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Tag: Levi Bryant

March 12, 2013

The Impact of Correlationism

Levi Bryant has posted some reflections on the deployment, evolution, and potential shortcomings of the term “correlationism.” It’s an interesting read that covers some of the more baffling developments and associations that have become attached to this oft-quoted term, and the post has me reflecting on the impact that correlationism — and its adjacent speculative realist movement — has had on my own thinking. Now, I don’t use the term correlationism very much, almost never actually, and I don’t really consider myself to be a “speculative realist,” whatever that might mean, but I have been involved in my fair share of discussions surrounding both so it’s not like I’m divorced from these terms either.

In the first place correlationism is, for me, a problem that I have to get into rather than one I have to get out of. This has to do with the fact that my two largest intellectual influences — the sciences of ecology and speculative philosophy — both start off from a radically different position than those for whom correlationism is a problem, and for whom the critique of it is an innovation. That’s not to say that correlationism doesn’t usefully describe a particular set of philosophies, or that the responses the concept has generated are simple, unnecessary, or unhelpful. Rather, I’m trying to emphasize that correlationism is a concept that has emerged historically within the context of a very specific set of discursive circumstances, and that there are other discourse communities, other ecologies of thought and ideas, for which correlationism wasn’t the problem or tradition of thinking that needed to be challenged or overcome. I just happen to belong to one of those traditions within which correlationism might never have emerged as a topic of consequence.

But if correlationism is not a term I readily use, and not a problem I was trying to solve, what has correlationism done for the work I am doing? The answer is that it has made possible a greater variety of discussions with a greater variety of people. The concept of correlationism has redistributed discursive relations amongst philosophers. In my case it has increased my ability to dialogue with people working within continental philosophy, and made it possible for me to engage  these traditions in a much more complex way than was previously possible. However, even here the contribution of correlationism has to be thought within a larger ecology of knowledges, and within a movement towards speculative philosophy emerging in continental circles more generally. This movement seems to have had something of a slow build over the past few decades, but surely we can point to a kind of Deleuzian moment with an epicenter radiating out somewhere around the publication of Difference and Repetition in 1968 (and even earlier with his recovery of Henri Bergson in Bergsonism). Surely a more robust genealogy would reveal an even more distributed build through time.

The situation today is quite different. Indeed, we can now name a whole litany of new speculative texts in addition to those directly associated with speculative realism. Here we can mention Isabelle Stengers’ book Thinking With Whitehead, which has clearly had a huge impact on the way Whitehead is read in France and elsewhere, as well as Steven Shaviro’s book Without Criteria, which as had a very profound effect on my understanding of Kant, Deleuze, and Whitehead, and has opened up new avenues of discussion between continental and speculative philosophy. We’ve also seen works like Nature and Logos, which draws connections between Whitehead’s speculative philosophy and Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophical research. There’s also been a renewed interested in older texts like Gabrial Tarde’s Monadology and Sociology. And There’s still much more on the horizon — the english translation of Bruno Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence for instance. There are countless more examples we could list.

All of these works point to an interesting shift, not just in continental theory, but in the ecosystems of thought that are now capable of interacting and mutating with one another in general. A new phase of parasitism and symbiosis has begun, and I think that the truly interesting syntheses of these disparate figures still lay ahead of us. Within this broader shift towards speculation correlationism has acted as a kind of rallying point in otherwise loose ecological zones. Here the object “correlationism” must be thought of as a conceptual actor with the agency to produce different kinds of discursive effects structurally coupled with different kinds of media. So even if it’s not a concept I hang my hat on every night it is one that has directly impacted the ecologies of knowledge in which I participate. At the end of the day it’s the increase in dialogue with a more diverse group of thinkers, a dialogue that I can attribute to this word “correlationism,” that I think has had the most impact on my work, rather than the problems to which the concept itself refers.

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December 14, 2012

Object-Oriented Sociology

Via a Tim Morton: A new paper that blends object-oriented philosophy with actor-network theory has been published HERE. I suspect we are going to see a lot more papers like this; there’s just such a strong affinity between the work being done in the social sciences — in geography, political ecology, urban studies, and anthropology for example — and the people working on object-oriented philosophy. I tried my own hand at applying object-oriented principles to what’s often referred to as “place-based” research, which drives at many of the same core issues that object-oriented philosophers also deal with (e.g., the heterogeneous mix of practices, technologies, geographic spaces, and cultures that cohere to form a “place”). If object-oriented approaches to place seem relavent to your work you can view that paper HERE. (Mind you it’s an initial foray into the topic, and much remains to be said).

I think the take-away here is that object-oriented approaches to research (empirical, theoretical, or otherwise) are necessarily a post-disciplinary endeavor.

What I’m hoping is that we’ll see greater collaboration between philosophers, sociologists, and ecologists in and around these topics. We’re already beginning to see this in Levi Bryant’s more recent work, and in particular his post on social ecology. Social ecology and it’s associated fields — here I’m thinking of the work social scientists like Alf Hornborg are doing in human ecology — has much to contribute to object-oriented studies. In many respects social theorists have already done helpful research in the areas that object-oriented studies is now beginning to cover. However, the reverse is also true: The philosophical underpinnings of object-oriented studies have much to contribute to the work being done in the social sciences, which do not trade in as much philosophical investigation as is done in the humanities. Perhaps the Rutgers post-doc on “Objects and Environments” will emerge as an early place where this kind of work can emerge within the academy (the work is of course already happening outside the official spaces, but a little institutional support never hurts).

 

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July 4, 2012

Paul Ennis Responds to Levi Bryant

A succinct and to the point essay from the recent Dublin conference. There’s easily a half-dozen great points worth exploring, which I wish I had the time to dig into. You can discover them for yourself HERE.

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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 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 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.

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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.

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November 8, 2011

Modes of Thought and Cosmopolitics

A discussion worth attending to erupted earlier this week, precipitated by THIS stimulating post by Levi Bryant (with a follow up by Bryant HERE and a rejoinder from Matt Segall HERE), concerning questions of mythic, rational, and ideological “modes of thought” (a phrase I am borrowing from Whitehead’s book of the same name).

The role of critique in specific, and enlightenment philosophy more generally, has taken center stage in terms of its tension with both myth and ideology. I won’t rehash the whole discussion here, but suffice to say that one point of contention has orbited around the need for critique vs. unresolved issues that may arise — unconsciously — when one takes a position of critique.

Indeed, one can never launch a “critique from nowhere” as though, to borrow Foucault’s language, we have a adopted a pure “gaze” with which we can objectively evaluate the ideologies and mythologies of others. I don’t see Bryant in his posts, which inspired this conversation, to be arguing for anything like this kind of “purity.” Rather, the essays in question appear to critically evaluate the role myth and ideology have played in some of the more recent horrors of history (notably WWI and WWII).

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October 28, 2011

Levi Bryant on Post-Disciplinarity

[Excuse the previous grammatical errors in this post. I am experimenting with the WordPress App on my phone -- it is proving difficult to use!]

Some fine reflections on pedagogy, the structure of knowledge circulation, and post-disciplinary practices from Bryant in THIS recent post. Bryant defines post-disciplinarity thusly:

And so it goes. Kris, Eileen and I are involved in trying to create something called post-disciplinarity where it is recognized that all of these disciplines are local knowledges, partial views on the world, where it is recognized that the artist, engineer, designer, and activist create knowledge and thought every bit as much as the scholar, and where a space can be opened where these divergent lenses can come to resonate with one another and generate new innovation in thought, art, design, and political engagement.

This is very close to what integral ecologists mean by the same term (for the integral ecologist, each discipline produces true, but only partial perspectives). Further, for the integral ecologist, disciplinary, interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary practices form the constitutive elements of what is called a post-disciplinary perspective. Disciplinary approaches are the most familiar, dealing with specialized knowledge and training from within the academy. Inter-, multi-, and transdisciplinary approaches vary in definition depending on who you ask.

I tend to think of interdisciplinary practices as the migration of one set of methods or insight from one discipline into another (e.g., when philosophers use the methods and insights from the complexity sciences to create novel philosophical propositions).

Multidisciplinary approaches I take to mean the collaborative efforts of specialists from a variety of fields working together to solve particularly complex problems (e.g., when physicists, chemists, and biologists work together to understand the links between organisms and their environments).

Transdisciplinary research refers to the move away from both inter- and multidisciplinary practices in order to create a “metaparadigmatic” practice of research and knowledge making. Here researchers have included in their research agenda a reflexivity that continually calls into question the paradigms which construct and enact their research programs.

Postdisciplinary, then, refers to the ability to move in between inter-, multi-, and transdisciplinary modes of research, as governed by the needs of the research project.

I think Bruno Latour is perhaps the strongest example of a postdisciplinary researcher I can think of, allowing the infrastructure of the actors in play to generate a unique research paradigm appropriate to the situation (Roy Bhaskar would surely be an excellent example as well, though he, I think with good reason, is hesitant to use the term “postdisciplinary” and instead prefers “cross-disciplinary”).

My own thesis work centered on creating a three-fold system of 1) a natural ecology, 2) a media ecology, and 3) a knowledge ecology. These three, interpenetrating ecologies roughly correspond to the physical sciences, social sciences, and the humanities, respectively. Its my fledgling attempt at producing a postdisciplinary approach to ecology.

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October 6, 2011

Ontology and #OccupySF

On September 29th I did a little bit of amateur ethnography during what we might call an #OccupySF demonstration on Market Street in downtown San Francisco. The protest was peaceful and well organized (the organizing group even had volunteers wearing neon orange vests to help the crowd navigate the streets safely). In my estimation a stubborn – and crucial – problem shows itself here: how does one actually protest against a transnational corporation? Surely the folks down at the local Chase bank which the protestors were rallied around aren’t responsible for the global financial crisis (I didn’t get the impression that anyone at the demonstration believed that either). Nevertheless this was the location the group chose to rally around – an expression of their disapproval of the corporate heads lurking behind the Chase Corporation. I was able to snap a few pictures of the event:

This one shows the central rallying point of the demonstration, within which I estimate there were around 250 people in total:

And this one, not two blocks down the street, goes to show just how many people would be needed in order to really get the city of San Francisco’s attention (let alone the federal government’s). Outside of the demonstration’s small epicenter, the city barely takes notice of anything happening at all:

I don’t highlight this short-coming to disparage the demonstrators in anyway. Rather, I want to call attention to 1) how San Francisco, as the supposedly liberal-left city it is, hasn’t seemed to match its east coast counterparts in New York just yet and 2) that there is a strange philosophical problem lurking here. Specifically, I was struck by the strange ontological problem presented by this situation. A transnational corporation is a massively distributed, interconnected entity that operates via billions of transactions between humans, materials, laws, weapons, thousands of other species, and neoliberal ideologies (in OOO parlance, a corporation is a “hyperobject”). Where, then, does such an entity actually “exist” in our everyday notions of space and time? How do humans, or groups of humans, address such an entity? I see this as an ontological problem insofar as the structures of society (and I mean this literally in the sense, of roads, common areas, buildings, city districts, and the like) limit acts of “public” demonstration to physical locations (like the Chase bank of the protest). Yet there is an important sense in which a transnational corporation exists in space-time in a way different than a protest happening in a public location.

My question is then an open-ended one, meant more to inspire further thinking and action than to produce a single answer. How do you effect something that is there, but not really there? A corporation is a concrete part of experience, i.e., it is an objectively real entity, and yet, the corporation cannot be found in one’s direct experience (though many of its effects can and are) – its too big, too distributed. Its a little bit like trying to see with your own eyes the birth of a solar system – the timescales are just too long for any one human to observe. In this context I think a return to thinking ontology and metaphysics (particularly OOO – and perhaps even more specifically, Levi Bryant’s studious attention to social structure and justice) are arriving just in time. We need a concrete political ontology now more than ever, just as we need more demonstrators, activists, and policy makers to further the ever-increasing problems of ecological and social justice.

San Francisco, I know you can do better than this. Show me what your made of.

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September 14, 2011

The Democracy of Objects

Less than a year ago, I started this blog with little to no knowledge of what to expect or who I would encounter. At that point in time, I had just finished the course work for my MA and was in the thralls of researching and writing my MA Thesis. As I exited one learning environment, I unwittingly had entered another one. My engagements with the online theory community has become a much appreciated second education for me in many ways. Both with respect to the fact that it has significantly increased the volume of my writing (something I was anxious about losing momentum on after leaving the classroom) and because I have encountered so many interesting, divergent, and exciting ideas within the 24 hour salon of online theory.

Participating with the readers of this blog as well as with the writers of numerous other blog sites has been an unexpected gift and an opportunity for which I am thankful. As most readers of this blog already know, Levi Bryant’s The Democracy of Objects has now been released online (with pdfs and print editions soon to follow). Bryant has been not only one of the most prolific members of the online philosophy community, but also a great teacher and inspiration to younger folks like myself (even as we have been on opposite sides of numerous issues in the past). I can’t recommend the book more highly, and am looking forward to cracking it open myself when the print copy is available.

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August 17, 2011

Response to Naught Thought

Ben Woodward over at Naught Thought has THIS timely post concerning the rather fuzzy distinctions that are emerging at the intersections of process philosophy (PP), object-oriented ontology (OOO), and speculative realism/materialism (SR/SM). I see Woodward requesting a response with two fronts: first, for greater clarity and formalization amongst process philosophers. Second, a greater distinction between OOO and other branches of SR/SM. I can help with the first question, and less so with the second- I am too unfamiliar with the SR/SM territory to comment, save for my one reading of Meillassoux (sorry Ben!). As far as Meillassoux goes, I know there are folks out there who see many similarities between his work and the PP framework (particularly in Whitehead), hopefully a more able person can address these issues.

Moving along to the first part of the question, Woodward begins with the following charge:

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May 26, 2011

Bright Objects?

Levi Bryant has a great post tallying the different types of objects he has, with the help of a few others, so far identified (“Dark,” “Dim,” “Rogue,” and “Domestic”). The first two are references to luminosity and seem to suggest that, the “darker” an object is the less effects it has on surrounding objects. I wonder, then, is it not fair to suggest a “bright object” that would be the reverse; an object with inordinately strong effects on surrounding objects? Martin Luther King Jr. might be an example of one such bright object. He is certainly not a lone figure in the civil rights movement, but, he is also a particularly powerful actor within the movement as a whole.

It’s curious to me that luminosity would serve as such an effective metaphor in describing objects and their effects, yet it seems to work quite well. In this sense, an object could be both “dark” and “bright” depending on which sets of relations one is attending to. Just a quick thought.

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March 22, 2011

Media Ecology and Blogging Part 3

I have been trying to contemplate more adequately this statement from Levi Bryant’s response to my earlier posts (part 1 and part 2). Bryant wrote:

Journals are able to maintain strict disciplinary boundaries and tend only to be read by specialists in a particular field. With blogging it is different. The philosopher writes a blog post and suddenly the artist, comedian, ethnographer, geographer, mathematician, businessperson, activist, housewife, linguist, rhetorician, computer programmer, etc., speaks up. You are no longer addressed to others that have undergone the same process of academic subjectivization as you, but now are forced to encounter a variety of different forms of thought, knowledge-production, and life. This significantly diminishes the narcissistic pretensions that any and every discipline harbors with respect to itself. Boundaries are blurred and something new tends to emerge.

Since even before I was a grad student I was very interested in transdisciplinary research projects, and have long felt that academic specialization had reached its peak and had entered a deficient phase that was stifling the kind of knowledge production that a politically globalized, economically networked and ecologically endangered planetary society requires. Transdisciplinary research differs from inter or multidisciplinary research in that it seeks to blur distinctions between research projects more thoroughly, engaging research questions at meta-paradigmatic scales.

As such, transdisciplinary research raises a variety of epistemological problems about the nature of human perception vis-a-vis worldviews and their accompanying research models. Thomas Kuhn did to scientific research programs what Freud and the gestalt psychologists of the 20th century did to the human psyche. Kuhn destabilized our sense of control in perceiving a truly “objective” image of an independent and unified world that existed “out there.” Transdisciplinary research is a late response to the coming to consciousness of the role paradigms play in even basic aspects of human perception.

And yet, transdisciplinary research alone does not seem up to the task of matching the incredible amount of diverse specialization happening at the upper levels of the academy (I am not against specialization by the way, but it does need a counterpart through a more integrative model of knowledge production). Perhaps what we need then is not just a new approach to organizing knowledge in the academy but rather a whole new medium of communication.

In short the response to academic specialization that fragments and distorts a more gestalt image of any given situation (and often requires the tyranny of one program over another) lies not only in integrative research, but in the construction of a whole new ecological environment where interactions can occur on dimensions not possible in print. Thus we are dealing with an emergent ecological context that is public, democratic and, just by nature of the medium, breaks down the esotericism of late 20th century disciplinary specialization.

In the end I think this is what blogging will come to (at least for the academically oriented). Its not there yet but I think blogging is so new that (as Harman also pointed out), like an ecosystem far from its climax state, the media ecology developing online still needs to pass through several successive phases of disorder and re-organization before it can enter a phase of “normalcy.” In this regard knowledge and media ecologies seem to operate in ways similar to Kuhn’s understanding of the difference between “normal” and “extraordinary” science (I prefer the newer term “postnormal“).

We are in a postnormal phase with regards to the development of new media ecologies and the results are, at this point, open ended.

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March 20, 2011

Media Ecology and Blogging Part 2

After some quick responses from Graham Harman and Timothy Morton on my recent post, and a slightly longer one from Levi Bryant, I have few comments to add that have occurred to me in response. In my last post I stated that blogging and traditional modes of publishing are different as ecological mediums and therefore we shouldn’t be troubled by their relationship since they are in fact not trying to accomplish the same thing (nor can they). In Morton’s post he pointed to the important point: “Why else put [blogging] down? It wouldn’t be a threat if it was totally different.” Agreed.

There are obvious similarities between blogging and academic writing (especially if your blog is geared primarily to text content as opposed to video or images). The formulation, the structure, the rhetoric- all of these can be the same whether one is writing a blog or an academic paper. Mcluhan pointed out that advances in technology tend to swallow and contain the previous medium, whilst adding new dimensions. Thus the oral speech of radio is included in the technology of TV, whilst TV adds the dimension of moving images. Blogging is the same. Text? Check. Images? Check. Video? Check.

However, technology does not proceed by simply expanding into greater spheres of inclusion, the expansion is always one of a branching particularity, not an enlarging system of containers- technology is not a series of russian dolls. The critics of blogging point to what is lost in the translation of academic content from papers to blogs. Neil Postman himself felt that we ought to return to a more literate culture (for him literary culture was at its most ascendent during the 18th and 19th century), arguing that television as a medium is incapable of producing political discourse regardless of the quality of the television programing. I think we are in a similar position with blogging today, and perhaps the burdens and benefits are not equally distributed.

Morton, Harman and Bryant are in a completely different position than I, and I am not ignorant of this fact. With no publications yet (though I do have an announcement to make about this- stay tuned!) I have nothing to lose by throwing my works out on the internet, and I think it absolutely proves my point that blogging is worth it considering that three of the people who’s works I use regularly were able to respond to my sentiments (much appreciated everyone, really interested to here your opinions).

Blogging is not better or worse than publishing, it is something different, though with the caveat that technology (as we have just noted) tends to include various elements of its previous incarnations creating the illusion that the new medium is just an extended version of the old.

Ok, last point. Is blogging a threat to academia because it exponentiates the downward spiral of the publishing industry? I don’t think so. I cannot speak for my entire generation, but I still buy books all of the time and as a matter of fact many of those purchases come as a direct result of things I hear from blogs that I follow in addition to the traditional outlets. I think the blogging/publishing relationship is mutually enhancing- nothing to fear here folks! If you write your own blog, or just follow them, this is in no way a substitute for actually reading the material that these people put out and I think most of my peers are aware of this.

Something like a crash course in media ecology seems necessary for our times.

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