A couple of weeks ago my friend Aprell and I got in one of those “what is the point” discussions about object-oriented ontology over at my friend Tim Richardson’s house at dinner. I gave my standard spiel. In my view, Continental theory and philosophy has been overly dominated by a focus on text and the lived experience of human beings, ignoring the role played by nonhuman entities in social assemblages. This, at least, was the conclusion I had reached by the end of my graduate education at Loyola University of Chicago. My courses were dominated Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, as well as Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Gadamer, Lacan, and Zizek. There was also a strong ground in the history of philosophy focused on Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. Some of my classmates would joke that I was permanently living in the “transcendental epoche” bubble, as I was, after an obsession with Heidegger, intoxicated by the thought of Husserl. Later that obsession shifted to Derrida, Lacan and Hegel, and I spent a tremendous amount of time exploring the French structuralist semioticians as well as the semiotics of Charles Sanders Pierce (the latter, much to the dismay of my Continental colleagues). Among these thinkers, Deleuze was the only outlier, the only thinker that didn’t seem solely focused on the signifier and the lived experience of the subject, exploring vistas beyond the human and culture such as the world of the tick and the morphogenesis of crystals. Occasionally, when no one was looking, I would read Dennett, Dewey, Andy Clark, and Lucretius under my sheets with a flashlight.
Deleuze and Lacan were my master-figures throughout all of graduate school, and remain my master figures today alongside Luhmann who I discovered in my third year when exploring systems and complexity theory. I read Lacan through Deleuze and read Deleuze through Lacan. I still remember discovering Zizek in my first year. He felt like the holy grail of theory. I had struggled with Lacan’s Ecrits, making little headway, had made a little more progress with Encore, but devoured Zizek’s Sublime Object of Ideology like a pulp horror novel, suddenly feeling as if I was “getting it”. My axioms during this time were “the universe is the flower of rhetoric” (Lacan, Seminar XX), and “there is nothing outside the text”. In other words, I was a thoroughgoing structuralist semiotician that believed that language diacritically structured everything, and deeply impressed by Lacan’s analysis of the structuring function of language in “The Agency of the Letter” in Ecrits. I believed that it was solely the signifier that introduced difference into the world, that partitioned the world, not anything in the world itself. Hjelmslev was an important influence here as well, as was Levi-Strauss. And, of course, there was Blanchot. Just as Derrida said at the beginning of Of Grammatology, and as Foucault said in his own way in The Order of Things and The Archeology of Knowledge, I believed the world could be read as a fabric of signifiers, as an effect of discourses and Heidegger’s “language as the house of being”. To be sure, there was the Real, that which always escapes the signifier, but as Zizek argued, this was itself an effect of deadlocks inherent to attempts to totalize the universe of signifiers.
So what happened? First there was my encounter with DeLanda’s Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy and A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, both of which brought non-signifying differences and material processes to the fore and led me to read Deleuze in a very different way. I was spitting mad and simultaneously fascinated when I encountered these books. Was he really arguing that ocean currents and wind patterns (non-diacritical, a-signifying differences) played a key role in where European and American cities developed? Preposterous! But he got me reading the historian Braudel and his dry as dirt yet magnificent Capitalism and Civilization. I then encountered Harman’s Prince of Networks, which attuned me– contra Koyre and Bachelard –to the importance of lab equipment and the materials worked with, the experimental setting, etc. (again things that were not of the order of the signifier). Meanwhile, another friend had me reading Havlock (Preface to Plato), Kittler, Ong, McLuhan, and Haraway, all of whom emphasized the materiality of media, its non-signifying dimension, what a monumental difference writing technologies and inscription systems make, and what differences technologies contribute. Later there would be encounters with the “poor-man’s” Braudel in the work of theorists such as Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, who would thoroughly demolish biological and cultural racisms through their analysis of geography or the material features of the environment in which people lived, as well as other historians like William McNiell. I add cultural racism, because text-based/signifier-based theorists are thoroughly unable to explain why certain cultures rose to prominence in the world without appealing to something “superior” in the signifying-systems of those cultures that rose to dominance. We see it, for example, in Zizek’s claim that there’s something superior in the European, Christian legacy that gave them dominance. Theorists like Diamond, McNiell, and Braudel are thoroughly able to demolish this cultural racism, this idea that there was something “special” about the Greeks, by analyzing geography, the prevalence of domesticatible animals and plants, available metals, growing seasons, etc. For them it wasn’t the culture, but the geography; and this based on the axiom that peoples always make maximal use of the resources available to them because, well, folks are smart wherever they live. Again, non-signifying differences, non-rhetorical differences. These were material differences that were more Marxist than the Marxist (Marx himself excepted).
So my universe, my universe structured by the fabric of the signifier, was collapsing. I could no longer claim, as Barthes’ claimed in The Fashion System, that language, the signifier, was a “primary modeling system”, i.e., a system that diacritically structured everything else. I had learned many truths from the Marxist critical theorists, the semioticians, Lacan, Barthes, Pierce, Levi-Strauss, etc. I wanted to and want to preserve these things. But I needed a theoretical framework strong enough both preserve these things and take account of these non-signifying entities such as writing technologies, ocean currents, satellites, microbes, the growing cycles of rice, high energy diets, etc. That required realism and a flattening of the world. The problem with my earlier orientations wasn’t in the recognition that the signifier produces the difference between a men’s room and a lady’s room, but in believing that the signifier functioned as a hierarch or sovereign that structures everything else. The problem lay in the refusal to recognize that sometimes the placement of a river or a mountain range makes a tremendous social difference. In this respect, only a realist/materialist approach that simultaneously recognized the reality of the signifier and a-signifying entities would give us the analysis required. It’s never been a question of rejecting analysis of the point of view from which a claim is made, text, narrative, and signifier, but always been a question of multiplying the factors that go into producing a social assemblage.
November 13, 2012 at 4:27 am
Perhaps this is a bit off topic but recently I’ve been reading some texts on Reich and Lowen and the bioenergetic therapy that their theories gave birth to. Have you ever had an encounter with these thinkers? Their attempt to return the material of the body to psychoanalytic therapy seems to perform a similar function of re-incorporating something which is essential but was previously marginalized to a discourse. Or would you argue that it is simply a way of further strengthening the hold of the signifier over the body now become text?
November 13, 2012 at 5:10 am
What’s interesting, Levi, is how close you truly are to the neo-materialisms that are arising out of DeLanda, Braidotti, Barad, and, even in Meillassoux in some of his newer clarifications. They all seem to be moving toward monisms that are no longer bound to some monolithic signifier (Nietzsche’s Will, Deleuze’s Life, etc.) but are offering in your sense of “multiplying the factors” a multiplicity that is immanent to an open-ended complexity that can never be reduced to some univocity. Are you still affirming a tie to Harman’s substantive dualism? Or, are you moving back toward a more materialist vision within some form of the new materialsms? Are is there some fine line between them? I see that a diachronic vision taking form now in your statements, a framework that shows the viability of processual development over static deployment?
Thanks for such an open and honest, personal summation of your growth. Excellent!
November 13, 2012 at 8:29 am
Your post reminded me of Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages. It’s exactly what he’s doing there, showing how everything cultural (in this case language and music) has its origin in geography, climate, migration, and a few natural disasters… No surprise that this text was the main target of Derrida’s most famous book.
November 13, 2012 at 1:18 pm
Noir,
I’m not sure I understand the question.
November 13, 2012 at 3:16 pm
Hi Levi… I’ll be more explicit:
Question One: Are you a dualist, or do you opt for some form of monism?
Harman affirmed a dualism at the heart of his OOO from early on:
“The basic dualism I defend is a familiar one, and will probably be endorsed by many readers of Heidegger. On the one hand, there is the world of tool-being, inaccessible to representation and existing only as the brute efficacy of a total system of equipment. On the other, there are the visible termini of that system, the various singular objects inhabiting the perceptible zone of life. These two realms are none other than those of Heidegger’s ready-to-hand and present-at-hand. In turn, this opposition is precisely the same as that between ontological and ontic. Only the trivial misreading of tool-being as “useful human instrument” can permit the false objection that the tool is not yet anything ontological.”
Harman, Graham (2011-08-31). Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (p. 31). Perseus Books Group.
Question Two: New materialism incoroprates “transversality”, is this something you would defend or oppose:
Transversality with New materialsm exposes a cultural theory that does not privilege the side of culture, but focuses on what Haraway would call ‘naturecultures.’ It explores a monist perspective of the human being, disposed of the dualisms that have dominated the humanities until today, by giving special attention to matter as it has been so much neglected by dualist thought. New materialism, a cultural theory inspired by the thoughts of Deleuze, that spurs a renewed interest in philosophers such as Spinoza and Leibniz, shows how cultured humans are always already in nature, and how nature is necessarily cultured, how the mind is always already material, and how matter is necessarily something of the mind. New materialism opposes the transcendental and humanist (dualist) traditions that are haunting a cultural theory, standing on the brink of both the modern and the post-postmodern era. The transcendental and humanist traditions, which are manifold yet consistently predicated on dualist structures, continue to stir debates, which have a stifling effect on the field (think of the feminist polemic concerning the failed materialism in the work of Butler, and of the Saussurian/ Lacanian linguistic heritage in media and cultural studies). New materialism allows for the conceptualisation of the travelling of the fluxes of matter and mind, body and soul, nature and culture, and opens up active theory formation. The three transversalities concern disciplinarity, paradigms, and the spatiotemporality of theory.
Question Three: Do you support a diachronic approach to things/objects?
You once said, and I paraphrase, that the that objects are dynamic systems that relate to the world under conditions of operational closure. A Luhmanian approach through makin a distinction. This seems more of a synchronic isolating of the object from its history or developmental process over time. Do you still support this view? Are or you open to a diachronic approach as well, one that offers a developmental and or processual view of the object as a creature with a series of traces that mark its ontic force? Instead of a dual of objects there is a sense of a Bildungsroman of and objects traces through time, its intra-active ontology as process through time, rather than as a fully deployed entity without out any sense of history or growth?
Sorry for the long winded rhetoric….
November 13, 2012 at 3:19 pm
sorry for the typo: “that the” in that last paragraph… remove.
November 13, 2012 at 4:13 pm
Levi- how beautiful to see the wonderings. Many of us in design-side of thinking/doing travel in our own ways along some of the paths you have traveled. Your personal intellectual GPS tracking map mirrors several of my own dead-ends, although I was fed semiotics via Pierce first and had to find on my own Heidegger and later DeLanda.
My partner and I need to read your word selection more carefully-some of us who deal with the 4D+ world of people, space, material and time get lost when we read your ‘flattening’ idea- for makers and artists the semiotic is a flattening ‘reduction’ [not anything like Husserl’s reduction] from the real. For us the real is literally dealing with depth and discovering sometimes literally the things-that-have-no-names. So as much as I love your writing, I have my own semiotic prison with ‘flattening’; I just have to have my contextual translator on when I see it in your and other writings.
Juhani Pallasmaa has a nice book I have my undergraduate designers read called ‘Eyes of the Skin’. In his writing real is not a ‘flattened’ visual of consciouness, but a further evidenced deeper one known by the hand, movement, or today, with Harman, via tool-being. Designers find themselves in an already vivid world pre-words that your thinking is helping us structure differently than mere representations. Thanks.
November 14, 2012 at 1:10 am
Hi Noir,
I find the monism question difficult. If by monism you mean Spinoza’s thesis that only one substance exists and everything else is a property of that one substance, then no I’m not a monist. If by monism you mean that there’s only the natural world, then yes I’m a monist, but of a pluralistic sort insofar as I believe their are a plurality of different substances. I’m largely in line with the new materialists on these points. Luhmann’s understanding of dynamic systems is not purely synchronic as dynamic systems have a history and evolution. In The Democracy of Objects I spend a lot of time discussing development (diachrony) in terms of developmental systems theory. I just don’t think that entities can be reduced to their history.
November 14, 2012 at 2:57 am
Thanks for the answer! Yes, seems that new materialism is a pluralistic mode of critical thinking about entities, and that these entities entail entanglements in which entities that are locally manifested are always already members of some intra-activie dynamical system. That one cannot reduce these systems to as you stated a master signifier, which I think we can all agree on is the central motif of pluralism. That dynamic systems being entangled in a multitude of matterings cannot be reduced to one unified history; their movement entail already a multiplicity of histories, not some master signifier: History. And, with Luhmann, we agree that there are many dynamical systems: he of course traversed the boundaries between communication and persons; that persons do not communicate, only communication does.
Ultimately we all enforce distinctions after the fact, philosophy always already making choices after the fact rather than being proleptically vigilant as in critique. Instead it seems critical thinking entails a transversal approach that cuts across a multitude of domains and disciplines such that it is an undoing rather than a doing: being that its double focus shifts between differing frames of analysis.
I appreciate that you “spend a lot of time discussing development (diachrony) in terms of developmental systems theory.” Your very open and shifting and metamorphic. I see that a lot of your terms shift and slide in your books, you never reduce a thought to one specific meaphor or metonym but seem to shift between etymological derivations in search of a meaning that can never be descriptive or represented. I like it that you are anti-representationlistic in this.
I know I’ve studed all OOO for a while and see that aspects are truly viable, and yet go against aspects of my own materialist investiture; yet, I think as it matures it will have great things to say to us who truly seek not just then new, but also a way forward.
November 14, 2012 at 2:59 am
typo: meaphor meanti metaphor…
November 17, 2012 at 1:03 pm
Am I to read this right as saying that you thought you found a refutation of racism in the semioticians and structuralists, they were really cultural racists. And then you found Braudel, Diamond et al. and realized that culture itself is a product of non-cultural factors, so all culture is relative to geography, invalidating cultural racism. Okay, I think I follow you so far, if that’s right. But has racism been refuted? Diamond stops short of suggesting that geography influences genetics, but it would be strange if it didn’t. So has racism been refuted? Just trying to follow you down this path of refuting racism, don’t want to stop before getting to the end.
November 17, 2012 at 1:27 pm
No bjk. I’m claiming that while the semioticians were able to refute biological racism they couldn’t refute cultural racism. By cultural racism, I mean the view that one society rises to dominance over others because of the superiority of its culture or signifying system. We see this kind of racism in how Heidegger talks about the Greeks or Zizek talks about the Christian legacy. Diamond shows how it is not the signifying system that allowed for the rise to dominance, but geography.
November 17, 2012 at 2:05 pm
If geography accounts for the rise to dominance, wouldn’t geography also reintroduce race? If the semioticians were wrong about geography, they might also have been wrong about race. It seems like you’re opening a bit of a can of worms here.
November 17, 2012 at 3:03 pm
Bjk,
Biology has shown no significant genetic differences between people from different regions of the world and therefore substantiates semiotic deconstructions of the concept of race. For that reason I don’t have the worry you’re raising. Diamond does an excellent job showing how availability and lack of availability of various resources molded different civilizations and gave some advantages over others.
November 17, 2012 at 6:30 pm
You might want to tell Jared Diamond that, because he’s been known to measure penises to see which race is bigger. Google Ethnic differences – Variation in human testis size by Jared Diamond.
November 17, 2012 at 8:58 pm
bjk,
I’m not familiar with that article or what it concludes. I do know that Diamond has tirelessly fought both biological and cultural racism. The argument of Guns, Germs, and Steel is pretty powerful and effective at demolishing the claims of cultural racists.
November 19, 2012 at 1:54 am
[…] to an earlier conversation with a friend, I argued that OOO is valuable because it draws attention to non-cultural agencies […]
November 19, 2012 at 4:00 am
Very interesting piece. I am intrigued with your Existenzbiographie (as Jaspers might say) of how you grew to encompass your vocation. This is how I read Husserl. That he offers a way to get to this kind of thinking but that he was not taken up on it by a large majority of those who came afterward. Thanks again. Much to mull over.
November 19, 2012 at 11:26 am
Psychoanalysis, Structuralism, Semiotics, and other frameworks: these are talismanic – they are loaded up with Truth, crackling with its energy, you put them round your neck and feel protected from the horror of reality. The All is all there is and it cannot be explained by any one thing. Truth and logic are always partial.