Comment on 'Letting Go'

In summary, the problem of a political precedence for ontology is really only a problem for those who already assume that politics undergird everything in the first place. It's the same motivation that will, I'm sure, motivate its supporters to disagree with me on the grounds that my position is merely an ideological misconception of some sort of latent neoliberalism. Of course, that's an example of the very problem with correlationism in the first place, one of many obsessions we must learn to let go of.

I hate to always bring it back to Monsieur Latour but he has a nice take on this issue: we must, he says, "detect politics ‘everywhere’ when some group formation is at stake [but] nonetheless ... avoid the empty claim that ‘everything is political’." (Taken from What if we Talked Politics a Little?.)

1: Politics is everything.

2: Politics is everywhere.

The broader part of contemporary 'continental' political philosophy and its associated 'theory' in the humanities and social sciences (along with most of the graduate students I know) would subscribe to the former; and they do so with good intentions. It is, however about as empty a claim as empty claims come.

If everything is political then writing 'deconstructions' that nobody will read about things nobody cares about can be construed as being politically 'active'.

I've thought in the past that this odd, paralysing stance of 'everything is political' mirrors exactly the scientistic notion of truth: that something is true because of a transcendent attachment to how things really are rather than a whole assemblage of attachments to heterogeneous actors who, altogether, make something true. Mirroring this, many people consider themselves to be 'politically active' because they think that 'everything is political' and thus that their 'critiques' are of worth simply by virtue of existing, not because they have any actual effect on anyone or anything whatsoever.

If politics is everywhere rather than being everything then what does this mean for the politics of ontology/philosophy debate? I think it means that we can never pretend that our discussions are completely outside politics but that does not mean that we should always be agitating for a particular political programme.

A Latourian response to politics is to admit that 'we don't know'. We don't have the answers. All we have is some questions that, to put it in a Deleuzian way, we have to reformulate until we have the right questions (because without the right questions you can't arrive at the right answers).

I don't think that any participants in these debates would place philosophy or ontology outside politics as such but it just doesn't automatically follow from this that all philosophical debates must be explicitly political ones. We cannot 'escape' politics (because it is everywhere) but we should not be lured into overestimating our own importance by assuming that everything is politics (and thus that our fairly esoteric discussions are of any political importance).

That is to say: philosophers should be free to speculate. (Politicians aren't free to speculate. Their jobs are too important for that.) This gives philosophers a certain amount of freedom - the freedom to be a bit apolitical if this is what will allow us to think differently (which is ultimately the goal of both philosophy generally and political philosophy in particular).

Every philosophy has political implications and I'd be highly critical of any philosopher who rejected political philosophy tout court but to assert that 'all philosophy must be political otherwise its just complicit in A, B, C and D' presupposes that any of us know what politics is or that any of us know what anything is for that matter.

In the name of politics this argument forecloses philosophy.

Or: if 'philosophy begins in wonder', political philosophy must begin with admitting that we don't really know what politics is.

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).

A simple yet powerful refutation of idealism

A simple yet powerful refutation of idealism: Ask any idealist to recall a time when they had a good idea but couldn’t find a pen...

Another attempt to ape Latour's rhetorical style

‘Man is rational! States choose! They act according to their interests!’, exclaim the rationalists. ‘Have you not read Machiavelli? Do you not know who Hobbes is? It is human nature, you irrationalists’, they fume.

‘Well’, interrupt the rational choice theorists, ‘you are right up to a point, although you are terrible positivists; we can only say that men act as if they are rational – your theories cannot grasp the fullness of reality; what hubris! We only assume individual rationality because this allows us the most explanatory and predictive power.’

‘Pah!’, smirk the poststructuralists, ‘power! And power is all you’re after; you say you only ‘theorise’ but you’re as bad as the rationalists; rational subjects are simply the produce of discourse – the washed up detritus of socio-linguistic fields. Or they’re just a product of the rationalising gaze of the researcher. We don’t know which it is. We refuse to impose our interpretations!’

Having just returned from failing to smash capitalism, the critical realists are in a bad mood: ‘Bourgeois rationalists and irrationalists the lot of you! Emancipatory social action can only be taken on the basis of counter-ideological, properly scientific knowledge but to presume a rational, transhistorical subjectivity is Whiggish at best; and as for you po-mos: go back to France! We all need to focus our energies on uncovering the intransitive dimension of social structures; that is the only way to bring about the rapt… we mean revolution.’

Observing this scene, the Latourian (ever the observer) scratches her head and appears puzzled: ‘These people seem to be missing the point’, she thinks to herself. She clears her throat and ventures to interject: ‘Of course presidents and generals act like rational, self-interested actors. Of course governments are structured so as to foreground this sort of thinking. So yeah, states are rational actors, sort of; insofar as they can be black-boxed, anyway. But we don’t need to read Hobbes or Machiavelli to know this. And what has human nature got to do with it? (Really, you should read up on ‘nature’ some time, all of you; I can recommend you some good books if you want.) But anyway, you’re all grossly overcomplicating the issue. We don’t know that these people act rationally because Machiavelli and Hobbes somehow worked out what ‘really’ drives humans; these people act like this because they’ve all read Machiavelli and Hobbes!! Have you ever seen a five-star General’s bookshelf? Ever thought to ask? Of course not. You’re all too busy trying to tell people what they think.’

Met with a flurry of expletives from all sides – ‘relativist!’, ‘obscurantist!’, ‘objectivist!’, ‘apologist!’ –, the Latourian exits the scene. A more hostile and pig-headed tribe this ‘anthropologist of modernity’ has never encountered. Even natural scientists are more calm and reasonable than this lot! ‘At the very least’, she reflects with a chuckle, ‘I got them to agree about something!’

And so it was that nought was solved. A sad tale, but one that bears telling.

Middlesex moving to Kingston

It is interesting how mixed the responses to the CRMEP's move from Middlesex to Kingston have been. I, myself, am delighted although everyone recognises that it is by no means a victory without caveats attached and that the campaign must continue. The primary criticism seems to be one of the campaign 'selling out' because they didn't go down in a hopeless blaze of glory. The more fair criticisms note that two junior members of staff won't be included in the move and that Christian Kerslake is still suspended without another job to go to. I can see where this reasoning would come from but the campaign have made very clear that their struggle is not over! They're not just going to abandon their friends and colleagues; the suggestion is absurd.

Despite what the few come-lately naysayers have suggested, the student campaign has been absolutely brilliant and I see no reason to assume that it will be anything else now that the Centre's future has been secured. The campaign has wisely avoided what is often the downfall of student protests, which is to adopt a poise of all or nothing, us against the world -- a 'the revolution starts here' attitude. Such an attitude deflates even the most unexpected and, frankly, unexpectable victories such as the recently announced Kingston move.

A good friend of mine once remarked that ' it is important for the Left to celebrate small victories, otherwise we just become a bunch of grumpy, middle-aged, white men arguing furiously about our almost identical views in dark rooms above dingy old pubs' (I'm paraphrasing and possibly embellishing).

We have not passed from the darkness to the light and there remains a lot of work to do but if such pragmatism sours events such as this which even the most outrageous optimists would have struggled to see coming then we are in a pretty pitiful state.

Abstract: ‘Where’s the action?’ Latour, ontology and world politics

My proposed abstract for the 'Globalization and International Relations' conference at Oxford in September was accepted. I don't know exactly where I'm going to find the time to write it but perhaps if I post it here it'll make me find the time!

It'll be my first conference presentation, which is funny as I'm not even a student at the moment; Mr Independent Researcher, that's me. I'm currently planning to write an article on Latour and IR and submit it for publication by the end of the year. This paper will cover one part of my thoughts along these lines.

The abstract:

‘Where is world politics today?’ (‘Where’s the action?’) Two unsatisfactory answers: (1) In the variegated actions and interactions of states; (2) In the complex actions and interactions of non-/trans-state actor-networks that increasingly disregard the actions and interactions of states. It is clear: we are divided by disagreements over actors – to know ‘where the action is’ we must first know who or what is acting. We need to understand our actors; we need to understand our ontologies. The demise of the state has often been greatly exaggerated in Global Studies (GS), this much is true; yet, equally, an overbearing state-centrism is the nettle International Relations (IR) has been trying and failing to grasp for decades. This paper explores what I believe to be the best meeting point of these two problematics: the ontology of socio-political aggregates – states, nations, governments, bureaucracies, armies, terrorist networks, media networks, socio-linguistic networks, etc. To this end, this paper: firstly, reconsiders the ontology of how states and states systems are made, through the philosophy of Bruno Latour; secondly, it compares this initial analysis to notable recent attempts to apply Latour’s philosophy to GS through actor-network theory (e.g. Srnicek, 2010); finally, it considers the relationship between GS and IR both actually and prospectively – are the disciplines best conceived of as ‘close cousins’?; ‘progeny and progenitor’ (with Oedipal undertones)?; or, do they merely bear a ‘family resemblance’ to one another? The actual relation of the disciplines is a question to be left open, however I shall argue that, precisely for reasons discussed in this paper, the proper relationship of the disciplines should be one of vital and intensive symbiosis.

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'.

Two Word Review of R.B.J. Walker's 'After The World, Before The Globe'

Pleonasm incarnate.

Comment on: 'Lakoff on Obama and the Gulf Oil Disaster'

Comment on: http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/05/28/lakoff-on-obama-and-the-gulf-oil-disaster

Perhaps I’m a cynical bastard, but I just don’t think people are primarily motivated by empathy but rather by interest.

The opposition of interest and empathy is an interesting one - I think it is a mistake to see them as being mutually exclusive.

For interest/empathy we can more or less substitute cognition/affect. If we do this we see that these are less terms in opposition and more psychological categories (so, parts of a whole). The point is that, if we divide the psyche up like this, both parts are involved in any event - including political and economic decisions.

Alberto Toscano's recent article 'Powers of pacification: state and empire in Gabriel Tarde' (which I read yesterday so it's fresh in my mind) makes an interesting point: the likes of Tarde (alongside Whitehead, Deleuze, etc.) who have recently been revived because of the central place they give to 'emotion' in metaphysics (and thus politics) have been hailed as displacing the reductive rationalism of neoliberal economics (and so most sociology and political science, too). But what Toscano points out is that this is only one side of the story - the side of the economists; the other side is that of the marketers - on this side, from Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann through to our PR obsessed present, the place of 'affect' has been pivotal (and it has always been associated with anti-democratic sentiments). Deleuze and Guattari weren't the first to describe capitalism in terms of desire - this had been going on for decades.

On this issue I would highly recommend Adam Curtis' documentary 'The Century of the Self (my favourite documentary of all time, in fact) which charts the trajectory of 'affect' through Western society from Freud's psychoanalysis through 60s/70s 'rebellion' to Bill Clinton's PR/market research fueled election campaigns.

All of which is a long winded way of saying that I don't think we have to choose either interests or empathy - it is in the interaction between interests and empathy that politics is to be found. The point that Ian mentions about Lakoff being a "60′s hippie flowerchild" is quite right and Curtis' documentary shows precisely the links between this kind of quasi-political subjectivity and the corporate politics of the present. Whether he is "increasingly out of place in the 21st century" is a more complex question, however. Far from being 'out of place' as such I would see his statements as standing for much of what passes for the 'left' in the U.S. today - that is, a remnant of bygone 'glories' that weren't actually all they were cracked up to be in the first place and still pervade the emotive focus of present discourse. In other words, the centrality of 'affect' or 'empathy' just places all the weight on one side of a, if not arbitrarily then certainly inexactly, partitioned psyche.

The right in the U.S. and elsewhere are under no such illusions - they are more than happy to play on both sides of psychology and be thoroughly instrumental in doing so. (See William E. Connolly's book 'Capitalism and Christianity, American Style' for an account of how the right is able to organise and cooperate even when it is profoundly divided internally between neocons, neolibs and evangelicals, etc.)

The interesting point, if we go back to Toscano's article, is that this 'affective leftism' so prominent in U.S. politics is also present in 'leftist' academia (hence the new popularity of Tarde, etc.)

Now that doesn't mean that I don't think Tarde, Whitehead, Spinoza and the others aren't important but (actually, like Spinoza) we need to rethink the relationship between emotion and rationality rather than just placing all the weight on one side over the other.

In short: neither interest nor empathy rules a priori - the 'left' is doomed so long as it dwells on either half; the right doesn't make this mistake.

Nice documentary from Al-Jazeera English on Britain, the empire and decline

'What is so great about Great Britain?' Not a lot it seems! A fine antidote to our new era of moronic, nationalist, Tory smugness.

Middlesex boycott petition, allegations of assault

It seems that my previous post was not so far off the mark. John Protevi (I'm really starting to love that guy) has organised a boycott petition. The numbers currently stand at 864 and are increasing literally by the minute.

In addition, the latest round of lies and subterfuge from the administration contains allegations that 'broken bones and serious bruising' was suffered by security staff 'protecting' the Mansion House premises from the students who were doing nothing more than turning up to talk to their Dean. (One might wonder why they were being disallowed from doing this in the first place.)

The below I posted at savemdxphil.com:

Besides the various evasions and the familiar misinformation in the letter Kay links to, surely the most serious part is the allegation that, during the Mansion House occupation:

“Assaults were committed on security staff by individuals from the protest on entering the Mansion building resulting in serious injuries including broken bones and severe bruising.”

If this is true why did the police leave so soon after arriving having concluded that nothing illegal had occurred and why has no further action been taken? If there is a shred of truth to these allegations, why has it taken until now to mention the ‘broken bones’ and the ‘serious bruising’. And where is the evidence? You would have thought that if these things had actually happened then evidence would have been taken and circulated as this would be the administration’s trump card PR-wise.

I can only assume on this basis, without having been there, that these claims are completely bogus – that is, that they are lies.

The administration may have been able to make their claims of ‘assault’ stick legally before (i.e. if anyone so much as brushed past a security guard when entering the building this could be construed as ‘assault’) but now that they have made their allegations more specific and more serious this has escalated the situation yet again.

Legal advice should be sought immediately on the subject of slander. A lawsuit should be discussed. This is easy for me to say, I know (it isn’t my neck on the line), but it seems necessary nevertheless.

With their backs against the wall, as they now undoubtedly are, and with their own jobs on the line, as they may well be before long, do you think that these people, given their conduct so far, will not file criminal charges if they think they can? If we are to assume that they believe their own claims then they must at least believe this to be a possibility.

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.

New Statesman on Middlesex

Another article on the goings on at Middlesex, this time on the New Statesman website.

I felt compelled to post this comment:

In recent days I have begun to think this but now I am completely convinced: The only possible next step for the resistance to this decision and its aftermath is legal action against the administration.

The administration has made clear that there are no depths it will not stoop to in order to crush entirely peaceful dissent. It is willing to evade, delay, go to the High Court, spread disinformation, lie and even suspend (and, it seems likely, expel) entirely innocent staff and students with no semblance of due process or reason (let alone justice) whatsoever. Brian Leiter commented on his blog that this sort of behaviour from an institution in the US would result in law suits being filed - and won. John Protevi in his email to the administrators mentioned the possibility of financial, legal and political action from the relevant professional organisations.

It might be about time for philosophers and other concerned citizens to put their hands in their pockets and set up a legal fund (particularly for the cases of students who may be expelled but also for resisting the closure as a whole).

So long as this fight remains legally asymmetrical (i.e. one side have lawyers and the other side don't) it will continue to be a situation where the big institution can unilaterally bully and intimidate with impunity. It is sad that protest alone is so impotent without establishing legal connections but that is how it is, it seems.

Also, a petition should be formed and circulated allowing people to declare that they are completely and totally boycotting Middlesex until the decision is reversed, students and staff are reinstated and unequivocal apologies are issued (if there is no such thing set up already). They haven't responded to countless declarations of outrage but they might respond to being told that a whole swarm of senior academics won't have anything to do with the "University" for the rest of their careers and will do everything in their power to discourage others from doing so if they don't retreat from their present position.

Philosophy at Middlesex is not the first case of this kind and it won't be the last but it could well be a tipping point. The fight simply must be won.

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!

Getting Diagrammatical

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.

Latest on Middlesex 'University'

Latest on Middlesex: http://savemdxphil.com/2010/05/14/correspondence-between-the-student-protesters-and-university-management-13-14-may

The plot thickens. The 'University' are continuing their PR campaign against their own students by suggesting that they 'forced entry' when gaining access to the now occupied building. Clever. Not quite enough of a lie to be outright slanderous but plenty enough to get the media and only semi-interested bystanders on the hook.

As a student demonstrator one never wants to go to a Tory for help but some carefully worded emails to the new Education Secretary Michael Gove could be worthwhile at this point. It wouldn't cost them anything to get involved and new governments like to be seen to break with their predecessors; plus it'd be a good issue bridge building exercise for the new coalition government. I will put some thought into a letter along these lines over the next few days.

Overall: Hang in there people! The administration's strategy has clearly been one of obfuscation and delays. They think that if they avoid the issue for long enough people will give up. The resistance might have to be maintained for months to come. Whether the occupation lasts that long remains to be seen. When lawyers get involved things get much trickier, especially when (as is usually the case) one party has an overwhelming financial advantage over the other. Right has very little to do with it.

I seem to recall that John Protevi's letter to the administrators mentioned possible legal, financial and political support from the philosophical profession; the time for that may come pretty soon.

I wish I could play more of an active and useful part in this, especially as I have a vested interest in very much wanting to study philosophy at Middlesex next year, but I currently work 7 days a week paying off ... student debts of course!

So my contribution sadly amounts to this blogpost and some carefully worded emails.

Now, into the ether with you!

Reply to: http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/05/14/some-remarks-on-latour-mereology-and-actants

Wow, a lot to respond to!

I should perhaps clarify my claims in response to Levi's and Graham's comments: I am certainly not claiming that large/macro/generally big objects are less real or necessarily unreal - not in the slightest, though my comment earlier was brief and unclear (I had to get back to work!) so I can see why it might have come across that way.

Take the planet. What is more of an object than that? And it's pretty big! My previous post was intended to pick up Johan's points and try to re-phrase them in such a way as to further the conversation - I felt that they had been swept aside a little too quickly, that is all.

I will say a little more too about my particular perspective on this coming from outside philosophy: in academic international relations (IR) the overwhelming (perhaps even the founding) ontological assumption has been that there exists at the highest spatial scale of human existence an international 'system' comprising discrete, rational units: modern nation states. Their interaction is taken to be entirely irreducible to their components (to perform this reduction is called the 'domestic analogy'; this is not to be taken as a compliment!). The system is said to have an anarchic structure due to there being no overarching sovereign; states thus interact through diplomacy, trade and war in accordance with the structural imbalances inherent in the system and their own nature. (From here we descend into haphazardly rehashed neoliberal economics where actors can only be envisaged as rational, self interested maximizers of their own wealth and security.)

In mainstream IR, then, we are dealing with kinds of objects: the states and the system(s) they reside in. This perspective remains dominant and since the late 1970s (and certainly since Kenneth Waltz's' Theory of International Politics' was published in 1979) this ontology has been propped up by a neo-positivist epistemology which tends to claim that 'of course states aren't really perfectly unitary, rational actors but this hypothesis affords the theorist the most explanatory power' (or words to that effect). The greatest problem with this theory is that, first of all, it is contradicted by a great deal of history; secondly, it has a profound tendency to reify and naturalise the state and the states system as lamentably but unavoidably structured to be violent (thus letting governments, arms companies, warlords, etc. off the hook). So, the largest, most powerful elements within this academic discipline depend for their theory, their jobs and their funding on assuming that states and the states system are closed objects - and so they defend their 'hypothesis' fiercely, regardless of the evidence. Equally, this ontology benefits bigots and war mongerers as it fits perfectly with nationalism, militarism and so on; and so these people defend this ontology, fiercely.

... Hence my particular concern over reifying cultures and nations. So, now perhaps you can see more clearly: it is not that think that nations or states or cultures don't exist (I don't think that these are simply nouns without objects, signifiers without signifieds), it is just that I am very keen to warn against this as yet inchoate (but, in my opinion, enormously exciting) school of political theory making the same mistakes as its predecessors. As it happens I do think that we should take states, nations and cultures to be objects of some kind but as of yet we are lacking the vocabulary to do this properly. It is to that end that I am trying to pose these comments.

Now, I don't mean to suggest that any object oriented people would tolerate the above described ontology for a moment; it wouldn't last ten minutes - I add this detail to describe where my scepticism of these particular sorts of objects comes from.

I can't really think what more to say about that right now, although there is a lot left unsaid so I'll just try to respond more specifically to the points Levi and Graham raised.

Levi, your above post is a good point well made. I didn't mean to imply that OOO=ANT or anything but rather more basically that if we drew up a provisional list of presently available empirical works in the social sciences and humanities that conformed more or less to what we might hope an object oriented social science might look like in future then Latour's work would probably be among the first on the list. ANT is so different to the works of Diamond, Braudel, McNeill, etc. that I thought it deserved mentioning. It wasn't trying to throw a spanner in the works, I was just trying to point out that we might need to tighten that nut a little!

On Latour's attitude to larger objects: I'm not sure I agree with you completely about this. Certainly he has a tendency to concentrate on more or less human sized objects (people, cars, pens, files, paperclips, etc.) but, to take your example of your college, he certainly doesn't deny the reality of such objects - it would be more accurate to say that he is sceptical of larger objects; these objects invariably emerge in the last chapter of his books; they are an achievement; they require much more labour to 'make speak' than the more or less human sized objects he starts off with. So, he gives larger objects a hard time, but I don't think he denies their reality.

Take his book 'Aramis, or The Love of Technology'; this is a book about a fairly large object - an urban transporation system. It eventually transpires that Aramis does not fully exist, but not because it is large; rather it is because its parts, in one way or another, conspired to thwart its coming into being. This should not, however, imply that Latour reduces Aramis' fate to its parts; Aramis itself enters the dialogue as a character and pleads to be allowed to exist (this sounds like a really weird way to write a sociology book but in Latour's prose it is thrilling); this is more than an eccentric (and brilliant) narrative device - it really is a book about Aramis; it really is a painstakingly precise account of how this object could not become fully real, why it had to remain on paper and in boxes not fully deployed, being doted on by maintenance staff and relied on by thousands of commuters. It would make no sense to write a book like this if such an object could not possibly become real - it is this very possibility that motivates it.

Similarly, I just this morning finished reading Latour's book 'The Making of Law'. While he approaches law through files, bodies, hallways, paperclips and so on he does eventually more or less arrive at the conclusion that law has an autonomous existence. He is not 100% clear on whether he attributes it complete independence (and admittedly his account is written through thoroughly human eyes) but its reality is certainly not denied.

The important point with regard to Aramis and the law, of course, is that Latour's realism is incremental (this is my favourite thing about it) and things can be more or less real, more or less objects, and there is room for ambiguity about the extent to which any given noun refers to something with an independent existence or whether the noun is the beginning and the end of the matter. We should also remember his heavy debt to ethnomethodology and thus to (unHarmanised) phenomenology. I read earlier today (just before my earlier post actually) that Harold Garfinkel's PhD supervisor was Talcott Parsons and his ethnomethodology was in some part a reaction against (but at the same time inspired by) Parsons' structural-functionalism. A point worth considering, perhaps.

So, it is the difference between scepticism and denial that is the matter at hand here. I am on Latour's side, personally, but if we accept this distinction then we can certainly have a conversation.

Graham, yes I am trying to be serious rather than flippant. I am very much arguing for option A, as you are. I am very excited by the discussions taking place on this blog and read your blog daily also. As you yourself remark in one of your books (I forget where), there are two sorts of critics: those that want you to succeed and those that want you to fail. I'm trying to be a friendly critic wherever possible!

So, while I don't have much to add right now about what the other 2/3 might look like I'm as keen as anyone on finding that remainder. A dose of considered, educated scepticism isn't the worst starting place; that is what I'm hoping to offer.

Gosh, anyone who reads all that deserves a medal or something!

Oh and p.s. Levi, I am with you on Latour's attitude to Marxism 100%. I'll try and say something intelligent about that another day.

Reply to: http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/05/13/the-busy-persons-braudel

One way of approaching the, I think, quite legitimate reservations that Johan raises is to recognise (and this should be quite obvious really) that just because we’ve got a noun for something doesn’t mean we should take it to be an object!

To use words like ‘European, Inca, Maya, European maritime technology’ do not necessarily make a work ‘object oriented’ – this is too hasty a conclusion. Whether a ‘culture’ or a ‘nation’ or a ‘state’ can be legitimately referred to as an ‘object’ at all I think is a very important point.

I study international relations and it is of the utmost importance to the theory of this discipline whether one accepts the state and thus the international system to be closed, black-boxed ‘objects’ (as the dominant, mainstream neo-positivist theories hold) or whether it is actually necessary to insist on opening up this black-box and actually denying it closure (both for ontological and ethical reasons). Similar concerns are routinely raised about Diamond’s histories and I think an OOO driven social science needs to address these problems as problems head on not just accuse critics of correlationism.

I think the problem with Diamond’s work is not that it is oriented towards objects (which is good) but that it is (like Braudel and McNeill certainly) overwhelmingly macro-oriented; this is not necessarily a bad thing but it is certainly something with a lot of problems attached to it.

If we are to advance object oriented theory into the humanities and social sciences further (and this is very much my intention) we need to square some circles. For example, are not the histories of Diamond et al. not the absolute anti-thesis of Latour’s ANT? (And is not Latour’s ANT somewhat the cause celebre of object oriented approaches in the social sciences so far?)

Being ‘object oriented’ doesn’t necessarily forgive one all other sins. I don’t think one need be ‘correlationist’ to recognise the problems of macro-history. That isn’t to dismiss its relevance, however, just to insist on the recognition of its problems.

Atheists For Whitehead

If I were to start a club.