Larval Subjects .

A review of Onto-Cartography by Bryan Bannon can be found here.  The review is mixed, but generally positive, I think.  He speaks of difficulties in individuating machines, yet as I argue, machines are individuated both by their powers and their history.  I’ll have to reread OC to see if I develop this point explicitly there, but it is developed in The Democracy of Objects, here on the blog, and in published articles.  At one point in the interview he makes the odd claim that “[t]he Deleuzian position on this subject is more sensible: the virtual is wholly indeterminate and is made actual in the specific relations a machine enters into.  In many ways, Bryant develops his view out of what I take to be a misunderstanding of Deleuze and Guattari’s position on relationality.”  Here it’s worth quoting Deleuze, “…far from being undetermined, the virtual is completely determined” (Difference and Repetition, 209).  This is a central point of chapter 4 of Difference and Repetition where the concept of virtuality is most thoroughly developed.

In philosophy and theory there is always a struggle with language.  While new coinings occasionally take place, the norm is rather that terms must be wrested from ordinary language and put to different uses.  There is always a danger here, for the terms continue to carry the connotations of ordinary language, yet theory also attempts to sever some of those connotations and also send the terms in a new or different direction.  Aristotle took the Greek word kategorein, meaning “to accuse” and gave it an entirely different inflection far from this connotation.  We can imagine how perplexed his audience was and that they said things like “but those aren’t accusations!” as if ordinary language should be a guide to philosophy.  Heidegger takes the German term Dasein, meaning to “exist”, and transforms it into an account of being-in-the-world.  Theoretical language does not treat ordinary language as a normative authority defining proper and improper use (Wittgenstein’s shameful idea), but instead struggles with the language it is thrown into– for it must work with something –so as to liberate a concept that departs from ordinary language.  If ordinary language is the house, not of being, but of doxa, then theory is, in part, a struggle against the doxa housed in ordinary language.  Often theory loses in this struggle with ordinary language.  Doxa has its day and swallows up the concept through a triumph of common connotations.  That’s how it often goes.  But there’s no other way.

So it is with the term “ecology”.  Ecology is relegated to the status of a regional ontology and is therefore only of interest to philosophers and theorists who work on climate, environmental issues, nature in literature, etc.  Ecology, ordinary language says, is an investigation of nature, the environment, climate, and what is green.  Those theorists interested in politics, the nature of knowledge. science, art, ethics, literature, society, etc., therefore have– the thinking it goes –no need to attend to ecology.  It’s outside their research area.

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Materialism is paradoxical in two ways.  I cite these paradoxes not to criticize materialism, but to attempt to circumscribe the material and how it differs from other orientations of thought.  First, it defends the thesis that the being of being is material, the physical, and therefore other than thought, but can only do so through thought.  Materialism proceeds through concepts, yet attempts to grasp that which is other than the concept.  The material is that which is anterior and posterior to the concept, thought, phenomenality, affect, the lived experience of the body, and signification.  It is without meaning, beyond all meaning, and certainly outside of all phenomenological givenness.  There is, for example, a radical difference between the lived body (the body of phenomenological experience) and the physiological (material) body.  The physiological body can, of course, affect the lived body, yet the lived body is no reliable guide to the material or physiological body.

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This article by Clive Hamilton, I think, marks what is at stake in the New Materialisms and some of the Speculative Realisms.  The issue is not some hackneyed attempt to champion the sciences and objectivity over meaning, but to draw attention to the material dimensions of how we dwell and live.  Today, more than ever, we need to reflect on whether the tools of deconstruction, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Marxist critical theory, and semiotics are adequate to thinking the world we dwell in and how these theoretical orientations might erase the fundamental materiality of existence.  This erasure is so thorough that it’s difficult to even discern when working within these theoretical frames for, after all, one can only see what one can see, and being is here reduced to meaning.  This critical reflection is not undertaken to erase these methodologies– quite the contrary –but to mark their limits, note their blindspots, and develop a theoretical frame capable of both preserving what is vital in these forms of thought and of moving beyond those limitations.  This is what is at stake in the critique of correlationism.  Materiality is not phenomenality, a lived experience, a meaning, nor a text– though it can affect all of these things –but something with its own dynamics and forms of power.  We need a form of theory capable of thinking that and that avoids the urge to treat everything as texts, meanings, and correlates of intentions.

I will be giving a talk entitled “Machine-Oriented Architecture:  Oikos and Ecology” for the Architecture Lecture Series before School of Architecture at Texas A & M on March 9th, at 5:45 PM.  Machine-oriented architecture explores architecture from the standpoint of operations, acts, and movements, treating the building as an entity that functions, distributing the forces of the cosmos and creating interfaces through the formation of membranes– physical and semiotic –between the broader ecology of the outside and the ecology of the inside.  Machine-oriented architecture traces the way in which, through material and semiotic operations, oikos acts on plant, animal, and human bodies, forging, as outputs, various forms of affectivity, life, and interrelations that reflect everything from the living’s relation to the cosmos, to our relations to economy, each other, gender, etc.  As is so often the case with the venues where I’m asked to speak and the themes upon which I’m asked to think, I clearly am not an expert on architecture, nor even a dilettante, so hopefully my audience will find something of value in my thoughts.  I’m truly honored to be given the opportunity to think on such matters, no matter how crudely I do so. Please join us if you’re able.