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.

Reply to: A Brief Remark on Ideology

I think the problem with your interlocutor’s argument is less one of discourse vs. objectivity/realism or the overemphasis of signification as, to borrow a Latourism, argumentative ‘short-circuiting’. The argument certainly over-privileges ideology but I think that this is less to do with the character of ideology versus whatever else as with reductionism (which can itself take various forms besides ‘ideology’ per se).

So, there is a bridge on the road leading to a beach. The bridge is too low to allow buses past. Poor people tend to take buses therefore poor people’s access to the beach is unfairly limited by the bridge. No problems here.

Your interlocutor suggests that the bridge is somehow a materialization or encrustation of ideology – you stipulate, quite rightly, that, as it stands (so to speak), it is a bridge! No more, no less. It is not a canvas, or a cinema screen and human cognition is neither the paint nor the projection required to make these ontological tabula rasa ‘come alive’. The bridge needs construction and maintenance by human hands but it wants for nothing in the moment. In other words, its being subsists in the short term apart from ideology, though it relies upon humans to exist in the long term.

Does this mean that the bridge’s shortcomings (pun intended) have nothing to do with ideology? Not at all – but nor does it mean the contrary. To establish this one way or the other requires substantially more labour – one must interrogate the bridge’s history; go and find planning records, interview the architect (if still alive), find out who and what was involved with the planning of the height of the bridge. Perhaps it was the work of a cabal of right-wing politicians, perhaps it was the result of a negligent planning process that excluded the voices of poor people, perhaps it is a very old bridge and the materials it was built from limited its size. None of this is known a priori; to short-circuit the argument by attributing a pre-established, pre-fabricated cause is insufficient. Ideology may well have played a part in this situation, it may not have.

One could equally short-circuit the argument with ‘objectivism’ (of various sorts) rather than ideology yet all of that is to be established and it is always open.

The bridge is ideological and it is objective – which aspect of its being becomes relevant in any given moment requires labour.

So, the question for me is not so much whether the bridge is an ideological construction or an objective one so much as what connections can be traced and how much labour one wishes to put into the investigation. Its shortcomings may be ideological or not – it is an empirical question in the Latourian sense of that word.

That said, the act of reducing this situation to ideology clearly indicates a preference for idealism! But this cannot be countered with objectivism of whatever sort without what I would call, again with M. Latour, ‘experimental metaphysics’!

Middlesex 'University' Philosophy Dept. to Close

The Philogosphere is ablaze with indignation and I must confess, I feel a little sick: Middlesex 'University' (this institution no longer deserves the title) has announced its intention to close its entire philosophy department - a department that is arguably the most successful of any in the humanities in a post-1992 university; a department that is undoubtedly the finest place to study continental philosophy in the UK; a department that is both financially viable and as far as research quality goes, I had previously assumed, the jewel in the crown of an ambitious 'university'.

I have a personal connection to this insofar as I had hoped to study in this department next year - an ambition apparently thwarted.

The reason given for the closure is financial - that, while the department is financially viable, it is not as potentially profitable as other areas. If this is the real reason then this is mind bogglingly stupid and repulsive on every level that I can think of. Not only is it the most anti-intellectual thing I've ever heard but for anything calling itself a 'university', even if it is only as a matter of branding, to close its most widely recognised intellectual success story seems simply bizarre.

I can only assume that there is a little more to this than has, as of yet, met the eye. While philosophy at Middlesex has achieved worldwide recognition I can't imagine anyone working there being particularly open to the direction the 'university' as a whole has taken. See, for instance, the opening of a Dubai campus and the Dean's cringe-inducing videos showing how business and academia can 'help each other out'. Might the decision have been made more on the basis of this useful asset being a long term hinderance? It seems possible. A dark day for (what remains of) my faith in academia!


http://savemdxphil.wordpress.com/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/29/philosophy-minorities-middleqsex-university-logic

Beauty pt.1

By asking the question of beauty and then fixing our gaze on art are we not selling ourselves, as human beings, far short? Beauty is unimaginable and it is personal. Deeply, deeply personal. I am reminded -- this word is key -- of a childhood memory. Why, I don't know. But I am. I am reminded of my grandfather's war medals. Some day I will inherit them. What could these strange lumps of metal mean to me? More or less a socialist! More or less a pacifist! A child of the '80s no less! They mean to me a great deal, in fact. Not that I was aware of this until a moment ago. Not until I shed a tear writing this... I am reminded of the dusty box in which they were kept, underneath old papers of what meaning I do not know. In this memory my father is showing them to me and whether by instruction or intuition I know where they came from and how important they are. If this happened precisely as I recall ... I don't recall... -- it is unimportant. The moment is saturated with sentiment and no little pathos. My father had, on the whole, a poor relationship with his -- ours is far better but to a large extent distant. This recaptured -- or should it be reconstructed? -- memory turns sharply on one point: though my father was frequently ashamed of his father with his conservatism, his casual racism, simply his age, there is no mistaking that in this moment, in this memory, in his eyes he is so, unmistakably, inarticulably proud. From father to son and father to son, did Freud ever explore this inarticulable sense of pride? And what consequence this memory 'politically'? Surely I am bound by distanciation in time and space from the blood soaked battlefields of the prior century on which these aforementioned strange lumps of metal gained meaning to reject all manner of attachment to these celebrations of nationhood and bloody murder dressed as sacrifice? Are we not iconoclasts? Are we not out to expose false idols? To show the strangeness of these strange lumps of metal? To show how power grows, disseminates, encapsulates, inculcates, totalises? As if we could... How am I to understand this memory buried so deep yet springing to mind so suddenly and now so presently? What was my Proustian trigger? Not tea, not cake not falling backwards off an uneven cobble stone! Causality is clearly a ridiculous notion in this case. What can I say except that this is beautiful? Terrible but beautiful. Oddly shameful but beautiful. Impossible but beautiful. Tragic, riven with tragedy, but glowing with beauty -- a dark beauty, a beauty only barely apprehended through blurry, tearful eyes. It is precisely my inability to make any kind of sense of this ridiculous event that makes it beautiful. I am, it seems, attached at my core, at my gut, to war, nationalism and history. Who knew?! How am I to approach a beauty so fragile? Will it not shatter purely by the force of my approach? This seems likely. And is this not beauty itself? By definition elusive?

Will, then, beauty save the world? I feel on the basis of this brief and self-indulgent introspection I can answer this question most clearly: beauty is no army; it cannot be mobilised; it cannot be deployed; it cannot be disciplined. Yet beauty emerges from all these things! From war, from the state, from discipline (though certainly not these things alone -- but from all things)! It has attached itself to me -- a most unlikely victim! And, as this is a state of politics, I am quite sure that I am not alone. No, beauty cannot save the world because the world can only be made with tools that endure and shape our grasp. But the world is beautiful -- and we might often wish it was not. It is and this is nearly all there is to be said about it. Beauty is not a saviour but it is a reprieve. It is an island, not a continent. Empathy, not essence. It is a moment, not a world. A picture, not a story. And lest this become a sermon, let us be thankful just for that.

Something gains substance by its unique relational emplotment not in spite of it. A substantial thing is related to but non-identical with anything else. The more unique the more coherent; the more coherent the more substantial; the more substantial the more unique (in a spiral-form rather than a circular sense with the missing dimension being relationality).

Latour's Substantiality

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

On Latour's Reflections on Critique

Denunciations of ‘fact’ may fall into the same trap as their opponents – they regard a ‘critique’ of a ‘fact’ as a significant event. Both sides seem unable to see facts as something produced rather than in/adequated, though the critical camp stray closer to this terrain.

Bruno Latour points out that a physics paper that would, if widely read, revolutionise its field will have no effect if, as is the fate of most scientific papers, it remains entirely unread. It contains, then, no truth that transcends its particular emplotment in space, time and matter; if read it might be hailed as the new Truth, but unread, devoid of any and all alliances it can be no such thing. Does not the drive to critique fall into this same trap? To submit an ‘essentialism’ to critique is seen, in some quarters, as an inherently valuable event. ‘Take that substance metaphysics!’ But if this critique has no effect – if no one reads it – what critique (as a kind of event rather than a theme or genre of literature) has actually occurred? Does a largely unread critique have more, less or the same existence as a largely unread fact? If being is an effect of language and language alone can the relative expediency of an unread critique or fact over a read one be ascertained?

Plainly, to switch from a demand for adequation to a demand for inadequation is insufficient. Hitherto ‘critical scholars’ have just ‘critiqued’ the world; the point is to change it (I thought we all knew this by now).

"Mark Fisher and Mike Watson: Dialogue on Free Education, Capitalism, and its Alternatives"

Mark Fisher at Indieoma

For years, workers in education have been bullied by a management telling them that they are in an ivory tower, protected from the hard realities of business, and that educational institutions really ought to be run more like businesses. Now we have seen that businesses can’t be run as businesses – and we in public service will have to pay the price.