Learned a new word: holon

Of particular relevance to thinking about DeLanda's ontology perhaps:

Holon: something that is simultaneously a whole and a part.

Thanks Wikipedia.

More from Žižek

What if, in truth, intellectuals lead basically safe and comfortable lives, and in order to justify their livelihoods, construct scenarios of radical catastrophe? For many, no doubt, if a revolution is taking place, it should occur at a safe distance—Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela—so that, while their hearts are warmed by thinking about faraway events, they can go on promoting their careers. But with the current collapse of properly functioning welfare states in the advanced-industrial economies, radical intellectuals may be now approaching a moment of truth when they must make such clarifications: they wanted real change—now they can have it.

He is referring primarily to Horkheimer and Agamben; the latter I consider to be a particularly important target given his weirdly pronounced fashionability in the last few years.

There certainly are a lot of self-styled 'radicals' in the academy. I myself have no problem with admitting to being a lily-livered leftist who has never been anywhere near genuinely radical, let alone revolutionary, political action. My parochial, rural working class upbringing was about as far from that world as that of private schools and private jets and nothing I have done since has brought me any closer to either of these alien realms. How usual! Indeed, yet what is striking is that so many people who are just as politically irrelevant as me pretend the opposite - these are self-styled radicals.

Times of potential political change, such as the present one, show much self-styled radicalism to be exactly what it is - so much hot air. 'You wanted change and decried its enforced impossibility - now it is there for the taking; take it!' No taking, no changing; there is nothing to say. Nothing in the academic production cycle allows for its relevance: it takes years to publish anything and nobody reads journals anyway. Besides, its not like anyone has anything in particular to say despite spraying words like 'emancipatory' and 'liberating' across their essays like piss up a brick wall.

At least Žižek gets people interested and he usually has something to say.

Žižek on Europe and "Permanent Economic Emergency"

I've not yet heard a better description of the state of the European Union than this piece by Slavoj Žižek:

One often hears that the true message of the Eurozone crisis is that not only the Euro, but the project of the united Europe itself is dead. But before endorsing this general statement, one should add a Leninist twist to it: Europe is dead—ok, but which Europe? The answer is: the post-political Europe of accommodation to the world market, the Europe which was repeatedly rejected at referendums, the Brussels technocratic-expert Europe. The Europe that presents itself as standing for cold European reason against Greek passion and corruption, for mathematics against pathetics. (Slavoj Žižek, A Permanent Economic Emergency, New Left Review 64).

It is difficult to find a place to stand on the EU in the UK. The right are happy to queue up to bash it on almost every conceivable issue, real and imaginary; however, the free market core of the project is generally ignored in terms of scrutiny in favour of ridiculous, spittle-flecked, nostril-flaring stories about straight bananas and the like. The EU's most voracious support comes from the centre with Lib Dems and New Labourites only too happy to endorse technocracy, supporting as they do both the EU's cosmopolitan pretensions and its free market ideals.

The leftist position should be clear: the EU is a neoliberal homogenising operation designed to facilitate the faster, easier appropriation of wealth for a more mobile few and to remove the possibility of political resistance for the (physically and socio-economically) immobile many. Yet it cuts across the political spectrum in an awkward way: it also realises in highly concrete terms a sort of left-leaning liberal cosmopolitanism that, in many ways, is difficult to resist, while, as the other side of precisely the same coin, it eliminates local democratic accountability and communal heterogeneity for the sake of neoliberal free market ideals.

It is easy to love the results of the Shengen agreement, the ability to live and work anywhere in the EU easily and freely, the apparent disappearance of intra-Europe realpolitik, etc. The question is: would the (at least ostensive) disappearance of borders that is so intuitively agreeable (to a social liberal) be possible without the overriding goal of socio-economic homogenisation (which should not imply egality). If one opposes the EU does that automatically make one an unrepentant nationalist?

To oppose the EU in the UK would generally involve aligning oneself with nationalists of all stripes - from moderate Tories to white supremacists via UKIP. It is something of a double bind that catches the most difficult questions for leftists today: how does one oppose neo-liberal economics while embracing broadly liberal values on questions of gender, sexuality, race and religion, etc.? The academic quasi-left of poststructuralists, deconstructionists and hermeneuticists have never come up with an answer for why their 'celebration' of contingency, openness and tolerance accords almost completely with the dominant centrist, liberal status quo. Of course, scratch many a pomo and you'll often find a economic Marxist underneath, which must lead them to declare: To economics, solidarity; to society, freedom and openness. Does this not preclude, as Žižek emphasises "political economy"? Two worlds, two rules - not unlike the nature/society fissure that social theory rests upon. Wherever shall the twain meet? The quasi-left has little or no interest. Where do we go from here?

Žižek continues from the above:

But, utopian as it may appear, the space is still open for another Europe: a re-politicized Europe, founded on a shared emancipatory project; the Europe that gave birth to ancient Greek democracy, to the French and October Revolutions. This is why one should avoid the temptation to react to the ongoing financial crisis with a retreat to fully sovereign nation-states, easy prey for free-floating international capital, which can play one state against the other. More than ever, the reply to every crisis should be more internationalist and universalist than the universality of global capital.

Not this Europe - another Europe. This seems to be the only way ahead. Damn the vicious, knuckle-dragging nationalists but equally damn and blast the suave, smug cosmopolites. Thing is: looks like this must be a Europe built from the ground up.

Levi's review of ch.1 of DeLanda's 'New Philosophy of Society'

Comments on: http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/09/08/drg-assemblages-against-totalities/

Two points:

First, DeLanda's key axis 'material/expressive:territorialisation/deterritorialisation' is very interesting and is quite a powerful starting point for a social ontology. However, I wonder how far the material/expressive dimension can be taken ontologically. It is a fairly easy distinction to maintain cognitively or epistemologically - indeed, it'd be difficult think without making this separation in some way - but just how deeply rooted can we say it is in reality? If we take DeLanda at his word then surely we must say that the gravitational attraction of two asteroids is a material relation while the attraction of a wasp to an orchid is an expressive relation. Moreover, this is a truth quite apart from any human interpretation of the situation - it is not a separation made for our convenience alone - it is how the universe is really divided up. I like the distinction but I'm not sold on its being an ontological as opposed to a cognitive or an epistemological distinction (that is if this is what DeLanda is really saying). I'm not fundamentally opposed to the argument but I think I need to know more about it before being at all convinced. (Admittedly this is the first book by DeLanda that I've read besides A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History, which is primarily empirical, so I may be just showing my ignorance.)

Second, I agree with Levi that territorialisation as DeLanda articulates is a very promising linking point with Latour's thought - particularly his notion of black boxes and his distinction between social complication and social complexity.

As Latour and Callon put it:

An actor grows with the number of relations he or she can put, as we say, in black boxes. A black box contains that which no longer needs to be reconsidered, those things whose contents have become a matter of indifference. The more elements one can place in black boxes – modes of thought, habits, forces and objects – the broader the construction one can raise. Of course, black boxes never remain fully closed or properly fastened … but macro-actors can do as if they were closed and dark. (Latour & Callon 1981, p.184-85)

The process of black boxing is, in Latour’s terms, a process of social complication to be distinguished from social complexity: “[C]omplexity [is] the simultaneous taking into account of many variables at once … complication [is] the piling of many simple steps one after the other.” (Latour 2000)

Something is ‘complicated’ when it is made of a succession of simple operations. … [T]he skills in an industrial society are those of simplification making social tasks less complex rather than making them more complex by comparison with other human and animal societies. By holding a variety of factors constant and sequentially negotiating one variable at a time, a stable complicated structure is created. Through extra-somatic resources employed in the process of social complication, units like multinational corporations, states and nations can be constituted[.] (Strum and Latour 1987)

In other words, social life starts out as being enormously complex; in this state societies can only be small, relatively ragtag bands of individuals. Social members (Latour uses the example of baboons as an example of social beings in an almost pure state of social complexity) have to work constantly to maintain their social relationships. No relations endure much beyond the immediate moment of interaction - this is an ethnomethodologist's society; a society whose bonds are constantly being remade on an inter-subjective level.

The more society becomes complicated (and this occurs when humans fold more and more non-humans into their increasingly 'entangled' society) the more social relations can be placed in black boxes, the more forces can be translated over greater distances with minimal distortion, the more tightly disciplined and closely knit humans become and the larger their collectives can grow; in this state societies can take almost any form - from larger tribes to city states to empires. Now relations endure far beyond the immediate moment of inter-subjective interaction and we can say, although Latour largely shuns this language, that social structures develop (and so social mereology becomes a relevant consideration).

The important point here is that Latour, like DeLanda (it seems) and unlike Deleuze and Guattari, doesn't hold territorialisation, organisation, disciplinisation or ordering in contempt so as to 'celebrate' the 'freedom' of deterritorialisation tout court. D&G were always begrudged to allow for anything positive in territorialisation, while for DeLanda and Latour these are more or less neutral terms, circumstance excepted. We can easily translate Latour's arguments here into DeLanda's terminology: territorialisation does not simply gather social beings into tighter, more disciplined, more regimented assemblages, it makes larger collectives possible. Therefore, simply 'celebrating' deterritorialisation as being inherently 'liberating' or whatever doesn't make much sense - we have to think much more about where social organisation must be carefully disciplined and where it must not. Sweeping statements either way are not helpful.


Latour, B. & Callon, M. 1981, "Unscrewing the Big Leviathan: How Actors Macro-Structure Reality and How Sociologists Help Them to Do So," In Advances in social theory and methodology: toward an integration of micro- and macro-sociologies, K. Knorr-Cetina & A. V. Cicourel, eds., Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Latour, B. Progress or Entanglement? Two models for the long term evolution of human civilisation. 2000: Unpublished Work: www.bruno-latour.fr/poparticles/poparticle/P-86-TAIWAN.pdf

Strum, S.S. & Latour, B. 1987. Redefining the Social Link - from Baboons to Humans. Social Science Information Sur Les Sciences Sociales, 26, (4)

Reflexivity

Already the DeLanda reading group is getting interesting with a lot of attention focused on the subject of reflexivity of social beings as distinct from natural beings as DeLanda outlines it in his introduction.

In short, DeLanda argues for a 'realist' conception of society where the social analyst's conceptions meet something intransient and real -- i.e. where the sociologist has a concrete referent object to analyse, not where said sociologist just builds up what society is through hypotheses, ideal types or signifiers. Having said this, DeLanda then immediately acknowledges that in some cases it is not this simple; he uses the case of a refugee as an example of an instance in which the social scientist may affect the referent object of study by altering the system of classification by which 'refugee' qua social subject is constituted. This happens and it is important; however, DeLanda argues, it is the exception rather than the rule. Most object of sociological inquiry are not reflexive in this manner (1-3).

On his blog, Alex Reid picks up this idea from Levi Bryant's introduction to DeLanda's introduction and writes:

[T]here is an interesting reflexive quality to a social realist ontology that it different from an ontology of natural objects. That is, calling a tree a tree doesn't impact what the tree is. Calling a plant a weed, doesn't change the plant (though it may change the way people react to the plant). On the other hand, the way we name things in a social milieu can be cybernetic. For example, students who become labelled as smart or troubled or whatever can tend to take on those roles.

In response Levi writes:

This reflexivity is one of the key features of the social. Social entities are capable of relating to the manner in which they are described, such that their description modifies their nature through this relation. If my doctor, for example, diagnoses me as suffering from depression, I might do research on depression and begin emulating some of these descriptions.

All of which reminds me of an essay called 'Social Thought and Social Action' by the philosopher Martin Hollis that appeared in a book called The Social Dimensions of Science in 1992. In particular I am reminded of what Hollis called 'double' and 'triple hermeneutics.'

"Guinea pigs do not read books", begins Hollis, "Biologists do." Humans react to their observation in a way that non-humans do not; in short, they are reflexive beings. This is a "universal social fact" (68). I think we can all agree that guinea pigs, in fact, do not read books. But this highlights something rather important. For Hollis the reflexivity of social beings divides the world in two: on the one hand, there are intelligent, reflexive humans who, when observed, necessitate 'double' or even 'triple hermeneutics' as we are then layering interpretations on interpretations on interpretations (hence leading to 'double' and 'triple hermeneutics'); on the other, there are mute, prostrate non-humans largely oblivious to their manipulation and utterly incapable of affecting the observer in response to the observer's manipulation.

Both Alex and Levi imply (perhaps they would not agree, but this is how it seems from the discussion so far) that reflexivity is a defining characteristic of sociality and that only social beings can be properly reflexive. DeLanda does perhaps imply something like thus but I do not think this is the right way to interpret him at this point.

DeLanda asserts that some social relationships are reflexive and others are not. Social relationships are reflexive when interpreting them affects the original phenomena. Writing policy guidelines for government refugee legislation is, therefore, a decidedly reflexive act as the category of 'refugee' is being reshaped as it is being observed. If I am sat watching a news report about refugees in Australia, for example, this is not reflexive in this way as my experience has no (or at least negligible) impact on the category of 'refugee.' Fair enough, but none of this restricts reflexivity to the social or, indeed, makes societies defined by reflexivity.

Firstly, DeLanda is clear that reflexivity is the exception rather than the rule. Secondly, I see no reason why, for example, an assemblage of gases locked in a relatively stable cycle of disequilibrium (so that the assemblage is constantly changing but cycles back to repeat itself relatively consistently) cannot be said to be 'reflexive'. Certainly it is not of the order of sentient beings attaining self awareness but nor is it totally different. Various beings in an assemblage react to other beings in such a way that all their properties are altered over time.

For Hollis humans are reflexive and non-humans are not, therefore humans and non-humans are completely different (reality is thereby duly bifurcated). For DeLanda some human relationships are reflexive and some are not and we already know that humans and non-humans are not altogether different. On that basis, I would rather put it this way: reflexivity is a possible property of all assemblages, not just social ones. Although social, human assemblages display unusually enhanced properties of reflexivity this does not place them ontologically apart from less reflexive or even un-reflexive assemblages. All can develop reflex mechanisms of one kind or another.

In this reading, human/human, human/non-human and non-human/non-human assemblages may all attain 'reflexivity' or they may not. It is an open question.

re: DeLanda Introduction

http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/09/01/reading-group-delanda-a-new-philosophy-of-society-anps-introduction/#comment-34041

I would certainly agree with mark about the introduction. I don’t really like the way DeLanda begins there, to be honest. The first few pages could have been lifted from any positivist sociologist in the twentieth century (and there have been more than a few). ‘Mind independence’ is in no way a new idea, it is the mainstream view for social scientists of all stripes. DeLanda’s innovation, it seems to me, is nowhere to be seen in the first few pages (though it abounds immediately after).

My criticism of his opening would be that the language with which he outlines his philosophy of science is far too similar to that of most mainstream (i.e. positivist) social theorists. Any given individual mind is not a necessary condition for the existence of society, although minds altogether are – that’s Durkheim’s shtick. It’s all valid enough but it’s not new. In short, DeLanda believes in social facts (a social fact: a social phenomenon that has “an existence of its own, independent of its individual manifestations.”)… Which is fair enough, any realist must believe so (at least in some form), but that is not where his innovation lies.

As soon as he gets into his assemblage theory we realise how different his approach is from any Durkheimians. We begin to see that, yes, minds in the plural are necessary conditions for the existence of society but that doesn’t mean so much. Water is a necessary condition for the existence of oceans, as are worms for the existence of rainforests. Human minds are just parts of vast ecosystems and, as important as they are, the mind independence of society is hardly reducible to social (or human) factors alone! Once we get into the assemblage theory we can think as widely as this, whereas the conventional social theory he flirts with would take collective human minds as (a) on a different (i.e. objective) ontological level to individual (i.e. subjective) minds and (b) as the only significant object of analysis.

But, that aside, this is an excellent introduction to DeLanda’s introduction and I’m looking forward to the rest of the reading!

Completed: 'Where’s the Action’ Latour, Ontology and World Politics

I finally finished writing the paper that I put an abstract up for a while ago. It turned out much longer than I expected. I have had to make up a severely redacted copy to present in Oxford next week. I shall post the full end product here for posterity.

'Where’s the Action’ Latour, Ontology and World Politics

The Onion on U.S. troop withdrawals

Sometimes only satire can cut to the core of things.

According to the president, the relative victory could be credited to a number of achieved benchmarks, depending upon how strict one's definition of "achieved" is. Obama pointed to the democratic election of an Iraqi parliament currently being held together by a thread; the streets of Iraq being slightly less hellish than they were in 2006; and the fact that women are now, for the most part, free to move around the country so long as they don't make a big production out of it.

Obama also noted that during the war more Iraqi insurgents died than American troops, which, he admitted, isn't necessarily the best way to determine a war's victor, but is nonetheless still preferable to the other way around.

...

Following the president's address, a car bomb ripped through an outdoor market in Baghdad killing eight Iraqis and wounding 32.

Pentagon officials also declared the mission, in a sense, kind of sort of accomplished Tuesday, citing the handful of Iraqi hearts and minds that may have been won over by the U.S. occupancy, and the fact that Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki had not yet been assassinated.

...

With the cessation of combat operations, and the declaration of what sources said couldn't be called a complete and utter failure because to do so would be to admit that the U.S. wasted $750 billion, lost 4,400 troops, and killed 100,000 Iraqi civilians for absolutely nothing, both Democrats and Republicans have attempted to take credit for the quasi-victory.

Two realisms

@ John (post 7)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Derrida again.

Nothing is completely present, there is no transcendental signified. Isn’t this above all what deconstruction is asking for and isn’t this a move beyond metaphysics as the metaphysics of presence? Isn’t this precisely a world without ultimate arche that would ground everything else and from which everything would originate, and without terms that are fully present and self-identical?

Something that has become quite plain from this debate is that when you say ‘realist’ (especially when coupled with ‘substance’!) a lot of people immediately hear contained within that term ‘unmediated, full, infallible, rational, foundational presence’ — which is unfortunate… It throws the proverbial baby out with the bathwater somewhat (i.e. it ditches all metaphysics so as to ditch metaphysics qua foundationalism).

The way Levi describes his own relationship with J.D. it would make sense to describe OOO as ‘post-Derridean’ in the sense that the main lessons of his work have been taken on board and are accepted but, some decades after deconstruction first broke onto the scene, is (refreshingly) no longer bound to Derrida’s method, his vocabulary or his goals.

re: "Realism is de rigueur" (pt. 2)

@ BB (post 53)

Thanks for the reading suggestion (G. Bennington “Not Half No End”), I’ll check it out.

[I]n the spirit of OOP, why not talk about the object (i.e. Derrida) and not your linguistic mediation of the object (i.e. the “tradition”?)

Is Derrida more of an ‘object’ than ‘the tradition’? Of course there is Derrida and then there is “Derrida” (just as in Latour’s Pasteurization of France there is Pasteur (the man) and “Pasteur” (the myth, the legend, the ‘genius’)).

It is difficult to disentangle these two things but certainly both were objects or collections of objects. Derrida is dead so he’s not much of an object anymore!

As for his texts, they remain objects but very much in the plural, translated into many different languages and printed thousands of times. Never mind the fact that they are intertextually related and cannot be understood qua philosophy texts outside of that relationality.

But aside from that, if you mean that I should just talk about the real Derrida rather than what I was taught about him (perhaps erroneously) then I must say that my impression upon reading him was that while he was ambiguously realist in his interviews, in his other texts he was straightforwardly anti-realist.

Derrida was extremely lucid in his interviews and rather difficult everywhere else and I suspect many of the citations arguing for his ‘realism’ came from the interviews rather than his other texts as there he let himself use declarative sentences.
But I must be clear: I am no Derrida expert — not even close, so I am not claiming any interpretative authority whatsoever. My point is more that if Levi and others take Derrida to be an anti-realist they are, in this respect, fully in agreement with the vast majority of the secondary literature on J.D.. Where they differ is that Levi and others think anti-realism is a bad thing and most Derrideans don’t.

This jars with the Derridean side of this ‘debate’ which broadly takes the line: ‘how can you think he is anti-realist? he obviously is a realist, just look at A, B, C, D…’. Well, it isn’t at all that obvious; if it was then fewer people would have made this mistake (if that is what it is).

My question therefore is: if Derrida was a realist why have so many people come to the opposite conclusion? Everybody is perfectly entitled to argue that he is a realist but I would like to hear why it is that so many intelligent people have made the mistake of thinking he isn’t (if it is a mistake).

It may well be that he has said anti-realist things and realist things at different times and in different texts. This seems most plausible. In this case we should ask if there is enough realism in Derrida for him to be usefully taken as a realist philosopher. That would seem to be the more pertinent debate.

re: "Realism is de rigueur"

If Derrida is truly a realist (and I think that this argument is very interesting) then 99.5% of the scholarship on his work for the past thirty years has completely misinterpreted him.

Certainly I was not taught this particular version of J.D. in grad school. To quote (verbatim) the professor who taught discourse analysis: “language relates only to language”. (Pretty unambiguous!) Perhaps I was misinformed by an oaf who knew nothing? Or perhaps, and I find this rather more plausible, I was taught the overwhelming, mainstream view present in every textbook and seminar syllabus I’ve ever seen. Perhaps this is why whenever anyone in the class was so naive as to suggest that human perception is impacted by non-human objects in fashions irreducible to individual or collective discursive representations of those objects they were swatted down with disdain?

So, why is it only now that the ‘real’ (i.e. ‘realist’) Derrida is there for all to see, so obvious and self-evident? For all those who consider Derrida to be a realist: great! But the first thing you have to do is to explain why almost everybody who has ever read Derrida has gotten the opposite impression.

Secondly: Does language relate to more than language? If there is no REFERENCE between words and worlds (nobody here is arguing that) then is there RELATION between words and worlds and, more importantly, are there worlds even without words?

re: Failed State of Political Theory

re: Failed State of Political Theory

A very interesting document on 'Failed States' is Foreign Policy's "Failed States Index":

It appears on their website with the tagline "The World's Most Vulnerable Nations -- And the Bad Guys Who Keep Them That Way". (Because we know that the world's problems are all down to evil black men, obviously.)

It ranges from the insensitive and oversimplifying to the overbearingly orientalist (not to say borderline racist), but that is the 'failed state' thesis all over.

Whoever heard of, instead of a 'failed' state, a 'successful' tribal structure? Presumably because such pre-modern notions are inherent failures -- only states can either fail OR succeed.

The state is the only game in town even when it's not.

There is a large body of literature on this topic within security studies but it hasn't made a dent on the neoliberal mainstream (which Foreign Policy embodies thoroughly).

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.

"Minotaurs"

The thing we commonly see with advocates of deconstruction and hermeneutics is, whenever faced with any criticism, is to call for a return to the careful reading of the text. But this is a trap. Whether intentional or not, it is a trap designed to insure that we never move out of the history of philosophy, an established canon, and the text.

This sort of thinking is also, I regret to report, increasingly widespread in social science and the influence here is even more corrosive because there is an added dimension: an avoidance of doing any actual research.

The 'there's nothing outside the text' crowd are a minority, yes, but they're a growing one; their cherished 'theory' provides a good excuse to never actually leave the campus or delve into primary research. A box set of The Wire and some theory textbooks and you're good to go. No need to go to the effort of speaking to 'real' people (what a regressive, rationalist notion!).

Of course I do not think that that textual analysis is a bad thing; rather, I am concerned that because of the narcissistic excesses of the 'textualists' the whole concept becomes ghettoised, making it extremely difficult for any fresh thinking to break through.

As a grad student or early career academic either you submit to the empiricist mainstream, which comes out in a rash at the sight of anything remotely 'continental', or shipwreck yourself on one of a handful of 'discourse friendly' institutional islands where you're not allowed to 'go outside the text' or make any positive claims about the world at all -- if it's beyond the horizon (of discourse) it doesn't exist!.

It's no wonder it all ends up going a bit 'Lord of the Flies' in these places.

PhD woes/lack of them

Peter Gratton's PhD experiences certainly seem to be exceptional. I'm not even sure if it is possible to finish a PhD inside eighteen months in the UK -- in political science at least. Most departments would not want to lose the funding for one thing (and so would surely attempt to refuse early finishers if at all possible) and any students with Research Council funding are funded for three years so it wouldn't make any sense for them to finish early even if they could -- they might as well work on something else in the meantime and finish the thesis off at the three year point.

I am not currently a PhD student but I have many friends that are and it seems that their supervisors expect them to work their thesis over and over several times before they actually commit to a topic or a question firmly, let alone complete the thing. This may be due to badly thought through ideas but it certainly seems that this is seen as being a formative experience that all but the most utterly exceptional students are expected to go through.

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.