Reply to Levi on pluralism, etc.

Levi responds (in the comments) to one of my previous posts on pluralism:

I find this post perplexing. First, it seems to me that this is a wildly implausible interpretation of the modernist. The modernist does not see the critical investigation of idols as a-political, but as a deeply political project. The whole motive behind "smashing idols" is that these idols have very real political effects and a very real impact on people's lives. Given that, there's really no alternative but to engage in that "warfare". Here I wonder whether some of this blase attitude towards these idols doesn't arise from different political circumstances in the US and Britain. I take it, for example, that Britain doesn't have people resisting climate change policy on religious grounds-- they claim to know how the world will end --or pushing Middle Eastern foreign policy based on end times theology; not to mention the issues of abortion, gay marriage, contraceptives, sex education, evolution, attitudes towards capitalism filtered through Calvinism, etc; nothing in American politics can be understood without understanding the role played by these idols and these idols have very real domestic and international effects. 

Second, I just don't think this is an accurate reading of Latour and that this post reflects Deleuze's description of the "beautiful soul" in Difference and Repetition. The beautiful soul holds that there can be a confederation of peaceful differences. I think we hope for this and strive for it as much as possible, but I also think that there are a number of circumstances where there are just irreducible antagonisms. There's really no way to align the interests of the worker and the owner. They'll always be at odds with one another. Similarly, there's no way to align the interests of the fundamentalist and the GLBT person. One really has to choose in these circumstances and unfortunately there's "war"; though hopefully of the peaceful variety (though the bombing of abortion clinics suggests otherwise). The premise here seems to be that the problem lies in people not being politically pluralistic, but it seems to me that antagonisms arise from elsewhere and from very real differences. 

Finally, it's important to recall the relationship between "trials of strength" and truth in Latour. Latour argues that every "truth" is produced through trials of strength that determine its capacity to stand or not (note his warlike language here). You seem to say that religion and science are on equal grounds with their fragility. Perhaps, perhaps not. Many religions have undergone trials of strength through the formation of collectives, institutions, and rituals that make them incredibly sturdy. Here I think of Dennett's version of meme theory where religions, for example, create memes such as "you will go to hell if you question doctrine" creating for themselves an "autoimmune system" that's extremely effective in producing endurance of these collectives. And, of course, religion engages in all the sorts of anti-pluralistic warfare you decry in this post. Science has also gone through its trials of strength through the experiment, the creation of instruments, the invention of "speaking objects" (the events that take place in experiments and that are observed by a variety of people), journals, institutions, etc. I don't think either of these things are particularly fragile. Both have aligned all sorts of actants to sustain their existence. As Latour says, those black boxes can always be opened and questioned anew, but in the case of science-- and depending on what scientific claim we're talking about --the bar is pretty high for justifying the opening of those boxes, e.g., there's not much reason to question the black box of vaccination at this point.

I don't doubt that there are differences in experience between where you are, Levi, and over on this side of the pond; in fact I know that there are and I appreciate how that creates a difference in perspective.  However, if anything that fact strengthens my argument.  I couldn't have been any more explicit in saying that sometimes idols need to be smashed, could I?  If they are destructive and deleterious to collective life then smash away!  You have not only a right to do so but a duty.  But do they all need to be smashed?  Really?

My whole point is that idol-smashing is an act that requires a decision, that it can't be auto-justified by appeal to a higher order of Nature or Rationality.  And I really do think that this is one of the central pillars of Modernism - that any action is justified if it's enforcing more Rationalism upon the world, if it's extending the light-curtain of Enlightenment that extra inch; that violence isn't really violence if it's in service of Rationalisation.

If you don't recognise the whole 'I am merely tearing the veil from your eyes; pain is character building, thank me' thing in Modernism then I'm not sure what to say.  Pretty much the entire discourse of European colonialism was built on this kind of thinking.  And it's not gone anywhere.  'Oh, you think this forest is sacred?  Adorable.  Bring in the bulldozers.  You'll thank us when your economy is rationalised.'

But the most important thing politically (or diplomatically) is that the world will never be Enlightened, Reason will never reign - so, we have to find ways of living together in spite of all that.

Which brings me to the second point.  'Living together' doesn't mean all holding hands in a circle and singing Kumbaya.  It might merely mean not kicking the shit out of each other.  Peace doesn't mean harmony and I don't think anything I've written can be taken to mean that.  My interpretation of Latour's whole cosmopolitical thing is that it's basically a more metaphysically ambitious version of Chantal Mouffe's agonistic pluralism.  Both are based on Carl Schmitt, for goodness sake (I almost wrote 'for heaven's sake...!').

The thing with Latour in his political writings (his later ones at least, e.g. On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods) is that his tone often suggests the perspective of a middle-of-the-road bourgeois liberal imploring us along the lines of 'aw shucks, can't we all just get along?'; but if you look at the philosophical resources he's drawing on he's always gone for the political realists.  In the '80s it was Spinoza, Hobbes, Machiavelli.  Today it's Schmitt.  Nothing cuddly about these folks, nothing beautiful about their souls.  The utopia of liberal consensualism is precisely what this whole political philosophy is working against.

Perhaps my tone has taken too much of Latour's along with it.  But there's agonism in that there pluralism, make no mistake.  And, if anything, I am going more towards the political realist side of things than Latour.  So, with respect, I think my reading of Latour is accurate and that, if anything, I am more cognisant of outright conflict than he is!*

Lastly, whether or not religions in the US are strong and sturdy (clearly they are) is beside the point.  It's a matter of decision and responsibility.  I'm not saying 'oh leave the poor old religious lot alone, you big bully.'  I don't dispute for a moment that there are many instances where there's a zero-sum game in terms of engaging with others: 'it's either you or me.'  E.g. when a child is ill, needs a blood transfusion and its parents won't allow it because they're Jehovah's Witnesses (this kind of story crops up with sad regularity).  Religious freedom and the right of the child to get medical treatment - there's a zero-sum game there, a decision must be made.  Neither Reason not Science can answer that question, it's always a political decision.  Likewise, in the UK recently there's been a lot of debate over female genital mutilation.  It's been made illegal but is still practiced.  Here, too, there's no middle ground.  It'll never be okay to say 'oh, only mutilate them a bit' or 'only mutilate young girls' genitals on a Sunday' - it's a fundamental disagreement.  And it's an abomination that must be eliminated.

I see no contradiction in this and anything of what I said in the last post.  Differences in emphasis, that's all.

It's easy to justify your attacks when your opponent is more powerful (i.e. when taking on the religious in the US).  But that isn't always the case and a political philosophy must be able to at least comprehend situations in which one's other is weaker, when speaking from higher status to lower - how does one then act?  And how does one act when one finds that an other's ways are ridiculous but in a manner that is inconsequential to oneself?  How does one act towards things that might be perceived as absurd but are of no real consequence or might even make the world a slightly better place?  Modernism, as I see it, can at best snigger behind its hand rather than with bared teeth in these situations.  That's scarcely pluralism.  It's not political pluralism, anyway.  There are deeper (and better) varieties of pluralism than this, that's all I'm really arguing for.



* An aside: Latour has long since moved on from Irreductions.  As important as that text clearly was for him it's been grossly overestimated as being programatically foundational in the past few years (blaming no names *cough* Harman).  The strict, reductive ontology of trials of strength hasn't been a major part of his work since the early 1990s, as I see it.  For example, his essay on circulating reference (the one in Pandora's Hope) was first published in 1993.  That produces rather a different theory of science to the trials of strength period in the 1980s.  He's a very different thinker to the one he was thirty years ago - although there are obvious continuities between then and now, too.

Morton's Hyperobjects and Pluralism

It occurred to me yesterday after reading Timothy Morton's Hyperobjects just what a postmodernist text it is in terms of style and construction.  It's really no different in how it's put together from the old 'all the world's a text' school of culture studies bricolage.  Bits and pieces of pop science mixed with every kind of cultural artefact (and, in all fairness, some genuinely earnest political musings) all jumbled together and loosely assembled with the help of some all too chunkily chopped and, for my tastes, rather undercooked object-oriented philosophy (garnished with wilted affectations of scientific realism...).  A thought salad, if you will.

It's a writing style that presupposes a flat ontology – i.e. a monism – i.e. a situation where a single vocabulary, a single style of speech, a single mode of assembly suffices to address any kind of thing wheresoever, whensoever, howsoever, whatsoever.  Heterogeneity without plurality.

It matters little in practice whether this monistic plane is discourse, object, language, network...  The world becomes a frozen lake across which the bricoleur glides, slides or tumbles, depending on his skill.  The relational labour required to forge any particular connection seems minimal, almost inconsequential – it is enough that the words are on the same page, conjoined by puns.

This can be a very exciting way of moving around, no doubt, but, read in book-length, it strikes me as shallow, superficial and reductive.  To address climate change, Dr Who, early 1990s British indie bands, aboriginal art, nuclear waste, Aristotle and so on all in the same mode of address, all in the same tone of voice, the same frenzied, impatient blur of the hyperactive scholar-magpie – it makes for an interesting read but ultimately an unrewarding one.  And it's difficult to swallow the dogmatically asserted 'realism' (proclaimed, never argued) when there is so little attentiveness to the specificities of all these things, when their bumps, grooves and all manner of details are smoothed over in such dramatic fashion.

It is as though the materials themselves offered no resistance, objection or direction to how they are spoken, stretched, compressed, displayed; they impose no obligation on the articulator as to the way in which they must be articulated.

This, it seems to me, is the importance of the pluralist project, philosophically (and realistically) speaking: to compel attention to the specific ways in which different things must be addressed in order to be properly articulated in their own terms.  This is what OOO, etc. can never do because it is essentially monist: there is one way of being and all further distinctions are subcategories of that one mode.

In establishing a 'universal equivalence' between all things (everything equally an object) it makes everything articulable all-together with a minimum of complication.  And this is not without value but nor is it innocent.

One interesting thing with Latour's modes project is that [net] permits this scholar-magpie approach since it self-consciously disregards the nuances of individual forms of being in order to string together as many relations (and thus to forge the thickest of descriptions) as quickly, easily and simplistically as possible.  So, the fast, loose thrill-ride of the monist is seemingly permitted but it is relativised, deprived of its innocence – it compels a choice, a decision to be made: why this mode, why this movement, why not another?  In other words, the very partiality of the pluralised network mode demands passing by the way of another mode [pre] (and from there to any number of others); plurality demands decision and hence responsibility.

And this, I think, leads to a more convincing 'realism' than that of Morton et al., for whom this becomes little more than a badge to pin to one's lapel and strut around, chest puffed out – proud.  That is a good name for it: proud realism, a realism of pride.  Science, in this 'realism,' becomes not so much a process that is implicated in any event of thinking the worlds around us in particularly productive ways but simply an honoured and honorific background process that gifts us lists of objects that we are entitled, since they are scientifically certified, to assert as 'out there, whether you like it or not.'  Science is a research and certification process: if it's on the list we can let it into our ontologies without another thought.  ('And if you're not on the list you're not coming in!' – for doormen-realists this is the main point: the authority to refuse entry.)

Thus, with Morton, we can stand there in the rain, feeling it falling on our head and imagine the vast, sublime, oceanic climate system whirring and whooshing over our head and think 'climate change is raining on my head' (he actually writes this) and think that this is a meaningful sentence, in all disconnection and transcendence from the scientific institutions that stabilise climate and climate change as objects of cognition.  And then we can denounce those who would insist that dynamic, ongoing scientific processes are essentially implicated in this event, in this actual occasion as lava lampy relationalists.

There's nothing more lava lampy than the manic postmodern stylings of cultural studies bricolage – and this is a style that Morton excels at.

To move with [net] is to move laterally; that is, across the frozen lake, traversing the flat ontology.  And we don't need to watch the Winter Olympics to know what stunningly graceful high-velocity ballets this freedom of movement can sometimes produce.  But this is not the only way of moving.  To pretend otherwise is irresponsible.

Pluralism is not an alternative to realism.  It is simply realism without its chest puffed out, showing off.  Pluralism is realism that recognises the multiple paths that any trajectory can follow and the beautiful plumage that can grace any mode of existence.

In that sense there is nothing much to it; it might be counter-intuitive but it's not especially complicated.  Perhaps one day it'll even be common sense.

Pluralism and ontology: a second attempt

So, pluralism. Realism too.

It all kicked off on the blogosphere a couple of weeks ago! I dropped out of the conversation as I was first ill and then very busy. I’m only catching up on what other people wrote now, apologies to all wherever they're due. I’ll try to respond to some specific points later but here’s a general clarification:

I think my original statement about ‘granting all entities an ontology’ has been broadly misunderstood (probably my own fault). To grant a god, for example, an ontology is not to admit that everyone's gods exist in the way that their followers describe them – that is the wrong register to even think about it. All that is required is to grant that a god is more than the electrical ripples in someone’s brain, more than abstract, vaporous ideas transcendently opposed to an earthy, material reality. All that is required is that when someone says that their god is something beyond them, external to them, greater than them, that it imposes duties on them, has effects on them that they do not themselves will – we accept this. In short all that we need to accept is that gods are irreducible to any subjective, isolated instantiation, any floaty, ethereal ideality or any sociolinguistically sanitised intersubjectivity. We don’t have to agree that there’s really a big bearded old man sat up on a cloud, a mysterious force that watches everything we do or whatever. That’s irrelevant. Belief per se is irrelevant. The point is that the god is an entity that exceeds its believers, that circulates among them, that is brought into presence through the heterogeneous and, yes, material practices of worship. Nothing more than this. Everything else follows from this, I think.

It’s in making this distinction (between chasmic dualism and joined-up pluralism, essentially) that we see what Stengers means by ‘this is war’ and what Latour means by ‘iconoclasm.’ The hammer-happy modernist going around wantonly smashing the idols of the poor, stupid, ignorant believers believes that he is scything the scales from their eyes, revealing the truth behind the illusion, tearing the curtain to the ground and showing them how things really are, rescuing the poor saps from their false consciousness. But what he is really doing is a violence to their practices, to the ways in which they bring into presence the beings that make these people who and what they are. This iconoclasm is a violence perpetrated upon these people and their cherished entities at their very core. That’s the point. It’s not that we should all be obsequiously polite or just not say mean things about other people’s beliefs, nor is it necessarily to deny that some idols are bad idols and so deserve to get smashed – it’s that to go around smashing idols is not a pure, innocent activity, it’s not a matter of revealing the reality behind mere appearances, it can’t be neutralised and made apolitical by appeal to Reason, Nature or Science. It’s political. It’s about making and unmaking worlds. At best it’s creative destruction, at worst it’s cosmopolitical imperialism. It’s not a cosy fireside chat between friends who happen to have some divergent beliefs. It’s a very much more serious matter of engagement with profound estrangement, with others who neither desire nor welcome your input, with others who encounter your unprompted proclamations as to their lives and worlds not as an amusing conversation starter but as an imposition. When I say ‘violence’ I do not necessarily mean it literally but nor should the seriousness of the signifier be understated.

To tear down a god is to destroy an entity – this is all I mean by granting all things an ontology, I mean that we must recognise this fact. In no way, shape or form do we need to agree what mode of existence that entity enjoys, what capacities it has, what demands it can make on us. We needn’t agree about any of that. But in order to be meaningfully pluralist we need to recognise that going around smashing idols – figuratively or literally – is an act of violence, an act of destruction not of revelation. This is why we need to be diplomatic; this is what makes that whole ethos necessary. This is why political engagement with others cannot be secondary to or derivative from belief; belief is not the foundation upon which we act politically; politics is a whole other mode of action from believing and knowing. This is why it’s wrong to see ‘being nice about others beliefs’ as being a matter of mere politeness, or of tolerance – ‘tolerance’ is a vacuity.

The point can be driven home by the recognition that 'our' cherished practices are not immune to iconoclasm either; we do not occupy a privileged position outside, above and beyond the melee; we are all vulnerable. Science, too, can be smashed. Behind the modernist’s reckless, vicious abandon is the belief that his idols are made from the purest adamantium – indestructible. But this is not true. Science, too, is a fragile institution of world-making that institutes beings that can be destroyed by unbound, marauding iconoclasm. Capitalism is the iconoclast-in-chief. The ideal of science as a community of researchers openly and publicly pursuing knowledge for knowledge’s sake is becoming more and more brittle, friable, frail by the day. More and more research is conducted behind closed doors, more and more knowledge is patented and closed off from public consumption, more and more science is owned by the capitalists who fund the research rather than the scientists who perform it, less and less are scientists the agents of science as an exercise in exploring the world and discovering its secrets, more and more are they simply employees of whatever arms firm or shampoo manufacturer their fragile employment conditions and limited epistemic horizons have forced them to work for. (And that’s not even getting into issues such as climate cynicism and the Science Wars of the 1990s.) Science, too, is vulnerable.

And it cannot be otherwise. Without the practices, networks, assemblages, rhizomes, systems that bring into presence the entities that make us who and what we are then we are marooned in nothingness. So, do not give up an attachment lightly – this is the fundamental insight, I think. The diplomatic pluralist ethos stems from this. The smashing of an idol is not a mere riffing on ideas, utterly removed from material reality, it is an act of destruction. (If I can communicate only one thing please understand this: it is an act.)

Latour writes in his Inquiry:

Yes, there are beings that do not deserve to exist. Yes, some constructions are badly made. Yes, we have to judge and decide. (142)

Sometimes idols do need to be smashed. What I take from his arguments on this is that such acts of cosmopolitical violence need to be seen very clearly and understood for what they are. The decision to act against an idol or a cherished entity of any kind must be a responsible one – that is, those taking the decision must bear responsibility for it. And so we need to be able to distinguish between good and bad idols, good and bad iconoclasms (and necessary and unnecessary smashings) rather than simply swinging our hammers around recklessly, wantonly, freely – endowed with the right to do so as if by divine fiat.

We must resist the modernist philosophies that permit the destruction of world-making practices in complete innocence. For the modernists there is no violence in ideality and so nothing to think about. Tearing away the misty veil of illusions – what’s violent about that? What could be less violent? It requires no justification, no thought, no debate, no consideration, no politics. In the modernist schema iconoclasm is legitimate in and of itself, pretty much by definition, because to refuse iconoclasm is to accept living in a world of illusions – horror of all horrors. But if we reject the bifurcation of nature then we have to also reject the freedom of auto-justified iconoclasm. Without the appeal to a world of illusions that is of no intrinsic value in itself how can the modernist iconoclast claim such perfect innocence in his actions? How can he look himself in the eye if he is not revealing realities but rather destroying worlds? Depriving modernists of their dogmas, of their dualisms, of their innocence – that is the trick.

So, what of realism? If ‘realism’ means retaining this institutionalised thoughtlessness (in whatever derivative form) then I am happy to kick it to the curb. If ‘idealism’ means recognising that our worlds are fragile and that there is no bedrock beneath the beach then I’m an idealist. So be it. That said I think that an ‘idealism’ that so enthusiastically throws itself into the materiality of the world, into truths of science, into the concreteness of earthly being and which rejects any kind of ideality abstracted from the substance of the world is not an idealism worthy of the name. I’d prefer to call that realism but it’s not about who gets to appropriate which tag. It’s about finding ways of living in a world in which all are vulnerable, all can be lost; in which no entity that populates our world is so safe and secure that it does not require any kind of maintenance. It’s about forcing careful, considered thought to occur in the right places and at the right times. It’s against thoughtlessness, not reality.

So, the sun will keep burning if we all die. Sure, great. But without the practices that tie us to its fusion, its gravity, its flares then it’s just a hot, bright thing in the sky to us. Without our bodies and our thoughts it isn’t even that. Sun spots are only part of our world in any meaningful way given the institutions that allow us to dissociate and discern them from the general blazing hotness of the celestial sky-lump. I see nothing idealist in this – on the contrary, is it not the height of realism?

We cannot speak of a thing to which we are not tied, so why do we persist in trying? Why do we wrestle with our own finitude with such sage, serious, solemn and earnest and yet frenzied devotion? Why not throw our energies into studying the threads and knots of our world, our pluriverse and accept that when we abstract from these things and speak of things ‘out there, besides us’ we are doing so because our entanglements all sufficiently well-coiffed to permit us these inferences. We know the sun in all its glory because we have built these institutions that bring it more intimately into our world. Can we speak of the sun ‘in itself’? I don’t see how. But I also don’t see why anyone should care. It is surely impossible to speak of things in themselves in any absolute way but it is perfectly possible to infer how things would be without our networks from within our networks – indeed, because of our networks. Such a fiction is always speculative, constructive, contingent – and so?...

The point is that we should be happy to be swamped in our atmospheres, bound up in our networks, channelling the whisperings of our idols. These attachments are what make us strong – they are what make us. And if we accept this, if we accept our unavoidably swamped, bounded, entangled predicament, then I think this has real consequences for our political lives, too.

The pluralism of ‘that’s your opinion, dude’ isn’t much help if it’s based upon an ethos of mere politeness, of sniggering in private rather than public. A more diplomatic pluralism, as I have tried to articulate it at least, finds plurality at a deeper register; a pluralism of modes of action as well as a pluralism of umwelten. It’s my belief that these things, in fact, go together.

A true pluralism would not only accept the basic reality of others' idols, it would rush to support them if they were demonstrated to be of value to the world.

A true pluralist might recognise something of herself in the anguished cries of an other watching his world being torn apart.

Ontological conflicts, political pluralism

Levi Bryant has a new post up (responding to Jeremy Trombley) on the difficulties of being both pluralist and realist:

We need a pluralistic– a pluralism that also recognizes different animal worlds as phenomenologically described by Uexkull –to cultivate compassion and proper ethical regard for others; a big part of which involves recognizing the limitations of ones own conceptual schemes, attempting to understand others, or at least recognize that they might inhabit worlds of meaning (in Heidegger’s sense) that differ substantially from our own. However, we need a realism because there are facts of the matter pertaining to what causes psychic maladies, climate change, how economy functions, etc., and when we get these things wrong we generate horrific practices. How, then, can these things be thought together? I don’t know. It seems I’m continuously trying to square circles.

(Well, let me try to circle that square! ... sorry.)

Ontologically and metaphysically the idea of realist pluralism is no longer an issue.  There are (appropriately) numerous variants but the basic idea that reality is itself pluralistic is well established.  The question is political-discursive.  It's what Stengers and Latour are getting at with their concepts of diplomacy and cosmopolitics.

They grant, first, that all entities exist and, second, that to say that someone's cherished idol (or whatever disputed entity they hold dear) is non-existent is a 'declaration of war' - 'this means war,' as Stengers often says.  They thus shunt onto-political discourse off of the terrain of knowledge/belief in the sense of existence/non-existence.  Their basic claim seems to be that 'respect for otherness,' i.e. political pluralism, can only come from granting the entities that others hold dear an ontology, even if you don't 'believe' in them.  You are thus permitted to say 'I do not follow that god, he has no hold over me' but you are not permitted to say 'your god is an inane, infantile, non-existent fantasy, grow up.'  And it's not just a question of politeness (although there's that too).  The point is to grant others' idols and deities an existence - one needn't agree over what that existence entails, over what capacities that entity has or what obligations it impresses upon you as someone in its partial presence but to deny it existence entirely is to 'declare war' - to deny the possibility of civil discourse, of pluralistic co-existence.

I think it's important to add that they do not deny the possibility of legitimate 'war talk' - perhaps there are circumstances where that is entirely justified, in fact it's inevitable - but the properly political question should be 'how can we live together?'  That is not a utopian political programme but a pragmatic one.  And that's also the root of the notion of the composition of a common world through diplomacy.

I found (and still find) this a difficult notion to get my head around.  The notion of 'speaking your mind,' of 'saying what you really mean' is so engrained in many ways that to temper that seems dishonest.  But we do it all the time, in practice.  That's 'political correctness' (which, contrary to reputation, has not actually 'gone mad').



Interestingly, although Stengers and Latour base this political philosophy upon their interpretation of anthropological praxis (combined with that of diplomacy), this kind of mutually accepting ontology is not entirely de rigeur within anthropology.  Mario Blaser is developing basically the same set of ideas within anthropology itself, talking about ontological conflicts and political ontology.

The question of correlation; Becoming sensitive to barbarians

Distancing himself from the concept of 'correlationism,' Levi Bryant muses on how his OOO is, in a sense, the most 'correlational' of philosophies:

Can I ever experience the world the way a mantis shrimp experiences the world?  Of course not.  However, through my knowledge of optics, electro-magnetic waves, its reactions to the environment about it, and so on, I can make all sorts of fallible inferences about what mantis shrimp have access to.

Sometimes I think my position is better described as “pan-correlationism” rather than as “realism”.  “Pan-correlationism” is the thesis that everything is an “observer” or that all things have access to the world in particular ways.  Put in Deleuzo-Spinozist terms, it would be the thesis that every entity is affected and affects other entities in its own way.  The way in which rocks have access to the world about them and act upon the world around them is different than how trees affect and are affected by the world, as well as from how corporations, governments, octopi, persons, and tiger sharks are affected by and affect the world.  Leibniz said that every monad is a point of view on the entire universe from a particular perspective.  Leibniz was saying that monads are observers.  Observing how observers observe is what really interests me.

This reminds me of a passage from Latour's eminently Leibnizian 'Irreductions':

The seagull, far from its name, far from its species, in its own world of air, sea, and favored fish; the fish far from its shoals, far from the gull and its beak, innocent in the icy water; the water that gathers together and shapes itself, mixed by the winds, knotted by the currents, heaving and breaking itself onto the beach ... The bird, far from its name, flies from the name that I give it, but continues to fly in treatises on zoology and the poems of St. John Perse. The gull is in its sky, irreducible to ours, but the language of the taxonomist is in the books, itself irreducible to any gull ever dreamed of, living or dead.

Oddly, perhaps, it also reminds me of a passage from Plato's 'Statesman.'  In this dialogue the Stranger is in conversation with Young Socrates; the topic of conversation is discovering the essence of the statesman; the method of discovering essences is that of dividing reality into classes, starting with the most general distinctions and working towards specifics.  After a while the Stranger invites Young Socrates to have a stab at it himself:

STRANGER: Very good, [Young] Socrates ...
And now, as you say, leaving the discussion of the
name,--can you see a way in which a person, by showing the art of
herding to be of two kinds, may cause that which is now sought amongst
twice the number of things, to be then sought amongst half that number?

YOUNG SOCRATES: I will try;--there appears to me to be one management of
men and another of beasts.

STRANGER: You have certainly divided them in a most straightforward and
manly style; but you have fallen into an error which hereafter I think
that we had better avoid.

YOUNG SOCRATES: What is the error?

STRANGER: I think that we had better not cut off a single small portion
which is not a species, from many larger portions; the part should be a
species. To separate off at once the subject of investigation, is a most
excellent plan, if only the separation be rightly made; and you were
under the impression that you were right, because you saw that you would
come to man; and this led you to hasten the steps. But you should not
chip off too small a piece, my friend; the safer way is to cut through
the middle; which is also the more likely way of finding classes.
Attention to this principle makes all the difference in a process of
enquiry.

YOUNG SOCRATES: What do you mean, Stranger?

STRANGER: I will endeavour to speak more plainly out of love to your
good parts, Socrates; and, although I cannot at present entirely explain
myself, I will try, as we proceed, to make my meaning a little clearer.

YOUNG SOCRATES: What was the error of which, as you say, we were guilty
in our recent division?

STRANGER: The error was just as if some one who wanted to divide the
human race, were to divide them after the fashion which prevails in this
part of the world; here they cut off the Hellenes as one species, and
all the other species of mankind, which are innumerable, and have
no ties or common language, they include under the single name of
'barbarians,' and because they have one name they are supposed to be of
one species also. Or suppose that in dividing numbers you were to
cut off ten thousand from all the rest, and make of it one species,
comprehending the rest under another separate name, you might say that
here too was a single class, because you had given it a single name.

...

STRANGER: Suppose now, O most courageous of dialecticians, that some
wise and understanding creature, such as a crane is reputed to be,
were, in imitation of you, to make a similar division, and set up cranes
against all other animals to their own special glorification, at the
same time jumbling together all the others, including man, under the
appellation of brutes,--here would be the sort of error which we must
try to avoid.

...

Plato's crane, Latour's seagull, Levi's mantis shrimp.  In different ways and for different reasons all these unassuming creatures represent the conclusion that the world of things is a plurality, not a duality.  There are real classes and real things but each of these things exist on their own and in their own right – any distinction that sets one kind of thing apart from all others is arbitrary and false so long as one fails to recognise that it is a distinction within a world of distinctions.

'Barbarians' are imagined by the same process that dualist philosophies are: by hiving off one tiny corner of reality and taking that fragment to be sui generis and exceptional, while everything left unmarked by that distinction is homogeneous, indistinguishable – a babbling mass of incoherence – barbarian.  Instead of performing the necessary labour of making distinction after distinction, whittling wholes into groups, sub-groups and sub-sub-groups, the dualist hives off one group alone and declares everything else to be of one kind in relation to it.  The real 'barbarism' is this demarcation itself.

It is interesting that Plato has the Stranger make this argument.  Xenophobia – irrational fear of strangers or foreigners – comes from the Greek xenos meaning "a guest, stranger, foreigner".  A 'barbarian' is thought to 'babble' because she speaks in a tongue that one cannot understand.  The xenophobe, in arrogance, takes an other's babbling to be 'what the other does' -- thinks that the other is a babbler, a fool; a blank, blinking vessel of incoherence.  And yet it is the xenophobe who is the fool – babbling is only manifest to the untrained ear of a monoglot.  To a polyglot the world is a rich, fully differentiated sea of differences – every language existing in and of itself, defined by its own characteristics, in a relationship of plurality to every other tongue.  The monoglot is unaware of any regime of expression or articulation besides his own – every other tongue is 'just noise.'  A monoglotic xenophobe takes the experience one step further and fearfully imagines the apparently undifferentiated mass to be of a single kind because they are undifferentiated to him.

There are two morals to this story:

First, take the correlate seriously.  The monoglotic xenophobe is a naive realist – he believes that because he experiences all the others of the world as an undifferentiated mass that they are; that there exist his people, on the one hand, and all the other barbarians of the world, on the other.  His demarcation, it turns out, is born out of ignorance rather than knowledge – by a correlational insensitivity; a perceptive poverty.

Second, being a pluralist rather than a dualist is a matter not of refusing or ignoring correlatedness but of working on becoming more correlationally sensitive – becoming more sensitive to the differences among things as they are representationally, correlationally manifest – by correlational sensitivity; by perspicacity.

If one looks out into the world and sees 'barbarians' – babbling, terrifyingly indistinguishable hoardes – this says nothing of those bodies and everything of one's own insensitivity towards difference.  The dualism of 'Hellene/barbarian' is an expression not of knowledge but of ignorance; not of sensitivity or intelligence but of the contrary.  The dualism of 'human/nature' is scarcely any different.

Plato's Stranger knew that.  He knew that differences must be worked out and distinguished carefully, gradually, without shortsighted shortcuts that would render any one group exceptional relative to a jumbled remainder that had no identity themselves – that A must be distinguished from B, C, D, E, etc. not from not-A.

Ignorance of correlate-dependence leads to dualism because it makes the perceiver insensitive to pluralities of difference.  It is only in recognising the profound existential significance of correlatedness (or whatever you want to call it) that real ontological pluralism is possible at all.  Far from ' the correlate' being the enemy, it is an indispensible component of any conceivable pluralist reality.