Whitehead, Latour, the reality of events, irreduction

Levi is back with some thoughts on realism, flat ontology and so on:

I just can’t agree with Whitehead regarding things like rainbows and the beauty of sunsets.  Oh sure, I think these things are real enough because they involve the properties of light coupled with brains. ... I draw a distinction between “exo-qualities” and “endo-qualities”.  An endo-quality is a quality that resides in the thing itself.  It’s there regardless of whether or not anything relates to it.  An exo-quality, by contrast, is something that only emerges in a relation between two or more entities.

Interesting stuff!  Forgive me my rambling:

Isn't 'light + rain + brain' an object itself?  Sure, they're objects individually and the rainbow qua aesthetic object only exists by their becoming related but, in Whitehead's terms, doesn't this combination of things forms a unique actual occasion?  In your terms doesn't it form an object, emergent from and irreducible to its component parts?  From the perspective of the rain droplets the rainbow may be merely exorelated as it is an event that the rain constitutes by entering into relationships with other things without exhausting the rain's own specificity.  However, from the perspective of the rainbow qua aesthetic event itself the rain droplets are endo-related because they are part of the event.

The fact that this event requires a brain is, therefore, neither here nor there -- it also requires a body, water, air, sun, particular atmospheric conditions, etc.  Rainbows aren't real in the same way that rain drops are real -- this is certainly true.  But this is a perspectival question since you could equally say that, from the perspective of an oxygen atom, the water molecule that it constitutes along with two hydrogen atoms isn't 'real' in the same way as the atoms themselves.  The water molecule isn't 'real, out there' because without the oxygen atoms there would be no molecule.  Similarly, the rainbow isn't 'real, out there' because without the perceiving brain there is no rainbow, only water in air forming a prism that diffracts light.

If there is a difference between these two examples it is because you have introduced a distinction between cognitive apprehension and other kinds of relations -- not an indefensible argument but one that must be made carefully.

So, beauty isn't a property of the droplets or the lightwaves or even these things together but we can definitely say that it is a property of the rainbow.  Beauty is a property of the rainbow so long as we accept that the rainbow is constituted by perceiving beings as well as rain, light, etc. -- that it is not an object perceived by a subject but an object that includes a subject.  The rainbow is not beautiful unless it includes a mind that perceives it as such but that doesn't mean that beauty is not a property of the rainbow itself, that beauty is confined to the mind.  It just means that it is contingent upon the precise constitution of the aesthetic event.

I'm just thinking 'out loud' now but we could say that two people looking at the 'same' rainbow won't experience beauty in the same way, therefore beauty is only in their minds.  But Whitehead could just say 'well, they're not looking at the same rainbows, then'.  They're looking at the same droplets and light rays, perhaps, but not the same rainbows.  So, rainbows are subjective, as is their beauty, but they are subjective in the sense that they include one and only one perceiving subject.  They are not a subjective apprehension of an external objective reality as this would mean perceiving subjects transcending objective reality, all looking out on the same, singular reality but experiencing it severally.  But they are a singularly subjective apprehension in the sense that these aesthetic events -- the rainbow qua beautiful thing -- can only include one perceiving subject.  When two or more people look at the 'same' rainbow they are experiencing two different events that merely share some constituent parts.

So, it's not a case of several subjects perceiving a singular reality but several aesthetic events involving an overlapping plurality.  This makes sense to me but it clearly requires a category of 'subject' distinct from other kinds of objects because there are many objects within a rainbow -- billions of water droplets, innumerable lightwaves, etc. -- but, for it to be a 'subjective experience' in the manner I described, it can contain only one subject.  Add another subject and you have two aesthetic events.

Although perhaps we are not trapped in our individual subjectivity.  Perhaps if we talk about, write about, paint about our experiences of beauty and if we share the same cognitive and aesthetic preconditions with other subjects then we can share experiences of beauty.  Perhaps through social, artistic processes we can draw our experiences together and perhaps we can meaningfully talk about multi-subject aesthetic events.  But those subjects would have to be drawn together by other conditions beyond the isolated events themselves.  We'd have to be drawing in further mediators, as it were.

Anyway, on Latour's principle of irreduction, people seem to forget what he actually says:

1.1.1 Nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything
else.
• I will call this the 'principle of irreducibility', but it is a prince
that does not govern since that would be a self-contradiction

That's his first principle in its entirety and each part of it is significant.  People often fixate on the 'irreducible' part and think that the principle is all about everything being unique and sui generis and nothing being articulable in terms of anything else.  I recall Ray Brassier in his review of Irreductions being most upset at how Latour said, first, that everything was irreducible but then proceeded to reduce everything -- even science, the horror! -- to his own terms.  He didn't realise that this is actually Latour's entire point! -- that the only way of understanding and perhaps even existing in the world is via an infralanguage (or something similar) that articulates other things in its own terms, thus reducing and rendering articulable what may be irreducible in its entirety but is not entirely irreducible.  (But then I don't think Brassier even really tried to understand that book -- his intention was damnation, not fair reading.)  Latour later calls this process 'formatting' and it's really the core of his whole philosophy.

Anyway, I'm all for unflattening the ontology.  Flattening it is just a first, critical step taken to erase all the fallacious distinctions that others have made in error.  Ultimately, having reduced everything to a single type, one must be able to make categorical distinctions within that typology.  Perhaps subjectivity can be suitably rearticulated in the manner I described above, or some other way.

More on Agency, Millennium Conference

A bit of background might help elucidate how and why I arrived at my last post on things and agency.  I was suddenly compelled to write about it by Jeremy's post but I'd been thinking about it for a while.

Until quite recently I too was quite happy to use 'agency' in the more-or-less Latourian fashion (as a catchall term for 'causal efficacy' of any sort) and considered any objection to it to be simply reactionary.  It was attending the Millennium journal's conference on 'Materialism in World Politics' a few months ago that changed my mind.  The conference itself seemed to be split down the middle to some degree in terms of the theoretical persuasion of the attendees: half were dyed-in-the-wool historical materialists of one sort or another; the other half were acolytes of materialism after the fashion of Latour, Connolly, Bennett, Haraway, etc.  I found it interesting that the to-and-fro of the argumentation between the two camps eventually ended up orbiting around one issue in particular: that of the 'agency' of things.

Some, Colin Wight and David Chandler for two, argued strongly against the attribution of agency to things.  Another person even called it 'fascist' since it 'eliminated the difference between people and things.'  This objection is, of course, totally reactionary.  Granting 'agency' to things doesn't destroy the difference between humans and other kinds of things; it makes the difference one within a plurality rather than across a duality and ontologically secondary rather than primary.  However, some objections were more nuanced.  The argument that really persuaded me was that the concept of political agency is a hard-won spoil of ideological conflict and that it mustn't be taken for granted because many political ideologies deny the notion of human beings in general having the capacity for reflexivity, self-consciousness and intentional, purposive, intelligent action.  We see this today with the creeping technocratisation of governance in Europe, disguised and rationalised by economics and the cult of There Is No Alternative, for example.  Such ideologies are real today and they were even more so in the past.

This made me realise that agency in science and in politics are quite different things.  In science human agency, conventionally defined, has been granted far too much but in politics this is not the case; in politics the very capacities that were so overstated in scientists need to be cultivated, nurtured and promoted.  What in one instance was so hyper-abundant as to be a pest in the other is, if not endangered, not in overwhelmingly good health.

We certainly need to understand the impurity and complexity of politics in terms of the massive proliferation of things qua 'issues' (as in 'dingpolitik') and we need to be rid of the myth of naked humans talking amongst themselves but we also need to recognise that there is an enduring truth in the various theoretico-political myths of 'humans amongst themselves' -- that there are specificities to human being that require special theoretical terms.  Human being may not be unique in type but it is singular in importance and so we need to be careful when we are taking apart the concepts with which its specificity has hitherto been captured, even if we are justified in performing such disassembly work in general.

So, I don't pretend to have any answers here.  I'm not saying that the old humanist version of agency must necessarily be preserved.  I'm largely won over by Levi's articulation of agency as gradational and to be attributed in its varying forms on the basis of empirical evidence rather than a priori.  Jeremy's splitting of the term into three works well too.

I suppose what I'm trying to say programmatically is that a lot of work has been done un-bifurcating nature, flattening ontology, pluralising duality, post-ing humanism and so on and a large part of this has involved dethroning the naked human Subject.  However, that, for any social or human science, can only be an initial, critical move; an earth-clearing exercise.  The attribution of 'agency' to things worked well at that stage but it has become dehistoricised and ANT has become known as 'the theory that things have agency' -- as ANT quietly steamrollers its way through the human sciences this claim becomes gradually indissociable from everything else anyone has ever said about it.  A far greater degree of nuance than this is now required

It seems that Levi and Jeremy are both well ahead of me on this but I met numerous people at the Millennium conference who were still very much stuck with the impression that the claim that 'things have agency' is very much the insight of Latour, ANT, etc.  I now think that this is not the important insight so much as it was one way of articulating a broader point in a way that worked analytically, polemically and philosophically in that particular context (science studies in the 1980s) but that is less than adequate now.

I suppose this is ultimately just a 'baby and bathwater' argument: I think that 'agency' as traditionally defined has some conceptual and political importance, despite its flaws, so we should be careful when redefining it, though redefine it we must.

A Defence of 'Agency' and Human Specificity

A nice post at Struggle Forever got me thinking.  Some of the below is directly related to it and then I go off into some general wanderings:

If agency is intentionality and efficacy, then structure can be seen as a kind of agency itself rather than merely the opposition to agency or a kind of determinancy.

There's another way of looking at this which is to say that, yes, structure and agency are two different kinds of causal efficacy - so in that they are of the same kind.  Their opposition is only a division within a unity.  But the point is that they still delineate a difference.  Now, I have no particular fondness for the agency/structure opposition.  I think it's a tired abstraction that is actually quite useless.  But nevertheless I'm resistant to this continual immolation of 'agency' in the name of 'flat ontology' or whatever you want to call it.

Establishing a common vocabulary for human and non-human things and holding them to common metaphysical standards instead of having one rule for one and another for the other is a worthy goal.  I fully accept that the difference between humans and rocks is no more ontologically profound than the difference between rocks and clouds and that all things have their own emergent, irreducible and end-oriented but nevertheless speculative, risky telos.  Man is not made in God's image.  We are wholly natural beings, just like everything else.

But still, using the term 'agency' to apply to any and all kinds of causal efficacy does violence to what that word has traditionally meant - and that meaning still means something.  What Latour, Callon et al. did in the early 1980s was to bracket any and all forms of causal efficacy under the title 'agency'.  They did this for analytical reasons, because differences in causal efficacy weren't interesting to them; they did this for polemical reasons, because it pissed people off and got them noticed; and they did it for philosophical reasons, because it allowed them to get away from the bifurcation of nature.  However, there is nothing utterly essential about 'agency' in all of this.  The redefinition of agency was one way that they could do these things but it's perfectly possible to retain their insights and follow their lead without turning all forms of causal efficacy into 'agency'.

And that is what I think we should do: retain a concept of consciousness, retain a concept of intentionality as it pertains to animals with highly complex nervous systems.  I suggest this not because I think that reality is made up of humans on the one hand and things on the other but because talking about a pluriverse still requires the ability to distinguish between things and to attend to very important things in their specificity.  Just because the difference between humans and other things is one difference among many, not a primordial ontological transcendence, doesn't mean that we can slash and burn all the vocabulary we have for talking about the particularities of human existence - and there are such things.  While I agree that we do need to transform our conceptual vocabularies in order to avoid bifurcating nature we still need our conceptual vocabularies to be able to make meaningful distinctions between different sorts of things and to discuss the particularities of those things - humans included.  More and more I'm convinced that 'agency' is too fundamental a concept to give away.  We can retain the insights of Latour et al. without trashing the concepts that they do.  We can trash other concepts by over-generalising them, but agency is too important.

The thing that people forget about 'agency' is that Latour, etc. were originally taking on the ideologies of science, which were flawed because they granted scientists far too *much* agency.  There was no real danger that scientists would forget that they had agency, intentionality and all these things just because a few French academics wrote some books bracketing that concept out of the equation.  However, since ANT, etc. is no longer confined to science we have to be careful because the political arena, in particular, is utterly unlike the scientific one.  In politics human agency is *not* assured.  People are *not* universally acknowledged to be capable of intentional political action.  In fact, half of political struggle is just convincing people that another world is possible, that they don't have to just go along with things as they are.

We need to be aware that agency in politics has a very different status compared to agency in science and we shouldn't assume that what worked well in the latter is necessarily right for the former.  What was good for sociologists of science in Paris thirty years ago isn't necessarily good for us now.

This is in no way a defence of dualism.  We can retain ontological pluralism, flat ontology and so on without eliminating the specificities of human existence.  That is the proper task, in my view.  There is nothing especially profound in wondering whether or not non-human things have agency or intentionality.  You're really just expanding these terms to encompass more and more kinds of causal efficacy - abstracting the abstraction.  A thoroughly dualist, scientific realist biologist could wander through the woods and wonder much the same as you in terms of the evolution of all the things in there without transforming 'agency' or 'intentionality' in the way that you have (following Latour, etc.).

Such transformation isn't necessary and, in my view, it isn't even desirable.  Not any more.  Other conceptual vocabularies are possible.

Pre-fab Post-ies; More on Critique

Will of 'Untied Threads' just wrote a critical but also very generous comment on an old post of mine.  It was a post on critique and poststructuralism in International Relations discourse.  He suggests, among other things, that I treat Richard Ashley unfairly.

In response, let me say firstly that I like Richard Ashley's work; I think that it has been very important.  The work that he (and others) have done since the 1980s drawing on hermeneutics, deconstruction and so on was important at the time and remains of value today.  I was trying to write in quite a polemical style in that post so maybe I sounded a little more damning than I intended!

To be more clear: the problem I have with Ashley et al. from a contemporary viewpoint is that while hermeneutic or deconstructive critiques had a great critical impact in the 1980s they don't any more.  Those ideas have become, formalised, institutionalised, standardised.  As always happens, those angry, young academics grew up.  They went from 'sticking it to the man' to being 'the man'!

Today poststructuralism is one of a number of 'approaches' or 'theoretical frameworks' that a student can adopt or enact as a preconceived, prefabricated scheme.  It has become an orthodoxy of its own.  While the critiques were originally opening up 'thinking space' by taking apart hegemonic discourses, their own presuppositions have become naturalised, are not internally challenged and are frankly stultifying.  These presuppositions have become the entrenched dogma of Poststructuralism (with a capital P).

For this reason we desperately need critiques of those critiques -- and that requires that we think hard about what it means to be 'critical' in the first place.  That was the basic point of my post.  People throw around that word without ever making clear what it means.  For some it seems to be little more than saying damning things about the state, or capitalism, or war, or patriarchy or whatever.  Which is all well and good as far as it goes but it doesn't go far enough.

The two meanings of 'critical' should be drawn together much more closely.  If critique fails to make its object critical (i.e. unstable) then it's pointless.  It doesn't deserve to be called 'critique' at all.  Being 'critical' has become more of a pose or a demeanour than anything substantial.  It's a social signifier, a territorial marker, a pin badge, a way that people identify with a particular kind of academic self-identity.

What all of this results in is the endless the regurgitation of the same old arguments about hegemonic discourses, logocentrism, speech acts and the rest.  It's time for serious change in our modes of thought.  There are many virtues of the poststructuralist heritage that should be retained but there must also be deep rooted and damning investigation of the flaws and vices.  We shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater but equally we shouldn't hold back in our critiques.

Vis-à-vis science: my point was simply that, in 'critical' IR discourse, 'science' is often taken to be the epitome of un-critical, mainstream, hegemonic thought.  Science becomes a synonym for positivism or the grumpy kind of Enlightenment rationalism that poststructuralists so love to eviscerate.  On the contrary, in my view, science is inherently critical.  Scientific knowledge (in scientific practice, if not in the popular imagination) is very unstable, often changing and always vulnerable to change.

That was the general point but, more specifically, I was asking: what actually induces a 'critical state' in a natural scientific discourse?  What makes things critical?  What generates the critical energy, the destabilising force?  Well, the claims of scientists, for sure.  One scientist proclaiming or disclaiming the findings of another in the myriad ways they do so.  But the objects of science can also render a discourse unstable.

When a lab experiment yields unexpected results 99 times out of 100 this is the result of user error.  But very occasionally it is because of some hitherto undetected phenomenon, some real thing that is, unprompted, by its own powers, producing a result, a perturbation, an effect.  Of course it takes much careful work on behalf of scientists to distinguish error and noise from these little kernels of discovery but the point is that scientific objects have the power to render our knowledge about them unstable.  Indeed, this is the whole point of scientific discourse: to elicit information from things themselves, not from what we say or what we think we know about things.  This information never transcends our interpretation of it -- we must always, necessarily translate the findings -- but that doesn't mean that objects do not elicit this information or that we cannot be realists about them.

In my original post when I say 'object' I am of course playing on the difference in meaning between that word as a noun and a verb -- 'an object' and 'to object.'  It's Bruno Latour's play on words to say that an object is something that objects to forces that engage it.  Scientific objects are objects because they object to the 'trials' (another Latourian term meaning experiments or tests) that scientists put them through.  They act and react in ways that is irreducible to the forces placed upon them by human subjects.  Hence they are real.  Hence we really know things about them.  Hence endless discourse analysis cannot do them justice because such analysis can only ever examine the forces tht humans place upon things, not the things themselves.

And hence poststructuralism is inadequate.  Scientific objects are objects because they can object and as such render critical the knowledge with and through which we regard them.  They cannot determine what we come think about them but they are real elements in the epistemic process.  Contrariwise, there is no place for non-human objects in poststructuralism except as blank canvases for the projection of symbols, language or meaning.  Objects might be accepted to exist but they are of no real importance, of no real reality.  In discourse analysis or deconstruction the only real things that are permitted to object or to have effects are signs, signifiers, structural linguistic relations and so on.  This is idealism with an alibi -- things in the background that do nothing, are of no consequence and exist only so that people can say: 'Hey, look!  Over there!  I'm no idealist!'.

And that's what's wrong with it all.  That's why the 'thinking space' that they once opened up is now stultifying.  That's why they're 'agoraphobic' -- agora being etymologically associated with 'thing' meaning the space where people get together and work things through.


This is getting rather long now so I'll try and wrap things up by answering Wills points more specifically!



Objects demand interpretation precisely because they are irreducible to interpretation and possess realities and capacities of their own.  You mention that demand/interpret in this sense becomes a dichotomy.  I honestly don't think that that's a problem.  There's nothing wrong with dichotomies so long as they are acknowledged to be instrumental, useful things, not simply the way reality is structured.  I could articulate basically the same point without using those terms and so without that dichotomy.  I just think that it's one useful way of making the point.  We constantly dichotomise things in thought; the problem is not with dichotomies as such but rather with the notion that our ideas describe the very structure of reality rather than our ideas being real things that interact with other real things in a common world.

I am familiar with the Copenhagen school, yes.  I read that essay you mention but it was a few years ago.  I'd need to take another look at it to comment on it now!

Vis-à-vis Heidegger: from my Latourian perspective Herr Heidegger is more part of the problem than the solution.  It isn't enough to say that we exist with other things, that we cannot think of ourselves except as embodied beings, enmeshed in other beings, etc.  All of that is true and pertinent but Heidegger prevents us from going that step further and thinking about things apart from human being (which, for Heidegger, is basically being itself).  Of course we can never truly, certainly know what things are like apart from ourselves since we can never transcend interpretation or perspective but that should not stop us thinking about the autonomy of things, thinking of things as they may be apart from us.

Poststructuralism makes this extra step impossible.  That is why it must be destroyed!

Comment on: "What Would Flat Ontological Criticism Look Like?"

What Would Flat Ontological Criticism Look Like?

This question has occupied my mind a fair bit. I think the best place to start is most definitely Latour's critique of critique. (This has been present in his work since at least 'We Have Never Been Modern' but has been most fully expounded in his essay 'Why has critique run out of steam?')

For Latour all critique, whether in the lineage of Kant through Marx to the Frankfurt School and today's poststructuralists or in the tradition of denunciation in the name of Science, results from the same ontological assumption: ontological un-flatness (what is the opposite of a flat ontology?). This is because critique is equated directly with denunciation and to denounce one needs an unreal overlaying the really real to peel back or tear away or unveil (postmodernists still follow this path even though they no longer believe in a real underneath the fabric - it's veil all the way down!). A flat ontology, for Latour, must therefore forego critique.

He makes a powerful point with regard to some elements of what has passed for critique to date. There is a widespread sense among (usually self declared) 'critical scholars' in the social sciences that not only is critique good but that it is the only valid occupation for a true scholar. All other forms of scholarship are seen as being somehow repressive. This is taken to an extreme by deconstructionists who insist that anyone enforcing their interpretation on anything is committing 'symbolic violence' or somesuch. To this extent, critique is a self-marginalising discourse. By this I mean that 'critical' thinkers are bound to ONLY criticise and they can only define themselves in opposition to a fabled 'uncritical' or 'essentialising' Other. For this reason they can never possibly succeed, which is a canny move as it means they never have to stop publishing and we never have to stop reading their work!

Latour makes mincemeat of these cliches but he goes too far. In fact I would say that he himself is too critical of critique - he ends up mirroring the very people he seeks to destroy. He has not one good word to say about critique and has no interest in asking what of it should be saved.

It's disappointing because Latour is at his very best when he takes something he disagrees with, takes it apart, translates it into his terms, puts it back together in the context of his overall system and makes you wonder how you ever thought otherwise. That is the way to proceed with the somewhat sullied word 'critique,' I feel.

etymonline.com informs me that 'critique' comes from the Greek kritikos "able to make judgments," from krinein "to separate, decide". The word thus carries connotations of separation and deciding; separation and judgement. Might we say that critique consists in separation and judgment? Judgement by separation? Separation by judgement? Aren't we all critically minded? If we weren't able to separate and to judge we wouldn't be able to get very far in life. If we accept something along these lines then there can be no more pure, exceptional form of critique only known by a chosen few (notice how in this way critique production has mirrored truth production). If this is so then we have to distinguish between different forms of critique and separate the good from the bad (itself a critical act, as I would describe it). This would require no foundation (contra Habermas), it would proceed by a process of critical deambulation, if you like. This would be a better definition (if a broad one) because we wouldn't have 'critical' thinkers opposed to 'uncritical' thinkers and the self-perpetuating dance this necessarily creates.

(Also this is more or less what a music or movie critic does - breaks cultural objects down, analyses the pieces, relates them historically and contextually and judges them (or at least that is the ideal).)

Moreover, this definition wouldn't allow for the assumption that everyone is engaged in a competition to be more critical than everyone else. This is really what critique as a self-marginalising discourse must do - its a perpetual arms race, a race to the bottom that isn't there. No matter how critical you are I must always try to be more critical because that is all there is to do. If we try to do anything else we're committing 'violence' and so must surely commit hara-kari forthwith. As with all practices premised on fundamental bifurcations of reality, it just can't work.

Yet critique is far too valuable an activity to throw to the dogs of excess and stupidity. For all the negligence of those who take critique too far - and far away from where they should - they're not all completely mad - there really are those who would deny critique all licence as a scholarly activity. And these people are the real enemy.

Latour often goes on about how Science Studies was the only field that could foment the breakthrough of transcending bifurcated nature - in other words, refusing sociological idealism without trudging back to the same old realism; of forming a new realism. Science Studies, so he says, was uniquely placed at the midpoint of the 'two cultures' and he and others were thus able to realise how both sides had it all wrong. Well, I think something similar could be said for my field, International Relations, on this subject of critique. If eradication of critique is at all possible or desirable in Science Studies it certainly is not in IR, the field that deals with war, genocide, espionage and all forms of tyranny as a matter of routine. One would have to be an utter sociopath to engage seriously with these issues and not have some sort of 'will to critique' (although, having said that, there are plenty who would attempt to do so in the name of 'political Science', but that's another story).

So, I'm not sure what a flat ontological criticism would look like. First we'd have to figure out just what 'criticism' has meant in other traditions - it doesn't seem to be any one thing. I've been meaning to read Foucault's 'What Is Critique?' for a bit as well as Judith Butler's commentary on it. That might be as good a place as any to start.

DeLanda Reading Group: Cities and Nations (Part Two)

I won’t try to review everything in previous chapters and I will assume that the various technical details and taxonomies are well defined by previous commentaries, however some points deserve revisiting before we crack on with chapter 5.

The first point to raise regards DeLanda’s realism and his definition of this in sociological terms as ‘conception-independence’ (3). In response to Levi’s review of the book’s introduction I wrote:

“‘Mind independence’ is in no way a new idea, it is the mainstream view for social scientists of all stripes. DeLanda’s innovation, it seems to me, is nowhere to be seen in the first few pages (though it abounds immediately after).”

I more or less stand by this argument, although I must now make some adjustments. Upon reviewing my notes, it becomes clear that DeLanda does not say that society is ‘mind independent’ – i.e. it has an existence independent of human minds – but that it is ‘conception independent’ – i.e. it has an existence independent of the analyst’s conceptions of it. This distinction is introduced to account for the fact that if human minds disappeared so would society. This is a fair and appropriate distinction but I still don’t accept that it is particularly innovative. It’s still ‘off the shelf’ realism that, to someone trained in social science rather than philosophy, is frankly de rigeur.

To my first comment Michael at Archive Fire argues that:

“While, for the most part I agree with that line of thinking, it must be acknowledged that DeLanda’s audience are not those people [social scientists]. DeLanda is, first and foremost, a philosopher – and specifically a Deleuzian philosopher drawing extensively on what has come to be known as the “continental” tradition. So DeLanda’s project must primarily been seen as philosophical - as an attempt to reach out to those thinkers who, having learned from the intensities of critical theory of the 80’s and 90’s that focused on language and interpretation, may, again, be seeking out a way to supplement their thought with a new concern for material life and the more tangible dimensions of human experience.”

I see his point but I don’t think that I can accept his reasoning. DeLanda makes extensive use of various sociologists’ works throughout the book and declares that his intention is to “elucidate the proper ontological status of the entities that are invoked by sociologists and other social scientists” (8). Far from aiming his book primarily at ‘continental’ philosophers he clearly wishes it to be valuable to social scientists too – he’s working at the edge of both traditions and as such should be evaluated as much as possible by the standards of both. This is consistent with his statement in an interview that “a philosopher cannot take … artificial [disciplinary] limits into account, and … should push multidisciplinary approaches to the limit” (Deleuzian Interrogations, 14). It is not that I find his definitions of realism wrong as such, it is just that they are a little simplistic – ‘clunky’ would be my preferred adjective.

However, this is not the main problem. The greater problem, besides his realism’s ‘clunkyness,’ is that both ‘mind independence’ and ‘conception independence’ appear to be attacks on a position of subjective idealism, whereas poststructuralist inspired orthodoxies (which I would assume are primarily in his crosshairs) must be characterised as intersubjective idealism. This is not a particularly massive difference in the grand scheme of things but it does make a difference in this case. An intersubjective idealist may well agree that society has a reality independent of their individual conceptions of it because their views, they would add, are themselves drawn from (or even produced by) the wider socio-linguistic or discursive field. Of course, because they define society in linguistic terms they remain anti-realist, yet they would still dodge DeLanda’s realist haymaker.

In other words, mind or conception independence is clearly a necessary condition for realism but it is not a sufficient condition.

So, moving swiftly on, what do we already know about assemblages?

“[A]ssemblages [are] wholes whose properties emerge from the interactions between parts” (5). “[A]t each scale one must show that the properties of the whole emerge from the interactions between parts” (32). In keeping with the realist temper of the ontology, assemblage based analysis is causal and is “concerned with the discovery of the actual mechanisms operating at a given spatial scale” (31). ‘Micro’ and ‘macro’ are relative terms, with any given assemblage having micro or macro aspects and there existing an effectively unlimited multitude of gradations between the two throughout the cumulative emergence of levels (32). Importantly, “although a whole emerges from the interactions among its parts, once it comes into existence it can affect those parts” (34). Assemblages thus possess powers of ‘downward causation’ – indeed this property may be what distinguishes them from mere aggregations of parts.

Assemblages are thus characterised by ‘levels’ which are continuous insofar as there is no definite dividing line between them and each higher level comprises all lower levels as parts; however, levels are discrete insofar as one can identify a number of parts which form a larger whole, the properties of which are irreducible to the simple aggregation of the properties of the parts.

Insofar as each level has its own properties and dynamics different analytical resources will be required. For this reason we could say that discrete assemblages are characterised by distinct modalities (L. modus “measure, rhythm, manner”) of existence. The sense of harmonic, rhythmic or musical distinction is a useful one because these notions are easy to imagine in terms of continua, yet at the same time it is easy to imagine distinct aural objects emerging from that milieu. In other words, the notion of modes as rhythms or harmonies allows for both the mixing and imbrication of elements and their distinction from each other.

Analytically, assemblages are analysed through a fourfold structure – that is, two intersecting axes, each of which are envisioned as continua. The first division is between material and expressive properties and the second division is between processes of territorialization and deterritorialization. (I will assume that readers are familiar with what these terms mean.) Each level thus requires an analysis of the following factors:

1) Material components of the assemblage.
2) Expressive components of the assemblage.
3) Territorializing processes at work in the assemblage.
4) Deterritorializing processes at work in the assemblage.

This divides up the empirical analyses quite neatly and intuitively. The analysis as a whole, however, should also indicate what causal mechanisms create, sustain and/or threaten the assemblage as a whole and must, therefore, give some indication of how all these elements work together. With this in place we can get down to business…

DeLanda Reading Group: Cities and Nations (Part One)

So, the DeLanda reading group draws to a close! All that remains is for me (and, independently, Peter Gratton at Philosophy in a Time of Error) to review the final chapter: Cities and Nations. As some of my review has become rather lengthy, I will divide it up between a few posts. After this first short explanatory post will follow:

2) A brief overview of some pertinent points made in previous chapters that will serve as background to the discussions of Cities and Nations.

3) Something approximating a blow-by-blow account of chapter 5 with minimal critical commentary.

4) A conclusion comprising a few comments on the preceding summary but also trying to extend DeLanda’s analysis beyond cities and nations. By this I mean that DeLanda’s “journey from the micro to the macro” (6) goes from individual persons through various types of local and regional organisation to territorial nation states and stops there. In my field, International Relations, this is insufficient. As DeLanda says himself: “an assemblage analysis of singular, individual entities must be complemented by a study of the populations formed by those entities” (107). States themselves form populations; they are usually called ‘international systems.’ I shall not offer anything like a complete (or even adequate) analysis but, utilising the writings of Kenneth Waltz (undoubtedly the most influential if, also, probably the most maligned IR theorist of the twentieth-century), I shall try to sketch out a beginning for this extra level.

EDIT: I've posted parts 2 and 3. Part 4 will follow some time next week. I'll update this post with links as and when I post the rest.

Bhaskar’s, Latour’s, and Stengers’ conception of science is one in which scientific practice is both transitive in the sense of being socially produced and where conceptions of the world change over time, while nonetheless being ontological in the sense that the objects dealt with by science are real and intransitive actors in the world.

The major difference between Bhaskar and Latour would seem to be that, as far as I can tell, the categories of transitive and intransitive are in every sense categorical. In Latour one must have degrees of transitiveness - 'to be real is to resist' and this precludes any absolute distinction between two in any instance. Plus, for Bhaskar, the intransitive dimensions of objects are hidden away out of sight in some mysterious other realm that we can only glimpse partially through 'critique' in the Kantian sense. This is what Latour's entire ontology is explicitly and rabidly opposed to - the two tier system in which realist is only open for viewing to a privileged few. I like Bhaskar but the transitive and intransitive dimensions do appear to me to be rehashed primary and secondary qualities. They are not a one-for-one match with them but they fulfill precisely the same function in his 'critical realist' scheme, namely to distance the really real from the merely epiphenomenal. Indeed, this is explicitly the case as Bhaskar believes that 'we' need to access the intransitive dimensions of social reality so as to facilitate 'emancipation'. Complete anathema to Latour (though perhaps not to Stengers).