Larval Subjects .

In discussions of speculative realism, a lot of ink has been spilled over debates about correlationism or whether or not it is possible to think being apart from thought, but, within an object-oriented framework, it seems to me that a far more profound ontological issue is at stake of which the issue of correlationism is only a subset.  Here I hasten to add that I owe this conclusion to Graham Harman.  The real issue is not whether or not whether or not it is possible to move beyond correlationism or whether being can only ever be thought in relation to thought and whether thought can only ever be thought in relation to being, but rather whether or not relations are internal or external.  The thesis that relations are internal is admirably summed up in Karen Barad’s statement that “relata do not precede relations” (Meeting the Universe Halfway, 334).  The thesis that relations are external is the claim that entities can break with whatever relations they happen to entertain to other entities at a particular moment and enter into new relations with other entities.  Based on these two conceptions of relations, we can thus see why the issue of correlationism is a subset of the question of whether relations are internal or external.  Correlationism is the thesis that the relation between mind and world or culture and world is always an internal relation, such that thought is necessarily inseparable from world and world is necessarily inseparable from thought.  It is a specific variant of a broader thesis that all entities are internally related or inseparable from one another.  We can see that if relationism or internalism is true, it is impossible for it to avoid correlationism, for in a world where everything is internally and inseparably related it would necessarily follow that all beings must be internally related to minds or culture.  This, however, is not the issue I wish to focus on.

Before proceeding to discuss these issues of relation in more detail, it is first important to address what this debate is not about, as I’ve sensed there has been some confusion regarding these matters.

First, the debate over whether relations are internal or external is not a debate about whether or not relations exist.  All sides are agreed that there are relations.  The question is whether these relations are characterized by inseparability or separability.  Can something break with its relations or is its being necessarily determined by its relations such that it has no minimal ontological independence from these relations?

Second, the question is not whether or not relations are important or whether they make a difference.  Whether or not my cat is related to oxygen or food or certain atmospheric pressures makes a big difference for my cat.  All sides, I think, can agree that the sorts of relations that obtain between entities make a tremendous difference to those entities.

Thus, third, the question is not whether we should focus on the analysis of objects or relations.  In other words, the debate isn’t whether we should focus on objects, decontextualized, independent of any milieu, or whether we should focus on milieu/relations.  Rather, the discussion is whether or not relations are internal to beings such that they are inseparable from their relations, or whether they are external in the sense that entities can break with relations.  As I have said with respect to my own work on many occasions in print and publicly, it is not so much objects or substances that interest me, but what happens when a substance, machine, or object (they’re all synonyms to me) either enters into new relations or breaks with its existing relations.  In my view, internalism just does not do a good job of responding to this question because it presupposes that beings are already internally related and thereby forecloses the question of what takes place when relations are either severed or forged.

Finally, fourth, it’s important to be clear as to what sorts of relations we’re talking about here.  Clearly there are some relations that are of a purely internal.  A parent cannot be a parent without a child.  There is no left without right.  There is no North without South, etc.  A triangle can only be a triangle through relations between three points.  We can call these “diacritical” relations.  Diacritical relations are relations that only exist internally.  Indeed, I would argue that every substance has its “diacritical domain” defined by what I call its “endo-relations”.  This is its internal relations– like the three points of a triangle –without which it would not be what it is.  The debate here is not between internal relations of this sort, but about relations between entities, substances, objects, or machines (again synonyms); or what I call “exo-relations”.  Is the relation that my cat entertains to all other entities in the universe like that of the three, inseparable points of a triangle such that it cannot break with any of these relations, or does my cat possess some minimal ontological autonomy that allows it to break from whatever relations it currently entertains, such that it is able to enter into new relations?  That’s the question.

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Graham has a fantastic post up responding to some friendly criticisms of his recent article on literary criticism in New Literary History.  The whole post is worth a read, but I wanted to set aside the discussion of literary criticism and focus on a point he makes with regard to the nature of theory that I think is tremendously important and all too often overlooked.  Harman writes:

Green’s point here is that only a fool would think that literary works could be cut off from all criticism. The New Critics were very intelligent, not fools; of course they knew that the literary work wasn’t cut off from all context, they simply chose to “emphasize” the relative autonomy of literary texts.

I disagree with this rejoinder, for the following reasons. Yes, the world is a complicated place, and theoreticians qua human beings are rarely going to embrace extremist doctrines about anything. If you try to pin down a Derridean on “there is nothing outside the text,” then of course they’re going to concede that the world isn’t just a text, and they may even act annoyed that you would attribute such a belief to them.

But the point isn’t whether private individuals called the New Critics really believed that a work could be entirely cut off form its social/biographical context. The point is whether they sufficiently accounted for the context in their theory. This is why reductio ad absurdum proofs are possible, after all. If I say that mathematism and scientism give us no good explanation of why perfect knowledge of a tree would not itself be a tree, it is insufficent to say “but of course they know that knowledge and trees are different.” The point isn’t what they know qua humans, but what their theories lead to as logical consequences.

This point is absolutely crucial to understand what it means to do theory and really gets to the crux of a number of debates we’ve had online over the years.  I cannot tell you how many times I’ve encountered someone who says “but of course theorist x doesn’t really think there are no things in the world or that material things don’t matter, they’re just doing this.”  Right before I left for Europe a couple weeks ago a well-known Deleuzian anarchist friend of mine who is now reading The Democracy of Objects made precisely these sorts of arguments against my critique of correlationism in a friendly email exchange.  As this person had it, I was attacking a “straw man” and claimed that certainly no one holds to the sort of discursivism or social constructivism I outline in the first chapter of TDO.  This person evoked Judith Butler in response to my claims, remarking that she’s a materialist and that while she focuses on the performative, utterances, and citational discourse, she certainly doesn’t reject the sorts of nonhuman actants I’ve been trying to draw attention to.

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Ian Bogost has a nice post up discussing the most recent politics vs (sic.) ontology kerkuffle.  Over at Digital Digs, Alex Reid has also written a terrific post.  What follows is an expanded version of a comment I posted over at Ian’s blog.

In Ian’s post and in a subsequent comment, it’s said that I gave the example of a white police officer shooting a black man in the face.  Actually I don’t use the example of a white police officer shooting a black man in the face.  I just refer to a shooting (at least as far as I can tell in my quick reread of the post).  That example came from Ahmed.

That aside, I think my point about the difference between ontology and politics holds up quite nicely with that example.  First, I immediately agreed with Ahmed’s point that racism is a real thing, that it is an ontological fact.  There was no dispute there.  In chapter 4 of The Democracy of Objects, as well as the introduction, I’m careful to make room for the ontological reality of social phenomena.  The realism of object-oriented ontology is not a realism that says that only physical objects like rocks and tardigrades are real, but is one that also defends the reality of semiotic entities like texts, works of art, court judgments, etc.  In some respects, this makes it a rather strange realism, as it refuses the thought/world, discourse/thing, divide characteristic of more traditional discussions surrounding realism.  Where, to simplify dramatically, debates over the last 40 or so years have tended to be organized around an exclusive disjunction stating that either the material world is what is really real or the discursive world is really real, OOO holds that both of these worlds fall in the field of the real.  Where before we were faced with a choice between either a scientific realism that said that only things like rocks, quantum particles, pulsars, etc., are really real such that things like signifiers, institutions, etc., “only exist in the mind”, or a social constructivism that said that our discourses abut the world and how we represent the world are the really real, such that things like rocks, stars, animal species, etc., are effects of discursivity, OOO says that both a pulsar is entirely real and irreducible to discourse, and that a discourse about race such as we find in eugenics is entirely real.  This discourse is not real in its representational capacity pertaining to what it says about race (it’s full of all sorts of false things about race beginning with the thesis that races exist), but it is real as a discourse that inhabits a world and that has entirely real and noxious effects on human bodies.  For OOO, discursive constructions are no less actors in the world than physical entities.

What OOO refuses is the thesis that we have to either hold that “physical beings” are constructed by discourses (discursivism) or that we must hold that discourses are mere figments of the mind that are unreal.  Both, for OOO, belong to the domain of being or existence.  This is probably why OOO tends to come under so much criticism from both sides of the debate.  The scientific realists are aghast that we would claim that things like myths or the discourse of creationism are real entities in the world that have real effects, and thereby take us to be undermining science and treating it as equal with creationism (we’re not).  The social constructivists are aghast that we would say that rabbits, aardvarks, black holes, etc., are real material entities in the world irreducible to discursive constructionism, and take us to denying the discursive construction of things like race, gender, nationality, etc., thereby allowing a dangerous essentialism in the door (we’re not).  What we’ve instead tried to do is adopt a more inclusive ontology that allows us to think the complex imbrication and interaction of a variety of entities, discursive and material, in the world.

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I received the following remark from an interlocutor in email:

For me, politics are a way of accounting for the forces exerted among interacting objects in systems, and as such ontology and politics are inseparable. It could just be that our conceptions of politics are radically different, where your polis is much more narrowly defined than my tendency toward a cosmopolis.

This might get at the crux of the matter between people who claim “everything is political”, and people such as myself, Badiou, Ranciere, and Zizek who vehemently reject this thesis. In my view, the idea that politics is a field of “forces exerted among interacting objects” is about as apolitical as you get and is not a politics at all. Entities exerting force on one another is merely a state of affairs, not a politics. People live for centuries with certain forces being exerted on them in highly despotic ways without ever encountering these forces as political. Rather, they see these things as “merely the way the world is” and as natural as the regular movement of the stars.

Politics is something that happens at a very precise point: it is what happens when that field of forces is contested and agents begin to envision the possibility of doing things differently. Nothing is inherently political. Things have to be made political. Indeed, making things political that were before apolitical is one of the most significant aspects of political struggle. The domestic space of the home does not begin by being political or a site of the political, but is made into a political site. Sexuality does not begin by appearing political, but is made into a political site. The workplace does not begin as political, but is made into a political site. As Philip says in a comment responding to my last post, “nothing is in and of itself political, but anything can be made political.”

If you claim that everything is political and reject the thesis that politics is a specific moment and type of activity, you’ve entirely given up politics and all that is important about politics. Politics is not merely the presence of things exerting force on one another, but is that precise moment where that field of forces is contested, challenged, and it is declared that something else is possible, that things don’t have to be this way. Making something political that was previously apolitical requires a lot of hard work. Go into any workplace around the world and you will find people that deplore their working conditions, think that they are horrible, but who also believe that this is just the natural and inevitable order of things and the natural lot for people such as themselves. Talk to any number of people suffering from incredible debt due to dishonest credit and loan practices, and you will discover, much to your frustration that while they deplore their crushing debt they do not see it as a political issue but their natural lot resulting from their own actions. It takes work to shift these things from being “the natural order of things” to something that is politically contested. The politics is not there already. The whole point is to get the politics there. Politics isn’t a state-of-affairs, but is the moment of intervention.

As a discourse, ontology seeks to articulate the most general and fundamental nature of being or of what is and what is not.  Ontology and being are not the same.  Being consists of what is regardless of whether there is any discourse about it.  Ontology is a discourse about what is.  This distinction is important because ontologies, as discourses about the being of beings, can be mistaken.  There is no discourse that doesn’t presuppose an ontology or metaphysics (I use the two terms as synonyms).  For example, if you tell a person that your mother is seriously ill and going in for surgery and they reply by saying “I will pray for you”, their statement, whether they realize it or not, presupposes an ontology.  Minimally such a statement presupposes ontological claims about the types of beings that exist and about causation.  This person presupposes the existence of a divine being of some sort and that prayer can have some sort of causal effect on your mother.  Likewise, when someone says that a particular technology is intrinsically neoliberal or capitalistic, they are making certain metaphysical claims about the world.  They are saying that 1) entities are an expression of the context in which they exist (in this case the technology expresses capitalism), and 2) they are saying that relations expressed by the entity are internal to that entity.  The claim that a relation is internal to an entity is the claim that that entity is inseparable from those for relations.  For example, if I claimed that the steam engine is an expression of capitalist economy, I am claiming that steam engines are inseparable from capitalist economies and that they cannot, for example, exist in a communist economy.  The claim is that the steam engine is necessarily an embodiment of capitalism.  Such a view presupposes a particular ontology:  an ontology of expression and internal relations.

Whatever certain post-metaphysical thinkers might like to claim, there is no statement nor action that does not presuppose an ontology or metaphysics.  Of course, most of the time the ontologies we presuppose are operative yet unconscious.  We speak and act based on them, without reflecting upon them.  I seldom pause to think of the ontology my actions presuppose when I’m cooking.  I seldom pause to think of the ontology I’m assuming when I evaluate presidential politics in the United States.  This is true even in philosophy.  Often the epistemologist fails to reflect on the ontology his utterances about the nature of knowledge presuppose, and likewise with the philosopher of art and ethicist.  We can refer to these types of ontologies as “non-reflective ontologies of everyday life” or just “non-reflective ontologies”.  These non-reflective ontologies are presupposed and operative without the person acting and speaking based on them being aware of them.  They’re just experienced as the obvious way things are.  Like Heidegger’s spectacles in Being and Time, they are so close we don’t even notice them.  I look through my spectacles to something else, not at my spectacles.  Likewise, I speak, live, and act through my ontology, rather than reflecting on my ontology.

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For anyone who’s interested, Rutgers is offering a post-doc devoted to SR/ANT/OOO.

Over at Being’s Poem my friend Daniel has a very generous and thoughtful response to my response to his review of The Democracy of Objects.  Let me emphasize that Daniel and I are good friends.  Whenever we get together we have a great time with each other.  One of the highlights of my trip to Liverpool for the Thinking the Absolute conference was his surprise appearance.  We’ve even talked about visiting his home in Peru together.  Our discussions might get heated on occasion, but they are always lively and productive.  Daniel makes me think and since, as Artaud mentioned, the most difficult thing in the world is to find ways to manage to think, I find this valuable and am grateful for it.  Matters are no different in this discussion.

First, let me reiterate that I find little to disagree with in the defense of epistemological realism Daniel presents in his review.  This is a point I’ve made frequently in discussions with the epistemological realists I’ve encountered.  I don’t disagree with you.  I don’t see myself going off and investing large amounts of my time in the work of thinkers like Sellars, Brandom, or Burge, but this is quite different than claiming that I think their claims are mistaken or false.  I’m grateful that others are doing this work so I don’t have to.  In other words, I think it’s possible for there to be distributions of labor in philosophy and theory.

Daniel’s critique of my claims about epistemology in the first chapter of The Democracy of Objects is particularly valuable, because it helps me to clarify my own aims better.  The first chapter is designed to accomplish three things:  1) provide grounds for why we are entitled to speak of entities independent of humans (an epistemological project), 2) carry out a critique of correlationism, and 3) unfold the basic structure of objects (or what I’m now calling machines) that will be the object of investigation for the rest of the book.  Daniel nicely shows that there are all sorts of other resources we can pull on to accomplish this first task.  He also shows that in my critique of correlationism I tend to conflate epistemology with correlationism, mistakenly suggesting that epistemological projects ineluctably lead to anti-realist positions.  I think he’s right in that criticism.

The more I’ve reflected on matters since the writing of The Democracy of Objects, the more I’ve come to feel that my target is not so much correlationism, nor anti-realism, as anthropocentrism.  I see my work as attempting to carry out an intervention in fields like cultural studies, critical theory, and social and political thought, where I find certain forms of anthropocentrism to be rife.  Here it’s important to be careful, as there are many different types of anthropocentrism.  There are, for example, theological anthropocentrisms that treat humans as the crown of creation.  We don’t find many of these in those domains of inquiry.  There is, by contrast, the far more pervasive anthropocentrism that consists in focus on a single relation, the relation between humans and the world and, in particular, how humans represent the world.

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Throughout what I will loosely call the “critical theories”, we get a strong investigative focus on how humans represent the world and analysis of beliefs, norms, language, text, signs, and so on.  For instance, you might get the anthropocentric ethnographer restricting his analysis of the Kaluhli to their beliefs about the world and norms.  Note that the ethnographer’s analysis of Kaluhli beliefs and norms is not concerned with the truth or falsity of these beliefs and whether those norms are right or wrong.  He’s just looking to understand the “worldhood of their world”, or the way in which they represent their world.  That ethnographer can simultaneously hold both that the Kaluhli believe these things (for example, that it is a particular spirit that causes plants to grow) and that this belief is a false or mistaken representation of the world.  It just happens that evaluating the veracity of these claims is not the project that the ethnographer is engaged in.

The anthropocentrism of this kind of ethnographer lies in the focus on Kaluhli beliefs and norms, in how they represent the world.  It is likely that the ethnographer is neither a subjective idealist nor an absolute idealist, believing that there are all sorts of things that exist independent of humans that are entirely real.  Rather, the anthropocentrism of such an ethnographer lies in his focus on representations.

It is this focus, I think, that I’m trying to target.  The first and crucial point I want to note, is that I don’t think the ethnographer is mistaken in the claims he makes about Kaluhli beliefs and norms.  Similarly, I don’t think Daniel is mistaken in the claims that he makes about epistemology.  Second, I don’t think discussion of the human-world relation is unimportant, should be excluded, or should be ignored.  What I am objecting to is a largely exclusive focus on one relation– the human-world relation –to the detriment of a host of other factors that I believe play a crucial role in why our social assemblages take the form they take.

A non-anthropocentric social theory would not consist in excluding humans or in ceasing to talk about how humans represent the world around them, but in expanding the what can be analyzed and investigated to nonhumans as well.  I am not alone in this sort of project.  It is a project shared by materialist historians like Braudel, assemblage theorists like DeLanda, vibrant materialists like Jane Bennett, new materialist feminists like Stacy Alaimo, actor-network theorists like Latour, etc.  The thesis is very simple:  our social world takes the form it takes not simply because of the beliefs and norms that influence how we relate to the world, but also because of the technologies, infrastructure, animals, microorganisms, material resources, etc., that we share the world with.  I’m trying to do my small part in drawing attention to these other things.  I think this is an important project because if it’s true that social relations don’t take the form they take simply by virtue of the things we collectively believe and the norms we advocate, if it is true that material nonhumans play a significant role in social relations, then producing social change will not simply be a matter of changing beliefs, but will also necessarily involve intervening in material structures.  However if we’re to intervene in those material structures, we first need to develop an attentiveness to them and awareness of them.

My hostility towards epistemology– whether of the realist or anti-realist variety –would therefore lie in the way in which it reinforces this anthropocentric focus on humans and their beliefs, norms, representations, texts, signs, language, etc.  Again, it wouldn’t be a matter of saying that the epistemologist is wrong, but that he’s confusing the issue being discussed.  To see my point, compare how Daniel and I might discuss agricultural practices in the 15th century.  Since we’re discussing a remote period in history, Daniel might ask how the historian knows that this was the way in which agriculture was practiced in the 15th century.  He might broaden the question to an investigation of the conditions and limits of any historical knowledge whatsover.

That’s a commendable project, but a very different sort of project than the one I’m engaged in.  When I talk about agricultural projects in the 15th century, what interests me is how agriculture impacted the form social assemblages took.  I would be interested in questions such as how the properties of the grains cultivated, coupled with existing agricultural technologies, influenced how people lived their lives annually.  For example, we might find that the absence of fertilizers, pesticides, and various harvesting and planting technologies rendered agriculture so labor intensive that people were not free to develop themselves in other ways.  Likewise, I would be interested in the way in which agricultural production impacted the size that cities and populations could reach.  After all, a population needs food in order to sustain itself.  I would be interested in how the life of populations, individuals, and cities becomes tied to the rhythms of food production and technologies of food preservation in such a milieu.  I would be interested in how the diet of this period affects human development.  I would be interested in how climatic changes such as the little ice age, and things such as drought and crop pestilences might correlate with various forms of social unrest.

These are just a very different set of questions than the types of questions Daniel is asking.  I am not asking how we represent these things, nor how the people of this period represented these things.  I am not asking whether or not these are true realities or what is really real.  I am asking, among other things, what role these things played in the form society took at this period, what political structure it might have had, and whatever turmoil it might have experienced.  My basic thesis, you might say, is that the world is a sticky place, that networks are sticky things, and that often we find ourselves trapped in less than ideal social assemblages because of these material agents.  If we wish to have better more ideal social assemblages, then you better know something about these material assemblages so you can intervene in them in such a way as to unstick life.

Now at this point, one might legitimately ask “aren’t you here concerned with a human-world relation?”  Yes, of course, I’m particularly interested in how these things impact human life.  Yet this is quite different than the sort of anthropocentric human-world relation I’m trying to move past.  Rather than focusing on questions of whether or not the peoples of the 15th century had an accurate knowledge of agriculture, or what their discourses about agriculture might have been, I’m temporarily bracketing those questions, to focus on what real differences the properties of grains, production technologies, travel technologies, climate, storage technologies, natural events, etc., had in organizing social relations in this particular way.  Here compare the sort of analysis we get in Tim Morton’s brilliant earlier book The Poetics of Spice with the sort of analysis we get in Braudel’s Civilization and Capitalism.  In Morton’s book, we get an analysis of how spice is represented in romantic literature and how this led to the development of certain capitalist and consumerist subjectivities.  I’m certain that Morton believes in the real existence of spice.  It just so happens that his analysis here is focused on how the people of the romantic period represented spice and what sort of subjectivity this generated.  By contrast, Braudel is not investigating how people of a particular period represented agriculture, but rather how the real material properties of organic bodies, climate conditions, geographic distance and proximity, and existing technologies contributed to social relations in particular ways.  They are two very different sets of questions.  An ideal analysis would include both— which is more than any one person could handle –and would investigate the properties of both what Deleuze and Guattari call the “plane of content” (bodies/things affecting and being affected by one another) and the “plane of expression” (how the semiosphere or field of representation functions and is organized in a particular milieu).  In addition to this, it would investigate how these two planes interact with one another.  If these days I’ve been focusing on the plane of content, then this is because I think that critical theory of the last few decades has tended to emphasize the plane of expression and currently finds itself faced with a set of frustrating questions as to why certain forms of social change aren’t taking place despite adequate critiques of reigning ideologies or systems of representation.  Again, it is not a question of abandoning these critiques, but of exploring some other factors that likely contribute to the eternal return of the same at the material level.

At this point I can here Daniel saying “but don’t you have to represent these things to engage in such analyses?”  Sure!  Whoever said otherwise?  Here I recall Zizek’s joke about Butler.  Zizek recounts a situation where a person who says “this is a coffee cup” being confronted with a Butlerian who corrects him saying “your claim is inaccurate!  this is a coffee cup from a western, 20th century, european standpoint, within a particular set of institutions and structure of power!”  To this, Zizek responds that all of that is presupposed in the statement “this is a coffee cup.”  Now I would disagree with Zizek in his apparent suggestion that it’s worthless to point out the structure of the perspective from which we speak, but he does make a good point.  Often things are presupposed in discourses and practices.  Isn’t this what Brandom points out to us in his account of reasoning?  I certainly presuppose that I can refer to the world.  How I’m able to do this, however, is not a project I’m engaged in because I’m trying to talk about these other things.  I’m glad, however, that there are other people such as Daniel that are engaged in this project.  I just wish they’d show a bit more charity and recognize that it’s okay for people to engage in projects different than their own and that these projects don’t have to be mutually incompatible.

Having read through about half of Daniel Sacilotto’s review of The Democracy of Objects, I must say I’m deeply gratified and honored by the time and thought he’s put into this massive critical review (47 pages). It is both strange and humbling to have someone else take your mad ramblings and half-formed thoughts so seriously. Additionally, I find that I am not in much disagreement with Daniel’s points about realist epistemology. Daniel shows a sophisticated knowledge of the work of figures such as Sellars and Brandom, and powerfully shows how they help to bolster a case for realist ontology. I am grateful that he’s provided me with tools that might help me to strengthen my own claims, before audiences of philosophers. I will say, however, that my preferred audience consists of geologists, ethnographers, biologists, artists, activists, engineers, analysts and others with degrees and practices outside my own degrees. I learn more from them, they ask better and more interesting questions, and we have better discussions.

It is no surprise that I have a rather strong antipathy towards epistemology. First, this antipathy involves an affective component. My experience of epistemologists is one in which I feel as if I’ve been placed before an inquisitor asking me to justify myself. Let me be clear. I am not, by any means, suggesting that we should not provide reasons for our claims. If I make the claim that the moon is made of green cheese or that the stars determine our destiny, I should be prepared to provide reasons for these extraordinary claims. If I say that pain is c-fibers firing, I should be prepared to provide reasons for those claims. What I find obscene in the philosophical discipline of epistemology is the abstractness of its question. Rather than asking a specific question such as “how do you know that yeast causes fermentation?”, it instead asks “how do we know?” It feels as if you’re being asked to show your papers before you proceed in engaging in any inquiry. While I certainly understand why a government agency would want reasons to give money to build a giant super-collider before giving that money, I find it rather difficult to understand why we should be required to give a one-size-fits all account of what knowledge is before engaging in inquiry. The whole task feels as if a huge monkey wrench is being thrown into the activity of inquiry at the outset, preventing inquiry from ever beginning at all. My feeling is always that if you object to a claim, object to that claim and ask for reasons in support of that claim. Don’t ask general questions about what knowledge is– it’s many things and there are many different types of knowledge (episteme, maybe nous, techne, phronesis, maybe gnosis, etc).

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For anyone who’s interested, here is the text of my talk for my appearance at University of Dundee on September 12th.  I am not sure whether the event is open to the public, or when and where it is, but will announce these details when they become available.  In this talk, I simply try to draw attention to what onto-cartography is trying to thematize.  There’s still so much to be done at the theoretical level and that work will only become available with the publication of Onto-Cartographies, so don’t beat me up too much!  I’m still working through these things.  At any rate, here’s the talk!  bryantontocartographies