Over at Circling Squares, Phillip– who’s always worth reading –has a nice post responding to a post I wrote earlier this week on the erasure of the real in contemporary thought and society. I wanted to zero in on one thing Phillip writes as this is actually the theme of my next book, tentatively entitled Monad-Oriented Ontology, which should come out with the Posthumanities Series with University of Minnesota Press in the next year or so. Phillip writes:
Having been reading Latour’s modes book a lot recently I can only read this in modal terms. For Levi it seems that there are only two modes, still. There’s the sunset and the sun; the subjective and the objective; the unreal and the real. Only two types of existence, two ways of persisting. All further distinctions must seemingly be made within those master categories. His ontology is pluralist inasmuch as it consists of a vast plurality of things but it’s dualist in terms of its modes of existence.
Therefore, in Latour’s terms, Levi is firmly within the ‘modern parenthesis’ – post-Locke, pre-James. Of course, I’m sure he’d criticise Latour’s rejection of substances, etc. but Latour’s pluralism poses some challenges. E.g. are all ‘subjective’ phenomena really of one mode? Is ‘subjective’ really such a secure storehouse for such diverse phenomena as sense experience, dreams, fear, ratiocination, etc? Can all further distinctions safely be made within those two categories?
This is simultanteously right and misleading. Before I get to that, I’d first like to say that while I haven’t yet finished Latour’s Modes of Existence, what I have read so far suggests that it’s his best book to date and, in certain respects, that it marks a revolution in his thought. I would argue, however, that what Latour seeks to accomplish there as an analysis of modes of existence, is what is at the heart of Luhmann’s theory of distinctions (and that Luhmann does it better).
So where is Phillip right and where is he misleading? Phillip is right to point out that I draw a distinction between objects in-themselves and objects-for-another (though this distinction doesn’t quite map on to the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity because there is an [epistemological] objectivity proper to objects-for-another). There are two ways in which we can view objects. We can approach objects as they are in-themselves, regardless of whether they are observed or related to by anyone, or we can observe how various types of subjects or observers relate to objects. That is, we can think about objects as they are for another. Latour (and Luhmann), I think, have a tendency to erase the independent existence of objects by virtue of approaching them almost solely in terms of how they are discoursed about and related to within a mode of existence (Latour) or social system (Luhmann). However, while it is certainly indeed true that I might have a particular legal discourse about Phillip, it would be odd and, I think, obviously wrong to suggest that Phillip’s existence is in any way dependent on my discourse about him. Phillip exists just fine as an object-in-himself regardless of whether or not any other entity discourses about him or observes him.
read on!
Notice also that Phillip is both a subject and an object. We must simultaneously think Phillip as an entity that exists in its own right and as a seat of experience (though I’d argue contra Whitehead that not all objects are also seats of experience; I don’t think rocks and stars are). At any rate, I think there’s a deep rooted tendency in these sorts of theories to erase the independent existence of other beings, attempting to transform them into products of discourse, figures in a mode of existence, etc. This, tendency, I think, has all sorts of really problematic epistemological, political, and ethical consequences. As I outlined in the post to which Phillip is responding, we became so terrified of saying that something is real because we saw this as undermining pluralist values of tolerance that it’s become impossible for us to say anything is real at all. This, however, has generated its own set of problems.
At any rate, recognizing that there’s a difference between how an observer encounters another object and the object– if it is indeed an object; viz., clearly God appears in all sorts of “modes of existence” and discourses, but there’s no being that corresponds to this talk –itself, doesn’t entail that we’re caught within the modernist frame (as Latour conceives it) where the discourse of truth trumps everything. With Latour we can recognize that there are many modes of existence for relating to the world and that there are different functives in each of these modes of existence. In Luhmann– who does it better and far more precisely –this thesis takes the form of a “theory of distinctions”, where every social system has its own operative distinctions and codes, relating to meaning within that system in their own particular way (really folks, you need to read this guy; I’ll will drag you to him kicking and screaming). Thus, for example, the legal system only relates to events according to the distinction legal/illegal, politics relates to events according to the distinction power/non-power, economy profit/no-profit, religion according to the distinction marked/unmarked, ontology the distinction being/non-being, news media information/non-information, etc. It’s all more intricate than this, but the point is that in each one of these systems– and “system” is a synonym for “object” within the ontology I propose –is a particular mode of existence for relating to the world.
It follows from this that truth/non-truth– and I suspect that this isn’t the operative distinction in what we call science –is only one mode of existence among many. Moreover, if this is true of the observers we call social systems, then it also follows that social systems cannot be steered by one particular system such as the political system. Why? Because the other systems will continue to be organized around the operative distinction that structures that particular mode of existence, e.g., the economic system will continue to “process” events in terms of the distinction profit/non-profit, rather than the operative distinction the political system is attempting to deploy in the economic system. If true, this poses a tremendous challenge to our understanding of the challenges faced by leftist politics which continue, even in anarchist form (the form I most advocate) to imagine all other social systems being controlled by the political system or mode of existence. We’ve barely caught up to the phenomenon of operational closure in our political thought. Additionally, if Luhmann is right about operational closure, it also follows that one particular system (economy) cannot serve as the base for all the other systems, determining them in the last instance. This is good news, of course, for cultural politics as we’ve long suspected that there are a plurality of domains of political struggle and that they can’t all be traced back to economy (Althusser was a great forerunner here with his concept of overdetermination), but it also significantly complicates the nature of political struggle and how to think these different systems.
At any rate, all of this is a round about way of saying that I’m very much on the same page as Latour with the idea of a plurality of modes of existence. I agree with this hands down and this was even the central point of chapter 4 of The Democracy of Objects: Many objects are not “merely” objects, but are also subjects and we need to be cognizant of this. Hence the idea of a “monad-oriented ontology“, that is attentive to how other objects encounter the world about them. Even Luhmann stresses this point, arguing that we must distinguish between the environment of a system (the particular way in which an object is open to the world or forms an umwelt), and systems in the environment of a system (other entities with different umwelts). Sadly he doesn’t himself follow this distinction through very consistently or coherently due to his ultra-posthumanist-correlationism. Had he followed this distinction through consistently (same with Latour), he would have arrived at the caveat that objects or systems cannot be reduced to how they are as correlates for another system. Put in Latour’s terms, both him and Latour would have come to see that we must preserve a kernel of the modernist divide even while completing that divide.
I will say this in criticism of Latour’s Modes of Existence: I think it contains a bit of the “beautiful soul” within it. Latour, I think, dreams of a “federative universe of harmonious differences” (Deleuze’s characterization of the beautiful soul in Difference and Repetition), where every mode of existence gets along in a happy daisy chain or orgy without an conflicts. This comes out with particular clarity in Latour’s discussions of religion in Modes of Existence. He wants to say something like “you atheists just don’t get it. You think religion is making ontological or scientific claims about the nature of the world, when in fact it’s an entirely different mode of existence completely unconcerned with such claims, talking about something entirely different.” In other words, he wants to draw an analogy to something like the difference between the mode of existence of the legal system where the operative distinction is legality/illegality and the economic system where the operative distinction is profit/non-profit, and suggest that the religious system or mode of existence is, like the legal system, talking about something entirely different than the scientific and philosophical system like the economic system. In other words, he’s tacitly suggesting that the new atheist is making a “category mistake” in their critiques. The problem is that this simply isn’t the case. Everywhere we look– at least in the United States –we see religious system making ontological claims rather than simply claims about the unmarked space or the space of paradox that arises necessarily within any system of distinctions for an observing (I’ll tell that fascinating Goedelian story another day). The point is that with these particular systems there just isn’t the possibility of a federation of peaceful differences (here I excuse Latour because he’s dealing with a very different religious universe in France and Europe).
Larval Subjects . 
October 13, 2013 at 1:00 am
Levi, your last sentence about excusing Latour “because he’s dealing with a very different religious universe in France and Europe” caught my eye. But, so are we WITHIN the United States (especially between opposing poles Dallas and San Francisco ; ) A very interesting correlation related to this jumped out at me today from some statistics on “households with broadband access” (in the Washington Post; source: OECD Communications Outlook – latest data from 2010). The United States was 11th at 68.2% compared to #1 South Korea at 97.5% and rankings 2-7 all being Nordic countries with 8x%. What I’m guessing is that this could correlate with how open people are to global trends, as opposed to other places having much more local, fundamentalist, and intolerant beliefs (at least when compared to anything-goes Neoliberalism ;)
October 13, 2013 at 8:38 am
Although i aldo havent finished latours book i was also struck with the similarities with luhmann (is he even mentioned though?). One difference i think is that while luhmann suggests that the legal system for example is made up of legal operations, latours point is that the legal system is made up of all kinds of non-legal elements (politics, economics, personal beefs etc) that is in the end connected *legally*. Luhmann perhaps would say the the legal system is made up of all legal operations wherever they happen (leading to luhmannian research is post-national legal constructs), latour has a traditional understanding of the legal system as the national institutionalized legal bodies, but a heteregenous understanding of what elements and operations it is made up of.
A biit of a sidetrack but what are your thoughts of that?
October 13, 2013 at 12:53 pm
number of the usual suspects are discussing the Latour book if folks want to join in: http://aimegroup.wordpress.com/
October 13, 2013 at 2:06 pm
We will also start a reading group here on a island outside Gothenburg, Sweden. In tribute to this Latour-quote:
“In August of that year, stretched out in the sun on an island across from Gothenburg, in Sweden, I couldn’t stop running my fingers over the rough red surface of the rocks as if to find out whether Whitehead could have been right . . . Everything became clear, then: what I had discovered in Kenya, and what the principle of irreduction had hinted at obscurely. There exists a completely autonomous mode of existence that is very inadequately encompassed by the notions of nature, material world, exteriority, object. This world shares one crucial feature with all the others: the risk taken in order to keep on existing.”
October 13, 2013 at 4:31 pm
Magnus,
Based on _Theory of Society 1_, I think Luhmann is far closer to Latour than might initially be suspected. As you point out, Latour argues that systems like the legal system are assemblages of heterogeneous actants. This causes him a serious problem that he tries to address in Modes of Existence: these systems nonetheless distinguish themselves from other systems, eg, the scientist insists there’s something unique to science even though it’s entangled with politics. Luhmann, of course, had already solved this problem two decades ago with his theory of distinctions and account of operational closure (and, I’d argue in a more sophisticated and interesting way than the “mode of existence thesis”).
But does Luhmann solve this problem at the expense of ignoring the heterogeneous actants upon which systems rely? Are we faced with a stark alternative between assemblages (Latour) and systems (Luhmann)? Much to my surprise, the answer is no. What Latour calls actants can be found in what luhmann calls structural couplings and mediums. Strictly speaking, these media are outside a system, but nonetheless condition systems in all sorts of important ways.
October 14, 2013 at 1:18 am
When talking about the relations between systems across their respective environment, Luhmann likes to borrow the concept of “polycontexturality” from Gotthard Gunther. The point is that how one observer observes one object doesn’t “exhaust” this object since it can be observed in different ways by another observers. For example, democracy means one thing for the political system, another thing for the legal system, another thing for the economic system, and so forth and so on.
Thus “Polycontexturality” implies two things.
1 – First, two observers (or systems, or subjects) are different from each other if they observe different objects. Two observers can observe the same object of course, but observer A must observes something that observer B doesn’t observe in order to distinguish itself at the level of his (or its) operations.
2 – Second, objects exist only if they are observed by more one observer at the same time. Using the example of democracy again, we can see that democracy becomes a reality when the political system, the legal system and the economic system all refer to it. And yet democracy continues to take a different meaning from each system as observer.
The result is a network within which observers and objects are mixed together. More exactly, any node in the network is simultaneously (or alternatively?) an observer and an object.
October 14, 2013 at 1:24 am
Well said, Jean-Sebastian.
October 15, 2013 at 3:08 pm
J-SG, but is there really (for example) a separate political system that is apart from economics and law, and is there some-thing that is “democracy” apart from what people do (with their extended-mindings) along the lines of these assemblages?
October 15, 2013 at 3:24 pm
Dmf,
The argument is that these various systems are entangled and interacting, but that each is nonetheless distinct insofar as they draw their own boundary between system and environment. It’s a mistake to confuse the political system with democracy or the state. A neo-fascist group seeking to overturn the state is still participating in the political system. The key point which I’ve made a few times now is that systems aren’t based on uniformity or consensus. Rather, they’re about reproducing a particular form of communication (social systems only exist as and through communication). Unlike a biological body that has a membrane, they only exist so long as they reproduce their boundary between system and environment through communication. Consensus and uniformity are even bad for their continued existence as agreement means there’s nothing more to communicate. In this regard, antagonism and conflict do a better job of continuing autopoiesis in the political system. Yes, economy is influenced by politics, but in an ECONOMIC way. The economic system interprets events in the political system not in terms of political distinctions, codes, and programs, but in terms of ecoonomic distinctions, codes, and programs.
It’s very important to note that for Luhmann these social systems are not made up of people. People are in the environment (outside) of social systems, while social systems themselves are made up of nothing but communicative events. While people are a condition for the existence of these systems, they are nonetheless outside as these systems only recognize communicative events and consciousness and neurological events can’t be communicated.
October 15, 2013 at 3:39 pm
sorry if I’m suffering from a kind of aspect-blindness on these matters and don’t mean to have you simply repeating yourself, was listening to oral arguments the other day from the supreme court on campaign donations, equal representation, mass-media, first amendment rights and such, and I just can’t grasp these knots/events as being divisible.
October 15, 2013 at 3:42 pm
There we encounter the legal system relating to economic events in terms of legal codes (legality/illegality), where the political system responds to those donations in terms of political codes such as increases and decreases of power. There’s a different set of distinctions and internal considerations for each of these modes of existence or systems.
October 15, 2013 at 3:57 pm
except that all of those aspects/considerations were part of this process:
http://www.c-span.org/Events/Supreme-Court-Hears-Oral-Arguments-in-McCutcheon-v-FEC/10737441924/
October 15, 2013 at 4:09 pm
AIME reminds me to Boltanski and Thevenot’s On Justification where they suggest six types of worth or orders. In AIME, Latour suggests that an event may maintain and protect continuity of different modes (it will support or not support one’s felicity condition). The interesting part is when intersection between these modes contradict each other. If I remember it correctly some modes are not compatible with some other particular modes. What is interesting for me is that B&T propose an eugenics situation where the order is not valid anymore. Strangely, Latour does not cite B&T and describes his book as influenced by Etienne Souriau.
While about object and subject, I like to see it as Deleuze’s line of flight. An object exist without an observer, but once they share a network, an object become both,
October 15, 2013 at 4:10 pm
dmf,
In fact they weren’t. When the Supreme Court makes a decision it’s doing so in terms of issues of legality and illegality, Constitutionality, not whether or not they will make a profit, etc. The considerations of this system have to do with documents like the Constitution, legal precedent, etc., that are completely foreign to the decision making process of the economic system. It’s a very simple point: the legal system understands these issues from the standpoint of legality, not profit. It employs a different code in its deliberations and communicative processes. You seem to be laboring under the assumption that somehow operational closure means no interaction whatsoever with events in other systems. But that’s not it at all. Operational closure means the system in question interprets those events from the standpoint of its own codes and distinctions. Take the reverse case with how the economic system responds to supreme court distinctions. It doesn’t respond to those distinctions in terms of communicative acts about their legality and illegality and whatnot, but rather in terms of opportunities for profit and loss (i.e., the stock market rises or falls in response rather than spitting back a series of legal precedents).
October 16, 2013 at 2:22 pm
Luhmann writes as a sociologists. In sociology, the alternative to Luhmann’s theory would be a Marxist theory positing a class structure cutting across (transversally, as it were) all institutions: politics, economy, law, etc. As a result, the difference between ideology and science is over-emphasized because all observers are expected to agree on the centrality of the class structure. At the same time, the difference between institutions or systems (again, politics, law, economy, art, religion, etc.) is under-emphasized or more exactly left un-problematized. Since class structure “over-rules” all the rest, there is very little the theory can say about the specificity of politics in comparison to law or the specificity of economy in comparison to politics. After all, the Supreme Court is not the Congress, and the White House is not the stock market. In terms of organizations, this is quite obvious. Yet there was a time in history when those institutions (again, those systems) were not clearly distinguished. There was a time when political leaders were all at once religious leaders (no difference between the pope and the emperor). There was time when executive power and judiciary power were not separated (no difference between political representatives and judges). Etc. Etc. For Luhmann, it is essential to grasp these social transformations to produce a theory of contemporary society. Accordingly, Luhmann believes that society today is not organized around a hierarchy (a class structure) but as a set of functional systems coexisting in each other’s environment. The goal is then to describe the differences between systems… or (I suppose) modes of existence.
October 17, 2013 at 2:35 pm
J-SG, it’s not obvious to me at all as senior White House officials are active power players on Wall Street (also think of all of the revolving-door issues in terms of governing figures working for corporations), people representing financial (and other private interests) regularly take direct roles in the legislative and oversight roles of the Congress, and the Supreme Court is blatantly a player in shaping both the legislative and financial (educational, military, religious,etc) processes. If sociologists/philosophers can’t match the on the ground accuracy of say good news reporting than they are working on science fictions.
October 19, 2013 at 8:40 am
Hi Levi,
First of all, it‘s interesting to see how, by emphasizing the distinction between things that are both objects and subjects, the non-naive reading of Latour and Luhmann is getting closer to non-naive reading of science that deals with causality as mode of connection between objects (qua objects) but still comes to grips with the fact that there is some realm of the subjective which must not be left out by a final description of reality but with which regular science has had problems so far.
Now one could say that both science as well as critical theory study things objectively („from the outside“ so to say and there for naively) and thus never truly acknowledge the object as it is for itself. Following Latour, acknowledging the plurality or modes of existence goes already into the right direction. But I don‘t think you‘re give deserved praise to Whitehead. It‘s exactly his theory of causality (or say his theory of prehension) that introduces the only real pluralistic way of relation among things; you will never get this from Luhmann‘s theory of distinction I think (which he extracted from the mathematical work of George Spencer-Brown but really only uses it as descriptive tool). You wrote in an earlier blog entry that
„[b]ecause to think about these other agencies [stones, rocks etc.] you have to think about real, material, causality that functions independent of the purposes to which people put things to, what they signify to them, their ideological motives, etc. „
I just don‘t see how you can get that out of Luhmann‘s operational closure but then please teach me something. As for Whitehead the ascription of „experience“ to rocks or stones, which you apparently find ridiculous, is a consequence of his theory of relation (causation/prehension). I used quotation marks to emphasize that he doesn‘t mean the kind of conscious experience which humans or higher evolved animals have. I think this is only logical, but wait for monad-oriented ontology to clear things up (maybe?).
October 19, 2013 at 10:33 am
Thanks for clarifying and correcting my misunderstandings, Levi!
As I understand it so far, for Latour, the ‘Philip’ qua physical, biological entity is a being of REP. His way out of ‘materialism’ (as he understands it) is by refusing that the being of REP is the substrate upon which other modes are imposed or into which the other modes are embodied. All modes are a priori equals.
Moreover, subject and object only have meaning internal to a mode. Towards the end of the first REF chapter he mentions beer yeasts and, importantly, states that they were swimming around the world quite happily for many years before they were pinned down in laboratories and factories and talked about in articles and blog posts, etc. Compare and contrast this with his infamous statements on Ramses II and tuberculosis, when he said that Ramses couldn’t possibly have died from TB because it wasn’t discovered yet…
What’s changed is that he can now separate the beings of REF and REP. Beer yeasts were beings of REP long before they became beings of REF. However, they did only become ‘objects’ when they entered into a relation with a ‘subject.’ So, he retains the word object in its classic relation as intrinsically tied to and co-constituted with a subject; both these entities – subject and object – are co-produced by the circulation and extension of reference. However, the scientist didn’t flash into existence as a physical being when he discovered the beer yeast for the first time and nor did the beer yeast emerge from nowhere; this was, however, the first beer-yeast-related subject-object relation.
As for the religious mode, I agree with your objections vis-a-vis Latour’s attempt to fend off the atheists, however what’s interesting is the extent to which he’s also trying to fend off his fellow Christians! He seems far more pagan than Christian, to me! It’s a defence, for sure, but a very odd one.
@ yuti
Latour references Boltanski and Thevenot if not in his modes book then elsewhere. He definitely mentions them as an influence.
October 20, 2013 at 11:30 pm
Robert,
Yes, I’m aware that Whitehead isn’t suggesting rocks don’t have experience in the way that lions do. I think that Whitehead is problematic for a number of reasons and therefore ought to be avoided in philosophy. First, there is the domain of teleological causation in his work. I believe that within a post-Darwinistic, modern framework, this is completely unacceptable and even reactionary. Second, Whitehead continues to make a variant of intelligent design arguments vis a vis God in his work. In choosing those eternal objects that function as lures for feeling, he is essentially playing a design role in being. Again, I think this is unacceptable within a contemporary framework of thought. Third, Whitehead simply doesn’t make arguments (as he himself admits). He gives us a series of pictures or descriptions without any real justification as to why we ought to accept them. Why you would suggest that Whitehead gives us the only pluralistic account of how beings relate to the world is beyond me. Whether we’re speaking of theorists like Uexkull, contemporary animal ethologists, biosemioticians, autopoietic theorists, or theorists such as Luhmann, there’s a wide range of thinkers making these sorts of points and doing so in a sophisticated way. We don’t need to embrace the silly ontology of Whitehead in order to discuss or think these things.
Regarding what one can and cannot get out of Luhmann, it’s important to understand that I’m not a “Luhmannian”, if by that you mean I restrict thought to Luhmmann and what he claimed. I believe that Luhmann has given us the most sophisticated theory of observing systems (different types of consciousness, animal, human, social, and computer) to date. That, however, is it. While materiality and its influence became increasingly important in Luhmann’s latest work– cf. the chapters on media in Theory of Society: Volume 1 –you really need to look elsewhere for a robust theory of materiality. I’ve tried to develop that in my own work in The Democracy of Objects and my forthcoming Ontocartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media.
October 22, 2013 at 1:46 pm
One of the primary differences I see between your work and Latour’s here is his focus specifically on the modes that describe Modern Europeans/Westerners. Once you get beyond Reproduction, Metamorphosis, and Habit the modes becomes increasingly culturally specific. That’s not to say other humans might have very similar modes or even other nonhumans. This is what you are pointing out in your response to Latour’s mode of religion.
In any case, as I read it, it is those three modes–REP, MET, and HAB–that are the basis of Latour’s ontology, where the primary goal does seem to be flattening the distinction between subject and object (only to reincarnate them as quasi-). Latour’s argument then seems to be that the modes of Religion, Law, and Politics produce the quasi-subjects of modern Europe. Admittedly he says it’s an incomplete project, so the modes could continue to proliferate, and they aren’t not meant to operate as is for other cultures. What’s more interesting than the modes he describes are the things he says cannot be modes, specifically economy (though for rhetorical purposes I don’t think it is hard to imagine why he wants to take on “economy”).
So in the conclusion to Part Two, where he brings these three modes together and talks about “lines of force,” “lineages,” and “enunciation” Latour starts to sound, at least to me, very much like DeLanda and a Deleuzian-inspired assemblage theory, though apparently without the virtual dimension.