Object-Oriented Philosophies | (((Knowledge Ecology)))

May 8, 2012

CFP: Ecopoetics

Call for Papers: Conference on Ecopoetics
February 22-24, 2013
University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, CA)
Contact and submissions e-mail: ecopoetics.conference@gmail.com
Deadline for panel and individual paper proposals: October 1, 2012

What is ecopoetics? What representational strategies and sociopolitical commitments might characterize this practice? How might we periodize ecopoetics and situate its modes of cultural production? This conference aims to bring scholars, poets, and creative artists into sustained dialogue on the historical and contemporary practices of ecopoetics.

We invite panel proposals or individual paper proposals that examine the various relationships—historical, material, aesthetic, activist—between poetry, poetics, and ecology. Possible topics include: ecological genres: pastoral, georgic, elegy, documentary; formal innovations in ecopoetics: sound- and performance-based practices, concrete and minimalist ecopoetics, intermedia ecopoetics; biopoetics, biopolitics, and posthumanism; pataphysics, biosemiotics, and information theory; discourses of pollution, garbage, toxicity, unsustainability, apocalypse; evolution and extinction; queer ecology; cross-cultural, indigenous, mestizo, subaltern ecopoetics; climate change and geosystems; creaturely life, life forms, nonhumans; life and non-life; site-specific poetics, bioregionalisms, transregionalisms, poetry and “sustainability”; Romantic and post-Romantic ecopoetics; Modernist and postmodern ecopoetics; the affective and ethical turn in ecopoetics; surrealist, digital, and conceptual ecopoetics; ethnopoetics; environmental justice and environmental racism; precarity, the multitude; disaster capitalism, petrocapitalism, “green” capitalism, political ecology; violence and abjection; urban and exurban ecologies; ecopoetics and object-oriented ontology; avant-gardening; poetry, activism, revolution.

Panel proposals should include a title, a rationale (250 words), and a list of presenters. For each presenter, list his/her paper title, institutional affiliation, and a brief academic bio. You may construct a traditional panel with 3-4 presenters reading 20-minute papers, or a seminar with 6-8 presenters, each reading brief position papers of 5-8 minutes. Panels composed entirely of graduate students or of faculty from a single institution are unlikely to be accepted. You may propose a partially complete panel, and in this case, if accepted, additional presenters would be assigned to your panel.

Individual paper proposals should include a title, a 250-word abstract, 3-5 keywords, institutional affiliation, and a brief academic bio. You may propose a traditional 20-minute paper or a brief position paper (5-8 minutes) for a seminar. If your paper is accepted, you will be assigned to a panel or seminar.

This conference will also feature poetry readings, art/film exhibits, and excursions to Bay Area forests and wilderness areas. Please direct submissions to ecopoetics.conference@gmail.com by October 1, 2012. Questions may also be directed to this e-mail address.

April 30, 2012

The Nonhuman Turn

Full conference schedule HERE.

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April 17, 2012

Radical Noumena: A Taxonomy of Gaps

Kant’s Copernican revolution has enjoyed, in diverse ways, a reconceptualization in much current philosophy. I’m interested in doing a quick taxonomy of some of the ways Kant is being thought anew in three different contexts: A.N. Whitehead’s process philosophy, Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology, and Brett Buchanan’s onto-ethology. It seems that in the case of Whitehead, there is disagreement regarding whether or not Whitehead’s cosmology can accept a “radicalized” Kantianism or whether, ultimately, the two are hopelessly incommensurable, regardless of new interventions. In the case of Harman and Buchanan, the differences may be more of degree than of kind; Harman asserts that the gap between entities — perceptual, physical, or otherwise — is ontologically basic to all relations, while Buchanan is principally interested in how the Kantian gap might show up in animal worlds exclusively. (To be sure, Harman spends most of his time discussing the ontological gap in terms of Heidegger’s critique of being and presence, but THIS post seems to indicate that the use of Kant is appropriate in this context. If you are interested in more on Harman’s distinction between Kant and Heidegger vis-à-vis object-oriented philosophy THIS post will help.)

16 comments

April 11, 2012

On That New Aesthetic

I can’t rightly tell you what it’s about, nor can I really tell you where it’s going. But the New Aesthetic seems worthy of a mention here. Part of me is interested because it puts what media ecologists do into a new light, one perhaps more native to young cultural creatives. Another part of me is interested because a connection with object-oriented ontology has already been made, and the comparison seems apt. Most of me is interested, however, because it’s trying to describe a phenomenon that I see unfolding in San Francisco on a regular basis. Actually, it would probably be more fair to say that the people involved in the New Aesthetic are in the business of creating and manipulating new media ecologies than with studying them from an academic point of view. I think this is worthy of some attention.

The New Aesthetic seems to have its roots in London (with a tumblr as its homebase HERE) and is only making waves in the states after a showing at SXSW — the annual music, art, and technology event held in Austin, Texas every year. Bruce Sterling seems to have written the touchstone essay on the topic HERE with a range of response essays already online HERE and some further comments and criticisms HERE. In his essay, Sterling writes, “The “New Aesthetic” is a native product of modern network culture. It’s from London, but it was born digital, on the Internet. The New Aesthetic is a ‘theory object’ and a ‘shareable concept’” and that,

This is one of those moments when the art world slides over toward a visual technology and tries to get all metaphysical. This is the attempted imposition on the public of a new way of perceiving reality. These things occur. They often take a while to blossom. Sometimes they’re as big and loud as Cubism, sometimes they perish like desert roses mostly unseen. But they always happen for good and sufficient reasons. Our own day has those good and sufficient reasons.

The New Aesthetic concerns itself with “an eruption of the digital into the physical.” That eruption was inevitable. It’s been going on for a generation. It should be much better acculturated than it is. There are ways to make that stark, lava-covered ground artistically fertile and productive. Lush, humanistic, exotic crops will grow from that smoking, ashy techno-rubble of ours, someday. I live to think so. I’m all for that prospect. It’s exhilarating to see such things attempted, especially in a small auditorium before the straights catch on.

There’s a sense that this movement (if one can even call it that) is part of a larger effort to understand and create media in new ways. In San Francisco I find myself elbow to elbow with a technology-driven, mobile workforce. At coffee shops the city over these kids (some of them younger than me) are creating start-ups, working for tech companies, building apps, designing websites and largely designing the infrastructure that the rest of the world calls the internet. Surely this all has to do with the proximity of Google, Twitter, Apple, and the rest of silicon valley (all within an hour’s radius of each other) and so the corporate structure still casts a long shadow over the whole city.

But many of these kids are plugged into something else. It’s not just that San Francisco’s designers and programers are into technology; they’re also obsessed with retro, nostalgia, veganism, localism, camp, and low-fi photography made on HD cameras. I think there is something about this brand of urban localism (as pretentious as it can be) that’s forging an interesting connection between the DIY movement and the tech movement. It took me awhile to link my interest in media ecology with what was happening in cafés in the Mission district, but then it finally hit me — these kids are in the business of making things. I didn’t see it as such because where I see colored lines of code on a computer screen, these techies see objects and things; real entities about to be unleashed in the world.

To be sure, most of these new things are probably irrelevant pieces of cultural detritus, more junk polluting the mental atmosphere; but some of these creations will go on to implicate themselves in everything from national revolutions to philosophy movements. Ian Bogost’s programming background and his new book Alien Phenomenology: Or What It’s Like to be a Thing makes a lot more sense in this context. One commentator has already made the connection with the New Aesthetic:

The New Aesthetic is a visible eruption of the mutual empathy between us and a class of new objects that are native to the 21st century. It consists of visual artifacts we make to help us imagine the inner lives of our digital objects and also of the visual representations produced by our digital objects as a kind of pigeon language between their inaccessible inner lives and ours. It’s the trace of interaction designers, surveillance drones, gesture recognition systems, fashion designers, image compression techniques, artists, CCTV networks, and filmmakers all “wondering about one another without getting confirmation.”

That last line is a quote from Bogost’s book, an exciting new addition to the OOO canon. Object-Oriented Ontology is, like the New Aesthetic, something substantially rooted in, but certainly not limited to, the internet and I don’t think anyone quite understands what these new mediums are doing to thought just yet. We have no McLuhan of the global theory object. In the end maybe we’re not dealing with a singular movement based in London (it’s hard to suggest what “based in” even means in this context) so much as a postnational attempt to grapple with the new media ecologies we find ourselves, for better or worse, immersed in.

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April 3, 2012

Alien Tongues and the Language of Things

PART 1 OF A DRAFT IN PROGRESS

That aliens have occupied central roles in philosophy, science, and politics is not debatable; what gets to count as an “alien,” however, is. The term implies irreducibility, otherness, exteriority, depth, darkness, concealment, and difference. “Alterity” is, in the most general of terms, the concept or principle of which “alien” is perhaps an anthropomorphic instantiation. But in some cases the term is expanded to include not just alien bodies (illegal, extraterrestrial, or otherwise) but also spaces, presences, or artifacts. Thus we speak not only of alien beings, but also alien spaces, alien presences, and alien artifacts. “Alien-ness” is a qualitative dimension that different kinds of beings can emit like a dark halo; a mist that conceals and accentuates the features of a mysterious presence that, whilst completely present, is in some significant way unrecognizable within the common parlance of perception. My stake in exploring aliens is not driven by posthuman fantasy, or by sci-fi indoctrination. Rather, aliens interest me for cosmopolitical reasons.

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March 23, 2012

Alex Reid on Object-Oriented Rhetoric

A fine paper HERE. I haven’t got much to say in response at the moment other than there is quite a bit of thinking going on below that lines up quite nicely with what I call a knowledge ecology; that is an ecology of signs or symbols — cosmograms most generally — that have their own agency alongside of other material objects like cell phones and earthworms. It’s very interesting to me how object-oriented philosophies are simultaneously ecological, rhetorical, and aesthetic. And I mean this in a very broad, cosmological way. Here is my favorite excerpt:

As we know, the question of origins is sticky business. Anthropologists discuss what they term “behavioral modernity,” which is to say when humans started behaving like us, including adopting symbolic behaviors. Traditionally, behavioral modernity was believed to have appeared around 50,000 years ago. Today there is less certainty, and in any case, there is a clear record of human expression that predates homo sapien. Perhaps, as an aside, we might recognize this insistence on symbolic behavior as the defining characteristic that separates humans from other hominids as a distinctly correlationist conceit. Though establishing the dawn of symbolic behavior may prove elusive, it does seem reasonable to assert that expression precedes language, so is it then reasonable to consider whether such pre-symbolic expressions operated rhetorically? As Meillassoux confronts in his meditation on ancestral knowledge, such questions are not easily answered. These pre-symbolic expressions are not like the various wordless exclamations of modern humans, which certainly fit into a symbolic context. In the correlationist frame, even the infant’s cry is symbolic inasmuch as it is for us, the symbol-using parents. Ultimately however, this is not about imaging a rhetoric without symbolic action but rather recasting symbols as objects among other objects in a flat ontology where the rock, the word “rock,” the sound rock, rock music, the Rock, Plymouth Rock, and the Pink Panther are all real and rhetorical, with or without us to view them symbolically. The point is to recognize that objects need not be symbolic or in relation to us in order to operate rhetorically. What is at stake here is a symbol-independent expressive force whose effects cannot be articulated wholly in terms of physics, chemistry or other related fields. Instead it is a minimal rhetorical ontological capacity that allows objects to enter into rhetorical relations and is not solely available to humans.

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March 6, 2012

An Ecology of Mind: The Depths of the Aesthetic

Shelley says something quite beautiful about poetry, which is that it’s the root and blossom of human knowing. I’d like to turn that upside down for a moment and wonder whether that image is possible because rooting and blossoming are themselves a kind of poetry. A flower is a plant’s poem about sex; a flower is a bee’s poem about precious food. I mean this quite literally, which is to say, poetically, though in a greatly expanded sense. Bees and flowers have coevolved over millions and millions of years into what we might call an interobjective system. Causality itself—how a flower attracts a bee in order to have sex—is poetic in this sense, in other words, as I’m arguing these days in various places, the aesthetic dimension is the causal dimension.

- Tim Morton

What is the aesthetic dimension? How deeply embedded in the cosmos is it? These are two of the questions I find myself asking recently. In the above quotation, Tim Morton makes the bold assertion that “the aesthetic dimension is the causal dimension,” the boldest part of which, I think, is that it is a correct statement. But what does it mean to say that the aesthetic dimension is the causal dimension? Perhaps if we keep repeating it the phrase will, like a mantra, reveal its deeper meaning to us. But perhaps it won’t, in which case we shall have to do some old-fashioned philosophical digging to discover what Tim could possibly be on about (the quote is from this recent interview). I’d like to do just that in this essay, though my path to making sense (or nonsense) of this phrase may be slightly different than Tim’s, even if we seem to arrive at similar conclusions.

My sense is that Bergson’s thesis about perception — that perception is primarily extractive rather than additive – is helpful in exploring the deep structures of the aesthetic dimension. This essay proceeds in three movements inspired by Bergson’s idea which can gives us: (1) a corrective account of perception that indicates that the real cannot be broken into “primary” and “secondary” qualities; (2) a fascinating angle from which to approach the phenomena of depth as a problem for both the sciences and phenomenological experience; and (3) an important link to cosmology via what Whitehead calls the “bifurcation of nature.” By linking cosmology, epistemology, and perception we can make some fascinating comments regarding how aesthetics (of all things) can link all three. This investigation yields fascinating insights into the ecology of mind, which I will discuss as a conclusion to this essay.

I’ve targeted the division between primary and secondary qualities specifically because it is this schism that makes the phrase “the aesthetic dimension is the causal dimension” so hard to understand. Whitehead calls this split view (between primary and secondary qualities) a “metaphysical chimera” that leaves us with “warmth and redness on one side, and molecules, electrons, and ether on the other side” (TCN, pp.36-37). The trouble with this system (which is the basis of most modern science, epistemology, and psychology) is that it may have turned the whole schema of perception upside-down. Where the metaphysics of primary and secondary qualities sees the act of perception as additive, we perhaps ought to follow Bergson and view perception as primarily extractive. An extractive approach to our understanding of perception would mean that qualities such as warmth and redness are relata that can be extracted from within a given phenomena itself, rather than psychic additions projected by the external observer.

In other words, given two appropriately mediated entities (in this case fire and humans) a recursive process of extraction occurs so that warmth and redness can be understood as actual characteristics of the fire itself (provided that these are abstracted from the concrete actuality which is the burning-fire-in-relation-to-a-human-perceiver). In this view, red and warmth are not properties added by human beings but are, rather, qualities that the fire possesses that represent possibilities of experience for humans. The primary (or causal) properties of the fire are in this way joined by the secondary (or qualitative) properties of the fire to form an enduring, integral event called “fire.” When we think about fire from this perspective, the phrase “the aesthetic dimension is the causal dimension” begins to make a lot more sense; aesthetics and causality are integrated all the way down and this has enormous implications for how we think about human perception and epistemology.

If there can be no final distinction between primary and secondary qualities (but perhaps an analytical distinction based on the method of abstraction) then we should find similar problems in our investigation of objects on either side of the line of bifurcation. We can explore this hypothesis by investigating any number of real objects; whether those are the objects of science (e.g., electrons, DNA, or helium atoms) or the objects of phenomenological experience (e.g., colors, sounds, or feelings) should not matter. If the causal dimension and the aesthetic dimension are linked — as Morton suggests and as Whitehead and Bergson support — then there should be recurring problems that mire both, being that they are, in fact, aspects of the same integral phenomena. Needless to say I think there is a problem that unites both sides of the line, and that problem is the problem of depth. We can explore depth from both the perspective of the sciences and phenomenology and yield the same perplexing result; depth endures beyond every attempt to flatten it.

Take the move to scientific reductionism, has any discipline of knowledge every born witness to more entities? By recourse to empiricism and systematic investigation the sciences have rendered a cosmos far older than we imagined, far larger in scale than we could have dreamed; and populated by a dizzying number of quarks, protons, electrons, waves, atoms, genes, galaxies, and stars than we could ever hope to count. Perhaps the buddhists, meditating in the thin atmospheres atop the mountainous Tibetan plateaus, alone have envisaged vistas of equal vastness. Reductionism multiplies beings when it theoretically should be eliminating them. In an attempt to eliminate the phenomena of direct experience in order to get to the really real, the sciences end up bearing witness to a cosmos much deeper, wider, and more densely populated than what we began with. The sciences lead only to a deeper cosmos, and with each new discovery of quarks, leptons, muons, and extra dimensions, we still seem only at the surface of a much stranger pond.

What of the phenomenological traditions then — those careful practices of the mind that seek to bracket the elaborate conceptual apparati of the sciences. Can these disciplines of the mind hope to illuminate for us the paradox of depth? The answer again is no. Even when we put all that we know about electromagnetic waves, particle spin, and speciation on the shelf we find the same troubling paradox swimming around us like an octopus releasing its ink into already dark waters. This seems to be a result of a simple phenomenological fact: the more we attend the more we perceive. Here the smooth surface of the writing desk becomes a rich, uneven topography infinite in detail; the quiet string section playing behind piano keys vibrates with endless tonality; the red sunset becomes a kaleidoscopic curtain of purples, golds, and fuchsias, each their own rich composites.

Try as we might there is no escaping the vast depth of things. Even when withdrawing from contact with the world of phenomena — as in certain practices of mindfulness and meditation — we find again the same increase in depth. This time it is our own inner dimension that begins to swell with the particles of thought, image, sound, and feeling; events of the mind that are seemingly always taking place with or without our attention. When we attempt to attend to these species of psychic life, we find the same paradox as before: our mindfulness makes us aware of more phenomena not less. When we try to practice a truly radical empiricism — one attentive to the machinery of science, the rise and swell of phenomenal experience, and the endless flow of mind — we find that this bifurcated theory of nature just won’t do. But anchoring the phrase “the aesthetic dimension is the causal dimension” to human experience alone just won’t do either.

If we truly want to link aesthetics and causality we need something more than an appeal to human experience. Tim is helpful here as well when he writes:

What is called subjectivity is really just a small region of a much larger space of interactions between beings: coffee cups, sea foam, flakes of obsidian and nebulae. To realize this is to enter into a larger world in which humans coexist with a plenitude of uncanny entities that for shorthand’s sake my essay calls objects. Ecological awareness just is the human attunement to this coexistence

Stated more plainly, Bergson’s thesis about human perception is not simply a matter of humans relating to world but is a matter of things relating to each other. This much Whitehead also understood and his hundreds of pages on prehension detail this magnificently. But what Whitehead accomplishes with technical precision he loses in accessibility and style. Here Tim’s compact phrase “the aesthetic dimension is the causal dimension” provides us with a single insight, a cosmological commitment to be sure, but one than that offers a clear way to understand how we might think the links between cosmology, perception, and epistemology. If we follow Whitehead and resist the bifurcation of nature into primary and secondary qualities then we are obliged to consider the weight of Tim’s arguments.

The truly strange thing is that when we link aesthetics and causality in this way we arrive at a new understanding of the mind’s (human or otherwise) relation to the world. We can begin to see that the material processes of causality, the biological process of perception, and the philosophical task of epistemology share certain unshakable similarities (ecological similarities as I am fond of arguing). If Bergson is correct and perception — at the level of the organism — is extractive and not additive, then does this state of affairs not mirror precisely what we know about cognitive acts such as building a new paradigm in the sciences? Paradigms are always extractive after all. Recall the opening quotation:

A flower is a plant’s poem about sex; a flower is a bee’s poem about precious food. I mean this quite literally, which is to say, poetically, though in a greatly expanded sense. Bees and flowers have coevolved over millions and millions of years into what we might call an interobjective system.

Is not the ecology of mind and perception similar in kind to the ecology of the more-than-human world? Does this not also hold true in the opposite direction as well; the perception of the organism shares an extractive function with the act of knowing, both similar because perception and knowing partake in a deeper structure that links, in an integral way, aesthetics and causality?

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February 24, 2012

Slow Thinking, Slow Science: Cosmopolitics and Ecological Ethics

My job as a philosopher is not to describe the probable but, rather, to activate the possible.

- Isabelle Stengers

Perhaps the two most radical (and radically important) concepts that I have encountered so far this year have come from the philosophers Isabelle Stengers and Graham Harman. The first has proposed the concept “slow science” as a practice of thought (an ecology of practices) that takes into account the effects of scientific knowledge production alongside of how well the sciences are undertaking their own constructions of knowledge. The second concept comes from Harman’s object-oriented philosophy. Harman has suggested, provocatively, that we should reject two often-related concepts: holism and interconnectivity. I’ll try and give an account of why I think both Harman’s object-oriented philosophy and Stengers’ account of slow science provide counter-intuitive, but enormously helpful, insights to contemporary practices of ecological ethics. Slow science and object-oriented philosophy will perhaps merge into one another in this essay, though I shall try and treat them separately and sequentially as much as possible before offering some conclusions.

Slow science, one might say, is an insertion of the precautionary principle into the very structure of scientific knowledge production itself. In other words, slow science attempts to join the effects of scientific knowledge production with the actual practices of scientific problem-solving. By merging the ethical impact of the sciences with the logic of science as an effective problem-solving tool, we generate a new kind of science; one that is structurally geared towards ethics, social complexity, and the future. “Need less to say,” says Stengers,

Slow science does not mean idle. The choice of the expression slow science makes this initiative part of the “slow motions,” best known of which is slow food—resisting fast, bad quality and ready-to-eat food and the system that produced it. Slow science is about the quality of research that is also its relevance for today’s issues.

We might say that slow science is thus first and foremost a form of slow thinking. Slow thinking attempts to stay with phenomena—to follow the actors where they might lead—so that a clearer understanding of the situated character of beings might emerge. This is necessarily a democratic process that turns the scientist into the composer of new publics and turns the citizen into a participant in the processes of scientific and technological knowledge production. Slow science is not a deconstruction of scientific enterprises but rather an attempt to construct better sciences that serve more people. It is in this respect that one might invoke the precautionary principle and build it into very logic and apparatus of the sciences; slow science attempts by democratic means what government attempts by legislative, judicial, or electoral means.

A practice of slow science has become necessary since modern technoscientific practices and modes of production have turned the whole planet into a volatile laboratory—without due process or consent from any of its erstwhile guinea pigs (which currently includes every living creature on the planet). Without knowledge or permission the beings on planet earth have been exposed to new, foreign chemicals, harmful pollutants, genetically modified foods, nuclear technologies; and an ongoing contamination of living, local resources. Science is no longer simply a question of hypotheses and experiments, nor is it simply an ethical matter regarding what constitutes an ‘appropriate’ scientific subject for investigation (though it is both of these). Rather, science has become the production of whole new world-spaces.

Here I want to be clear and emphasize that science has not only opened up new perspectives on a pre-existing world, but actively participates in and dominates the composition of new material world-configurations. To think that the sciences simply represent one perspective amongst many represents the scourge of perspectivalism; perspectivalism equivocates and, in so doing, completely flattens the possibility of a genuinely powerful engagement with the more than human world and our various modalities for knowing it. My point here is not that the sciences occupy a sovereign position over other ways of knowing, or that the sciences provide any kind of a clear route forward for humanity. No, it is precisely because the sciences produce effects so unpredictable, so far spread and wide reaching, and are so linked to militarization and exploitative models of consumption that they demand special attention by the public. We need more science, not less. But the kind of science that we need is slow science, a participatory model of science that takes the public—both human and nonhuman—seriously.

This notion of slow science—hinged on the very premise that the sciences and ecological worlds are intimately linked—finds a strange companion in a highly counter-intuitive ontology. I am referring of course to Graham Harman’s object-oriented philosophy. While most scientists, politicians, and philosophers have come to grips with the fact that we need a better account of ‘things’ and their impact on human societies and the earth’s ecology, fewer people have accepted that these ‘things’ may have a deeper, subterranean layer to them that, despite our best efforts at physical or conceptual interaction with them, resist our capacity to encounter them fully. Here the various professionals and hobbyists who have tried to understand ‘things’—economists, artists, ecologists, and philosophers—have adopted two primary commitments about things: (1) all things are interconnected, and (2) they can be fully understood by their interactions with other things. To deny that either of these theses is true seems to cry out for a flat earth in an age of GPS satellites and quantum physics.

To think ecologically it just doesn’t seem to make sense to argue against holism and interconnectivity, but this is exactly what Harman’s object-oriented philosophy does and, I would argue; it not only makes good, justifiable sense in an ecological age, it might actually provide us with some of the strongest grounds with which to construct a new kind of ecological ethics. Harman’s thesis about objects is rather simple and has four basic postulates: (1) beings cannot be reduced to their presence to any other being, which means that; (2) any object is not exhausted by either its use or conceptualization by any other object, implying; (3) whilst objects do interact with another—and can be created, transformed, and destroyed—no object directly impacts another, this amounts to (4) A “vicarious causality” where the contact between two objects is always mediated by a set of relational qualities that emerge between the interaction of objects themselves.

Vicarious causality has an aesthetic structure insofar as all objects are limited in their interactions between each other such that there is a process of abstraction at work where each thing can only ever render an incomplete picture of the other things that it comes into contact with. I would argue that this aesthetic quality of causality also has what one might call a metonymic structure. Just as the ancient Greek philosophers tried to conceptualize the whole of Being through a series of metonymies—symbolic parts that stand in for a greater, more complex whole—so each thing in the universe enacts a simplified rendering of an infinitely deeper cosmos. Where the pre-Socratics variously posited earth, air, fire, or water as the primary elements by which all other phenomenon could be interpreted, so to do things of this world form simple metonymies of the cosmos, caricatures that bespeak a thing-specific enactment of a world that sits at the surface of an ocean that remains infinitely deeper.

Harman’s argument for the non-relational qualities of objects has important contributions to make to ecological thinking. In ecological circles there is an ever-present concern with ‘ecofascism’—a term used as a point of criticism by leftists and conservatives alike to point to the unsettling ability of some ecological discourses to totalize and subordinate the parts of a system to the whole of a system. The problem with holistic schemes is that they tend to wreck havoc on social relations, and usually to the determinant of the already marginalized. Global summits on climate change, for example, routinely demand tougher regulations on ‘developing’ nations while the very rich continue on expanding as they please. But if we take Harman’s object-oriented philosophy seriously, than it appears that totalities are actually ontological impossibilities; and if totalities are ontological impossibilities then it starts to make sense why holism can feel so wrong from a sociological perspective—holisms try and force a totalized identity upon an irreducibly diverse community. In this sense holism is not only politically dubious but also ontologically dubious.

What a slow thinking of Harman’s philosophy helps us to understand is that, yes, ecology is about relations, but this is only a part of the story since it ignores the huge and potent dimension of non-relationality that affords an important substantiality to all beings not well-captured by interconnectivity or holism. When you think about it, not only does this raise some provocative ontological questions, but it also helps us to think the hugely important question of why relations are, without contest, the unquestionable center of ecology to begin with when ecology should just as readily be about the non-relational. Take industrial growth society for example, its completely unsustainable and the central problem with industrial growth society is that its central goal is to connect everything to everything else through capital exchange. Ecological ethicists, for example, do not want the Keystone pipeline built precisely because it will make things more connected and not less. The Keystone pipeline is dangerous only insofar as it increases the interconnectivity between tar sands in Canada and oil producers in the heartland of the United States. In this case increased interconnectivity is a terrible thing for ecological ethics and we need a better conceptualization of the non-relational to understand what it is that makes sound, ecological sense.

In other words, what ecological ethics needs right now is a strong theory of non-relationality to compliment its overemphasis on interconnectivity—not to deny the importance of interconnectivity in ecology but to recognize that ecology is not exhausted by interconnectivity. Harman’s emphasis on the dark nucleus of objects held in reserve from direct contact with other objects allows us to consider a fuller ecological ethics, one more acquainted with a non-totalizable alterity—the truly alien—that does not sacrifice our ability to contemplate a rigorously more-than-human and ecological ethics. In fact, Harman’s ontology actually produces the conditions for the possibility of the alien and so makes, we might say, a condition wherein liminality is ontologically basic. Here we have a cosmology that is not a homogenous or unified whole, but rather something like a series of intimate collectives—ecologies of actuality—encountering and shaping one another. These liminal gaps are what make interconnectivity possible in the first place. Objects thus resist the tryanny of the one (or what Harman calls “overmining”) and the tyranny of the many (or what he calls “undermining”).

The point is not to reduce or discount the ontological monism(s) upon which the earliest theories of ecology were built (Cf. Ernst Haeckel) but to continue to think the project of ecology forward so that we can better adapt human society to the earth’s ecologies. We might theorize, then, that Stengers’ practice of slow science and Harman’s object-oriented philosophy produces a revitalized sense of what ecological ethics actually means. With slow science we are concerned with the sciences as a constructive enterprise that actively shapes the future conditions of a common socius–the earth community–and that such an understanding should be connected to practices of science as such. On the other hand, Harman’s ontology provides ecological ethics with the opportunity to consider the non-relational elements of things as central to ecological issues, and in this case we ought also to consider the disconnect between beings if we are to practice a relevant form of ecological ethics.

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February 13, 2012

Thoughts on Identity, Multiplicity, and Withdrawal

I’m writing the following in response to Levi Bryant’s most recent post on “Some Scattered Thoughts on the Problem of Substance.” There is much to read in Bryant’s post and I am only going to focus on two of his points here. First, Bryant wants to emphasize the multiplicity of entities over and against their unity or identity. Second, Bryant is arguing for a distinction between ontological withdrawal and epistemological withdrawal. Being as influenced by Whitehead as I am, I find natural affinity with many of Bryant’s arguments (implicitly I think Whitehead and Bryant hold similar positions on many issues), however I’ve long been arguing for the acceptance of identity and withdrawal (a la Graham Harman — though I suspect that my position may be too Whiteheadian for his tastes). Interested readers may also want to check out THIS post which nicely sums up some of the discussion so far. In what follows I will attempt to sketch out my own position regarding Bryant’s points in terms of some ecological principles I think we should be attentive to.

(1) Levi wants to distinguish between epistemological and ontological withdrawal, and I agree that there are two (recursively linked) domains operative to distinguish — though whether these are ontologically distinct is up for debate. Levi also rightly points out that the perception of unity for any entity is achieved after a process of enactment. This implies that within the perceptually unified field of an organism, there is actually a multiplicity of processes, functions, and events occurring. No disagreements here. However, where we differ, I think, is how we relate the enactivist paradigm to ontology. I read Whitehead’s ‘ontological principle’ and ‘prehension’ as ontological arguments for why enactivism makes sense. In other words, rocks and tables ‘enact’ a world in the same way that humans and squid do. Of course enactivism is a theory that responds to issues in cognitive science, and prehension is an ontological theory dealing with issues in metaphysics. However, I think bringing the two together as variations of an analogous activity is a tenable position and has some consequences for the distinctions Levi is drawing between epistemic and ontological withdrawal:

(i) In the enactivist paradigm, it is the whole organism’s body that is involved in enaction rather than a specific set cognitive/neural processes exclusively (surely the nervous system is key here, but so is the fully embodied organism in question). This in turn means that it is the organism’s being that relates to its environment, rather than a cognitive/perceptual subset of the organism operating abstractly. In other words, organisms do not have knowledge of their environment, organisms are fully integrated with their knowledge of their environment. I see enactivism as an ecologized version of McLuhan’s statement “the medium is the message;” organisms are what they know and perceive; deploying this knowledge as the enactment of a specific world configuration.

(ii) Given (i) it seems that enaction is primarily an ontological process of relations, rather than an epistemological one. For me, this analysis fits quite nicely with Whiteheadian prehension (which posits three moments nonlocally participating in each actual occasion; the occasion, the datum, and the subjective aim). In short, then, enaction is more like an ontological principle of relations than an epistemological one (and here I break with how the enactivist paradigm has been concieved historically, which has mostly been in the realm of cybernetic approaches to epistemology). My hypothesis here is that enactivism is a biological version of Whiteheadian prehension (which is an organismic cosmology anyway…) This leads me to further suggest that;

(iii) While it is true that epistemology can be considered a distinct realm of philosophy that shouldn’t be collapsed into other areas per se (e.g., ethics or metaphysics) it is also true that — if we except something like enactivism or prehension as ontological principles — epistemology starts to look more like an ontological theory of knowledge wherein knowledge itself enacts different world configurations (and recursively constitutes different kinds of bodies) given different sets of knowledge ecosystems. Thats a short way of saying that knowledge (or epistemes in this case) are embodied in specific media (e.g., brains, books, and bytes), are not “other than” those media and, in this way, also share the same ontological qualities as ‘physical’ interactions between, say, tornados and barn doors. Thus I think prehension and enactivism lead us to an ontological understanding of (a) beings; (b) beings relations to each other; (c) the relationship between beings and knowledge; and (d) the relationships between different kinds of knowledge enacted by different kinds of media. With these points in mind, I would argue that;

(3) Object-oriented philosophy’s account of withdrawal holds true for both ontological and epistemological domains, where the ontic and the epistemic can be distinguished analytically to perform certain philosophical tasks, but are ultimately integrated in the embodiment of beings such that epistemic and cognitive ecosystems are ontologically real in the same way that other ecosystems are. This leads me to suggest that;

(4) Positing the withdrawal of identity on ontological and epistemological levels is actually a move to secure the integrity of individuals through their irreducibly real character (contra Levi’s claim that a focus on withdrawn identity necessarily leads to marginalization or oppression). What is essential to highlight here is the hugely important role Levinas plays in object-oriented philosophy’s account of relations. Recall that in object-oriented philosophy the Levinasian face, understood as an ethical imperative that calls forth and constitutes the subject, becomes radicalized such that all beings (human or nonhuman) issue ethical imperatives based in an infinite alterity, rather than a subsumable political essence which can be totalized through political acts of subjugation. (Of course subjects can be subjugated regardless of philosophical ideals, but I would argue that this is true whether we think the subject as singular or multiple. Thinking that positing subjects as either singular or multiple will determine the political outcome of those subjects ignores the ecological character of knowledge and also presupposes that oppression is somehow based in logical thinking, when clearly such a thing has never been the case). This also has some consequences;

(i) In the case of ecological ethics, for example, we are tasked with ‘speaking for’ (in the Latourian sense) beings for which our current political legislatures and ethical practices cannot account for. Thus we find the political task to be centered around preserving the worlds of beings who meanings we cannot fully translate. The crucial imperative is thus to build political structure around the needs of individuals with actual identities and real needs rather than multiplicities that cannot be accounted for in the space of the social.

(ii) In other words, an ontological concept of individuality and identity, rather than being regressive moves to essences that can be policed on the basis of proximity and marginilization, can move us into a political structure where the center/periphery dynamic is broken into an account of agency distributed throughout individuals that are variously human/nonhuman or biotic/abiotic. In this sense it is the social collective that is better aided by being thought of has a multiplicity rather than the specific individuals that constitute that collective.

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January 26, 2012

Object-Oriented Linguistics

A great post on the thingliness of words, phonemes, morphemes, and sentences by Sam Mickey HERE. A brief excerpt from the introduction:

Words have conventional meanings, but do they also have their own meanings, apart from the meanings that humans assign to them? For an object-oriented linguistics, a word is its own thing, distinct from any references or any speaker or listener that encounters it. This would suggest that a word has its own meaning, its own style of being, its own virtual capacities. This opens up old questions about how much meaning is given in the thing itself and how much it is determined by the word’s references and relations to the conventions and contingencies of speakers and listeners

I’m running around quite a bit today and I shall have to think more about Sam’s post but suffice to say that some kind of detailed account of the thingliness of words, symbols, and meanings is definitely part of the knowledge ecology project. Looking forward to seeing how this develops.

January 25, 2012

Precarious Causation!

Its the clever term Michael proposes in his latest volley in our ongoing discussion about withdrawal and object-oriented philosophy. If any of you are still interested in this now weeks-long debate head over HERE to read Michael’s new post. I’m reposting my response to him below:

Read the rest of this entry »

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January 19, 2012

Strange Materialism and Cosmopolitics

Matt Segall responds to my earlier post on the differences between object-oriented materialism and realism. Matt offers a good synopsis of the various positions in play:

Adam at Knowledge-Ecology has posted some reflections on the issues at stake in the confrontation between philosophical realism and philosophical materialism. Levi Bryant (Larval Subjects) and Michael (Archive-Fire) place their bets on materialism, while Graham Harman (Object-Oriented Philosophy) and Steven Shaviro (Pinocchio Theory) prefer realism. This isn’t the whole story, however. When we shift to the issue of withdrawal (i.e., the accessibility of things), Shaviro, Bryant, and Michael all line up in opposition to Harman by arguing for the contingent, rather than absolute untouchability of things.

It seems that my phrasing of the difference between absolute and contingent withdrawal has stuck in the conversation, we’ll see if others find the distinction useful in the future. Of course “absolute withdrawal” means more “absolute and contingent withdrawal” than “absolute opposed to contingent withdrawal” being that we are not discussing absolutes in the sense that all objects relate to one another in identical ways in all situations. Absolute just means that no contingent set of circumstances approaches the alterity of objects more than any other.

I think Matt’s description is mostly representative and accurate except that I would add that object-oriented materialism “OOM” (as Bryant has cleverly termed it) is for Bryant a form of realism. Additionally, Michael is also suggesting that his appeal to onto-specific assemblages is also a kind of realism. I was the one to suggest, independently, that a) materialism is not a realist enough realism and b) That Michael’s position could best be classified as a kind of materialism alongside of Bryant’s (though there positions will differ on other issues). I’ll unpack my thoughts on materialism more clearly as we move along, and then I want to transition and make a comment about my (cosmopolitical) views on philosophy in general, which are not side issues in this debate.

First, a note on materialism itself. I don’t use materialism in a pejorative way, I’m just not convinced that materialist descriptions are deep enough to capture the insights of the three primary philosophies in my orbit: (1) radical empiricism, (2) process philosophy, and (3) object-oriented ontology. In the case of (1) and (2) materialism is insufficient insofar as we are also trying to account for the qualitative and phenomenological elements (i.e., first-person perspectives) of the cosmos; and here “person” can refer to the perspective of any thing whatsoever. In this sense I think materialism is only a partial realism.

In the case of (3) I was drawn to OOO primarily because it was a realism that could be taken seriously by materialists (i.e., it has empirical weight) but could not be collapsed into materialism. Harman’s OOO posits a Levinasian infinite (i.e., a metaphysical infinite) at the heart of all entities that is not collapsable into the phrasings of materialist language. By making OOO a kind of materialism it loses some of its punch. This is of course just my reading, however, and for others the move to materialism will be welcome; particularly insofar as a rejection of the Levinasian/Hedeiggerian elements of Harman’s thoughts make an OOM much more tenable, I just so happen to disagree with this reading of the issues and so continue to affirm realism over materialism.

Second, the materialism/realism issue is still nascent insofar as OOO theorists themselves are changing positions and refining arguments. In his most recent post, Bryant argues:

Just some quick remarks on materialism as I’m in the midst of completing paperwork today. One of the fault lines among the OOO theorists is the divide between the materialists and the realists. Harman describes his position as a realism, while I describe mine as a materialism. I take it that materialism is necessarily a realism insofar as it begins from the premise of human-independent entities that are not dependent on thought. In certain respects, materialism is ontologically a more restrictive position than the sort of realism that Harman advocates. On the one hand, Harman’s object-oriented philosophy wishes to hold open the possibility that while there are material entities, it’s possible that other non-material objects exist such as, for example, numbers.

This is clearly an evolution in his thinking, contrasted to his older post “Realism is Not a Synonym for Materialism” where Bryant writes (I’ve shortened the passage for brevity):

There is a reason that realists such as myself, Harman, Latour, Stengers, and Bogost refer to ourselves as realists rather than materialists. While it is indeed the case that all materialists are realists, as anyone who has taken an elementary course in categorical logic knows, the reciprocal proposition “all realists are materialist” does not follow from this first proposition…Where the materialist holds that only material beings are, the realist tends to be pluralist, allowing for a wide variety of different types of entities that are equally real…

In this connection, I think Harman provides the proper argument against materialist realisms. Harman’s argument is basically that philosophical materialisms (I won’t impugn the good scientists that frequent my blog) are idealisms. If they are idealisms then this is because they begin with an idea of the real, of what being is, and then set about translating all beings into this model…To begin with an idea of what is real is to begin within the framework of an idealism that allows the concept to dictate being. By contrast, object-oriented ontologies, paradoxically, do not begin with a thesis of what is real, they do not allow an idea to dictate being, but rather hold that we do not know what the real is, only that the real is.

I think Bryant’s older position (following Harman’s), in addition to the points I highlight above, is a good argument for maintaining the realist/materialist distinction. And while we certainly shouldn’t begrudge any philosopher the right to refine and change their views, in this case I remain unconvinced and find the Latour/Harman/Stengers view more compelling (though I’m not convinced that Latour would be in love with the label “realist” either, but perhaps for slightly different reasons)

Matt then wants to know if my own position could be considered a kind of “strange materialism” that stands “shoulder to shoulder” with Bryant’s materialism. This is where I would like to make a few comments about cosmopolitics and philosophy in general. Insofar as I am not interested in the tribalism associated with philosophical agreements between factions, it matters little to me whether or not my interlocutors positions are the same, different, or incommensurable to my own. To some philosophers such a position may signal the death of “real” of philosophy, but I take this as the essential starting point of cosmopolitics.

If I am permitted a slight turn into unexpected territory, I am informed here by Foucault’s discussion of the philosophical approach of Epictetus. Recall in this reading that Epictetus viewed his school as a hospital; a clinic for the soul (psyche) where the philosopher is to the mind what the doctor is to the body. In this sense the purpose of philosophical practice is extended outward towards the collective insofar as the philosopher’s role is to aid the psyche of individuals and societies (an inherently political responsibility). Further, the purpose of philosophical practice is directed inward insofar as the philosopher is also accountable to her own health inasmuch as the philosopher’s health (physical, psychic, and spiritual) is central to the philosopher’s ability to attune to the needs of society.

What is the point of my digression here? I take cosmopolitics (and radical empiricism/pragmatism) to be based around the composition of new public collectives around which problems (social ailments and symptoms) can be cured or relieved. In this capacity cosmopolitics is about becoming adequate to the composition of a political art wherein the goal is aesthetic insofar as there are better and worse ways to compose new collectives. Here we are, as Latour says, attentive to “matters of concern” instead of simply “matters of fact.” The concern comes from the public, the collective, and in this sense the philosopher again emerges as a kind of doctor of the soul of society. In this sense philosophy is for me closer to a pharmacopeia than a list truths. This does not entail that all is relative; the symptoms and ailments philosophers are attentive to are independently real and concern real lives and bodies apart from our perspectives of them, but the medicine of the moment will vary greatly depending on circumstance.

Thus cosmopolitics is a kind of pragmatism, but a kind of pragmatism that is capable of making ontological statements about the real without collapsing into any singular point of view. This is the kind of pragmatism that James argues for in A Pluralistic Universe; a book which I believe argues for an ontological pluralism far stranger and more elusive than any one philosophical position can capture. All of this is to say that philosophy, from the cosmopolitical view, will require a diversity of (incommensurable) perspectives in order to collect large enough publics around the goals and needs of our increasingly planetary culture. For this reason I celebrate the diversity of perspectives available in speculative philosophy even as I maintain my own particular philosophical view point.

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January 17, 2012

Windmill Materialism

Discussing the differences between contingent and absolute withdrawal in object-oriented philosophy with Michael (Archive Fire) has produced a surplus of exciting topics to explore. The foremost of these issues hinges upon the difference between a realist and a materialist account of object-oriented philosophy. Michael and I share a pragmatic aim and would most likely vote along the same party line in any cosmic election. However, we still remain at opposite ends when considering the merits of contingent and absolute withdrawal. Michael advocates for the former and I for the latter. Let me take a few moments to unpack why I think that realism has advantages over materialism (which I think is a good descriptor of Michael’s position) and why the ontology of withdrawal is better respected by such an account.

First, let me go into a little more detail regarding my understanding of the ‘objects’ of object-oriented philosophy (I am drawing here from Graham Harman’s work and the interested reader should consult his books for further information). So far the debate has centered upon only one dimension of Harman’s account of objects, when in fact there are four dimensions to his story. To briefly recover some of the insights from Guerilla Metaphysics, Harman argues that an object is split into a fourfold tension deployed along two axes. Along axis-1 the object is split between (a) the object in-itself and (b) the object as deployed in a specific relation. Along axis-2 the object is split along (a) its unity as a whole object and (b) its multiplicity as a collective entity consisting of a network of features.

A simpler way of saying this is that an object is both substance and relation; a unity and plurality. Also note that Harman’s fourfold object is a synchronic rather than a diachronic entity in regards to its plural existence (I am applying the labels synchronic and diachronic, I can’t recall Harman using these terms specifically though they seem appropriate). As a synchronic entity, the object is not a substance and then a relation, but an episodic substance/relation simultaneously. In this sense Harmanian objects are a lot like Whiteheadian actual occasions in the sense that objects have a temporal character to their nature, rather than just a Newtonian spatial one (actual occasions “concresce” through threefold prehensions; but thats another story).

The fourfold nature of the object is essential to understanding the absolutely withdrawn character of the object. If we focus just on axis-1 we can see that, by definition, the object in-itself is the substantial object that is not deployed in a specific relation. If we are talking about the object deployed in an onto-specific scenario we are discussing only aspect (b) and never aspect (a). This has already transformed the nature of objects to fit a materialist ontology, when in my understanding it is ontology that should be trying to fit its descriptions around objects (no matter how strange things get). What we get by emphasizing only half of axis-1 is thus always materialism and not realism. Materialism is always windmill materialism.

What is windmill materialism? Windmill materialism is an example I draw from Guerilla Metaphysics but, again, is not a phrase that Harman uses in the text. Harman writes:

To give an example, it cannot really be said that windmills are made of ladders, pumps, rotating blades, and wire-mesh crow’s nests. Or rather, it is made of these things only in a derivative, material sense. Although the windmill needs these smaller parts in order to exist, it never fully deploys these objects in their totality, but makes use of them only by reducing them to useful caricatures. That is to say, a windmill does not fully sound the depths of its own pieces any more than a human observer does. It merely siphons away the needed qualities from these objects, just as animal stomachs reduce the sparkling allure of fruits to brutal, one-dimensional fuels. To reverse an old cliche, there is a sense in which the sum of the parts is always greater than the whole. The whole is always a simplification of its parts. The windmill caricatures the ladder and the pump, ignoring their full reality by harnessing them to a specific formal task (pp. 93-94).

With such a specific example in mind we can reiterate the central tension between materialist and realist object-oriented philosophies. In the materialist position, contact between the windmill and its parts is direct but partial. In the realist position contact between the windmill and its parts is indirect and vicarious. In each version, the windmill is irreducible to both its component parts and its possible contexts and uses. The difference is that in the former (materialist) position direct contact with the partially exposed core of an object is being made, whilst in the latter (realist) position all contact is vicarious.

In both materialist and realist object-oriented philosophies we have already obtained a large storehouse of commensurable ideas. In both variants we can say that the whole is less than its parts and the the parts are more than the whole. This is a crucial insight that can be reached from either the materialist and realist postions. For this we should applaud both camps since it tells us some very interesting ontological truths about reality. From this insight we know, for example, that reductionism will always multiply the number of beings in the cosmos, while holism will always reduce the number of beings in the cosmos. Hooray for both materialist and realist object-oriented philosophies!

We are left then with the question of why we should go beyond the materialist account and opt for the realist one. Recall that the realist account of absolute withdrawal is not a the result of a an exclusively human, cognitive deficit. It is an ontological position regarding relations in general. Everywhere there is an onto-specific set of particularity and interactivity — the flesh of some embodied interaction — but just as each unity is also a diversity, each embodied particular is also an absolutely withdrawn alterity. In this context alterity is both absolute alterity and ontological alterity. Thus when Michael in his most recent post writes:

This is it precisely: if we willfully ignore the characteristic differences between the capacity for knowledge (cognitive powers) and the capacity for contact (powers of the flesh) we generate unwarranted and empirically invalid assumptions about the nature of object-object relations.

I think this quite misses the point. By positioning alterity as an ontological feature of things I think we can reframe Michael’s point above in the following way. If the ontological character of relations is fundamentally about prehension — each entity’s unique enactment of an onto-specific world — then we do not have a split between “cognitive powers” and “powers of the flesh.” Rather we (humans) have something like enfleshed cognitive powers; a result of our embodied particularity’s engagement with the cosmos. In a sense then, epistemology is the onto-specific mode of translation each entity engages to enact its universe. Snails and bonobos have fleshy epistemologies just likes humans. Even stars might have some kind of episteme in this sense (I think I just heard lots of cries of disappointment and ridicule from somewhere over yonder…) The point is that the cognitive and the embodied are two phases of the same integral entity. Thinking is a kind of touch and touching is a kind of thinking; and alterity is always a part of this process.

Lets unpack alterity a little more. Alterity in (realist) object-oriented philosophy is always absolute alterity because, just as an object is irreducible to its relations or onto-specific deployments, an object is also irreducible to the differences between it and all other objects. Alterity is a synonym for withdrawal. The irreducibly real alterity of objects is not present — either partially or fully — in any specific set of relations and as such absolute alterity is metaphysical alterity insofar as it is not a feature of material relations. The alterity of entities in the cosmos forms an ecology of otherness, a negative ecology juxtaposed to the positive ecology of relations, wherein the cosmic others can be palm trees, coconuts, salamanders, or supernovas. (Harman notes that the medium of exchange between entities is always interior to some larger object formed by an encounter between entities. Harman calls the task of describing the metaphysics of the interiors of objects “endo-ontology.” I use the simple phrase “ecology” to describe the same thing).

To be sure metaphysical alterity doesn’t mean that real things aren’t happening to real beings in real relations. It also doesn’t mean that the onto-specific and ever-present political dimensions of history are somehow erased. Precisely the opposite is the case; an object’s essence is right here, not on some transcendental plane. It is immediately close and vulnerable, capable of being destroyed, whilst also discreetly ungraspable. Object-oriented philosophy is not a god’s unique perspective on things, its a thing’s perspective on things and as such share as all the intimately contingent problematics any materialist could ever want. By positing alterity as a feature of things, object-oriented philosophy is suggesting that a view from nowhere is impossible; but, as Isabelle Stengers or Alfred North Whitehead might say, a speculative account of the nature of things apart from us is an incumbent feature of any philosophy that tries to think ethics and change the world. This is in reference to the twofold nature of terms like “cosmopolitics” or “speculative realism.”

I suppose thats enough for now as this post has already gotten quite lengthy. I’d like to end on one final note about materialism. I in no way reject materialism as a premise that must be grappled with or deployed when appropriate. History is filled with the profound and positive effects of materialism (I of course mean more in the Marxist or scientific senses than in the consumerist ones). My only point is that I don’t think materialism goes far enough in its account of the real when doing speculative philosophy. To be sure there is nothing that says that one must do speculative philosophy and I myself don’t always find it a practice necessary or appealing. But my concern is less with the completeness of a particular philosophy and more with how well it is composed. In this sense I look for better and worse materialisms and not a simple materialism/anti-materialism binary. I’m a pragmatist at heart and when it comes to looking for the best materialist philosophies, I think the object-oriented versions are surely at the top of that list even if I tend towards the realist account more.

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January 12, 2012

The Cosmopolitics of Withdrawal

Michael of Archive Fire continues our debate over the ontological status of withdrawal in THIS fine post. I am very much appreciating the tone and complexity of Michael’s thoughts and continue to view his position (which we can now call a kind of “contingent withdrawal”) as a valid thesis that deserves further attention; though finally I still disagree. I see two major points of disagreement that are setting us apart: 1) Michael is arguing for a materialist postion, whereas I see materialism as being only a subset of actuality (i.e., an abstraction); and 2) Michael sees the position of absolute withdrawal as being a problem of human knowledge and cognition, where I see the problem of human knowledge and cognition as an example of problems which face relations in general.

On the first point, I can’t see materialism as providing a complete ontological account (sorry Levi!) of the cosmos. Here I, like Michael, follow Whitehead’s notion of the actual occasion though my interpretation differs from Michael’s. For Whitehead, the actual occasion is not an entity that exists in simple location (no actual entity does for Whitehead); instead an actual occasion consists in three “moments” integrally present within the occasion itself: a subject prehending, a feeling prehended, and a subjective aim by which the prehension occurs. Each of these moments are simultaneous occurrences within each occasion (the outside is always-already “in” in the inside, as it were).

So here’s the rub on why I think Whitehead is not a materialist even though his philosophy is entirely compatible with materialism (its a kind of radical empiricism if you want to go Jamesian). Whitehead is careful to point out that while “stubborn facts” (what the materialist or empiricist would consider as the really real) are a necessary feature of our cosmology, they are finally abstractions that exist in the past as constitutive features in the emergence of new actual occasions (“the universe becomes one and is increased by one” as the famous saying goes). The point is that what is “matter” or “material” is only ever retrospectively defined as such. And here I mean “defined” in a cosmological sense that we can distinguish from a smaller anthropocentric gesture where humans get to “define” what is actually real. In other words, for Whitehead, the material universe qua universe is always the past, historical universe flowing into the present and on into the future. When we think of it this way, materialism is only a temporal subset of actuality.

On the second point Michael writes:

So, the take-away here is that structural encounters are direct by virtue of their causal efficacy, but ‘translations’ of such encounters are necessarily “selective”, obscure and partial: direct but partial. And I believe the notion of “absolute withdrawal” is predicated on conflating the limitations of cognition and representation with embodied experience and causality in general. But intentionality and conceptuality are not identical to contact and experience [I will comment more on this in my next post]. The so-called “rift between essence and appearance” applies to generally to symbolic operations but not necessarily to material relations and structural causality as such.

For myself (and for Whitehead) there is no ontological distinction between those modes of relations that are symbolic in nature and those that are non-symbolic in nature. Relations of any kind have what one could call a semiotic component. This is precisely what Whitehead means by prehension, though he doesn’t appeal to semiotics to make his case. In this sense I follow Harman and Morton in thinking that the rift between essence and appearance is not a feature of a human cognitive deficit, and is instead a feature of all modes of translation regardless of scale or complexity. Here I break with Whitehead (who I think qualifies as an advocate of contingent rather than absolute withdrawal — though of course he never uses this language)

At the end of the day Michael and I largely agree and are almost certainly applying these theoretical constructs towards similar aims: social and ecological justice are most definitely at the fore for both of us. In this sense we are in alliance in a larger cosmopolitical terrain that surpasses our differences here. While we both agree that relations are always contingent insofar as the onto-specific character of any particular set of enacted entities will always be of central importance, we disagree in that I still don’t think that if we added up all the onto-specific relations possible for any entity that that entity would then be *finally* revealed in its totality; there would still be a remaining surplus lurking within each finite, historical moment. Thus it seems to be the case that entities can be fully destroyed (or eaten as in Michael’s example) without be fully revealed. Another strange state of affairs…

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January 10, 2012

Harman on Aesthetics and Philosophy

A brief addendum to my previous post from THIS excellent essay a good friend reminded me about earlier today. Some classic Harman in these two noteworthy passages:

First, beauty is not one limited neighborhood of reality, one tiny theater district or concert hall of the world, meant to entertain us after the day’s serious work is finished. Instead, beauty penetrates every square inch of reality; the world as a whole has an aesthetic structure. Second, the sense of beauty is not just a random personal taste projected onto a boring objective world of chemicals and neutrons. Although we humans may disagree about whether a canvas by Jackson Pollock is beautiful or not, this debate happens not because we are miserable isolated egos unable to communicate. There is no reason to be so cynical. Instead, we disagree about beauty because we live outside our private minds, agreeing and disagreeing about the objects that surround us all.

and:

Allow me to end on a somewhat stranger and wilder note. There is no reason to believe that allure belongs only to human artistic experience, or bird songs, or the radial symmetry of flowers that is so attractive to insects. For there is no such thing as qualities in isolation from objects. When fire burns cotton, it does not burn “flammability,” but burns the cotton itself. We have already seen that no human can ever fully grasp the depths of cotton or fire, since these objects remain mysterious units that exceed all of their visible qualities. But the same thing must be true of the relation of the cotton and fire to each other. The fire reduces the cotton to an ability to be burnt, not reacting at all to its fragrance, its softness, its price on the world market, or the story of its origin in a village field. To repeat, the cotton itself is something deeper than all of its qualities, something that can never fully approached. The fire both touches and fails to touch the cotton. It destroys the cotton without ever fully reaching its depths. But this is strikingly similar to all the more human forms of allure, in which we encounter a unified object split from its properties, an object that we can sense but never fully define. This leads us to the following question: is it possible that even physical causation has a metaphorical structure? I believe that the answer is yes. And if so, then beauty lies at the root not only of human daily experience (as Santayana saw), but even at the root of physical events such as fires, earthquakes, and the explosion of stars. If there is something ghostly and magical about beauty, then this disturbing magic already lies in the heart of physical matter, not just in the privacy of the human soul.

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January 9, 2012

Jupiterian Realism: Imperatives and Withdrawal

Michael of Archive Fire has a fresh post up regarding the perilous task that lies ahead for the object-oriented enthusiast when it comes to justifying the concept of withdrawal in object-oriented philosophy. Michael’s post is characteristically generous and well-written and has me compelled to offer a continuation of his treatment on the topic (which itself seems to have been generated by this post from Levi Bryant).

I would like to suggest that we can frame this discussion within two conceptions of withdrawal: absolute and contingent (the first associated with the work of Tim Morton and Graham Harman, the second with Michael and Levi Bryant). I’ll explore the topic in general terms first–covering some familiar OOO debates as I go–and then move on to suggest that absolute withdrawal remains a valid thesis when thought in conjunction with what Alphonso Lingis calls “the imperative,” a central feature of Harman’s philosophy. Thinking imperatives and withdrawal together may clear up some of the issues Michael raises in his post or, at the very least, may move the discussion into deeper, unexplored thickets.

Lets traverse some basic territory first. With each new iteration, Bryant continues to develop his own “onticology” making it increasingly clear that his conception of objects–as processes or systems possessing operational closure–brings hims closer and closer to the work of Alfred North Whitehead. In my understanding, Bryant is arguing not for an absolute withdrawal, but a contingent withdrawal wherein a real object is deployed in and through its relations, though never fully so in any specific set of relations. What does this amount to? It seems to me, if I am reading Bryant correctly, that this form of contingent withdrawal suggests not the absolute absence of the real object, but a real object always-already deployed amidst a “regime of attraction;” objects are withdrawn in the sense that they are irreducible to relations and contexts, but not fully departed from all relations and contexts. (Side note: it is Bryant’s account of “regimes” where I feel closest to him philosophically, I have come to realize–rather slowly–that his use of this term is entirely compatible with how I use the word “ecology” in an expanded sense, but I digress).

Here we could draw a further connection between Bryant and Whitehead. For Whitehead, an actual occasion is deployed within a set of both prehensions and negative prehensions. In short, this means that an actual occasion is never fully exposed in any given scenario but only partially so depending on circumstance. This account is also very similar to the Harmanian distinction between real and sensual qualities, though differs in that for Bryant the real object is partially deployed, whereas for Harman the real object is completely withdrawn. It bears mentioning that I have a rather strange relation to the conception of objects-as-processes-partially-deployed. I am, on the one hand, thoroughly in debt to the work of Whitehead and count him as perhaps my strongest philosophical influence. On the other hand, I affirm the distinction between “real” and “sensual” objects advocated by Graham Harman and the “rift between essence and appearance” advocated Tim Morton. To be sure then, out of the three object-oriented philosophers that I mention above, it would seem most coherent for me to, following my cognitive debt to Whitehead, follow Bryant’s account of withdrawal, rather than Morton’s or Harman’s. And yet I’m not fully prepared to abandon absolute withdrawal just yet.

Lets take a look now at the crux of the issue. In his post Michael writes:

However, where I think OOO goes too far (at least with Harman and Tim Morton) is where they assign absolute identities to such potent beings to an extent where there is an imposition of metaphysical boundaries that do not actually exist…This radical boundary-making, I suggest, can only obscure the already complicated project of investigating BOTH the assembled efficacy and individuality of entities (their onto-specific potency, or ‘being’) and their fully implicated, material-energetic, processual, embedded and temporal relations (their ‘becomings’) simultaneously. I argue, counter-intuitively perhaps, that it is the onto-specific substantially of entities and assemblages that should caution us to avoid characterizing such complexities as merely “objects” or “relations – and talk more specifically about particular complexes distributed realities and the ecosystems they enact.

Michael’s concern here, as I read it, is that it makes no sense to experience and grapple with a relational, contingent world of affect whilst at the same time suggesting that this panoply of activity is the result of objects that do not touch–clearly all kinds of beings are crashing into one another everywhere! What a mess! So, if real entities everywhere are touching each other nowhere, than how is that anything is happening at all? And further, if it is the case that entities are withdrawn absolutely from one another then what possible sense of responsibility can we have towards such entities (a necessary question indeed)? Can we even be responsible to such entities?

The answer, for me, lies in the imperative. Objects are integral units dipolar in nature; mental and physical; affective and material; sensual and real; withdrawn and impelling. Much time has been spent discussing the withdrawal of objects from one another–an already bizzarre state of affairs. But what might be even stranger is the compelling, magnetic osmosis that seems to be occurring between the withdrawn cores of objects even as they only encounter one another indirectly. This, then, would be a response to Levi when he writes (on the problem of absolute withdrawal):

It’s not just that the object is empty for me, the person seeking to know the object. No, it is also that the object is empty for any other object, because the real being of the object is withdrawn from each and every object, existing in a self-contained vacuum, unable to touch any other object.

I would say that an absolute withdrawal and emptiness are not the same thing. Rather than an empty ontology I would suggest an interrogative ontology. It is the magnetic, impelling character of the real object’s withdrawal that, without directly coming into contact with another object, makes it have a real impact in the world–despite being withdrawn. But, one might correctly ask, if the withdrawn object is having effects its not totally withdrawn is it? I say yes it is precisely because an object has the power to impel other objects towards itself without those objects needing to have any direct knowledge or experience of the first object itself. It strange to think but knowledge and experience do not appear to be prerequisite in this account of causality.

In this sense I think vicarious causation provides a robust account of the real-sensual tension. Withdrawn, real objects are not passively existing dark voids of nothingness. Rather, real objects are endlessly attractive, compelling, and magnetic. I would describe this scenario by appealing to one’s own embodied experience. You are already reading, already listening, already thinking, already breathing. What does this mean? It means that the entity that is you, like all other entities in the cosmos, is compelled by the trillion things in your field of experience. This doesn’t mean that you are distracted or diffuse in attention necessarily (though I suspect that sometimes you are…) What it does mean, and this is a point that Harman’s Husserlian background brings to the fore so strongly, is that you are compelled forward by your intentional consciousness and its love affair with an always erupting cosmos. The gravity of those trillion things pulls your sensual experience into a pixelated encounter with the blooming entities that surround you, without ever revealing the whirring chrysalis at the heart of each entity (We might note that Tim Morton’s sympathy for this view could come from his Buddhist background, but this is conjecture on my part).

This alliance between withdrawal and the impellative nature of things makes the rift between essence and appearance seem tenable to me. Its almost as though each object is a dipolarized magnet; pulling you in and pushing you away simultaneously. Donna Haraway calls this ontological state of affairs “interpellation.” The inertia of some of these magnets can be quite compelling, almost as though even the smallest object has a Jupiterean mass forever hidden from experience, pulling other objects in and out of its orbit without ever revealing itself (just think of the affect of a split hydrogen atom and its role in history). These hidden Jupiters lurk within the depths of everything and have nothing to do with relational properties (qualitative or quantitative).

Michael’s post is well worth considering and I take both his and Levi Bryant’s work as theses both well articulated and demanding of attention. And I share Michael’s sentiment that, while in conversation with Bryant, Morton, and Harman, I count myself as a student and not a peer. Nevertheless, I remain sympathetic to absolute withdrawal.

5 comments

December 6, 2011

How Language Shapes Thought

I was just sent a great essay entitled “How Language Shapes Thought: The Languages We Speak Affect Our Perceptions of the World” which has proven to be a great read. There have been variations of this thesis emerging in linguistics since at least the 1930′s following the so-called “Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis” that, broadly stated, suggested the languages people use shape their relationships to other people, their sense of space and time, and their relationship to the more than human world.

To me this sounds like a rather obvious supposition, however it is only recently that linguists and cognitive scientists have been able to collect the empirical data to support such a view. This article, for example, argues the following:

People communicate using a multitude of languages that vary considerably in the information they convey. Scholars have long wondered whether different languages might impart different cognitive abilities. In recent years empirical evidence for this causal relation has emerged, indicating that one’s mother tongue does indeed mold the way one thinks about many aspects of the world, including space and time. The latest findings also hint that language is part and parcel of many more aspects of thought than scientists had previously realized (p. 63).

And further concludes by stating:

What researchers have been calling “thinking” this whole time actually appears to be a collection of both linguistic and nonlinguistic processes. As a result, there may not be a lot of adult human thinking where language does not play a role. A hallmark feature of human intelligence is its adaptability, the ability to invent and rearrange conceptions of the world to suit changing goals and environments. One consequence of this flexibility is the great diversity of languages that have emerged around the globe. Each provides its own cognitive toolkit and encapsulates the knowledge and worldview developed over thousands of years within a culture. Each contains a way of perceiving, categorizing and making meaning in the world, an invaluable guidebook developed and honed by our ancestors. Research into how the languages we speak shape the way we think is helping scientists to unravel how we create knowledge and construct reality and how we got to be as smart and sophisticated as we are. And this insight, in turn, helps us understand the very essence of what makes us human (p. 65).

I think the future of linguistic research of this variety will start to look more like media ecology (broadly construed) than the current cognitive linguistic emphasis on universal grammers. In this sense, the particularity of a language group (including its unique grammer and lexical output) seems to have just as much impact on human cognitive development as any deeper, underlying structure to produce language as such. I think there are good grounds to suggest then that, just as media ecology has emerged as the study of “media as ecology,” we can also say that a new kind of “linguistic ecology” is emerging that treats language as an ecological domain recursively linked to other ecological domains (including knowledge ecologies!)

What does this look like? Well, the media ecologists are well and far ahead when it comes to the type of research programs I am suggesting vis-a-vis the study of knowledge ecologies. Fortunately, it seems that media ecology research can provide a template for how to research knowledge ecologies. There is already a great deal of historical evidence, for example, on the difference between oral and literate cultures (cf. Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy). For Ong, the differences between orality and literacy are not surface-level “aesthetic” differences that can be united by a deeper structure in human cognition. Rather, Ong puts mediums of communication on par with the human enactment of things like causality, temporality, and sensory perception. Oral communication, for example, stresses auditory sensation and the immediacy of sound as a resonating, vibrating medium of exchange. Literate communication, on the other hand, stresses the visual sensation, requires a concept of linearity, and emphasizes a disjunction between subjects.

I think what we are seeing with the emergence of new research programs into the nature of language is an increased awareness that languages, ideas, words, paradigms — I’m not entirely clear how to sort these terms — act in a Latourian sense that reveals a much more subtle plain of activity than what is generally construed by the natural sciences of ecology. As I have proposed before, I think the way forward (in part) lies in articulating not just one ecology but three ecologies; a material, media, and knowledge ecology. These three ecologies require an awareness of what Graham Harman calls “undermining” and “overmining.” In the above article, for example, it seems clear that the effect of language on human cognitive development cannot be reduced only to underlying, universal structures of human cognition. Nor can languages be reduced to sociocultural contexts and historical events. It seems, rather, that even individual words can have impacts on human perceptions and cognitive development.

The surprising conclusion here is, and this won’t come as a surprise if you already accept the thesis of extended cognition, that words are in some sense “outside” of individual human speakers even though they appear to be generated from “inside” human skulls. Languages, worldviews, paradigms, and lexicons in some sense constitute a different sort of “object” replete with their own autonomous effects on material worlds. I would argue that, up until recently, Latour has skirted the issue of actors that occupy an ambiguous place in peoples psyches (he doesn’t have much an articulated psychology), though it seems that we are now in a place to consider what an ecology of knowledge may look like alongside of the greater ecologies of actuality, and in that sense include what Latour calls a “cosmogram” alongside of other actors like stethoscopes, MRI machines, and iPhones.

2 comments

December 5, 2011

Psycho Ontology

Its a bit of an awkward sounding phrase but THIS conference entitled “Psycho-Ontology: Human Nature, Human Mind” (h/t Tim Morton) sounds like its asking the right questions:

Do the operations of the human mind have something to teach us about the fundamental structure of reality? Philosophers such as Hume, Kant, James, Bergson, Husserl, Kuhn, and Goodman have, in different ways, seemed to believe this question should be answered in the affirmative. Yet as disciplines, cognitive science and metaphysics are usually conducted without reference to one another.

“Psycho-ontology” can be defined as the investigation of the relationship between human cognition and features of reality: We do psycho-ontology when we study the way perception, thought, and emotion play a role in helping constitute the world we inhabit. But psycho-ontology can also move in the opposite direction: It can involve studying the fundamental features of reality in order to gain insight into how human cognitive processes work.

Unfortunately, there do not appear to be any Whiteheadians or Object-Oriented Philosophers in the mix. Oh the horror! I suppose there is no one to blame but ourselves.

1 comment

November 25, 2011

For Jason Hills

Over at Immanent Transcendence, Jason Hills has been exploring (and pushing) the relationships between nominalism, universals, and realism, particularly as they are thought in the context of OOO. I find myself with a brief moment to contemplate some of the issues Jason is raising, so I’m taking the opportunity to write a quick response. Jason writes:

What’s the point? Without a realism of universals, of which the phenomenal qualities are a case, then any experience becomes arbitrary. We run into all the problems of empiricism that Hume and Berkeley exposed. Should we then seek shelter in Kant and psychologism? Qualities are law-like by-products of human experience that have no basis in external reality? No.

What is at stake? Without a reality of universals, then phenomenology really is every bit of trash that most analytics think it is. This is in part why they almost universally denigrate it–because they are NOT REALISTS about universals, and thus they think that mere experience is hokum. And thus they retreat into a neo-Cartesian position of thinking that what is really real is the rational and intellectual, err … “scientific.” This was part of Husserl’s ferocious critique in the Crisis; they mathematized being and did not even realize it.

These comments arise in the context of a discussion some of us have been having over at Matt Segall’s always industrious and creative blog Footnotes To Plato. At stake seems to be the status of universals in Whitehead’s process metaphysics, and, similarly, how such notions might transfer over into OOO-land. I’m certainly open to further exploration on these topics (I don’t think any one should feel ashamed about struggling to think the status of universals in one’s philosophy, it is certainly contested and important territory), however, I do have some thoughts in response to Jason’s comments. And, for further disclosure, when I think “OOO” I do not think it apart from the important alliances it has with process philosophy, ANT, science studies, situated knowledge practices, and cosmopolitics — they all merge and depart from one another in important ways that only strengthen their role as a speculative ecosystem of thought. That said, here are some comments.

First, I’m not convinced that realism requires universals, save for perhaps one. That universal would be contingency as in Meillasoux’s “hyperchaos” (within which even the laws of physics are contingently unfolding) and/or Whitehead’s “ontological principle” (within which no actual occasion can enter into the universe from nowhere, and must rather emerge from a constitutive set of historically occurring patterns or relations). Here I have always been confused by why Whitehead would call his “eternal objects” “eternal” given that the premise of his ontological principle seems to preclude both the eternality of either entities or patterns in the universe, and the fact that his metaphysics denies any entity the ability to be outside or external to the universe (and thus not really transcendent or eternal).

I see two options here 1) re-work Whitehead’s metaphysics so that “eternal objects” actually deserve the name through a ontological justification of such entities or 2) drop the name all together and come up with a new one that better describes the formative, participatory patterns Whitehead seems to be referring to (Matt Segall seems to think that participation, in Whitehead, goes both ways from creatures to forms and vice-versa, if thats the case I again think the term “eternal” should be dropped). Here Whitehead is among the most generous of philosophers and always caveats his philosophy with an appeal to the limited nature of abstractions, Whitehead encourages a rethinking of his premises whenever necessary.

In the context of the ontological principle I don’t think contingency amounts to the same thing as arbitrary (as Jason indicates in his post). Rather, as Isabelle Stengers notes in a memorable phrase, we are not affirming the relativity of truth through the ontological principle but, rather, the truth of relativity. A difference that makes a difference if there ever was one. This also connects to Jason’s charge that, without universals, a philosophy cannot be considered properly realist. I disagree as this seems to unnecessarily equate realism with both secular and religious versions of ontotheology, which I don’t think necessarily follows from considering oneself a “realist.”

The final question lurking around these parts of discussion has to do with the ontology of numbers and mathematics. In the recent essays I have been preparing, I feel that I have made a pretty solid case for (or at least am approaching a solid case) for the ecological ontology of knowledge but, and I admit full ignorance here, have a great deal of difficulty thinking the ontology of mathematics. Here the question of universals still looms. If my very limited understanding of Badiou is correct, than he seems to be arguing that ontology is rooted in mathematics, my own line of thinking here would like take this in a more Whiteheadian direction as Badiou’s ontology — please correct me someone if I’m wrong — seems to create a new materialism that suffers from many of the same bifurcations that old dualistic materialisms suffer from (i.e., making an ontological distinction between apparent and causal nature, where for Whitehead these are integrally united in the philosophy of organism).

OK. That was more than I had planned to write and I apologize for any details I have glossed over. These are important, open-ended questions and this response hopefully can be approached as a learning moment for myself and everyone else whom might find these questions interesting.

44 comments

November 21, 2011

Levi Bryant With More on “Myths”

A great, short definition of how Levi Bryant views the category of “myth,” following Andre’s (of the excellent blog Intra-Being) post on cosmopolitics and factishes yesterday. Levi writes:

Over at Intra-Being, the great Andre has continued the discussion of myth that took place over at this blog and at Knowledge Ecology and Footnotes2Plato. In his depiction, Andre presents the discussion as a debate over myth and ideology. For me myth is defined not by its content, but by its structure. For example, the fact that something contains reference to the supernatural does not necessarily entail that it is, as I understand the term, mythological. Likewise, the fact that something is secular through and through does not entail that it is non-mythological. When we speak of a structure we are not talking about the content of a thing, but of a set of relations that are shared among a variety of different things.

Levi makes the very helpful distinction that myths do not exclusively refer to the supernatural, and non-myths do not exclusively refer to the mundane or secular. I think the way Levi’s rubrik pays attention to structure rather than form is helpful insofar as it resists thinking of myths as something we can relegate to a premodern era or consciousness, and, conversely, that just because an ideology is secular, does not mean that it cannot smuggle in a crypto-ontotheology (which we might also call an appeal to a kind of secular supernaturalism or “god trick”).

Thus I largely agree with Levi’s assessment but would also want to draw further attention to Andre’s comments on what Latour calls “factishes.” For Latour, in the same way that we (“we europeans”) have never ontologically lived in a world split between nature and culture (despite much philosophical squabbling to the contrary), we have also never lived in a world split between what we call “natural” and “supernatural.”

“Nature,” “culture,” “natural,” and “supernatural” are all categories which, in my opinion, emerge out of a bifurcated ontology that sees things like gods, forms, and souls on one ontological plane, and animals, plants, and minerals on another. If one is committed to a strict transcendentalism, one may be inclined to view the former category (of gods, forms, and souls) as ontologically primary. Conversely, if one is a strict materialist, one may be inclined to do the reverse and see the latter category (of animals, plants, and minerals) as ontologically primary.

In both cases the one is reduced to a caricature of the other, a pale derivative of a more primary reality (somewhat ironically, both also end up being forms of idealism that reduce the real to its relation to humans…). In this context, I follow Latour in that I am more interested in tying these strange, diverse entities together into more interesting knots, rather than trying to get rid of the knot all together through some form of enlightened eliminativism (Haraway playfully referred to this as an “ontological game of cats cradle” during her recent AAR talk, a very nice image indeed).

My commitment to entanglement over disentanglement may seem like an appeal to a kind of muddy mysticism wherein I retreat from making any claims about truth and so forth. However, my point here is not that everything that has been said about immortal human souls and deities (for example) is true — and lets be clear here, most of what has been said historically about atoms, particles, genes, and races has not been true either – but rather that the situation, within the context of an ecological ontology, forms a kind of “unruly complexity” wherein every entity has its own semi-autonomous, evolutionary impact on the world and ought to be followed and respected as an irreducible entity (i.e., thought, pattern, icon, or tool) in its own right.

Category: Object-Oriented Philosophies

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