2015 Millennium Conference: 'Failure and Denial in World Politics' (keynote: Bruno Latour)—an opportunity for rethinking critique?

The theme for this year's Millennium conference at the LSE has been announced: "Failure and Denial in World Politics." The keynote speaker will be Bruno Latour.

This is an interesting development (not surprising as Latour has a long standing relationship with the LSE, but nevertheless). Until just a few years ago, Latour's work was almost completely unknown in the field of International Relations (the field that provided ma formation, as the French say).

At the 2012 Millennium conference on "Materialism and World Politics" (at which I presented a somewhat inchoate paper on actor-network theory and offshore tax havens) there were what seemed like dozens of graduate students drawing on Latour's work and actor-network theory more broadly. The larger proportion of senior academics, however, ranged from indifference to hostility to this trend. And the hostile did not hold their tongues—all the familiar tropes were wheeled out: "networks are neoliberal!"; "this reduces humans to rocks!", etc. One objector even suggested, with all the indignation of a die-hard humanist, that this 'flat ontology' business was proto-fascist.

Actor-network theory, 'new materialism,' object-oriented philosophy and the like have gained ground within IR with remarkable speed—like an invasive species flourishing in a hitherto blissfully isolated island ecosystem! I would not be surprised if at this conference there were some kind of revanchist backlash from Critical Theorists attempting to regain lost territory.

Besides all that, it should be a very exciting conference. I've not attended since 2012 but I've never heard anything but good things. The Millennium conference is run by the remarkable and prestigious graduate-run journal of the same name. It has none of the fusty self-importance of the larger, more grimly institutionalised professional conferences but, at the same time, is large and well-known enough to attract a really top-notch group of participants.

I'll have to give some thought regarding what I'd like to present (the deadline for abstracts is the 3rd of July). It would be a good opportunity to visit the problem of science critique in relation to science denial. This is a troubling issue for IR, which is far more deeply wedded, at least amongst some sections, to the practice of critique than science studies ever was (and for good reasons, I'd argue).

If the impressions and expectations I've described above are correct, the time would be very ripe for attempting to think through critique once more. Not so as to dismiss it—how could one conscionably study the arms trade or the Israel/Palestine conflict without doing so, in some sense, 'critically'?—but in order to think it 'par le milieu,' as it were.

If the classic will to "ruthless criticism of all that exists" can no longer license the usual pompous, faux-radical stupidity (not the context in which that line originated but very much what it has become), and I believe that it cannot, that does not mean that critique as such can be dispensed with. What if critique is also an atmospheric phenomenon, a necessary precondition of our continuing to breathe? What if the minute perforations it instils are necessary for the stability of any enshrouding coexistential manifold? What would a more incisive and selective critique or decompositionism—not 'of all that exists' but necessarily relative to some situational decision—look like?

These are the kinds of questions that, I think, will need to be asked.

The only thing worse than being talked about...

If, as Oscar Wilde famously put it, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about then Graham Harman could certainly have things worse. To be sure, people are talking.

However, of course, one never wishes to be merely criticised. To be criticised well—that is the tacit compliment one must hope for. And having read the first instalment of Peter Wolfendale's surgical broadside against Harman's work—namely The Noumenon's New Clothes (Part 1)—I can only conclude that Harman is being criticised really rather ably, albeit with an attitude that is not exactly cordial.

Now, I haven't followed the ins and outs of this kerfuffle over time and to be honest I don't really care that much. However, to have one's work subjected to such forensic criticism can only be a compliment of sorts, even if said forensics are openly pursuing a policy of annihilation by scorched earth. To be the subject of such an analytical blitzkrieg is assuredly not the worst thing in the world.

So, 'SR,' 'OOP.' Moribund? Perhaps. Dead? Not with this level of chatter on the lines. Even as something to react against, Harman's work is clearly vitalising for many.

However, having said that, I am less and less interested by it every time I read some of it. Despite Harman's prolific output I haven't detected a great deal of evolution or progression (or even consolidation) in his ideas over the past several years—and I was fairly unconvinced of the major points of his philosophy to begin with.

The 'reduction to relations' critique is often asserted but rarely argued and I've never found it in the least bit convincing. Without that bombshell in place the substance-oriented edifice doesn't have a leg to stand on (to mix my metaphors) and becomes just a rather de-nuanced, metaphysical version of actor-network theory with the word 'realism' inserted at strategic intervals.

Harman points, fairly enough, to the fact that a great many people are interested in his work. However, to say that a philosophy is demonstrably popular is not an overwhelmingly strong defence of its validity. Its value should be assessed by the quality control department, not sales. It is entirely possible that its popularity and its controversy issue from the same sources: excessive simplicity, depthless polemic and unprogressive repetitiveness.

Anyway, the only way to kill something off, ultimately, is to stop talking about it. And I'm not sure that we're there yet, but we may be getting closer.

Politics is correlational, not correlationist

Graham Harman has written a few posts in the past few days on art and 'correlationism' and now on politics too.  He criticises:

a bizarrely literal interpretation of how to get past correlationism. First, it is assumed that the problem with correlationism is that humans are involved. Second, it is assumed that we must brainstorm some way to remove humans from the picture, even if we’re talking about a domain (such as politics) that is obviously saturated with the human even if we try to expand it into a Latourian Dingpolitik (I don’t think Latour is claiming that there will literally still be politics even if all humans are exterminated).

It is, indeed, rather strange that anyone would think that a non-correlationist politics is a good idea -- or even a meaningful idea at all.  I've heard it argued (often as a matter of outraged critique) that Latour's political philosophy makes humans and non-humans politically 'equal' -- as if it's a competition and as if there could be politics without human beings.  On the contrary, the 'Ding' within 'Dingpolitik' simply highlights on the polyvalence of the word ‘thing,’ drawing together its meaning ‘object’ and also the use of that word to mean 'political assembly' in many European languages.

Latour is drawing the two meanings together -- thing qua object and thing qua political assembly -- to argue for a political philosophy based on John Dewey's 'The Public and its Problems'.  Things, Latour argues, are the 'problems' or issues around which human political assemblies -- i.e. publics -- must form in order to resolve them.  Things provoke these politics, they provide the impetus and the risk that makes these politics necessary and which interests the human actors involved, but there is no suggestion that the things themselves are equivalent to the human political actors; it is very much the humans who have to sort things out, albeit as networked, materially and technoscientifically complex actors.

There has been a tendency in political science (as throughout the social sciences and humanities) to treat things as extrinsic to politics in the sense that we have politics one hand and the material world on the other.  In other words, conventional discourses of political science map very much onto the dualisms that get critiqued by people wielding concepts such as 'correlationism.'  Therefore, it may seem natural to involve the concept of 'correlationism' in critiquing and trying to think past these structuring dualisms.  However, people shouldn't take the notion of 'correlate' to be a dirty word!  There are many things that only exist as correlates of something else -- and politics must surely be one of those things.

There can be things without humans but there can be no humans without things.  There can be no politics without humans.  Therefore, there can be no politics without things.  But this doesn't make humans and non-humans 'equal' -- humans still have to do the work of resolving political controversies; they just do so neck-deep in political things, or 'dings,' if you will.  Politics is not ‘correlationist’ – it’s correlational.  And there’s nothing wrong with that as such, so long as it doesn’t distract us from the ontological and political folly of mind/world or human/nature dualisms.

On Killing a Meme

Following Jay Foster’s recent article, the Circling Squares blog claims that I’m overgeneralizing Latour’s plasma. I ignored this when Foster said it, but with two people it risks becoming a meme ...

An amusing irony that I neglected to mention in the previous post is that, given that about 10 people usually read this blog (on a good day), Harman would probably have been better off ignoring what I'd said as in picking my post out for criticism he only went and increased my readership tenfold!

Perhaps this is another lesson to note in the critique of critique: if you strike a meme down it might become even more powerful! I jest, of course; I don't expect anyone to take me seriously but it does demonstrate that, once you adopt an actantial, 'object-oriented' or memetic way of thinking, it becomes plain that there is much more to discourse than proclamation and refutation. These things have 'a mind of their own.'

Incidentally, I haven't read Jay Foster's article so I don't believe that I'm reproducing that particular meme.

Harman on me on Harman on Latour on plasma ...

Graham Harman responds to my last post on Latour's 'plasma':

Following Jay Foster’s recent article, the Circling Squares blog claims that I’m overgeneralizing Latour’s plasma. ...

Here’s the central point where the critique goes astray: “[Plasma] isn’t something that is generalisable to all things and all relations since it pertains primarily to epistemic or social relations.”

This misses Latour’s entire point. “Society” for Latour has nothing to do with a social realm as opposed to other kinds of realms. The social for Latour contains absolutely everything, including fictional and nonexistent beings (as long as they have some sort of effect on other things).

The idea that the plasma isn’t inherently unformatted but simply not yet known to humans gives a central status to the human knower that is simply not part of Latour’s outlook.

In short, plasma is one of the most metaphysical concepts in all of Latour’s work. It cannot be tamed or decaffeinated by trying to claim that it’s just the harmless and tepid point that sociologists must humbly realize that they don’t know everything yet.

Instead, as explained in Prince of Networks, Latour needs to posit the plasma because his overidentification of things with their effects on other things leaves him with no way to explain change, and thus he ends up in the same position as the Megarians in Aristotle’s Metaphysics. It is an innate hazard of all relational ontologies, of which Latour has developed perhaps the most interesting version we’ve seen.

Another part I don’t like: “When talking about plasma Latour clearly has his sociological hat on, not his philosophical one.” (emphasis added) You can’t use the word “clearly” unless the case is actually clear; it shouldn’t be a clumsy battering ram used to assert that your opponent is so obviously off the mark that sustained argument is not even necessary.

Here’s a more general issue. To say that Latour sometimes wears a metaphysician’s hat and sometimes a sociologist’s hat is certainly true. But it is never true at those moments where he is in fact making metaphysical claims. The distinction between metaphysics and sociology cannot be invoked on an ad hoc basis simply to insulate Latour’s argument from extreme metaphysical consequences at the places where such consequences arise. The plasma is one of those cases. It is a striking invocation of something like the pre-Socratic apeiron, for reasons entirely necessary to Latour’s argument, and with the same difficult consequences we see among the pre-Socratics (and to some extent in contemporary arguments about “the virtual”.)

Okay, some of the above I can readily accept: my use of 'social' and 'epistemic' was rather imprecise and misleading. I apologise if my previous post came across as a "clumsy battering ram"; I hope this version of the argument is more incisive. I'm still working these points out, thinking them through and have yet to find anything like a satisfactory way of expressing them. I do, however, believe that I am right.

I fully understand that by 'social' Latour does not mean either a particular distinct realm or kind of stuff, nor does he mean anything purely human -- 'social' is not purely anything. As he defines it, 'social' simply means 'association,' which can occur between anything. However, whether or not "[t]he social for Latour contains absolutely everything" is another question entirely (and, happily, it gets to the heart of the matter). Personally, I could not disagree more and I find the contrary to be evident in pretty much everything Latour writes.

Again and again and again, throughout his works, Latour states that the social is fragile, narrow, particular and limited -- and he does this for very good reasons! It is because disconnection is the norm and connection is fragile and rare that tracing associations (the raison d'etre of ANT) is both (a) interesting and (b) possible (because associations are not infinite and unending). So, no, the social doesn't include "absolutely everything" -- it can include 'absolutely anything' but that is not the same thing at all. Profound disconnection is the (admittedly implicit) starting point for all his ANT, of which Paris, Ville Invisible, is, for me, perhaps the outstanding example. This text, along with others, leads me to understand the following:

The social only contains that which has been enrolled within the social. Without groundwater pH testing laboratories groundwater pH is not part of the social. With groundwater pH testing laboratories groundwater pH is as much a part of the social as handshakes or tennis. Without censuses peoples' ages or family sizes are not part of the social; with censuses they are. Before HIV was discovered and brought to public awareness it was not part of the social. It existed, it infected and killed people, it spread from person to person (or perhaps from hominid to hominid) and it was, therefore, both real and relational but it was not social.

'Social' does not describe everything altogether -- it only describes certain, narrowly defined areas of reality (which do not all overlap, themselves). These nooks and crannies are not 'realms' separate from the natural, the political, the economic, etc. but equally they are not coextensive with everything. By replacing the sociology of the social with the sociology of associations he does not make 'association' a synonym for 'relation' in a metaphysical sense. Asteroids bouncing off one another in another part of the galaxy are only 'social' if some techno-scientific apparatus ties them into the sociality of associations. That a collision is, in a manner of speaking, an association is true generally but not in the precise, technical sense with which Latour uses 'social.'

This is the impression of the social that reading Latour's ANT accounts give me. 'Social' here is certainly not anthropocentric in the sense of imagining naked humans talking amongst themselves with everything else existing as a mere backdrop -- non-human things are ontologically equal and they're everywhere. But equally it is not non-anthropocentric in the metaphysical sense of pertaining to assemblages that involve no humans whatsoever. To claim that it is seems to me to be an unjustified abstraction that diverts us quite a long way from what Latour actually writes.

So, what, then, of plasma? Let's take a look at what Latour says about that in Reassembling the Social:

I call this background plasma, namely that which is not yet formatted, not yet measured, not yet socialized, not yet engaged in metrological chains, and not yet covered, surveyed, mobilized, or subjectified. How big is it? Take a map of London and imagine that the social world visited so far occupies no more room than the subway. The plasma would be the rest of London, all its buildings, inhabitants, climates, plants, cats, palaces, horse guards. Yes, Garfinkel is right, ‘it’s astronomically massive in size and range’.
...
sociologists were right to look for some ‘outside’, except this one does not resemble at all what they expected since it is entirely devoid of any trace of calibrated social inhabitant. They were right to look for ‘something hidden behind’, but it’s neither behind nor especially hidden. It’s in between and not made of social stuff. It is not hidden, simply unknown. It resembles a vast hinterland providing the resources for every single course of action to be fulfilled, much like the countryside for an urban dweller, much like the missing masses for a cosmologist trying to balance out the weight of the universe.

So, plasma is indeed that which resides outside associations and serves as a resource for unexpected changes. However, it matters a great deal whether social associations are all encompassing, omnipresent, touching everything or whether they are narrow, particular, fragile, regional and so on.

If 'social' is a synonym for 'relation' in a metaphysical sense then plasma must be what resides outside all relation of every kind. It must be some ghostly, untouchable, literally unspeakable phantom lurking in the corners of the shadows of the fissures of reality (yet somehow dwarfing it, being the larger part of everything). I can see why Harman likes that notion but I really can't see it in Latour's texts at all.

If 'social' is not a synonym for 'relation' but is instead a particular kind, form or region of relation then plasma needn't be anything like this. Plasma instead becomes simply that which has not yet been socially enrolled, formatted, formalised and allowed to circulate in social networks. It is ghostly and unspeakable from the point of view of that network but that network is narrow, particular and partial and therefore that which is plasma with respect to it may be fully formed, formalised and circulating in other kinds of networks elsewhere. Plasma suddenly becomes much more earthly, boring and run-of-the-mill (for better or for worse).

To make this point clearer, let's take up an example from before:

HIV, prior to its discovery in 1981, was not enrolled in the social -- it was, therefore, part of the plasma. However, since HIV, we now know, existed as a particular viral type for decades before this date it was not some ghostly, formless, virtuality lurking in the shadows -- humans were simply ignorant of it. It wasn't formalised, there were no metrologies for it, it couldn't be socialised. It was real, it spread, killed and was therefore a relational entity but it was not social. It was not strictly, metaphysically (or, indeed, physically or naturally) speaking formless -- it was socially formless, socially unformatted. It didn't circulate in social networks. It circulated in OTHER networks -- it wasn't without relation or form entirely, it was simply unrelated to those networks we call social. After 1981 it was formatted, formalised and socialised so that it could circulate within human-centred social networks as a social entity rather than just circulating in human bodies as a viral infection; prior to such happenings it was plasma, but plasma with respect to the social (or epistemic) networks in which it would later circulate. It previously circulated in assemblages of blood, sex, bushmeat markets and so on so it was not plasma with respect to those networks. Therefore, plasma is not the same thing to all things, everywhere.

Phew. I hope this is now ... clear!

For Harman's Latour, plasma is plasma to everyone and everything everywhere. For Latour, as I understand him, plasma is only plasma to those networks that have not yet formalised and enrolled it. No network can enroll everything (c.f. irreduction), therefore every network has plasma outside it but what is plasma to one network isn't plasma to another. What Harman gets wrong (in my opinion) is that the 'missing masses' are not missing from all relation -- they are missing from social relations, which is only one very particular kind of relation among others. A thing that is plasma with respect to human-centered sociality is not necessarily plasma with respect to any other kind of thing or complex of things.

More poetically, plasma is the oil to sociality's water but it might mix and meld happily and freely with other substances -- which the universe is full of since 'social' is not a synonym for all kinds of 'relation.'

So, actually, I should slightly redress what I said before: plasma can be generalised on a metaphysical level but not as Harman does so. I shouldn't have said that "[plasma] isn’t something that is generalisable to all things and all relations since it pertains primarily to epistemic or social relations" -- upon reflection is is generalisable but only if one recognises that something that is plasma is not entirely formless but is formless with respect to a network in which it cannot yet circulate. In terms of human sociality this 'inability to circulate' is understood as a relation of ignorance, of not knowing. It is, therefore, an epistemic relation, as Latour articulates it. Hence I was not completely wrong in saying that plasma primarily pertains to social and epistemic relations -- it could be more than this but it is no more than this in Latour's own writings (since he's only talking about sociality).



I should finally mention, by way of long overdue conclusion, that I'm not claiming to know 'what Bruno really means' or anything like that (how could I? and why would I care?). You might be thinking -- 'so, Harman's Latour is not Latour's Latour, big deal.' Well, it's true, as I'm sure we're all aware, that there can be no translation without transformation. That Harman's account of Latour does not simply mimic Latour's own is not to be commiserated, indeed it is to be celebrated. Yet, while there is no translation without transformation, equally there is no translation without continuation. Transformation on its own is not translation at all. And there are elements of Harman's Latour that I really struggle to relate back to the original. Plasma is a case in point and this is the main reason why I brought it up. There's nothing wrong with the way that Harman abstracts from Latour's sociological metaphysics as such but on this particular point I think the rather huge transformation indicates an underlying misunderstanding, perhaps the misunderstanding demonstrated in The Prince and the Wolf where Latour freely admitted to not really understanding Harman's critique of him.

All I'm trying to do is reproduce an account of an idea as I understand it on the basis Latour's own writings. I'm doing this because I honestly don't recognise Harman's version of this idea in Latour's texts and I'd like to better understand the differences between these two philosophies as I find both to be fascinating.

More on Harman and In/Civility

Further comment on: http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-to-graham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/

Baklazh, I can see where you're coming from with Graham's latest post -- it certainly doesn't exude temperance and it does come across as something of a missive. 'Idiotic' is rather an undiplomatic choice of words but then again he didn't call anyone in particular AN idiot, he called the particular idea under consideration 'idiotic.' Hence this was not strictly an ad hominem attack -- it was an attack on an idea. Contrast this with Alex's original post which was extremely personal and almost completely ad hominem...

It's worth bearing in mind that pretty much exactly the same critique that Alex constructs above has been leveled at these guys again and again over the past few years. Therefore, they're not necessarily responding to anyone in particular when they say things like this. It's the idea in abstraction, not any particular enunciation of it. It might be new for some readers but for them it's a zombie meme that just keeps coming back again and again -- hence the frustration and the terse responses.

It's unfortunate that that blogging lends itself so much to this kind of brusqueness. The 'filters' that normally crop up automatically in conversation by being in the same room as someone, looking someone in the eye -- basic civility -- often fail to arise when simply sat at a computer facing a bunch of words. That said, this isn't really an excuse. We shouldn't just say 'boys will be boys'. Bad behaviour is bad behaviour.

But then it's not always easy to judge beforehand where the line is between being pointed and being rude. I hope that my own choice of words from my post above -- principally 'maelstrom of nonsense' -- weren't taken personally by anyone but frankly I stand by the sentiment as nothing anyone has said has changed my mind. We all owe it to each other to be civil but not to the point where we cease to be honest.

And, in the spirit of honesty:

While I find a great deal wrong with OOO/OOP, etc., the above arguments are badly constructed. They stem from a refusal to examine the relationship between ontology and politics, taking the two to be fused, axiomatically, and assuming that anyone who says otherwise must be some reactionary, rationalist, 'liberal bourgeois' fossil.

The whole original post stems from making graspingly inferred assumptions about Mr Harman's personal political convictions, or lack thereof. Harman apparently had a 'better the devil you know' attitude towards Mubarak before the revolution. That is his sin. Fine. And we are to infer an entire worldview from this kernel. Very well.

However, a lot of the conclusions drawn from this just don't make much sense to me. For instance: "if everyone in Cairo were clones of Harman, the revolution would never have happened." What this fails to mention is that Graham is not Egyptian! He's a foreigner! He lives there but frankly Egyptian democracy is none of his business. He's not a part of it and from what I recall Egyptians weren't that keen on outside influence during the revolution. If he spent all his time spouting off about what Egyptians should or should not be doing I'm quite sure that the critique would be turned around by 180 degrees and he'd be accused of being an imperialist, forcing his ideas upon others!

In other words, while the hypothetical is undoubtedly true it's equally unfair and beside the point. For me, as a student of international relations, this critique (so typical of political theory) ignores the fact that we live in a world of political multiplicity. We're not embedded in a continuous, unbroken fabric of political solidarity and praxis. For better or worse, our actual political agency is relative to our membership of political collectives to which we are not necessarily geographically local. Judging a person for non-participation in a process that has no real place for them seems harsh.

Moreover, Graham's pre-revolution attitude ('better the devil you know') was shared by vast numbers of Egyptians -- including Egyptians who eventually participated in the revolution. So, sure, if absolutely everyone held that attitude nothing could have happened but, evidently, the prevalence of such an attitude is not necessarily an impassable barrier to revolution. Are we to label everyone outside the vanguard apolitical, bourgeois apologists? I'd advise against it.

That said, while Alex is probably reading a little too much into this one interview I think 'liberal bourgeois' probably does sum up Graham's attitude, at least judging from what he's published. He might not disagree. But, you know, so what? What difference does it make? Does that do anything whatsoever to discredit his philosophy? Not necessarily.

What Alex needs to specify is why political predilections are of primary importance in assessing the validity or verity of an ontological argument. That they are primary is simply assumed. There is no substance to this assumption at all. THAT is the crux of the philosophical disagreement, quite apart from the sturm und drang of personal slights, perceived and misperceived.

"Harman’s self-stated goal is to remove politics from ontology, creating a new kind of pure ontology in which, as he says in the interview, philosophy should not be the handmaid of anything else."

Does Alex mean to suggest that philosophy SHOULD be the handmaiden of politics? If so I'd genuinely love to read the reasoning behind that. I completely disagree but I'd like to read an actual argument specifically in favour of this position. I've heard it said many, many times but never heard anyone actually say WHY. Why is politics the master signifier? Why is politics the trump card?

If only someone would make this case rather than alternating between being rude to other people and complaining when they're rude back -- then we'd be getting somewhere.

As I've mentioned a few times, the critique Alex levels only makes sense if politics and ontology are fused -- if ontology is and must be determined by political considerations. If they're not fused then political reasons cannot in and of themselves sunder ontological claims. And if they're not fused then conflating political personhood and ontological object-hood is just a basic category error.

In my previous comment above I went through a few ways in which politics and ontology can be separated without pretending to create some impenetrable firewall between the two. I won't repeat myself too much but it suffices to say that the 'purity' of ontology is a complex question, not one to be hastily judged one way or the other without consideration.

Friends, some consideration, please!

Let's both be a bit nicer to each other and not take others' criticism of our ideas so personally.

Maelstrom of Nonsense

Comment on: http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-to-graham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/

Wow. Quite a maelstrom of nonsense we've got going on here! Difficult to know quite where to jump in.

Might as well respond to Alex's last comment: "if ontology and politics are entirely separate domains" -- nobody seems to be making this claim. Ontology and politics aren't 'domains.' Ontology is the philosophical study of what is, politics is the process through which people form, contest and contest the formation of collective human being. 'Realm' [or domain] doesn't seem to be an appropriate term. It implies a divided spatiality that is difficult to conceive of and it implies a juridical separation that just misses the point. They are simply different practices practiced in different places for different reasons. They're different things.

The claim being made is that accounts of what is (i.e. ontology) should not (a) be determined by politics and cannot (b) determine any political position, practice or possibility.

This does NOT mean that ontology and politics are hermetically sealed realities, totally parallel to each other. In fact they meet in a variety of ways. To describe but a few:

-- Firstly, our accounts of what is profoundly shape how we understand ourselves, the world we live in and without an ontology all politics -- and all life, really -- would be literally unthinkable. Moreover, any political movement that lacked any grasp on reality would fail immediately. In fact it could never come together in the first place. Therefore, politics presupposes ontology.

-- Secondly, while accounts of being cannot determine any political thought or action that might derive from them there are certainly some ontological claims that are heavily politically loaded; e.g. Thatcher's claim that there is no such thing as society. Ontology can be politicised, it can be politically significant but that doesn't make ontology altogether political. You can only politicise something that isn't first of all political.

-- Thirdly, while we might say that there is being with no human beings there surely is no ontology without ontologists. Ontologists engage in ontology and produce this ontology, criticise that ontology, etc. Ontology is the name of their practice not their research subject (that's 'being'). Therefore, as fallible, embodied, emplaced, 'thrown' human persons no one should ever claim that their ontological pronouncements issue from a non-position, outside all social influence or historical particularity (or politics). Anyone claiming such a thing in this day and age would be a comical fossil at best and a tyrant at worst. Fortunately, neither Harman nor Bryant nor anyone affiliated with them make this claim.

Politics and ontology can be intertwined in many ways but they're still different things and one can quite easily talk all day about ontology without getting into politics. Ontology readily bumps up against politics and is easily politicised but that does not mean that it SHOULD be politicised -- and it certainly shouldn't be politicised all the time.

So, our accounts of what is (our ontologies) must be generated, influenced and informed by much, much MORE than politics alone. This doesn't make these things hermetically sealed discursive jurisdictions -- far from it. But it DOES mean that any given politicisation of ontology must be undertaken FOR A REASON. It is not the default position.

Ontology isn't always already political -- nothing is. Nothing is political which isn't first politicised.

And this isn't 'apolitical,' by the way. The really apolitical position is that which says that 'everything is political' as if politics were some smoggy, unbreakable shroud enveloping absolutely every being, everywhere from miserable cradle to wretched grave.

Politics is a pretty inglorious business most of the time. I really don't understand why so many people take it as the master signifier to end all master signifiers. I'm really rather GLAD that politics is not omnipresent. A world in which it was would be a true dystopia. Fortunately it only exists as a utopia of the foolish.

And as for the claims that granting reality to corporations justifies their political enfranchisement ... well, my mind boggles at that. That would only be the case if ontology and politics were fused. Only then would the granting of ontological thing-hood simultaneously be the granting of political personhood.

And they're not fused...

Derrida et al.

The Derrida debate:

For some obscure and possibly pathological reason this debate recalls to my mind a cliché often found in car adverts:

"It's all the car you'll ever need..."

Is deconstruction "all the [philosophy] you'll ever need"? Can anyone make that claim of any philosophical position or any one thinker? If so that pretty much precludes the claim to be a philosopher. Yet a great many people (and I am not necessarily including anyone in this debate in this generalisation) seem to think that deconstruction is 'all the car you'll ever need' and that we should pretty much just stop looking for anything else. The only legitimate task ahead is to iron out the creases in the theory and get on with 'destroying in slow motion', as Latour likes to say. (For anyone who thinks this is an invalid generalisation I know a notable professor of political theory who has said pretty much exactly this to me in the past; I have no reason to believe that it is an isolated belief -- in fact I expect the contrary.)

It is an odd sort of 'end of history' movement and it cropped up around the same time that Francis Fukuyama revived that tired old Hegelian trope (and for probably very similar reasons). Fukuyama declared the end of history for geopolitics; Derrida, if you believe the hype, declared it for philosophy and literary and social theory alike. Strident rightists and confused leftists have this in common. I think this says a lot.

I have nothing against Derrida, only against Derrideans. He was a first rate philosopher but a limited one. If he can be said to be a great philosopher that greatness surely comes from an unsurpassed and probably unsurpassable attention to detail and a close concentration on a handful of very particular problems. For this he should be celebrated.

He is not, however, all the car I will ever need; nor is his work all that useful for what I am interested in right now. The problem is that his work has achieved such a hegemony that I have to prove that he is not relevant to my work than the other way around. The burden of proof with regard to his ir/relevance is on me, as far as far as past supervisors and many of my peers are concerned. This too says a lot, I think.

More on Plato

After further reflecting on my earlier post on Plato, I think I've identified a little more closely what resonates for me between the Statesman and the object-oriented philosophies of Harman, Latour et al.

The resonance: (pre-Kantian) epistemology. Plato treats knowledge as an object; or, more accurately, as a wide variety of objects to be discerned through division and organised through a procedure of combination (thus mirroring in terms of philosophical method what skills the ideal statesman is supposed to have). It is clear that the Statesman is a product of knowledge - an epistemic being - but this epistemology is unconcerned with whether or how we 'really' know the statesman. Simply, the statesman is both the product of and the holder of a certain kind of stately knowledge. In the Republic we learn the importance of education and calisthenics; presumably these are the methods through which the ideal statesman is to be moulded. He is a construction, in other words; the meeting of knowledge and flesh; of rhetoric and star-jumps! How we know him is a methodological question not one of correlation (at least this is true after Plato gives up searching for the seventh, perfect kind of politics as this serene harmony could only be known to gods - how modest he is!).

So, the statesman is both the holder of the knowledge of (political) weaving and the product of the knowledge of (philosophical) weaving. This is a most important point. Would it be so hard to generalise this lesson - to collapse the structure of the dialogue into a political-philosophical kind of weaving?

What I want to take from this dialogue is a more generalised account of political subjectivation that takes the subjectivising powers of knowledge seriously but doesn't reduce the debate to Kantian epistemological questions of correlation. I think the weaving metaphor allows this precisely because it serves as a metaphor on a number of levels - principally as a philosophical method and as a metaphor for the statesman.

Plato shows a fondness elsewhere for imagining the philosopher as the statesman so this parallel shouldn't be surprising; is it all that hard to imagine going one step further and imagining every subject as a political-philosophical weaver? (There is something really rather Whiteheadian in this particular notion.) It seems quite straightforward to me. In fact this is more or less exactly the idea of the subject that we get in ANT - the semi-blind lay metaphysician plodding ever onward, simultaneously weaving and woven; entangled in the heterogeneous web by which it climbs, from which it feeds and of which it is spun. We need only forget the pre-existance of the subject and our work is done.

This I think is the trace of dialectic I find in Latour - the careful, methodical extraction and combination occurring not on the vertical axis of reality (not shuttling back and forth between ideology and nature, for example) but on the horizontal axis - shuttling back and forth between heterogeneous objects of many kinds; many of them epistemic in kind, many of them not.

Plato's Statesman - 'Lump Ontologies' and 'Barbarism'

I read Plato's Statesman last night; a quick and enjoyable read - and food for thought aplenty (which is good seeing as I'm basing the essay around this dialogue!). One thing that stood out was the very briefly examined issue of 'barbarism'. Initially, this piqued my interest as it gives a hint at Plato's attitude towards what we would now call 'international relations'; but on reflection, it is much more significant than that:

VISITOR: [Attempting (with a hint of impatience) to explain to Young Socrates the dialectical art of division] All right, here's an analogy. Suppose one wanted to divide the human race into two parts. What most Greeks do is make the division by separating Greeks from all the rest: they use the term 'barbarian' for all the other categories of people, despite the fact that there are countless races who never communicate and are incompatible with one another, and then expect there to be a single category too, just because they've used a single term.

Young Socrates, in his inchoate wisdom, fails to 'carve nature at its joints' but rather opts to jump straight to the conclusion (he attempts to define humans in opposition to beasts instead of taking all the progressive steps of division that the visitor demands).

A helpful footnote on this same page:

'Barbarian' literally means someone whose language one does not understand. The visitor's point is that this does not pick out a unified class; various peoples are not brought into a single natural grouping by the fact that they are not comprehensible to Greeks, and an important sign of this is that some of them are not comprehensible to one another.

So, Plato goes beyond many other Greeks of his time in not dissolving all foreigners into one homogeneous mass; good on him, but this is not the interesting point here, I think. Rather, this moment in the dialogue hits on something most important; a point made more extensively and convincingly by the likes of Bruno Latour and Graham Harman; specifically, he refuses to reduce a group of beings to one ontological category just because there is a convenient noun for that group of beings and because those beings are linguistically incomprehensible or mute. He refuses, in other words, to reduce foreigners to an undifferentiated 'outside' against which the 'inside' is defined. Thus, he refuses the dominant trope of both modernist and postmodernist political ontologies.

So, Plato grants ontological self-distinction to foreign beings.

But wait!: "Various peoples are not brought into a single natural grouping by the fact that they are not comprehensible [i.e. they do not speak] to Greeks". Well, isn't this more or less the same point Latour et al. make about non-humans? They have the ability to act and differentiate themselves without subjective attribution of such difference; without, even, the need to communicate this differentiation linguistically. So it is with non-humans: telephone wires, space dust, cows and gyroscopes possess the ability to act to differentiate themselves from other objects beyond what these nouns do to/for them. Certainly it would be difficult (if not impossible) to speak of these objects without having individualised words for them but that does not reduce their being to these words, just our relation (note: not 'reference') to these objects through these words. Plato recognises foreigners not as an undifferentiated lump, but as multiplicitous and active. He recognises reality as something that can be ‘cut at the joints’ (and therefore as having joints).

However, while he doesn't relegate foreigners to a ‘brute lump,’ he does something similar – he relegates the polis to something like this. For Plato, it is the polis that is a brute lump, an anarchic mass of flapping mouths and flailing arms (and this he loathes). It is active, fractious even; dangerous, certainly; a many-headed monster, as they would say in the seventeenth-century. It is self-differentiating to be sure but it cannot be self-organising except in the most basic and flawed ways. It needs organisation, it needs care, structure, it needs a statesman. This is not at all unlike the 'lump ontology' so loved by post/moderns; it identifies an aggregate of actants as undecidedly mixed up; as effectively homogenous and unknowable; above all, as dangerous.

In this latter sense, then, we recognise clearly what 'Platonism' has come to mean today; the philosophy by which the polis is an unruly force to be ordered by an enlightened, all powerful leader. Yet in the section I've highlighted we notice something else, something irrepressibly present in Plato's texts, something not anti- but un-Platonic. It is a germ, a sapling, it is embryonic, but it is there.

Is it too much to refer to 'lump ontologies' as committing 'barbarism'? I like this word; I think I will keep it!

Barbarism: The fallacy by which any aggregate or collective (and so that is anything) is conceived of as being an undifferentiated mass incapable of self-differentiation or action because the differences between these objects cannot be linguistically communicated. The fallacy by which an outside force (mind, discourse, Geist, political structures, etc.) is said to be necessary to impose order, establish differentiation and provoke action. A close cousin of 'hylomorphism'. [A definition in progress, clearly.]

This all begs for me a large number of questions but, in particular: I've been wondering a lot while reading Latour's work of his relation to Plato and to dialectical method more generally. Certainly he rejects absolutely 'dialectic' as it is received today but there is something in Plato's (often painfully) slow, methodical reasoning, his progressive distinctions, his acts of division and combination, that resonates with Latour's methodology.

The essay that I am planning will basically argue that if we can stop reading the Statesman as a dialogue on how to conceive the ideal autocrat and instead read it as a work on method that folds back into a work on subjectivity generally, we can drive a stake into the hearts of Platonism and anti-Platonism (so, that is one heart from different directions, really) equally.

Detaching Plato's dialogue from his transcendental cosmology and his (entirely co-dependent) transcendental political prescriptions is no small task but I don't think, having read this dialogue now, that it is as hard as one might think. There is so much in the dialogue that it completely overflows any attempt to narrate it definitively - much less can it ever be reduced to the clichéd received Platonism that so many love to bash today. That said, it is completely understandable why people bash Plato - there is a lot there to dismiss - but that has for too long been used as an excuse to not read more creatively. At least that is what I hope I'm doing!

Latour's Substantiality

Harman criticises Latour for reducing everything to relations. Against this Harman posits substance as that which withdraws from all relationality. Latour of course also has a conception of substance - in fact it is central to his ontology. Whereas Harman sees substance as an absolute distinction - either something is a substance or it is not - Latour, as he so often does, gradientialises it - something becomes a substance through its trials of strength; substantiality is a badge of honour, a hard won achievement. What is stopping us from reconciling these two positions? What if we abandon Harman's absolute distinction between substance and relationality and instead see substance as something earned rather than something simply inherited? Can we not say that the more substantial an entity becomes the more it withdraws from relationality? The fire consumes the cotton in its entirety only if the cotton is relatively ill defined in relation to the fire. If the respective entities are firmer, more distinct and substantial then each have properties that elude relationality - i.e. their encounter through burning.