New materialism doesn’t exist and flat ontology is a red herring—first reflections on Millennium 2015

I've just arrived back from the Millennium journal's conference for 2015 at the LSE in London. The headline act was Bruno Latour and I'll post some thoughts on his lecture when I get time. But, first things first, I feel like I need to get this off my chest.

'New materialism' as a cohesive body of thought doesn't exist and 'flat ontology' is a monumental red herring. Andrew Barry made the former point very well in a panel on Sunday afternoon. He very much voiced what I was thinking but I will try to expand on that.

Saying that there are new materialisms might be a step in the right direction but it's still not good enough if the analysis then continues to proceed on the basis of lowest common denominators (many of which are erroneously identified). For many of the thinkers who are being frequently identified by that term, it is quite questionable whether they are materialists at all. The metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, for example, is often referred to as materialist (didn't hear that at this conference but have done in the past) but what can this mean when he did not base his ontology on a conception of matter but rather of events (or rather 'actual occasions')? Latour himself has flirted with the term 'materialist' but this is far from a simple relationship (he is comfortably more Whiteheadist than materialist, by any reasonable estimation).

Being not-an-idealist is not the same as being a materialist – it is not an either/or equation. The presumption that we must all choose between these two preset options is a death blow to the possibility of thought. It's just much more complicated than that.

The loose family resemblance that the term new materialism identifies cannot serve as a starting point for any meaningful analysis or critique. That requires grappling with particular thinkers in their particularity. And that is a much more difficult task than casting around vague aspersions but it's also the only way to actually say anything. (Of course, the pressures of the 10 minute conference presentation tend to work against any and all forms of incisiveness and subtlety but nevertheless.)

Having said all of that, there are a handful of thinkers who place themselves under the flag of 'new materialism' and I don't wish to disparage whatever that term is doing for them. However, as the term is circulating within International Relations conversations (and to a large extent within human geography as well), I think it is quite clear what that term is doing there: shoehorning a rather varied range of thinkers into a neat-ish box that can be broadly and abstractly discussed on the basis of a handful of alleged, half-articulated lowest common denominators. It is all about dumbing down the conversation.

That may be a bit harsh but only a bit.

(I should add at this point that I am not aiming these comments at anyone in particular but at the general level of conversation around these issues. Those promoting new materialism and flat ontology might be as guilty as those criticising these terms, in this respect.)

I hasten to add also that I have nothing against '-isms' and other heuristic devices that allow the complexities of intellectual affiliations and trends to be signposted and made navigable. However, academics have a deeply unhealthy relationship with -isms, turns and the like. In IR, in particular, there is a long history of obsessing over trends and movements rather than authors and arguments. It's never innocent and always involves the suppression of various aspects of the landscape of possible thought.

If that sounds like rather a 'poststructuralist' thing to say (it may well do) then that term itself, I would argue, is not at all exempt from these problems. What was at stake in privileging structural linguistics in the intellectual inheritances of those authors grouped under the term 'poststructuralist' (they were all much more than this)? I have my theories. The main one is that this made it easier to turn a complex set of ideas into a 'theoretical framework' that could be taught, textbooked and 'applied.' But I digress.

Secondly, flat ontology. Until recently I had forgotten that this was a 'thing.' It gets thrown around in a variety of ways without what it's supposed to actually mean being made particularly clear in any given instance. More and more it seems to be used as a polemical tool which suggests that the likes of Actor-Network Theory flatten out all forms of hierarchy and have, therefore, no perception of or interest in questions of power and inequality (although see also). This rests on a conflation of ontology and method.

In ANT (itself a somewhat diverse array of scholars but, I think, just about cohesive enough to make the designation meaningful) it is an important principle of method that one does not presuppose that which one is attempting to account for. Thus, ANT effects a flattening of the social field in the sense that pre-established hierarchies and verticalities are not what is used to explain events on a level of generality but what is to be explained in terms of the specificity of each observed hierarchy.

Take a scientific fact. A fact that has won out over its rivals and been enshrined in textbooks, encyclopaedias, people's general knowledge, etc. Plainly, the situation I am describing is not 'flat' in the sense of there being no hierarchy. It is precisely because there is hierarchy that one should not take hierarchies for granted. The hierarchy is the thing that one wishes to explain and this explanation comes from an intensive description of the process by which human and non-human agencies are criss-crossed and assembled, each affecting and perturbing the overall formation as they are enrolled into it. That is, the hierarchy is assembled from a heterogeneous array of forces that one can never a priori place in a pre-given hierarchy. The field that is to produce the descriptive explanation is flattened insofar as order is not to be taken for granted and no one case is to be made the archetype for all other cases. That's all.

That doesn't mean that this approach is necessarily right or that it is universally applicable (I don't think that it is) but that it should be understood for what it is – at least as much about method as about ontology per se.

Relatedly, this is what Latour has to say about power in a recent interview. They don't use the term flat ontology but it could be easily read into the question.

– VD: We want to ask you about power. If we assume that ontologies are multiple and relational, where do we locate differences and power asymmetries? There has been a lot of criticism, especially in Latin America, that this idea of multiplicity erases conflict, hegemony, domination and asymmetries. So how would you answer to this criticism and include questions on asymmetries and power? 

– BL: I think you have to reverse the question and ask: when do people use the notions of power and asymmetry? What is the landscape that we imagine as the ideal? I always suspect when the landscape we imagine as the ideal is flat, where there would be no power relations and where all relations would be symmetrical. Behind the notion of power is the idea that power is something that should not be carried out, that it is a sort of deviation from the path represented by something we have in mind that is probably reason, or solidarity, or peacefulness. However, people like me never believe in peacefulness as symmetry. I don’t use so much the notion of power, because asymmetry, in the landscape we try to describe, is everywhere. If you describe a mountain from here to Buenos Aires, you will need to follow one calibrated instrument and describe how this one instrument registers differences, what in my work is actor‑network theory (ANT). For example, we think the pampa is very flat and then we see it goes up and down! So, to register asymmetry you need a notion that doesnot use the word power because when you use power there is always this idea that you could actually get rid of it. That power has to disappear, that it is abnormal. But asymmetry is the nature of the landscape you are describing. Moreover, if you mean by multiplicity association in the ANT sense of the word, that is as heterogeneous connections, which have to be composed, it means you have to be amazingly precise on the nature of the asymmetry. That is, this man here or this woman there is actually producing, in this specific place, a pattern which is spreading in this way and which has to be attacked. Is this power? Yes, of course it is power. But power doesn’t add anything to that description. The primary problem of the notion of power is that it withdraws something from the description, because it says: “Ideally, we could do without power”. So power is a drug, it isa sort of poison that is used because people feel good about doing so, “Ah, I’m describing power relations”. But the problem is that they never do it because in fact they replace the analysis of the asymmetry in a specific place, where specific effects have been produced, by this sort of overall ideal. They assume that if they speak about power, the work already is done. But as long as you are not able to identify where danger is being produced and modified, abstain from using the notion of power. That is why I’m very suspicious about people who use power. It is basically a left over from the Left, an old idea that assumes that we should address power because they imagine that they could get rid of it. 

– VD: Is it like a shortcut? 

– BL: Yes. Could you imagine describing a landscape where there would be no power? Actually, I put power at the heart where it was not supposed to be: in science! So, I’m not impressed by those criticisms. Others put power everywhere, but not in science. And in science, where we show it, asymmetry is everywhere, the scientist that published this here and not there, etcetera, everything is completely asymmetrical in science. But then, it doesn’t mean that you have to add the notion of power. Because if you add it, what do you add? This is a question I have never understood. What is added by adding the notion of power? Yes, it is asymmetrical. It is like saying the Andes are high. Yes they are high. Now, if you want to walk it up and down you need lots of trucks. Where are the trucks, how do we mobilize them, which road do we take, which tools do we need to walk it up. These are the questions we have to ask.

For Latour, power doesn't add to the description and is politically misleading, so out it goes. (Now, I think that there is still a need for a concept of power as a risk that any actor undertakes in channelling forces that might capture it but that's a topic for another day.)

What the ANT-type position does refuse at a properly ontological level is the dualist separation of nature/society, substructure/superstructure or anything of that sort (if that's what a 'flat ontology' is then, yes, it is flat – although it would be more accurate to say non-dualist). The critical realist separation between transitive and intransitive, for example, is, from this point of view, just another instance of the same old modernist bifurcation of nature, with a bit of a tweak. It is a depth ontology that operates on the basis of images of surface and subsurface, soil and bedrock, veil and reality. It's more of the same: the shallow ephemera of perception vs. the immutable depths of reality.

It is not so much that ANT et al. are 'flat' but rather that critical realism et al. are dualist (even if they sometimes claim not to be). The metaphor of depth carries within it the critique of flatness. To promote 'flat ontology' as a good thing is rather to promote a term of abuse. Neither flat nor deep – refuse the imposition of the choice.

So, yes, there are real and important differences to be identified and picked apart here, undoubtedly. But phrases like new materialism and flat ontology aren't nearly good enough to get at them. It's like trying to do heart surgery with a shovel.

Probably the principal difference to be picked apart, in my opinion, is the insistence upon empirical, idiographic, casuistic and descriptive studies. That is to say, the insistence that theory be what facilitates empirical research rather than being what substitutes for it, overlays it or provides the explanatory supplement that the things themselves lack; that studies focus intensively upon particular cases and attempt to understand them in their specificity, while at the same time accommodating their wider connectedness and historicity; that the only form of explanation should be a well-constructed description and that generalisation should be undercut at every opportunity.

These are principles that are eminently contestable and that would make for a conversation worth having. However, until we can get past such poorly constructed concepts that don't even make contact with the real disagreements, this will not happen.

A concept of power without potentia

In a recent post I reflected on the significant limitations Latour's Deweyan political mode imparts upon his political philosophy.  I concluded by arguing that politics can only make sense given a concept of power.  Latour rejects power for largely philosophical reasons (and arguably sound reasons as far as they go).  Therefore, we need a concept of power that is compatible with the best of his thought but doesn't submit to the unnecessary limitations that he has placed upon himself.  The following constitutes an initial, schematic, impressionistic move to that end.  A first stream of thought that is hopefully headed in the right direction but has not yet located its target with any precision.

The problematic of power without substance.  To abstain from a concept that is essential for all political thinking because of philosophical quibbles is simply petty.  Power qua the potentia of a substance may be conceptually inadequate for our purposes but etymology is not an impassable barrier to conceptualisation.

Power as placement within an assemblage, a network with hierarchical or non-symmetrical properties.  P has power not because of any innate or bodily potential (his body plays a part, of course, but scarcely more than his aortic valve) but because of his placement within a vast assemblage of corridors, telephone wires, aides, secret service personnel, flags, lawns, bureaucrats, journalists, tanks, guns, bombs, etc.  All these things bear a relationship to P that is asymmetrical.  They are there for him in ways that he is not there for them (and vice versa, in fact).  His face is on practically every flat surface; a house of mirrors with him in the sweet spot. Those who buzz and flit around him are practically invisible by comparison.  He issues orders, they follow them with degrees or gradients of resistance, elements of disobedience and betrayal, yes, but far weaker, shallower gradients, far lesser betrayals than orders issued in the opposite direction!  (This particular Circle is massively lopsided.)

It isn’t difficult to think of power within networks (nor is it especially original).  Power is a property of actors arrayed in a highly particular fashion, a property of network structure – and structures only endure because of processes keeping them that way, yes, but given those processes power is real enough to be referred to by name.  A figuration, a synecdoche, yes – but that is true of all proper nouns.

Gradients of resistance.  The master issues orders and it is as though his words roll downhill, effortlessly.  The servant follows them dutifully without any real objection; his only immediate concern: trying to avoid being crushed under their seemingly massive weight!  The servant can make requests but only at great expense, with difficulty and only on special occasions.  It is as if he has to tenderly, gingerly roll his request up a hill and the master can disinterestedly swat it away, commanding, as he always does, the high ground.  With the slightest of disinclining gestures the request rolls back down again.  The servant is worse off than even Sisyphus, he cannot keep rolling his stone up again and again!  Next time the master’s response may not be as benign as a disinterested swat…

‘Ah, so the master ‘has power’ and the servant ‘does not.’’  Indeed, this is how it appears and it appears this way because this is how the network is structured.  And as long as it remains structured in this fashion then the dialectic keeps a’rollin’.  However, all networks are unstable – and structures are the least stable network-configuration of all!  All networks require institutions to keep them solid.  And this is especially true of tightly structured networks that must, if they are to remain self-respecting, appear to remain unchanged over decades, even centuries.

However, if they do hold (an empirical question) then the master really does ‘have power.’  The amount of ‘work’ he has to do in order to rebuff his servant’s meekest of requests is inconsiderable; the servant, contrariwise, has to work day and night just to meet his master’s approval and even then his words are so weak that they barely leave his mouth.  ‘Yes, sir.  Thankyou, sir.’  These are not his words even if they issue from his lips.  To speak his own words in his master’s presence is extremely risky – that is unless his master has granted him that privilege: ‘You, there! Say what’s on your mind, lad!’  A small foothold on the mountain.

The differential gradients are as real as anything – as long as the structure holds.  We can and should interrogate these structures to see how they work, however we needn’t and, indeed, cannot pick apart every structure every time.  Black boxes, habit – these are not the pudding-skin of false consciousness.  A habituated, instituted structure is a real structure with real effects.  It is churlish and unnecessary, therefore, to deny the existence of power.  Yes, it is a network-effect, yes it is unstable – but what isn’t?  You can’t tackle any explanandum without some explanans and sometimes that means taking network-effects for granted (they grant us this privilege when they stay stable, for whatever reason).  Indeed, this is the only way anything can ever happen.

If every network fell apart all at once there would be nothing because there is nothing beneath networks; no Nature, no God.  Nothing to pick up the pieces.  If the servant stopped to consider his situation, perturbed from the trajectories of obedience for whatever reason, he may come to rebel.  Habit keeps the relationship stable.  The very taken-for-grantedness is one thing that keeps the structure intact.  So, might we not want to untie those bonds for that very reason, to help unburden the poor servant?  Yes, we may very well do.  But (a) one cannot unburden every agent all at once (and not all want saving), (b) habit is only one thing keeping the structure stable, causing the servant to rebel could be very bad for him – he could be fired, thrown out by his unsolidarist former colleagues, blacklisted, even beaten or worse and with impunity because of the master has the ear of the local sheriff, etc. –  and (c) this is only an example, an archetypical (the archetypical) instantiation of a power relationship.  The point is to show that power gradients are real and that they can legitimately function as explanans if they relate to steadily structured network relations, the configuration of which establishes the differential work-gradients that we recognise as ‘power.’

The fact that these gradients depend on more than themselves only matters insofar as (1) we are morally or politically obligated to unpick these configurations in particular (in which case we particulate them and them alone) or (2) these structures aren’t sufficiently stable for our purposes and our explanation risks falling apart when they yield.  In any case, political power and networks are no more incompatible than electricity and the National Grid.

If kept stable the power is indeed there ‘in’ your wall socket.  If patriarchy remains intact then the man sat at the head of the table really 'has' power over his children and womenfolk.  If P succeeds in getting re-elected, avoiding impeachment and assassination, keeps his donors 'onside,' avoids being made a 'lame duck' (where he becomes P in all but name and is then confined to activities that belong purely to his office, i.e. bombing somewhere with a desert) then, yes, he is the most powerful man in the world.

Etymology be damned, a concept of power without potentia is entirely possible – and it is quite simply a requirement for any kind of politics (including [pol]) to make any sense whatsoever.

And before wise people object that none of this is new: I know.  That's my point.  Latour has abstained from 'power' for many, many years and his political philosophy is horrifically malnourished as a result.  My point is that there is simply no need for this.  The problematic is more a stream than a raging river and with some fairly light conceptual work the stream can be bridged.

Power is not a utility in short supply.  There is no danger of blackouts if we tap into the grid.