Two realisms

@ John (post 7)

Well, you can 'prove' anything with contextualism so, yes, my point is conceptual in that regard but I think that it makes sense.

To put it a little more precisely: it seems to me that there are two variants of 'realism' to be recognised and they often become conflated. This point can be demonstrated by quoting Levi from above:

"Nothing is completely present, there is no transcendental signified."

One variant of realism would agree with this statement, one wouldn't. The former, I would argue, has taken on board, knowingly or otherwise, the kind of arguments that Derrida and his associates have been making for the past forty years -- taken on board, understood and moved on. The latter still believe in the 'really real' beneath all the mess, superstition and unreality. This is quite a big difference.

Many of the critics of the sort of realism that Levi and Graham are proposing immediately assume that they are attempting to insert some sort of transcendental signified back into the discussion -- to get 'back' to the 'really real' beneath all the sludge and detritus of sense perception. (I must admit, this was the conclusion I initially and ignorantly jumped to.) This is rather far from the truth!

Perhaps my view is a little skewed coming much more from political theory than philosophy -- in political theory 'realism' has for a very long time been the exclusive province of rock-kickers and table-thumpers, desperate to beat their opponents into submission. Levi, Graham et al. are, thankfully, a bit above that and the difference between this old, rather vulgar, foundationalist realism and what is going on now deserves recognition.

Many 'realists' in political theory talk about going 'back' to realism, the implication being that 'yes, yes, all that stuff about signifiers and whatnot is very interesting and all but lets get back to what we were doing before -- talking about reality'. The new realism isn't going 'back' it is going in its own direction, which I, for one, am pleased about.

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).

Little Lateral Realism Story

If not 'realism' then what? Anti-realism? Surely not! 'This statement is not true' is too pointless a waste of time to ever be more than silly and sophomoric; at worst it is simply moronic. Latour's position is clearly superior. Statement A is more or less universal, more or less true, more or less a fact depending on its associations; that is, on its relativity. If I whisper statement A and nobody hears it then it is extremely weak. If I pick up a megaphone and bellow it out then it could be stronger; then again, if the excessive volume annoys people who would, had I just whispered A closer to them, been receptive to it then it is counterproductive; volume - that is, raw power - doesn't necessarily equal 'strength'. Suppose I stand on Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park in London, soapbox under foot, and pontificate A to passers by. The fate of A is then dependent on my rhetorical skills, the weather, other speakers present at the same time, etc. Passers by and other onlookers may think me just another lunatic - they may immediately assume A is some weird conspiracy theory and not listen at all. If so, A remains weak - a fiction and a mere one at that. Then again, perhaps people will listen. Perhaps A is, under the right conditions, an unexpectedly powerful statement - a 'lure for feeling', indeed. Perhaps it is so powerful that it takes on a life quite of its own. Perhaps my listeners become stronger believers than myself. Perhaps then I become like Monty Python's 'Brian', terrorised by a mob that believes me to be the deliverer of the sublime A to the people. A, then has become strong - too strong! The stronger it becomes the more universal it is; the more people believe it to be true, the more entangled in all manner of heterogeneous human and non-human associations becomes the more truthful it becomes - the more real it becomes.

Critical realists call their realism (both critical and) 'depth realism'. I call mine 'lateral'; I could also call it 'breadth realism'.

From Literal Realism to Lateral Realism

A friend of mine was just telling me about an encounter she had with her PhD supervisor yesterday where the supervisor (a card carrying historical materialist) ranted at length about the iniquities of poststructuralism (my friend being a card carrying poststructuralist). Thinking about how I disagree with both positions I think I have found a pleasantly succinct way to articulate in broad strokes what I now believe:

What we should be doing is lateral realism rather than literal realism. The latter operates on the vertical axis - it seeks to rise up 'above' things (to get a bird's/God's eye view) or get down to the 'foundations' of things (to get an architect's view); the former operates on the horizontal axis - it seeks only to connect and trace; or, to separate and combine; to see the relations between specific things rather than the determining structure behind all things. (Lateral realism is thus a synonym for 'flat ontology.')

Literal realists seek to discern the literal from the 'merely' figurative; the true from the false; the phenomenal from the epiphenomenal. Lateral realists only seek to widen what is regarded as real; simply, the sensible is real (though this has panexperientialist caveats attached). To say 'x is not real' is self-evidently contradictory. The only useful question is 'how is x constructed' or 'how well is x constructed'. But, and this is the key point, non-humans construct reality as well as humans (this is something neither a historical materialist nor a poststructuralist could accept). To be real is to act. Humans, mountains, microbes and space dust are thus all real. We just have to ask 'how do these things act on each other'. It is a much simpler task!

This Orthodox Latourism requires some serious exegesis but I am happy with where it is presently.