greek, while prior to Heidegger we will get all sorts of thinkers such as Hegel and Kant speaking about how certain people are “more natural” and therefore further from reason and autonomy, while others (the Europeans and men) are truly autonomous.
Here “nature” takes on a very different valence than the one that was defended by Lucretius and Spinoza. “Nature” comes to signify, in contrast to culture, that which originates essentially from within itself. The bird “naturally” builds its nest. Culture comes to signify invention. We then see the colonialist sorting of peoples– one Heidegger won’t hesitate to speak of in his talk of the Volk and the “destinings” of people much later –where certain people are closer to “nature” and therefore less “Dasein”, and others are further from “nature”. The people’s being discovered in the “New World” and “Africas” will be said to be “closer to nature”. They will be the “primatives” who are said to be dominated by their passions, to live among trees and plants, who are incapable of reason, and all the rest. Similar things will be said about women. Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill will have to refute these arguments, showing that women are really rational beings and that their squalor is the result of lack of education and opportunity. The argument form “nature” will then be used to justify patriarchal oppression. The Heideggerian argument will run that if women shouldn’t be allowed to own property, preside over their own bank accounts, or get educated, then this is because they are “like children”, they are too close to nature, they are too dominated by “phusis”, and therefore need a strong man capable of reason and judgment to guide them. Similar arguments will be used in support for slavery and in the oppression of every other minority. It will always be the argument that Heidegger brought to the fore in his discussions of “phusis” and those cultures that are closer to being and those that aren’t, that certain peoples are just too wild to be granted their own self-determination and that they need a strong patriarch to guide them.
If the concept of nature needs to be denatured, then this is because it is contaminated by this concept of “nature”. Again the square quotes. It is this idea of a deterministic essence where certain beings are capable of reason, history, self-creation, self-positing, and the rest that aren’t that needs to be destroyed. To denature nature is to return to a more profound nature of nature… One that recognizes with Love & Rockets that you cannot go against nature because when you do it’s nature too (ergo, heteronormativity is bullshit), and that thoroughly contests these sorts of essentializations.
Larval Subjects . 
May 24, 2012 at 2:23 am
I think you can *claim* to be a materialist and also believe in signifiers and meanings, but the two are inconsistent. For something to be material, it must be ultimately detectable by the senses, either naked or with instruments. Meanings are not so detectable. One can point, as the manifestation of meaning, to the links between various sounds or written symbols and their relation in time and space to various actions, but that relationship is not itself directly perceptible; it’s merely a hypothesis. A hypothesis is an imaginary grouping drawn only in thought.
That imaginary grouping could itself then be construed as a meaning, but its material aspect would need to be explained in the same way, and would encounter similar failure. At no point could you ever go from matter to meaning.
You’re always left with some imaginary grouping element that can exist only in an incorporeal entity — the mind.
May 24, 2012 at 2:31 am
You’re assuming minds are immaterial. I think that’s a tendentious thesis to say the least… A strangely Cartesian one as well. Anyway, show me your ontology. If these aren’t material events and phenomena, what are they? Why do people with strokes and brain damage lose capacities to process meaning? Account for the phenomena.
May 24, 2012 at 2:36 am
Additionally, I’d be intrigued to hear you explain why the computer Deep Blue doesn’t process meanings, possibilities, and learn. Put up.
May 24, 2012 at 3:22 am
“You’re assuming minds are immaterial.”
I’m not assuming it so much as showing it to be the only possibility. If we believe in meanings, we must also disbelieve in materialism, and incorporeal minds follow naturally.
“Anyway, show me your ontology. If these aren’t material events and phenomena, what are they?”
Well, they’re thoughts. Everything is thought, essentially, or, at least, some non-material substance that is capable of giving rise to thought… pure awareness or consciousness, one might call it.
“Why do people with strokes and brain damage lose capacities to process meaning?”
Matter and thus brains are also thoughts — they simply have the specific property of being perceptible. Since the universe is a system of thought, there’s no contradiction in believing there’s a specific subsystem, say, brains, which have specific effects on other thoughts. The mind is dependent on material thoughts, but does not consist exclusively of them.
“I’d be intrigued to hear you explain why the computer Deep Blue doesn’t process meanings, possibilities, and learn.”
Well, that’s easy. Deep Blue is simply pumping electrical signals across circuit boards and into monitors. It is humans who, looking at those monitors, make meaning from their displays, and are satisfied or dissatisfied with the learning. Meaning is a qualitative, conscious experience of significance, and we have no reason to believe circuit boards are capable of it.
The computer is just a complicated medium for human art. It no more processes meanings than a book processes Shakespeare or a piano processes Mozart. These are all just instruments by which humans exploit various physical laws.
May 24, 2012 at 3:29 am
Ive always called your term Hominid ecology the human ecosystem. What you have to say about Darwin and the history of species is very important. Botanical history has been a very important subject to me, and it is a great way to begin to understand the history of genetics and its provenance. From studying Geology, we have a great record of the history of life of earth, even if it is like a series of flashcards we must piece together.
Also important in your post is your address to the formation of power in human society, especially how you link this relationship to a philosophical understanding of “nature”. This has been a longstanding problem in many human societies, and I think about this issue alot and how the philosophical underpinnings can be nudged in the right direction, towards non violence and the reduction of assholes, etc. I am mulling on concepts of ignorance and lack of a collective knowledge of resource management, economically driven issues..
It is great to read your post, taking on these difficult topics, and I am inspired to keep thinking!
May 24, 2012 at 10:22 am
You write,
“Discussions like materialism discussion are one of the reasons I blog. In discussing things with others I learn a lot and discover things and ways of thinking that would have never occurred to me in the solitude of my study.”
Is this in accordance with your notion “that ‘to be’ is to make or produce differences”? Or, no? This is to ask, I would like to know if your desire and subsequent act of challenging your understanding of concepts (like materialism, naturalism,…) is “to be”, “being”, “reality”? If it is, (and I understand I may be misinterpreting you) are there some concepts that are more worthy of pursuit? A hierarchy perhaps?
May 24, 2012 at 12:29 pm
Your line of reasoning can also be used when addressing the problems of homosexuality and other LGBT movements, I guess. The media discourse is (in contemporary Europe, at least) all about unnatural behaviour of “those” people, but they fail to acknowledge that they are making wrong point and wrong connections. This reminds me of A thousand plateus by D&G and plateaux called On the refrain, where they (in my opinion, it was Deleuze, who made most of the claims written there, but at the end of the day it really doesn’t matter who wrote what …) are talking about ethology and birds. Example: “Every morning the Scenopoetes dentirostris, a bird of the Australian rain forests, cuts leaves, makes them fall to the ground, and turns them over so that the paler internal side contrasts with the earth. In this way it constructs a stage for itself like a ready-made; and directly above, on a creeper or branch, while fluffing its feathers beneath its beak to reveal their yellow roots, it sings a complex song made up from its own notes and, at intervals, those of other birds that it imitates; it is a complete artist. This is not a synaesthesia of the flesh but blocs of sensations in the territory—colors, postures, and sounds that sketch out a total work of art. These sonorous blocs are refrains; but there are also refrains of posture and color, and postures and colors are always being introduced into refrains: bowing low, straightening up, dancing in a circle and a line of colors. The whole of the refrain is the being of sensation. Monuments are refrains. In this respect art is continually haunted by the animal.” (DELEUZE AND GUATTARI 1994:184) I agree here with E. Grosz, when she says, that D&G say that these birds are artistic, although they don’t say anything about instincts and free singing. Art has, I guess, its origin in emergence of qualities as an expression of territory. I know this is a bit chaotic post, but what the hell, it will maybe raise some questions! :)
Good day to you all and congratulations on a nice post, Levi!
Andrej
May 24, 2012 at 1:19 pm
Andrej,
Right! That’s exactly where I’m trying to go! A thoroughgoing naturalism just can’t endorse an ontology of natural kinds such as the sort the heteronormative bigots endorse (“homosexuality is unnatural”) because *everything* has natural causes. Nature knows no “kinds” in that way. I think there’s a kind of friction between two entirely different concepts of nature here. On the one hand, there’s the pre-Modern theological/Platonic concept of nature where nature signifies essences or natural kinds that emerge from themselves and where nature is opposed to that which is the result of techne treated as the artificial. On the other hand, there’s the post-Galalian/Darwinian concept of nature where everything is nature and there are no essences of this sort.
May 24, 2012 at 6:10 pm
What most interests me here is the use of generality. I tend to understand by the term “nature” what that individual believes to be the “general state of affairs.” Once nature becomes – as here — something with no outside, one can wonder why use it at all? What function does such a term hold when it seems to exclude nothing? Since such usage (BTW I am not fighting this image of thought just exploring its pragmatics) has no apparent descriptive value, what remains, or me, the vestigial force here is that of generalization itself: the belief in the “natural” status of the general, a status granted by the tacit presumption of the possibility of the generalization of one’s operant belief. While he did not finish or – for my taste – go far enough, Althusser toward the end begins to think a materialism less unconscious of its general, that of the aleatory or the encounter.
May 24, 2012 at 8:15 pm
Dan,
That’s a good observation. For me, part of the aim is to diffuse the concept of nature by generalizing it so much. On the other hand, the term does remain opposed to the supernatural and dualisms, so it’s not fully without content. Further, part of the aim is to show how culture is thoroughly imbricated with the natural world. I see this recognition as a crucial necessity for thinking ecologically.
May 24, 2012 at 9:27 pm
@onceandfuture: “If we believe in meanings, we must also disbelieve in materialism, and incorporeal minds follow naturally.”
…what? I don’t see that it follows, at all.
May 24, 2012 at 11:02 pm
[…] culture is outside of that we might go to, but where culture is beyond this nature. As I’ve recently tried to argue, nature should be seen as a general term for being embodying all things, including the […]
May 25, 2012 at 6:27 am
[…] Bryant/Larval Subjects has a few new post up (HERE and HERE) about the contingently constructed concept of “nature” and about his own […]
May 25, 2012 at 3:56 pm
I’m not sure I feel that the material and the incorporeal are mutually exclusive in the way you present them here. To conflate the body or the embodied with the material, and, further, stretch the term “body” to encompass “anything that exists,” and, I guess, existence itself, as you do in your subsequent post, may introduce some problems in your ontology of emergence.
I have no problem with a staunchly materialist stance. To affirm the materiality of existence, of being and becoming, obviously leads to powerful ways of imagining and discussing the world that correct for the fact that we are all still good Cartesians (whether we like it or not). Materialism is indeed reductive, but that does not necessarily mean that it must lack complexity. Emergence, in the way we are speaking about it here—the ontology of the event or happening, what Simondon calls transduction—is eminently materialist, but it necessarily implies relations between elements that makes systems more than the sum of their parts. It is this “more,” the product or effect of the relation, the dynamics that take place between entities as they encounter, perceive, and interact with one another, upon which hangs the notion of emergence. But these relations—we could also speak in terms of potential, potentiality, power (pouvoir as opposed to puissance for all us Foucauldians, or potentia as opposed to potere for those of us with more Latinate inclinations), or affect—I don’t think it would be precise to call these relations corporeal in the strictest sense. Relations may start with bodies and happen between them, but they are not themselves embodied.
Deleuze and Guattari place a good deal of importance on the incorporeal: the all-important concept, for instance, “is an incorporeal, even though it is incarnated or effectuated in bodies. But, in fact, it is not mixed up with the state of affairs in which it is effectuated. It does not have spatiotemporal coordinates, only intensive ordinates” (What is Philosophy? 21). For Guattari especially, incorporeal entities have a central place in the “ethico-aesthetic paradigm” he calls virtual ecology or ecosophy (see Chaosmosis, esp. ch. 7, “The Ecosophic Object”). He even uses the formula “immaterial entities,” stressing that, for matter to be dynamic, to be contingent and thus subject to history, and not simply an anhistorical substrate for human activity or “society,” there must be the “more” that emerges from material encounters: “Space and time are thus never neutral receptacles; they must be accomplished, engendered by productions of subjectivity involving chants, dances, stories, about ancestors and gods. . . . Here there is no effort bearing on material forms that does not bring forth immaterial entities” (Chaosmosis 103). (Now, we might accuse Guattari of an anthropocentrism here, maybe even (gulp!) humanism, as he is specifically referring to human “cultural” activities, but we must not forget that, specifically in his later work, Guattari’s political and ethical task as a philosopher is to feel out (heavy emphasis on feeling, on the power of aesthesis) new “habitats of wisdom”—thus eco-sophy—from which human beings may respond to ecological crises of all sorts. [I find that there is a proximity to Heidegger in the language of the oikos that is compelling, though that is a whole other topic.])
In any event, without the incorporeal, materialism becomes truly, and perhaps dangerously reductivist, even essentialist. Without the “more” that emerges from the relations between an assemblage of parts, there is no dynamism, no becoming. Put another way, and to refer to the Lucretius you cite in your other post, if there is no void, there can be no movement. And a void, obviously, has no body; it is devoid of matter—it is an effect of, at the same time that it effects (and affects) material relations.
May 25, 2012 at 4:11 pm
Anderson,
I explicitly discuss the void in a variety of places, cf. for example, my recent post entitled “Stacy Alaimo: Porous Bodies and Transcorporeality”. Unlike Deleuze and Guattari, I do reject the existence of incorporeals. For me, in order for two entities to interact there has to be some sort of physical relation between them. Things like signs, for example, always exist in some sort of physical medium (brains, computer data banks, air, bits of paper, etc) and must be materially transmitted. I think D&G get it wrong here and I instead following Lucretius and his account of simulacra (see my earlier post on simulacra). That said, you seem to be missing what I say about emergence when you talk about relations. You seem to equate materialism with reduction to parts, but emergence theses are claims about relations between parts. In other words, it’s the relation between parts that makes the event or entity a distinct entity in its own right. You write:
These remarks suggest that you’re not familiar with my ontology, as I define the being of entities not in terms of their qualities or properties, but in terms of their powers, potentialities, and affects. You can read chapters 3 – 5 of The Democracy of Objects to get a sense of my positions. If you’re going to participate in discussion with someone else you should at least take the time to acquaint yourself with their positions. In this response alone you seem oblivious to me views on the void, power, potential, affect, relation, and emergence and then proceed to lecture me about these things. A little reading is in order.
May 25, 2012 at 5:47 pm
Woah! By no means did I wish to offend, and I wasn’t trying to “lecture” you. I apologize if it cam off in a way that was overly aggressive, but I had an academic disagreement with your terminology and I wanted to enter the conversation and state my position viz. your post. I really do not want to get into a flame war here, but I did not think that preliminary reading was a requirement for commenting on your blog. @onceandfuture, who made the first comment here, was not told to read up on your published work, despite disagreeing with you.
At the end of the day, I understand and agree with the fundamentals of your position; indeed, my whole point was to emphasize the relations between parts and not the parts themselves. I am quite familiar with the ontological position of speculative realism; I’m down with entities being defined by what they can do, their powers, potentialities, and affects, rather than their properties. I’m not quite sure how my comment indicates that I am “oblivious” about this. It seems to me that the majority of my comment simply affirms your position.
Yes, something like a sign or a thought, or what have you, requires a physical substrate and emerge from physical relations. Can a sign, or any sort of communication, at whatever level you choose, even exist without at least two embodied entities relating with one another? I’m with you 100% of the way.
I guess I’m not sure what the stakes are in outright rejecting the notion and the terminology of the incorporeal. Everything that exists is, indiscriminately, a body. Okay. But is the relation between bodies a body too? If it is, what room is left for the void? I’m sorry to be overtly hostile here, but a void is a void. There is no material there. Isn’t that the point—the void separate bodies so that they can relate in the first place? It has to be incorporeal in that sense, no?
May 25, 2012 at 7:44 pm
Anderson,
First, SR is not one unified position but a variety of quite divergent and opposed positions. Whose are you referring to? Second, if you weren’t lecturing me about powers, potentials, emergence, relations, etc but were merely articulating my positions then you should have indicated, in some way, that you were talking about my positions. From your post and the other ones I recently deleted I get the sense that you have no familiarity with my work and just like to hear yourself talk. Having engaged on line with you years ago I’ve always found your manner condescending and overly aggressive, which is part of the reason I deleted your earlier comments on hominid ecology where you did not even seem to read beyond the first paragraph of the post (you asked for arguments for the use of the term, yet the whole post was that argument).
Third, you’re muddling things in your points about void and relation. Yes, I hold that void exists. I’ve said as much repeatedly. All I’ve said is that for two things to relate or interact there must be some material transmission between them. The song I now hear on my radio had to be conveyed through electro-magnetic waves from the radio station to here. Electro-magnetic waves are material things. Holding that interactions require a material vehicle does not deny the void.
May 25, 2012 at 8:58 pm
Bryant,
I feel that you may have me confused with someone else. When did we engage online years ago? I have only become active with blogging in the past month or two, so I can’t imagine when we would have crossed paths before. You seem to be taking out your displeasure with this other person on me.
In any event, I suppose we’ll agree to disagree about the materiality of the void.
As for my reply to your post on hominid ecologies, I did not ask for arguments about why you used the term. I read your post. I understand why you coined the term and the stakes involved, and I agree and align myself with your commitment to the notion of ecology, as well as need to displace the humanist human subject. I simply asked what advantage the term had over other terms that did much the same work, and I also pointed out a possible point of difficulty with the term “hominid.”
As for the aggressive tone you perceive in my comment, I once again apologize. I was simply trying to stake a claim and back it up, at the same time offering a different perspective in response to your post. I’m sorry if my point of dissent was taken as an outright attack. I guess you feel that I am an interloper in your community, speaking out of place.
I must admit, however, that I find it bothersome to have you accuse me of being aggressive and condescending immediately after your insulting charge that I “just like to hear myself talk,” as well as the curt suggestion from your previous reply that I am “oblivious” to your arguments and that “a little reading is in order”—in particular, reading of your own published work.
May 25, 2012 at 10:51 pm
Anderson,
If I’ve confused you with someone else my apologies. I don’t think we’re disagreeing on the void.
May 25, 2012 at 10:52 pm
The person I believed you were was quite an obnoxious troll, ergo my response. If you’re not that person let’s begin again.
May 26, 2012 at 1:48 am
I’d like to start again. I just want to make connections and have some dialogue here. Again, I’m sorry to seem aggressive. I guess I’m being deliberately confrontational, trying to call you out a bit, but I think that we’re sort of trained to be that way as academics. I did jump in without really introducing myself or making my intentions clear, so my bad. I’ll make sure to be more courteous in the future. I’m still feeling out the protocols of blogging.
I’m not deep into the SR or the OO scene, though I know Harman’s work a little, and I know what’s going on from oblique angles through writers working on the problem of life, like Eugene Thacker, as well as through some of the fringy critical media theory and STS people, like Jussi Parikka and Thierry Bardini. I know my Deleuze and Guattari (together and alone), my Simondon (though from secondary sources), my Latour and Haraway, and so on, so I know some of the wells where you go to drink. (I am at a disadvantage when it comes to Žižek, and at a complete loss with Baidou.)
Like I say, I think we are really very much on the same page in terms of what is at stake, ethically and politically, in how we approach the discussion of things and the ecosystems, ecologies, and economies they comprise.
My questions are ones of terminology and emphasis, and have to do with my major alignments at the moment. I have been engaging with Stiegler and Derrida (and Heidegger) much more to address problems of humans, nonhuman animals, and technics. If the void has caught my critical eye, it is because I am as curious about the “gaps” between things, the ruptures between beings and the limits that guarantee their irreducible difference and singularity, but which must nevertheless be crossed, or at least communicated across, for the new to take place.
The ethics that I am trying to work through hinges absolutely on finitude. Which has interesting tensions with what you are presenting, which I might call something like an ontology of plentitude. (I just made that up right now, so it may not describe what you’re after.) I think you’re primarily interested in the goings on in the gaps between things, that is, in how different entities are linked up in their relations. I’m interested in that, too, but I’m also curious about the gaps themselves and the work, what I would consider eminently ethical, imaginative, and creative work, that goes into leaping those gaps—at whatever level you want to focus on, from leaps between quantum states, to the jump from algae to complex multicellular organisms in the Cambrian explosion, to the communicative leaps I make every time I am able to understand and be understood by my dog (or my two-year-old boy, for that matter). Know what I mean?
In any event, I don’t want to throw out the idea of the incorporeal or of incorporeal entities just yet. I guess I want to maintain a distinction between “incorporeal” and “immaterial,” so that we can talk about the emergent “more” that exceeds the sum of an assemblage’s parts precisely without the possibility of confusing the “more” for the parts themselves or of saying that the more is just another part. Music comes out of an orchestra and is carried by vibrations in the air, but it is not itself an orchestra or vibrations. Thought is produced by a brain as it types on a computer screen, but it is not itself a brain or a screen. That’s all I’m saying.
Nick
May 26, 2012 at 2:56 am
Hi Nick,
Sounds like we come from similar backgrounds and sets of references. I should caution that my onticology is quite different from Harman’s object-oriented philosophy. If you’re interested, I have an article in The Speculative Turn– “The Ontic Principle” –that outlines some aspects of my position. It’s a bit dated now, but it’ll give you a sense of where I am.
I’m interested in the gaps between things as well. The book project I’m working on at the moment is entitled Onto-Cartographies. The basic thesis is that space and time are not containers (as in the case of Newton), but that they arise from interactions between bodies. In other words, I don’t think there’s an all encompassing milieu in which things are contained. For me there has to be some set of paths between entities for them to belong to the same space and time. This is why I pluralize “cartography”. There is not space simpliciter or time simpliciter, but spaces and times. Onto-Cartography would map how these assemblages function (and clearly the fact that I advocate the existence of void complicates this as void seems like a kind of container; I’ll have to work through that). At any rate, I think this network concept of space and time has important social and political significance.
I bring all this up in relation to your points about incorporeals. The reason that I’m so insistent on the thesis that incorporeals are material entities is that I’m particularly interested in issues of the time it takes for messages, signs, texts, etc., to travel throughout the world of entities and to cause effects. For me it’s socially and politically important to recognize that can convey messages to everything else, that messages take time to travel, that the mediums we use (air in speech, writing, fiber optic cables, smoke signals, etc) all have particular properties that both affect the content of messages (McLuhan) and the mediums affect what sorts of social and political relations can form in a society or hominid ecology. For example, a society based on speech can only reach a certain size because everyone cannot talk to everyone else and because messages conveyed through speech undergo significant mutations as they pass from person to person. I’ve written about these issues with respect to Lucretius’s theory of simulacra here: https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/04/24/of-the-simulacra-atomic-images-lucretius/ This is only one example of the sort of thing that the method of analysis of onto-cartography would investigate. You can find another example here: https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/05/12/paths/
Sorry to throw all these links at you. I’m just trying to a sense of where I’m coming from. I agree with your point about the symphony. The symphony is not just those acoustic waves traveling through the air. It requires brains, a history of music stored in those brains, systems of meaning, etc. It’s a complex event. Nonetheless, I think it’s important to emphasize that the symphony requires transmission through a material medium like acoustic medium. Returning to your points about the gap between things, the symphony can only be heard within a particular range of distance (this changes with the invention of new mediums such as recording). In other words, the symphony peters out in the void. This has important consequences pertaining to who can participate in this event. If we treat the symphony as immaterial we miss all this. Now in the case of a symphony this probably isn’t a big deal. But what if we’re Marxist revolutionaries seeking to change society? Have we significantly attended to the ability of the masses that we’re addressing to receive this message (are we speaking across the appropriate channels for the message to be received?), and is the message circulating throughout the relevant social world for the message to produce changes or is it simply locked in the pages of academic journals? Here the issue is one of materiality, how one material system processes or receives material sendings from another system, and how a material text circulates throughout the world. These are the sorts of things I’m grappling with and why I’m very cautious about talk of incorporeals.
Apologies again. My experience with the other person I mentioned was quite distressing and vexing. Having done this for a few years now (since 2006), I’ve become much more gunshy about my interactions. I do realize, however, that I very much came off as an asshole and am sorry for that.
May 26, 2012 at 2:34 pm
S’okay. I’m glad that we came to a better understanding. (I’m glad, too, that I restrained myself from getting super bitchy and totally alienating you. Because I can be, and often am, an arrogant asshole—big time.)
I’ll check out your links. I’m totally with you about how crucial the question of temporality is in terms of the political issues surrounding media and communication. More than the symphony or even something nebulous like “Marxist revolutionaries,” we could ask how something like an Arab Spring could arise in Egypt while civil war erupts in Libya. Or the Occupy protests. These are rhetorical questions at the same time they are media/technical questions (though I would always trouble that very distinction). Why does “the 99%” have such power to spread but really no power to effect any palpable social change. Why is it persuasive enough for everybody to agree “this is right, this is good,” but not enough to incite sustained critique of and opposition to the systems in place that institute and maintain grievous inequalities. More crucially, why do the Arab Spring and Occupy movements peter out in terms of both their resistive and their persuasive powers and give way to reactive retrenchments of conservative control? Time and the temporal “biases” of the media involved are definitely undertheorized elements of these issues.
Are you familiar with Stiegler’s work? Lately, he is particularly concerned with cultivating attention in an economy where attention is captured by industrialized technics and capital. How can we “make” attention, fait attention, as in the French, rather than pay (and pay for) attention, as in English?
If I’m worried about tossing out incorporeality, it is because I get a queasy about the potential for full instrumentalization of the material, as in many technocratic-technoutopian-technohumanist, Neo-Darwinist, and hyper-Cartesian posthumanisms, like those expressed in transhumanist, extropian, and singularitarian movements. The full-on adherents to these ways of thinking, like my arch-nemesis Ray Kurzweil, are thankfully few and viewed with some ambivalence (though not enough, I feel), but the fragments of their attitudes suffuse the culture of globalized society.
It’s a double-edged sword. Of course, if we ask after the materialities of assemblages, if we think more carefully and complexly about how certain systems of communication or media ecologies function, then perhaps we can work on more creative, progressive means of social activism—more enduring Occupy movements or Arab Springs. But I worry about the potential for claims of technical mastery by human subjects. If there remains an incorporeal, something that affects and that we can certainly feel, but not necessarily manipulate directly, then it doesn’t seem as easy to me to loose a necessary humility and an affirmation of finitude. Again, it’s a question of language. I’m not claiming that you believe that the material or the embodied equates to the manipulable or even the empirical. Quite the contrary. It’s just that when I hear the argument that there is nothing but body, I cannot help but hear echoes of some of the arguments for strong AI or ALife (my own doctoral research), which so often decenter the human only to bring in the modern liberal humanist subject through the back door, with all its intentionality, self-possession, and self-appropriation. I’m trying to feel out a language that heads off that danger.
In any event, if you have the time and energy, check out what I’m up to at Anthropo-eccentrism. Take another look at what I had to say about hominid ecologies and let me know if I’m way off base. I’m also curious about your use of the term “wilderness.” I have a post about the wilderness, where I engage briefly with Derrida and the posthumous.
Nick
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