Responding to my recent post on Mckenzie Wark, George makes a great set of observations:
As for this perennial “ontology” vs. “politics” issue that you guys discuss here over and over again (it seems), it would be nice if it was that easy – ontology is about things being and does not imply politics of any sort – but somehow it’s not (which is why you have to say it again and again like a mantra for years now). So if Nazis think that races exist and that among those, some are superior and some are inferior, is this not an ontological statement about how things are? If that doesn’t in itself imply a certain political view (I’ll grant you that), then surely such an ontological position is very easily politicized.
For me, the issue is rather different. It’s not that I disagree with the thesis that an ontology can have political implications. Ontologies do and can have political implications. At the core of my ontological thinking, I belong to a tradition of thinkers such as Lucretius, Hume, Badiou, and Meillassoux. When I say I belong to this tradition, I am not saying that I share all of their philosophical positions or claims. Far from it. Rather, I am saying that with these thinkers I hold that every configuration of being is contingent– though I wouldn’t go as far as Meillassoux –such that it is capable of being otherwise. Thus, for example, I reject necessitarian accounts of being such as we find in Leibniz with his thesis that this is the best of all possible worlds and that this world results from a design, or accounts such as we find in Hegel. For me, the world is not the result of a design, a plan, nor is there a way it “ought” to be (though certainly we have preferences as to how things ought to be).
This is a thesis that I think has important political implications. If it is true that everything is contingent, then it’s also true that every social order is contingent. There is no reason that societies have to be organized in this particular way. If it is true that there is no reason that societies have to be in this particular way, then we are free to envision and fight for other types of social formations. In my view, every revolutionary political philosophy is premised on the thesis that being and the form society takes are contingent. By contrast, we will find that every reactionary politics always puts forward a thesis about necessity, whether through claiming that human nature is such that this is the only way that society can be organized without disaster (“people are just greedy, so communism could never work!) or by arguing that this is naturally the way in which society must be organized. Both of these positions– the revolutionary and the reactionary –presuppose very different ontologies.
read on!
So if I concede that ontologies can have political implications, what is my gripe about questions about the relationship between politics and ontology? First, I believe that allowing your politics to dictate your ontology is simply poor reasoning. Ethico-politico questions and ontological questions are different language games and obey different rules. When I have my ethico-politico theorist hat on, I’m asking questions about what ought to be. When I have my ontology hat on, I’m asking questions about what is and is not, and what is generally common to all beings. What I believe ought to be doesn’t legislate what is. Ethico-politically I think that atomic bombs are evil, terrible things and that they shouldn’t exist. That doesn’t change the fact that they do exist. My reasons for claiming something does or does not exist should be based on whether or not it is true that such a thing exists, not whether or not I would prefer for it to exist. Second, the domain of ontology is broader than the domain of politics. As far as we know, politics is an activity only engaged in by human beings. It is something that only occurs for a subset of existing beings. When we’re raising questions about the being of beings, we’re concerned with the nature of all beings, not one particular subset of beings. There’s no politics that I know of on the planet Venus, yet Venus and everything that exists on Venus is nonetheless something that exists and therefore of interest to ontology. For some reason, some people seem to feel that pointing this out somehow diminishes politics. To me it just means that questions of the political are more specific than questions of ontology. Nothing about that prevents one from raising questions of the political.
George raises an important question about racism with respect to Nazi’s. I make the claim that OOO doesn’t entail any particular politics. Why is that? It’s because I recognize that things like national socialism are real, exist, or are beings and that therefore ontology must account for them. The point here is difficult to express clearly. National socialism was a real being, and is therefore counted among the things that exist. Any ontology must therefore provide the means of accounting for such things. However, national socialism also presupposes an ontology or itself contains a theory of being. What ontology or theory of being do national socialists presuppose? They presuppose an ontology in which difference races have essences and that some of those essences are superior to others. That is an ontological claim. Is it true? I don’t think so. One can simultaneously acknowledge that something like national socialism is a real being and that national socialism’s theory of being (that essences or races exist) is false. Our reasons for rejecting national socialism’s theory of being shouldn’t simply be that it is a loathsome doctrine, but also that it is a false doctrine. Were I, however, to claim that OOO somehow entails a particular politics, I would also be claiming that somehow being itself prevents things such as national socialism from coming into existence. Not only is that an absurd thesis, but it would come as quite a surprise to the families and friends of the millions who died in the Holocaust.
All of this aside, I do believe that the ontology I propose– and these claims aren’t shared by all OOO theorists; indeed there’s quite a bit of disagreement between us on these points –does have political implications. What might they be?
First, flat ontology 1) rejects the existence of any sovereign terms that stand above all other beings and legislate and organize those beings (God, kings, fathers, etc) without themselves being impacted and limited by those beings, and 2) rejects the existence of any eternal and unchanging essences. Rather, flat ontology holds that all beings exist on a single plane, interacting with one another, that they all equally exist, while there are also clear differentials of power between them. If these claims are true, then it follows that sovereignty is always an illusion and that any social formation premised on essentialism is false. Here we find preserved all the critiques of identity and essentialism carried out over the last few decades. Someone might say, “if you think that, then why don’t you talk about it?” First, I do directly talk about it in my published work and quite often on this blog. Second, I think these critiques have been completed and I accept them. What more is there to say?
Second, I hold that all beings or objects are the result of a becoming and themselves become. Objects come into being out of other objects, become over the course of their existence, and pass out of existence. There’s no entity that did not arise out of other beings, that isn’t subject to change or becoming, and that won’t eventually pass out of existence. This thesis is perhaps where I diverge most markedly from other OOO theorists. In my view, objects– or what I’m now calling “machines” –only exist as processes or becomings. From moment to moment they must engage in activities to endure or continue to exist, and when those activities cease they disintegrate. If this is true, then some sort of historicist account of how societies come into being and why they take the form they take must also be true. In a Twitter discussion today McKenzie Wark claims that OOO has problems with thinking historical time. I find this claim completely baffling. If it’s true that every entity arises out of other entities and has its own becoming, then it will also be true that every object is historical. Nothing about my variant of OOO stands opposed to the sort of historical materialist analysis that Wark advocates; indeed, I pretty much embrace a hybrid of Marx and Braudel with respect to why society has taken the form its taken. But again, ontology is working at a more general level of analysis than the specific analysis of a particular being such as contemporary society, and this is work that’s already been done elsewhere. What more is there to say? I accept it.
“Wait, so you don’t reject the critiques of the social constructivists with respect to essentialism and identity, and you don’t reject the historical materialist account of why society has taken the form it’s taken; so what’s all this controversy over OOO about?” I honestly don’t know as I’ve been upfront about these things. Sometimes it just seems that everyone wants you to talk about what they’re talking about and that they somehow take you to be opposed to what their research work if you’re not talking about the same things (many of us will be familiar with the blind reviewer that basically says “x should be doing my project!”). My instinct is always to integrate things that I take to be true and important, not banish or exclude them. As Eileen Joy says, “we need more thought, not less, we need more tools, not fewer.” But if there is one thing that I’m trying to do, it’s broaden the realm of what can be talked about today. I believe that contemporary Marxist theory largely came to be dominated by idealism as a result of cultural Marxism, focusing on ideology, law, beliefs, signifiers, texts, narratives, etc. In doing so, I think it’s betrayed Marx’s original vision that was extremely attentive to material power in the form of technologies, geographical peculiarities, infrastructure, factories, etc. I believe that a good deal of essentialist critique came to focus too much on the signifier, text, and narrative, to the detriment of materiality. What I try to do, in my own small way– and many others are doing it as well –is draw attention to the power of things, how they constrain and afford possibilities of action, and how they are every bit as important to understanding oppression and emancipation as sound critique of law, ideology, signifiers, narratives, texts, beliefs, etc. I don’t care to get rid of either cultural Marxism nor discursivist critiques of essentialism. Rather, I want to contribute to broadening the field of what we can talk about and analyze in our political thought. I believe that this will lead to more effective critique, but will also expand our possibilities for engaging with and trying to change the world about us.
August 7, 2012 at 12:45 am
Reblogged this on Becoming Poor and commented:
I’m posting this in the wake of our discussion of Agamben’s The Coming Community on Friday, where we were bouncing ideas around about whether or not the book was descriptive or normative. I think this post is helpful because in the first part Bryant distinguishes between ontological and ethico-politcal perspectives. For me, Agamben comes across largely on the ontological side — or what I was calling diagnostic in our discussion — but he undoubtedly has an ethico-politcal standpoint when he argues that “the political task of our generation” is to form a community, or, “a perfect exteriority that communicates only with itself.”
August 7, 2012 at 2:28 am
Added a link back to your post. Been reading your new book The Democracy of Objects which clarifies much of your philosophical system. I can see a political outgrowth at some time in the future from you. In this passage I found some excellent ideas regarding the non-human actants and their impact of both political and social theory as an avenue of inquiry that might be worthwhile to pursue:
“Such an attentiveness to these nonhuman actors would provide us with the resources for thinking strategies of composition that might push collectives into new basins of attraction. Whether or not a village has a well, a city has roads that provide access to other cities, and whether people have alternative forms of occupation and transportation can play a dramatic role in the form collectives take. However, in much of contemporary cultural theory, these sorts of actors are almost entirely invisible because the marked space of theory revolves around the semiotic, placing nonhuman actors in the unmarked space of thought and social engagement (p. 289) .”
August 7, 2012 at 2:42 am
Levi, after my apocalyptic rant, let me be a bit more focused in response to this post. You say “I belong to a tradition of thinkers such as Lucretius, Hume, Badiou, and Meillassoux.” I am not sure I see these as a tradition though I can imagine common denominators. So, let me take the last two – who clearly are linked – to supply context for a question. You now view things as machines. Do I understand then that this is – as that pair of philosophers seem to me (and many) as anti-Deleuzian- that this metaphor (Or not?) of the machine is not the same as the machinic? For D & G, the “machinic” seems almost the opposite of the machine. Indeed, and maybe more to the point of these last couple posts, this vocabulary is not apolitical but is indeed in its territorialization, its abstract persistence, and its algebraic character, the vocabulary of capital. If the only non-hegemonic politics is the micro-politics of the encounter, of what Bakhtin calls “the act,” does not any generic ontology risk becoming part of a machinery of homogenization? I am not, to be a little clearer, saying this is what you are doing as I know your personal politics and your global intent is the opposite(as it is for B & M), but it is a question about the tradition of abstraction, even ontological abstraction, and its potential political ramifications.
August 7, 2012 at 3:08 am
Dan,
I’m not sure where you’re getting this opposition between machine and machinic in Deleuze. I can’t find it there.
August 7, 2012 at 3:47 am
Hello it’s a very interesting discussion and because you refer to Badiou i think it’s important for the way societies change to include the concept of event as he refers to……. A moment of radical change….how do nonhuman factors contribute to this moment of change?
August 7, 2012 at 10:14 am
I’d like to state that ontology does not have political implications, but politics is implicated in ontology. According to Deleuze, two pure ontologies were ever written; one by Duns Scotus in which Being was neutral, and the other by Spinoza in which Being was affirmative. The former as it is well-known was developed by Heidegger and his disciples among which I would like to name Blanchot who has captured a whole generation in France including Deleuze. The striking traits one can perceive in both of these ontologies is most important of all the community of form between substance (the name was to be soon worn away in the work of Deleuze to become multiplicity as substantive, singularities) and the modes; actual beings of extrinsic existence that imprison those singularities within the eternal rules and regulations of mechanical composition and decomposition which make up an infinity. Eternal insofar as essence (traditional Spinozist vocabulary I cannot do away with) or Potentia involved by existence. The second important trait was the notion of nontranscendence which found its best political articulations in Nietzsche’s ‘eternal return’ or Artaud’s ‘crowned anarchy’ not to mention Spinoza’s ‘auto-affectivity.’ Now, it is not possible to discuss these political doctrines (as Nietzsche sneered–death and the sneer of its capital error–his was only a simulacrum of a doctrine) in detail in a commentary. Let it suffice to say:
1. Today, authentic ontology (an ontology that is consistent, made up of adequate ideas that communicate in the same event) is misrecognized for its shadow: NeoPlatonism that has close ties with negative theology which works through the idea of the gift to codify the field of response-ability and its freedom by means of a pathologic sense of guilt.
2.Ontology is an invitation to the limit by means of a volitional intuition that the event creates in us; the limit where modal essences without separation are contained by the attribute that constitutes the Potentia of substance (which can be said to exist only as a logical inference of the existence of the modes), this stifling limit is zero intensity or dying: the transcendental plane of becoming. What is at stake is the body and a thinking that exceeds thought. Ontology brings along educative violence. See DR, technologies of the self (Foucault), and the Stoics. It is a political program repeated with a difference each time through a genuine question. Turning the transcendental plane into an encounter, the event into transcendence is a resexualization that creates fascist doctrines.
3. Heidegger’s question ‘What is Being?’ is important, but even if the differenciator between beings and questions is ‘Being’ as the interrogation, we cannot let one question remain intact through all dice throws. That would be to do away with all thematics and move toward the thetic as if the closure of the Event has given us the task to clear the equivocity that conceals its univocity once and for all (sovereignty in Heidegger). Deleuze’s intuition is different; each dice throw is a once and for all leaving no question intact; an incision that enfolds all questions is the affirmation of Andology (once again, a term by Deleuze).
August 7, 2012 at 1:36 pm
ok, but wouldn’t it be the case that the distinction between “ought” and “is” is incompatible with the logic of becoming that characterizes being? That is – if being is always already becoming than what is is always already an ought insofar as politics informs the possibilities of becoming.
benjamin
August 7, 2012 at 2:59 pm
Ben,
No. When a tomato decays there’s no “ought” about its passage from ripeness to rottenness. It could have just as easily been frozen.
August 7, 2012 at 8:00 pm
Ok, I’ll play along then. Two part response. Part 1: Skipping to the part about Nazis – if they have an ontology X (“National Socialism”) and you have an ontology Y (“OOO”), then, all things being flat, their ontology and your ontology are on equal ontological ground. Obviously, as most sane human beings, you say that their ontology is false (you don’t give any argument as to why, but we don’t really need one at this point, I hope). I hope that it is equally obvious that they will say that your ontology is wrong (“Aryans” above all etc etc). How do you solve this ontological conflict? Do you simply claim that your ontology is true and theirs is false? That’s hardly a smart move. One way is, for example, to say that, all things being flat and so on, ontology X creates a horrible world for the majority of the people while ontology Y does not. So even if there are superior and inferior races, we “ought not” to treat people differently (say as we do in non-discrimination legislature – people aren’t allowed to be discriminate even though we all know they have different sets of features and so on). However, it seems that since you can’t connect “is” with “ought,” you aren’t allowed to do so in your ontological system of coordinates. So how do you deal with ontology X that contradicts your ontology Y? Where does it belong?
Part 2: Concerning the tomato – tomato’s “passage from ripeness” into any number of states is easily predictable. Just set the conditions and there you go (“if left unfrozen, tomato will rot” etc etc). I’m not sure I understand this part of the conversation. If there is no passage from “is” to “ought” (or from “ought” to “is” – see Higgs boson which “ought” to have been and now “is”), then what happens to basic science? Does it not more or less predict what “ought” to happen based on what “is” happening?
August 7, 2012 at 8:11 pm
George,
I give the arguments as to why there are no essences in The Democracy of Objects. We could just as easily go to biology where it’s been shown that there’s surprisingly minescule genetic variation among humans on the planets. It’s not merely an assertion. One of the strongest arguments against things such as racism is that they are making claims about humans that are false. Why would we want to undercut this by saying that it is really politics that decides truth and falsity?
Your example of the Higgs Boson is not an example of an ought claim, but of a prediction. Oughts are curious in that they hold regardless of whether facts about the world contradict them. For example, just because murder is rampant throughout the world, this doesn’t somehow change the fact that murder is wrong. Murder remains wrong regardless of whether everyone murders. By contrast, predictions can turn out to be false and are thereby abandoned.
August 7, 2012 at 8:13 pm
And here I hasten to add that I just give prohibitions against murder as an example to illustrate the point. You might disagree with the claim that murder is wrong. I don’t care to debate that issue. Plug in whatever ought claim you like.
August 7, 2012 at 8:46 pm
Seeing that you completely ignored the essence of my questions (concentrating on minor issues), I don’t think this is a productive conversation. From what I can understand, you are saying that the ontological conflict between ontology X and ontology Y is solved by appealing to some third element (science – “genetic variations among humans”), some ontology Z. That is to say, instead of solving the ontological conflict, you are adding more elements to it (and completely throwing out your claims to flatness). Why should ontology X (“racism”) have any regard for ontology Z (“science”) unless ontology Z is hierarchically higher than ontology X?
P.S. Please stop sending people to your book, I know you are eager for everyone to read it and so on, but you come across as desperate and needy on that front. If it’s really as good as you say it is, people will read it. Constantly asking them to do so is rather sad. I wanted to pick it up and read it, but looking at your blogs, I’m put off by the amount of self-promotion that you plug in in every paragraph. Just an outsider’s advice.
In any case, I’ve seen what you do to unfriendly comments on this blog. I best leave this at this. Thanks for dedicating a blog post to my small comment – you must have a ton of time on your hands.
August 7, 2012 at 9:31 pm
George,
You seem to have some issues. All I did was make the rather modest and obvious claim that ontologies can be mistaken or false. Your question about the Nazis seems to indicate difficulty understanding that.
August 7, 2012 at 9:36 pm
I’m also unclear as to how you would arrive at the conclusion that flat ontology entails the abandonment of truth and falsity. Flat ontology is just the rejection of transcendent God and essences. Your tantrum and personal insults here are rather peculiar as I merely responded to your questions both politely and as best I am able.
August 8, 2012 at 12:03 pm
Although I wasn’t able to keep track of these lines of commentaries, allow me to state a couple of things. First of all, I have the sense that biopolitics here, because it deals with life as much as it does with death is equated with some sort of ontology. I find this sort of thinking very dangerous. Racism (a phenomenon completely different from race wars) connected to biopolitics has always been historically specific; ontology in this respect, deals with a number of questions: Does bare life exist other than in modes? How does the dogma of sacred life serve different opponents and to manipulate what ends? How are we to come to grips with the confinement of the outside? Problems and interrogations…
I had formerly mentioned the “community of form,” this means the same attributes that constitute the infinite (the essence of god in spinoza) and contain modal essences (intensive quantities) are the very same attributes finite modes involve. This was basically the reason why Spinoza was ostracized for making substance the proximate cause of all beings. Logical extension of this stance was that even though modes need other finite beings in order to exist (external causes), their actualization process always takes place intensively in relation (the relation of nonrelation) to the proximate cause: the conclusion is; ‘individual comes before the species.’ Already an ontological challenge against racism.
I think the problem has always been the human; always situated in a more striated dimension than other beings loaded with the imaginary, language, ‘consciousness of a whole which appears only when a whole wants to subordinate itself to a superior whole’ (Nietzsche), always too much of phenomenology. Nonetheless, ontology needs to deal with this rigid seriality. It cannot do away with it. As Guattari once said, we need to eat the shit we have created. In terms of language, for instance, our labor involves finding beneath those adjectives and nouns (pauses and rests of well-defined identities), the expressed (sense), the verb, the infinitive which the medium of our body attributes to the state of affairs and our language carries to the future as expression: ‘corporealizing thought’–most simple and thereby the most difficult.
For the distinction between the problem of race and racism in biopolitics, see Foucault –Society Must Be Defended.
August 8, 2012 at 8:17 pm
God, Ken was right, you really are an incredible moron…
August 9, 2012 at 2:31 pm
[...] at larval subjects, Levi has been posting a series of posts (here and here) that are concerned with capitalism and politics, with a particular emphasis on articulating the [...]
August 13, 2012 at 10:22 pm
What do you feel is not being talked about or analyzed in contemporary political discourse that ontology, or your version of it, can help with?
August 13, 2012 at 10:56 pm
Otto,
Explore the blog. I’ve written quite a bit on this.
October 7, 2012 at 3:16 pm
[...] shows some of his political affiliations, as well as his separation of onticology from politics: read here. Like this:LikeBe the first to like this. This entry was posted in social ecology and tagged [...]