The once vibrant and invigorating spirit of poststructuralism has ossified under the force of its own oscillations; flung to the 'margins' so far and so often, it has hardened into a dogma as sedimented and inflexible as any foundations that it once shook. Indeed, the 'margins' once occupied by self-declared 'dissidents' no longer exist. Today there are simply mainland empires and archipelago empires.
The cog-grinding, smog-belching industrial monolith of the positivist mainstream is as imperious, self-certain and xenophobic as ever; yet, fringing the shore, harboured on islets, cays and atolls, Lilliputian hegemons rule with fists no less iron than the grand girder-smelters of the mainland. The poststructuralist’s archipelago empire can lay claim to no sprawling plains or ragged mountain ranges but within their own jurisdictions – certain journals, particular departments, chosen conferences and prescriptive seminars – their place is established, safe, proud, grey, boring, unquestioning, self-assured and fecund as dust.
The deterritorialisers have become territorialised.
The margins mirror the mainstream in miniature.
What once shook needs shaking.
Wednesday, 13 June 2012
Pre-fab Post-ies; More on Critique
Will of 'Untied Threads' just wrote a critical but also very generous comment on an old post of mine. It was a post on critique and poststructuralism in International Relations discourse. He suggests, among other things, that I treat Richard Ashley unfairly.
In response, let me say firstly that I like Richard Ashley's work; I think that it has been very important. The work that he (and others) have done since the 1980s drawing on hermeneutics, deconstruction and so on was important at the time and remains of value today. I was trying to write in quite a polemical style in that post so maybe I sounded a little more damning than I intended!
To be more clear: the problem I have with Ashley et al. from a contemporary viewpoint is that while hermeneutic or deconstructive critiques had a great critical impact in the 1980s they don't any more. Those ideas have become, formalised, institutionalised, standardised. As always happens, those angry, young academics grew up. They went from 'sticking it to the man' to being 'the man'!
Today poststructuralism is one of a number of 'approaches' or 'theoretical frameworks' that a student can adopt or enact as a preconceived, prefabricated scheme. It has become an orthodoxy of its own. While the critiques were originally opening up 'thinking space' by taking apart hegemonic discourses, their own presuppositions have become naturalised, are not internally challenged and are frankly stultifying. These presuppositions have become the entrenched dogma of Poststructuralism (with a capital P).
For this reason we desperately need critiques of those critiques -- and that requires that we think hard about what it means to be 'critical' in the first place. That was the basic point of my post. People throw around that word without ever making clear what it means. For some it seems to be little more than saying damning things about the state, or capitalism, or war, or patriarchy or whatever. Which is all well and good as far as it goes but it doesn't go far enough.
The two meanings of 'critical' should be drawn together much more closely. If critique fails to make its object critical (i.e. unstable) then it's pointless. It doesn't deserve to be called 'critique' at all. Being 'critical' has become more of a pose or a demeanour than anything substantial. It's a social signifier, a territorial marker, a pin badge, a way that people identify with a particular kind of academic self-identity.
What all of this results in is the endless the regurgitation of the same old arguments about hegemonic discourses, logocentrism, speech acts and the rest. It's time for serious change in our modes of thought. There are many virtues of the poststructuralist heritage that should be retained but there must also be deep rooted and damning investigation of the flaws and vices. We shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater but equally we shouldn't hold back in our critiques.
Vis-à-vis science: my point was simply that, in 'critical' IR discourse, 'science' is often taken to be the epitome of un-critical, mainstream, hegemonic thought. Science becomes a synonym for positivism or the grumpy kind of Enlightenment rationalism that poststructuralists so love to eviscerate. On the contrary, in my view, science is inherently critical. Scientific knowledge (in scientific practice, if not in the popular imagination) is very unstable, often changing and always vulnerable to change.
That was the general point but, more specifically, I was asking: what actually induces a 'critical state' in a natural scientific discourse? What makes things critical? What generates the critical energy, the destabilising force? Well, the claims of scientists, for sure. One scientist proclaiming or disclaiming the findings of another in the myriad ways they do so. But the objects of science can also render a discourse unstable.
When a lab experiment yields unexpected results 99 times out of 100 this is the result of user error. But very occasionally it is because of some hitherto undetected phenomenon, some real thing that is, unprompted, by its own powers, producing a result, a perturbation, an effect. Of course it takes much careful work on behalf of scientists to distinguish error and noise from these little kernels of discovery but the point is that scientific objects have the power to render our knowledge about them unstable. Indeed, this is the whole point of scientific discourse: to elicit information from things themselves, not from what we say or what we think we know about things. This information never transcends our interpretation of it -- we must always, necessarily translate the findings -- but that doesn't mean that objects do not elicit this information or that we cannot be realists about them.
In my original post when I say 'object' I am of course playing on the difference in meaning between that word as a noun and a verb -- 'an object' and 'to object.' It's Bruno Latour's play on words to say that an object is something that objects to forces that engage it. Scientific objects are objects because they object to the 'trials' (another Latourian term meaning experiments or tests) that scientists put them through. They act and react in ways that is irreducible to the forces placed upon them by human subjects. Hence they are real. Hence we really know things about them. Hence endless discourse analysis cannot do them justice because such analysis can only ever examine the forces tht humans place upon things, not the things themselves.
And hence poststructuralism is inadequate. Scientific objects are objects because they can object and as such render critical the knowledge with and through which we regard them. They cannot determine what we come think about them but they are real elements in the epistemic process. Contrariwise, there is no place for non-human objects in poststructuralism except as blank canvases for the projection of symbols, language or meaning. Objects might be accepted to exist but they are of no real importance, of no real reality. In discourse analysis or deconstruction the only real things that are permitted to object or to have effects are signs, signifiers, structural linguistic relations and so on. This is idealism with an alibi -- things in the background that do nothing, are of no consequence and exist only so that people can say: 'Hey, look! Over there! I'm no idealist!'.
And that's what's wrong with it all. That's why the 'thinking space' that they once opened up is now stultifying. That's why they're 'agoraphobic' -- agora being etymologically associated with 'thing' meaning the space where people get together and work things through.
This is getting rather long now so I'll try and wrap things up by answering Wills points more specifically!
Objects demand interpretation precisely because they are irreducible to interpretation and possess realities and capacities of their own. You mention that demand/interpret in this sense becomes a dichotomy. I honestly don't think that that's a problem. There's nothing wrong with dichotomies so long as they are acknowledged to be instrumental, useful things, not simply the way reality is structured. I could articulate basically the same point without using those terms and so without that dichotomy. I just think that it's one useful way of making the point. We constantly dichotomise things in thought; the problem is not with dichotomies as such but rather with the notion that our ideas describe the very structure of reality rather than our ideas being real things that interact with other real things in a common world.
I am familiar with the Copenhagen school, yes. I read that essay you mention but it was a few years ago. I'd need to take another look at it to comment on it now!
Vis-à-vis Heidegger: from my Latourian perspective Herr Heidegger is more part of the problem than the solution. It isn't enough to say that we exist with other things, that we cannot think of ourselves except as embodied beings, enmeshed in other beings, etc. All of that is true and pertinent but Heidegger prevents us from going that step further and thinking about things apart from human being (which, for Heidegger, is basically being itself). Of course we can never truly, certainly know what things are like apart from ourselves since we can never transcend interpretation or perspective but that should not stop us thinking about the autonomy of things, thinking of things as they may be apart from us.
Poststructuralism makes this extra step impossible. That is why it must be destroyed!
In response, let me say firstly that I like Richard Ashley's work; I think that it has been very important. The work that he (and others) have done since the 1980s drawing on hermeneutics, deconstruction and so on was important at the time and remains of value today. I was trying to write in quite a polemical style in that post so maybe I sounded a little more damning than I intended!
To be more clear: the problem I have with Ashley et al. from a contemporary viewpoint is that while hermeneutic or deconstructive critiques had a great critical impact in the 1980s they don't any more. Those ideas have become, formalised, institutionalised, standardised. As always happens, those angry, young academics grew up. They went from 'sticking it to the man' to being 'the man'!
Today poststructuralism is one of a number of 'approaches' or 'theoretical frameworks' that a student can adopt or enact as a preconceived, prefabricated scheme. It has become an orthodoxy of its own. While the critiques were originally opening up 'thinking space' by taking apart hegemonic discourses, their own presuppositions have become naturalised, are not internally challenged and are frankly stultifying. These presuppositions have become the entrenched dogma of Poststructuralism (with a capital P).
For this reason we desperately need critiques of those critiques -- and that requires that we think hard about what it means to be 'critical' in the first place. That was the basic point of my post. People throw around that word without ever making clear what it means. For some it seems to be little more than saying damning things about the state, or capitalism, or war, or patriarchy or whatever. Which is all well and good as far as it goes but it doesn't go far enough.
The two meanings of 'critical' should be drawn together much more closely. If critique fails to make its object critical (i.e. unstable) then it's pointless. It doesn't deserve to be called 'critique' at all. Being 'critical' has become more of a pose or a demeanour than anything substantial. It's a social signifier, a territorial marker, a pin badge, a way that people identify with a particular kind of academic self-identity.
What all of this results in is the endless the regurgitation of the same old arguments about hegemonic discourses, logocentrism, speech acts and the rest. It's time for serious change in our modes of thought. There are many virtues of the poststructuralist heritage that should be retained but there must also be deep rooted and damning investigation of the flaws and vices. We shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater but equally we shouldn't hold back in our critiques.
Vis-à-vis science: my point was simply that, in 'critical' IR discourse, 'science' is often taken to be the epitome of un-critical, mainstream, hegemonic thought. Science becomes a synonym for positivism or the grumpy kind of Enlightenment rationalism that poststructuralists so love to eviscerate. On the contrary, in my view, science is inherently critical. Scientific knowledge (in scientific practice, if not in the popular imagination) is very unstable, often changing and always vulnerable to change.
That was the general point but, more specifically, I was asking: what actually induces a 'critical state' in a natural scientific discourse? What makes things critical? What generates the critical energy, the destabilising force? Well, the claims of scientists, for sure. One scientist proclaiming or disclaiming the findings of another in the myriad ways they do so. But the objects of science can also render a discourse unstable.
When a lab experiment yields unexpected results 99 times out of 100 this is the result of user error. But very occasionally it is because of some hitherto undetected phenomenon, some real thing that is, unprompted, by its own powers, producing a result, a perturbation, an effect. Of course it takes much careful work on behalf of scientists to distinguish error and noise from these little kernels of discovery but the point is that scientific objects have the power to render our knowledge about them unstable. Indeed, this is the whole point of scientific discourse: to elicit information from things themselves, not from what we say or what we think we know about things. This information never transcends our interpretation of it -- we must always, necessarily translate the findings -- but that doesn't mean that objects do not elicit this information or that we cannot be realists about them.
In my original post when I say 'object' I am of course playing on the difference in meaning between that word as a noun and a verb -- 'an object' and 'to object.' It's Bruno Latour's play on words to say that an object is something that objects to forces that engage it. Scientific objects are objects because they object to the 'trials' (another Latourian term meaning experiments or tests) that scientists put them through. They act and react in ways that is irreducible to the forces placed upon them by human subjects. Hence they are real. Hence we really know things about them. Hence endless discourse analysis cannot do them justice because such analysis can only ever examine the forces tht humans place upon things, not the things themselves.
And hence poststructuralism is inadequate. Scientific objects are objects because they can object and as such render critical the knowledge with and through which we regard them. They cannot determine what we come think about them but they are real elements in the epistemic process. Contrariwise, there is no place for non-human objects in poststructuralism except as blank canvases for the projection of symbols, language or meaning. Objects might be accepted to exist but they are of no real importance, of no real reality. In discourse analysis or deconstruction the only real things that are permitted to object or to have effects are signs, signifiers, structural linguistic relations and so on. This is idealism with an alibi -- things in the background that do nothing, are of no consequence and exist only so that people can say: 'Hey, look! Over there! I'm no idealist!'.
And that's what's wrong with it all. That's why the 'thinking space' that they once opened up is now stultifying. That's why they're 'agoraphobic' -- agora being etymologically associated with 'thing' meaning the space where people get together and work things through.
This is getting rather long now so I'll try and wrap things up by answering Wills points more specifically!
Objects demand interpretation precisely because they are irreducible to interpretation and possess realities and capacities of their own. You mention that demand/interpret in this sense becomes a dichotomy. I honestly don't think that that's a problem. There's nothing wrong with dichotomies so long as they are acknowledged to be instrumental, useful things, not simply the way reality is structured. I could articulate basically the same point without using those terms and so without that dichotomy. I just think that it's one useful way of making the point. We constantly dichotomise things in thought; the problem is not with dichotomies as such but rather with the notion that our ideas describe the very structure of reality rather than our ideas being real things that interact with other real things in a common world.
I am familiar with the Copenhagen school, yes. I read that essay you mention but it was a few years ago. I'd need to take another look at it to comment on it now!
Vis-à-vis Heidegger: from my Latourian perspective Herr Heidegger is more part of the problem than the solution. It isn't enough to say that we exist with other things, that we cannot think of ourselves except as embodied beings, enmeshed in other beings, etc. All of that is true and pertinent but Heidegger prevents us from going that step further and thinking about things apart from human being (which, for Heidegger, is basically being itself). Of course we can never truly, certainly know what things are like apart from ourselves since we can never transcend interpretation or perspective but that should not stop us thinking about the autonomy of things, thinking of things as they may be apart from us.
Poststructuralism makes this extra step impossible. That is why it must be destroyed!
Thursday, 7 June 2012
More on Harman and In/Civility
Further comment on: http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-to-graham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/
Baklazh, I can see where you're coming from with Graham's latest post -- it certainly doesn't exude temperance and it does come across as something of a missive. 'Idiotic' is rather an undiplomatic choice of words but then again he didn't call anyone in particular AN idiot, he called the particular idea under consideration 'idiotic.' Hence this was not strictly an ad hominem attack -- it was an attack on an idea. Contrast this with Alex's original post which was extremely personal and almost completely ad hominem...
It's worth bearing in mind that pretty much exactly the same critique that Alex constructs above has been leveled at these guys again and again over the past few years. Therefore, they're not necessarily responding to anyone in particular when they say things like this. It's the idea in abstraction, not any particular enunciation of it. It might be new for some readers but for them it's a zombie meme that just keeps coming back again and again -- hence the frustration and the terse responses.
It's unfortunate that that blogging lends itself so much to this kind of brusqueness. The 'filters' that normally crop up automatically in conversation by being in the same room as someone, looking someone in the eye -- basic civility -- often fail to arise when simply sat at a computer facing a bunch of words. That said, this isn't really an excuse. We shouldn't just say 'boys will be boys'. Bad behaviour is bad behaviour.
But then it's not always easy to judge beforehand where the line is between being pointed and being rude. I hope that my own choice of words from my post above -- principally 'maelstrom of nonsense' -- weren't taken personally by anyone but frankly I stand by the sentiment as nothing anyone has said has changed my mind. We all owe it to each other to be civil but not to the point where we cease to be honest.
And, in the spirit of honesty:
While I find a great deal wrong with OOO/OOP, etc., the above arguments are badly constructed. They stem from a refusal to examine the relationship between ontology and politics, taking the two to be fused, axiomatically, and assuming that anyone who says otherwise must be some reactionary, rationalist, 'liberal bourgeois' fossil.
The whole original post stems from making graspingly inferred assumptions about Mr Harman's personal political convictions, or lack thereof. Harman apparently had a 'better the devil you know' attitude towards Mubarak before the revolution. That is his sin. Fine. And we are to infer an entire worldview from this kernel. Very well.
However, a lot of the conclusions drawn from this just don't make much sense to me. For instance: "if everyone in Cairo were clones of Harman, the revolution would never have happened." What this fails to mention is that Graham is not Egyptian! He's a foreigner! He lives there but frankly Egyptian democracy is none of his business. He's not a part of it and from what I recall Egyptians weren't that keen on outside influence during the revolution. If he spent all his time spouting off about what Egyptians should or should not be doing I'm quite sure that the critique would be turned around by 180 degrees and he'd be accused of being an imperialist, forcing his ideas upon others!
In other words, while the hypothetical is undoubtedly true it's equally unfair and beside the point. For me, as a student of international relations, this critique (so typical of political theory) ignores the fact that we live in a world of political multiplicity. We're not embedded in a continuous, unbroken fabric of political solidarity and praxis. For better or worse, our actual political agency is relative to our membership of political collectives to which we are not necessarily geographically local. Judging a person for non-participation in a process that has no real place for them seems harsh.
Moreover, Graham's pre-revolution attitude ('better the devil you know') was shared by vast numbers of Egyptians -- including Egyptians who eventually participated in the revolution. So, sure, if absolutely everyone held that attitude nothing could have happened but, evidently, the prevalence of such an attitude is not necessarily an impassable barrier to revolution. Are we to label everyone outside the vanguard apolitical, bourgeois apologists? I'd advise against it.
That said, while Alex is probably reading a little too much into this one interview I think 'liberal bourgeois' probably does sum up Graham's attitude, at least judging from what he's published. He might not disagree. But, you know, so what? What difference does it make? Does that do anything whatsoever to discredit his philosophy? Not necessarily.
What Alex needs to specify is why political predilections are of primary importance in assessing the validity or verity of an ontological argument. That they are primary is simply assumed. There is no substance to this assumption at all. THAT is the crux of the philosophical disagreement, quite apart from the sturm und drang of personal slights, perceived and misperceived.
"Harman’s self-stated goal is to remove politics from ontology, creating a new kind of pure ontology in which, as he says in the interview, philosophy should not be the handmaid of anything else."
Does Alex mean to suggest that philosophy SHOULD be the handmaiden of politics? If so I'd genuinely love to read the reasoning behind that. I completely disagree but I'd like to read an actual argument specifically in favour of this position. I've heard it said many, many times but never heard anyone actually say WHY. Why is politics the master signifier? Why is politics the trump card?
If only someone would make this case rather than alternating between being rude to other people and complaining when they're rude back -- then we'd be getting somewhere.
As I've mentioned a few times, the critique Alex levels only makes sense if politics and ontology are fused -- if ontology is and must be determined by political considerations. If they're not fused then political reasons cannot in and of themselves sunder ontological claims. And if they're not fused then conflating political personhood and ontological object-hood is just a basic category error.
In my previous comment above I went through a few ways in which politics and ontology can be separated without pretending to create some impenetrable firewall between the two. I won't repeat myself too much but it suffices to say that the 'purity' of ontology is a complex question, not one to be hastily judged one way or the other without consideration.
Friends, some consideration, please!
Let's both be a bit nicer to each other and not take others' criticism of our ideas so personally.
Baklazh, I can see where you're coming from with Graham's latest post -- it certainly doesn't exude temperance and it does come across as something of a missive. 'Idiotic' is rather an undiplomatic choice of words but then again he didn't call anyone in particular AN idiot, he called the particular idea under consideration 'idiotic.' Hence this was not strictly an ad hominem attack -- it was an attack on an idea. Contrast this with Alex's original post which was extremely personal and almost completely ad hominem...
It's worth bearing in mind that pretty much exactly the same critique that Alex constructs above has been leveled at these guys again and again over the past few years. Therefore, they're not necessarily responding to anyone in particular when they say things like this. It's the idea in abstraction, not any particular enunciation of it. It might be new for some readers but for them it's a zombie meme that just keeps coming back again and again -- hence the frustration and the terse responses.
It's unfortunate that that blogging lends itself so much to this kind of brusqueness. The 'filters' that normally crop up automatically in conversation by being in the same room as someone, looking someone in the eye -- basic civility -- often fail to arise when simply sat at a computer facing a bunch of words. That said, this isn't really an excuse. We shouldn't just say 'boys will be boys'. Bad behaviour is bad behaviour.
But then it's not always easy to judge beforehand where the line is between being pointed and being rude. I hope that my own choice of words from my post above -- principally 'maelstrom of nonsense' -- weren't taken personally by anyone but frankly I stand by the sentiment as nothing anyone has said has changed my mind. We all owe it to each other to be civil but not to the point where we cease to be honest.
And, in the spirit of honesty:
While I find a great deal wrong with OOO/OOP, etc., the above arguments are badly constructed. They stem from a refusal to examine the relationship between ontology and politics, taking the two to be fused, axiomatically, and assuming that anyone who says otherwise must be some reactionary, rationalist, 'liberal bourgeois' fossil.
The whole original post stems from making graspingly inferred assumptions about Mr Harman's personal political convictions, or lack thereof. Harman apparently had a 'better the devil you know' attitude towards Mubarak before the revolution. That is his sin. Fine. And we are to infer an entire worldview from this kernel. Very well.
However, a lot of the conclusions drawn from this just don't make much sense to me. For instance: "if everyone in Cairo were clones of Harman, the revolution would never have happened." What this fails to mention is that Graham is not Egyptian! He's a foreigner! He lives there but frankly Egyptian democracy is none of his business. He's not a part of it and from what I recall Egyptians weren't that keen on outside influence during the revolution. If he spent all his time spouting off about what Egyptians should or should not be doing I'm quite sure that the critique would be turned around by 180 degrees and he'd be accused of being an imperialist, forcing his ideas upon others!
In other words, while the hypothetical is undoubtedly true it's equally unfair and beside the point. For me, as a student of international relations, this critique (so typical of political theory) ignores the fact that we live in a world of political multiplicity. We're not embedded in a continuous, unbroken fabric of political solidarity and praxis. For better or worse, our actual political agency is relative to our membership of political collectives to which we are not necessarily geographically local. Judging a person for non-participation in a process that has no real place for them seems harsh.
Moreover, Graham's pre-revolution attitude ('better the devil you know') was shared by vast numbers of Egyptians -- including Egyptians who eventually participated in the revolution. So, sure, if absolutely everyone held that attitude nothing could have happened but, evidently, the prevalence of such an attitude is not necessarily an impassable barrier to revolution. Are we to label everyone outside the vanguard apolitical, bourgeois apologists? I'd advise against it.
That said, while Alex is probably reading a little too much into this one interview I think 'liberal bourgeois' probably does sum up Graham's attitude, at least judging from what he's published. He might not disagree. But, you know, so what? What difference does it make? Does that do anything whatsoever to discredit his philosophy? Not necessarily.
What Alex needs to specify is why political predilections are of primary importance in assessing the validity or verity of an ontological argument. That they are primary is simply assumed. There is no substance to this assumption at all. THAT is the crux of the philosophical disagreement, quite apart from the sturm und drang of personal slights, perceived and misperceived.
"Harman’s self-stated goal is to remove politics from ontology, creating a new kind of pure ontology in which, as he says in the interview, philosophy should not be the handmaid of anything else."
Does Alex mean to suggest that philosophy SHOULD be the handmaiden of politics? If so I'd genuinely love to read the reasoning behind that. I completely disagree but I'd like to read an actual argument specifically in favour of this position. I've heard it said many, many times but never heard anyone actually say WHY. Why is politics the master signifier? Why is politics the trump card?
If only someone would make this case rather than alternating between being rude to other people and complaining when they're rude back -- then we'd be getting somewhere.
As I've mentioned a few times, the critique Alex levels only makes sense if politics and ontology are fused -- if ontology is and must be determined by political considerations. If they're not fused then political reasons cannot in and of themselves sunder ontological claims. And if they're not fused then conflating political personhood and ontological object-hood is just a basic category error.
In my previous comment above I went through a few ways in which politics and ontology can be separated without pretending to create some impenetrable firewall between the two. I won't repeat myself too much but it suffices to say that the 'purity' of ontology is a complex question, not one to be hastily judged one way or the other without consideration.
Friends, some consideration, please!
Let's both be a bit nicer to each other and not take others' criticism of our ideas so personally.
Sunday, 3 June 2012
Maelstrom of Nonsense
Comment on: http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-to-graham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/
Wow. Quite a maelstrom of nonsense we've got going on here! Difficult to know quite where to jump in.
Might as well respond to Alex's last comment: "if ontology and politics are entirely separate domains" -- nobody seems to be making this claim. Ontology and politics aren't 'domains.' Ontology is the philosophical study of what is, politics is the process through which people form, contest and contest the formation of collective human being. 'Realm' [or domain] doesn't seem to be an appropriate term. It implies a divided spatiality that is difficult to conceive of and it implies a juridical separation that just misses the point. They are simply different practices practiced in different places for different reasons. They're different things.
The claim being made is that accounts of what is (i.e. ontology) should not (a) be determined by politics and cannot (b) determine any political position, practice or possibility.
This does NOT mean that ontology and politics are hermetically sealed realities, totally parallel to each other. In fact they meet in a variety of ways. To describe but a few:
-- Firstly, our accounts of what is profoundly shape how we understand ourselves, the world we live in and without an ontology all politics -- and all life, really -- would be literally unthinkable. Moreover, any political movement that lacked any grasp on reality would fail immediately. In fact it could never come together in the first place. Therefore, politics presupposes ontology.
-- Secondly, while accounts of being cannot determine any political thought or action that might derive from them there are certainly some ontological claims that are heavily politically loaded; e.g. Thatcher's claim that there is no such thing as society. Ontology can be politicised, it can be politically significant but that doesn't make ontology altogether political. You can only politicise something that isn't first of all political.
-- Thirdly, while we might say that there is being with no human beings there surely is no ontology without ontologists. Ontologists engage in ontology and produce this ontology, criticise that ontology, etc. Ontology is the name of their practice not their research subject (that's 'being'). Therefore, as fallible, embodied, emplaced, 'thrown' human persons no one should ever claim that their ontological pronouncements issue from a non-position, outside all social influence or historical particularity (or politics). Anyone claiming such a thing in this day and age would be a comical fossil at best and a tyrant at worst. Fortunately, neither Harman nor Bryant nor anyone affiliated with them make this claim.
Politics and ontology can be intertwined in many ways but they're still different things and one can quite easily talk all day about ontology without getting into politics. Ontology readily bumps up against politics and is easily politicised but that does not mean that it SHOULD be politicised -- and it certainly shouldn't be politicised all the time.
So, our accounts of what is (our ontologies) must be generated, influenced and informed by much, much MORE than politics alone. This doesn't make these things hermetically sealed discursive jurisdictions -- far from it. But it DOES mean that any given politicisation of ontology must be undertaken FOR A REASON. It is not the default position.
Ontology isn't always already political -- nothing is. Nothing is political which isn't first politicised.
And this isn't 'apolitical,' by the way. The really apolitical position is that which says that 'everything is political' as if politics were some smoggy, unbreakable shroud enveloping absolutely every being, everywhere from miserable cradle to wretched grave.
Politics is a pretty inglorious business most of the time. I really don't understand why so many people take it as the master signifier to end all master signifiers. I'm really rather GLAD that politics is not omnipresent. A world in which it was would be a true dystopia. Fortunately it only exists as a utopia of the foolish.
And as for the claims that granting reality to corporations justifies their political enfranchisement ... well, my mind boggles at that. That would only be the case if ontology and politics were fused. Only then would the granting of ontological thing-hood simultaneously be the granting of political personhood.
And they're not fused...
Wow. Quite a maelstrom of nonsense we've got going on here! Difficult to know quite where to jump in.
Might as well respond to Alex's last comment: "if ontology and politics are entirely separate domains" -- nobody seems to be making this claim. Ontology and politics aren't 'domains.' Ontology is the philosophical study of what is, politics is the process through which people form, contest and contest the formation of collective human being. 'Realm' [or domain] doesn't seem to be an appropriate term. It implies a divided spatiality that is difficult to conceive of and it implies a juridical separation that just misses the point. They are simply different practices practiced in different places for different reasons. They're different things.
The claim being made is that accounts of what is (i.e. ontology) should not (a) be determined by politics and cannot (b) determine any political position, practice or possibility.
This does NOT mean that ontology and politics are hermetically sealed realities, totally parallel to each other. In fact they meet in a variety of ways. To describe but a few:
-- Firstly, our accounts of what is profoundly shape how we understand ourselves, the world we live in and without an ontology all politics -- and all life, really -- would be literally unthinkable. Moreover, any political movement that lacked any grasp on reality would fail immediately. In fact it could never come together in the first place. Therefore, politics presupposes ontology.
-- Secondly, while accounts of being cannot determine any political thought or action that might derive from them there are certainly some ontological claims that are heavily politically loaded; e.g. Thatcher's claim that there is no such thing as society. Ontology can be politicised, it can be politically significant but that doesn't make ontology altogether political. You can only politicise something that isn't first of all political.
-- Thirdly, while we might say that there is being with no human beings there surely is no ontology without ontologists. Ontologists engage in ontology and produce this ontology, criticise that ontology, etc. Ontology is the name of their practice not their research subject (that's 'being'). Therefore, as fallible, embodied, emplaced, 'thrown' human persons no one should ever claim that their ontological pronouncements issue from a non-position, outside all social influence or historical particularity (or politics). Anyone claiming such a thing in this day and age would be a comical fossil at best and a tyrant at worst. Fortunately, neither Harman nor Bryant nor anyone affiliated with them make this claim.
Politics and ontology can be intertwined in many ways but they're still different things and one can quite easily talk all day about ontology without getting into politics. Ontology readily bumps up against politics and is easily politicised but that does not mean that it SHOULD be politicised -- and it certainly shouldn't be politicised all the time.
So, our accounts of what is (our ontologies) must be generated, influenced and informed by much, much MORE than politics alone. This doesn't make these things hermetically sealed discursive jurisdictions -- far from it. But it DOES mean that any given politicisation of ontology must be undertaken FOR A REASON. It is not the default position.
Ontology isn't always already political -- nothing is. Nothing is political which isn't first politicised.
And this isn't 'apolitical,' by the way. The really apolitical position is that which says that 'everything is political' as if politics were some smoggy, unbreakable shroud enveloping absolutely every being, everywhere from miserable cradle to wretched grave.
Politics is a pretty inglorious business most of the time. I really don't understand why so many people take it as the master signifier to end all master signifiers. I'm really rather GLAD that politics is not omnipresent. A world in which it was would be a true dystopia. Fortunately it only exists as a utopia of the foolish.
And as for the claims that granting reality to corporations justifies their political enfranchisement ... well, my mind boggles at that. That would only be the case if ontology and politics were fused. Only then would the granting of ontological thing-hood simultaneously be the granting of political personhood.
And they're not fused...
Tuesday, 8 May 2012
The future of European hegemony: "geo-economics"?
In the Guardian today:
On Monday the former president of Latvia, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, argued that the EU was becoming both dominated and neglected by Germany.
"Is the Europe that is emerging from the euro crisis a German one? During the euro crisis, power in the EU seems to have shifted towards one national capital in particular, Berlin," she wrote in Warsaw's Gazeta Wyborcza, together with Portugal's former European commissioner Antonio Vitorino. "Germany, it seems, is becoming a 'geo-economic power' driven by the needs of its export sector.
Sunday, 6 May 2012
Britain in a nutshell: queuing and apathy
Truly vintage Brooker:
... The low turnout has been blamed on bad weather, which was almost certainly a factor – but on the other hand, if you won't vote because of drizzle, you weren't that arsed in the first place. People will queue in the rain to see Kasabian in concert. They'll queue in the rain to enter Abercrombie & Fitch. They'll queue in the rain for any old shit, as long as it isn't democracy.Funny because it's so very, agonisingly true.
Friday, 27 April 2012
re: 'Can I tell the difference between the the objective and the subjective?'
Response to: Richard Murphy's 'Can I tell the difference between the the objective and the subjective?' - and subsequent comments
Too true(!).
The carving up of reality into the objective and subjective is a power play. Once you've made that incision anything that you can convince people is on the 'objective' side cannot be argued with -- it simply is, 'whether you like it or not.' Its propagation therefore no longer requires assent; it can be taught as fact and beaten into stubborn skulls if needs be.
While it's true that Austrian economics reacted against the scientistic and state-centric economic orthodoxy, which promoted central, 'objective' planning, it makes little sense to deny that Austrian economics, in many circles, has become the new orthodoxy and is treated as if it were the objective truth 'whether you like it or not.' For this reason it is regularly subject of such power plays that would seek to make its claims unassailable.
And this is terribly unfortunate since few scientific doctrines have ever been so thoroughly and consistently refuted by experience and kept on walking.
And that brings me to the undiminished importance of relative truth even in the absence of absolute truth (i.e. 'objectivity').
If your complaint, my namesake, is that Richard was implying possession of objective knowledge by saying that you are 'wrong' on matters subjective then I think that your objections are misplaced. Words such as right and wrong, true and false are still perfectly applicable in a world devoid of any hard and fast subjective/objective distinction. They represent not claims on correspondence to reality 'out there' but rather denials of reasoning and demands for evidence. Because we still have these things -- reasoning and evidence -- even if they can never give us 'objectivity.' They are devices of argumentation and are intrinsic to all scientific and political discourse.
If the 'subjectivism' of Austrian economics absolves it from defending the inadequacies of its own reasoning and evidence then this is a worrying thing -- objectivity or no objectivity.
Too true(!).
The carving up of reality into the objective and subjective is a power play. Once you've made that incision anything that you can convince people is on the 'objective' side cannot be argued with -- it simply is, 'whether you like it or not.' Its propagation therefore no longer requires assent; it can be taught as fact and beaten into stubborn skulls if needs be.
While it's true that Austrian economics reacted against the scientistic and state-centric economic orthodoxy, which promoted central, 'objective' planning, it makes little sense to deny that Austrian economics, in many circles, has become the new orthodoxy and is treated as if it were the objective truth 'whether you like it or not.' For this reason it is regularly subject of such power plays that would seek to make its claims unassailable.
And this is terribly unfortunate since few scientific doctrines have ever been so thoroughly and consistently refuted by experience and kept on walking.
And that brings me to the undiminished importance of relative truth even in the absence of absolute truth (i.e. 'objectivity').
If your complaint, my namesake, is that Richard was implying possession of objective knowledge by saying that you are 'wrong' on matters subjective then I think that your objections are misplaced. Words such as right and wrong, true and false are still perfectly applicable in a world devoid of any hard and fast subjective/objective distinction. They represent not claims on correspondence to reality 'out there' but rather denials of reasoning and demands for evidence. Because we still have these things -- reasoning and evidence -- even if they can never give us 'objectivity.' They are devices of argumentation and are intrinsic to all scientific and political discourse.
If the 'subjectivism' of Austrian economics absolves it from defending the inadequacies of its own reasoning and evidence then this is a worrying thing -- objectivity or no objectivity.
Monday, 16 April 2012
38 Degrees Government Snooping Petition
Powers such as these, however they are intended to be used, are always abused.
Privacy, once given up, is almost impossible to reclaim. The power to suspend our privacy will be taken from us unless we refuse.
Bit by bit, little by little, inch by inch we are sleepwalking into a dystopia. Who will we have to blame when we wake up?
We like to imagine that evil invariably bursts into the world suddenly and through the media of specific actions by identifiably evil actors. The more unsettling truth is that evil often simply seeps into the world, curdling and coagulating, driven by the best intentions of quite ordinary people.
Well intentioned or not, we must refuse this power grab or we will only have ourselves to blame.
The 38 Degrees Petition
Privacy, once given up, is almost impossible to reclaim. The power to suspend our privacy will be taken from us unless we refuse.
Bit by bit, little by little, inch by inch we are sleepwalking into a dystopia. Who will we have to blame when we wake up?
We like to imagine that evil invariably bursts into the world suddenly and through the media of specific actions by identifiably evil actors. The more unsettling truth is that evil often simply seeps into the world, curdling and coagulating, driven by the best intentions of quite ordinary people.
Well intentioned or not, we must refuse this power grab or we will only have ourselves to blame.
The 38 Degrees Petition
Monday, 19 December 2011
One reason not to get a Kindle
I'm not sure I like the idea of Amazon knowing everything I've highlighted!
No thanks.
Monday, 5 December 2011
Economics Makes Markets
An absolutely perfect example of how economics makes markets:
And furthermore:
Policymakers' riposte to Keynes would be the same as it would be to Hayek: get real. If we take no action to rein in deficits, we will be slaughtered by the markets; bond yields will go up sharply, negating the impact of cheap money. Keynesian fiscal policy, in other words, will only be possible when the markets share Keynes's belief that jobs matter more than the level of national debt, and given the way economics has been taught in universities for the past 30 years, that moment may be a long time coming.All these years of baseless, absurd, evidence-phobic econo-babble are killing us. And they call it science!
And furthermore:
[Tim Worstall argues] that we should not tackle tax evasion because to do so would reduce GDP. He says the existing rate of evasion is optimal and we should not address it as we are at an equilibrium state where we can afford this level of crime.
...
I utterly reject that argument.
...
There [are] no such equilibria. What there are instead are economists and those influenced by them like Worstall who believe in cost-benefit analyses that suggest there are such equilibria. But because they have believed that for so long they now actually think the equilibria exist and that we should positively promote them. They have made their model into the terrain – when it is at best a very imperfect model to start with. That explains so much of the predicament we are in. We are seeking something that is simply not there.
Sunday, 4 December 2011
The Eyes of Gideon
He keeps his money in a mattress,
He doesn't trust the banks.
We used to think him cowed and strange,
But now we understand.
He doesn't trust the banks.
We used to think him cowed and strange,
But now we understand.
The eyes of Gideon,
Haunt him daily;
They chase him through his sleep.
The eyes of Gideon.
We used to laugh,
And now we reach for our glass,
Of air and debt, hope and imaginary things;
And we're told: this is what the good times bring;
And we wonder what a world it could be,
When Gideon's eyes can chase us through our sleep.
Haunt him daily;
They chase him through his sleep.
The eyes of Gideon.
We used to laugh,
And now we reach for our glass,
Of air and debt, hope and imaginary things;
And we're told: this is what the good times bring;
And we wonder what a world it could be,
When Gideon's eyes can chase us through our sleep.
Friday, 25 November 2011
Saturday, 19 November 2011
On 'Lenses'
Two sides of the ocular metaphor:
1. Tinted lenses: 'If only we could see things unimpeded! Our lenses shamefully limit us.'
2. Spectacles: 'Without our lenses there is only blurry continuum! Our lenses are all we have.'
(Aren't we told so often to 'be reasonable' and see through one type of lens with one eye and the another with the other? No wonder we get sea-sick on dry land!)
Both sides of the metaphor rely on a beginning a middle and an end: An 'outside' which somehow gets 'inside' via a liminal point that transforms and protects the outside and inside, respectively. Both versions of the metaphor require the tripartite schema. Thereby, a more elongated, complicated schema is rendered unthinkable; for example, a schema of trajectories, trains or chains with many points of transformation rather than just one.
It is not that there is no transformation (everything being essentially of the same underlying substance), it is that there is no one point of transformation where one substance is trans-substantiated into another (nature into mind, things into thought, world into words). We need to be able to understand transformations where they actually happen without being prejudiced a priori as to where they supposedly must happen (at the liminal point between 'inside and outside' -- always). The location of transformation is a question of fact rather than principle, as is the quality and quantity of transformations (we must assume that there are many).
We can't be the realists of the tinted lenses cursing our luck at the stubborn obduracy of these lenses, nor can we be the anti-realists dismissing all the outside as so much unseeable nebulous hazyness. We must be realists of transformation, wheresoever it occurs.
Therefore, the ocular metaphor is useless for us (unless we can perhaps come up an example of a delicately arrayed series of lenses that are all necessary but independently insufficient to their collective refraction -- but even then we might be reducing each lens to the whole, which would take us back to square one).
1. Tinted lenses: 'If only we could see things unimpeded! Our lenses shamefully limit us.'
2. Spectacles: 'Without our lenses there is only blurry continuum! Our lenses are all we have.'
(Aren't we told so often to 'be reasonable' and see through one type of lens with one eye and the another with the other? No wonder we get sea-sick on dry land!)
Both sides of the metaphor rely on a beginning a middle and an end: An 'outside' which somehow gets 'inside' via a liminal point that transforms and protects the outside and inside, respectively. Both versions of the metaphor require the tripartite schema. Thereby, a more elongated, complicated schema is rendered unthinkable; for example, a schema of trajectories, trains or chains with many points of transformation rather than just one.
It is not that there is no transformation (everything being essentially of the same underlying substance), it is that there is no one point of transformation where one substance is trans-substantiated into another (nature into mind, things into thought, world into words). We need to be able to understand transformations where they actually happen without being prejudiced a priori as to where they supposedly must happen (at the liminal point between 'inside and outside' -- always). The location of transformation is a question of fact rather than principle, as is the quality and quantity of transformations (we must assume that there are many).
We can't be the realists of the tinted lenses cursing our luck at the stubborn obduracy of these lenses, nor can we be the anti-realists dismissing all the outside as so much unseeable nebulous hazyness. We must be realists of transformation, wheresoever it occurs.
Therefore, the ocular metaphor is useless for us (unless we can perhaps come up an example of a delicately arrayed series of lenses that are all necessary but independently insufficient to their collective refraction -- but even then we might be reducing each lens to the whole, which would take us back to square one).
Tuesday, 15 November 2011
On Human Exceptionalism
Levi Bryant comments on a debate happening across various blogs on human exceptionalism and anthropology.
This is a really interesting debate and something I've thought a lot about lately.
This kind of problem always reminds me of a passage from Plato's Statesman where the Stranger reproaches Young Socrates for failing to 'carve nature at its joints' and instead making hasty generalisations about kinds of things; of failing to perform the labour required for accurate classification.
Stranger: The error was just as if some one who wanted to divide the human race, were to divide them after the fashion which prevails in this part of the world; here they cut off the Hellenes as one species, and all the other species of mankind, which are innumerable, and have no ties or common language, they include under the single name of "barbarians," and because they have one name they are supposed to be of one species also. Or suppose that in dividing numbers you were to cut off ten thousand from all the rest, and make of it one species, comprehending the first under another separate name, you might say that here too was a single class, because you had given it a single name. Whereas you would make a much better and more equal and logical classification of numbers, if you divided them into odd and even; or of the human species, if you divided them into male and female; and only separated off Lydians or Phrygians, or any other tribe, and arrayed them against the rest of the world, when you could no longer make a division into parts which were also classes.
Plato's method of division and classification is particularly laborious in this dialogue and it has irritated more than a few classicists (I'm not one but I've read a few) who wonder why he doesn't just make broad distinctions and jump to the end where everything is nicely carved up; why go through the process of division (which frequently goes off on tangents that are subsequently abandoned) if you can just state the end product and be done with it? I think Plato realised that that's lazy and that philosophical method is as important as philosophical claims. In short he recognised the importance of working things through, of honouring the mediators rather than fixating on the end products, if you like. But I digress.
Who is more 'barbaric': the multitude of peoples chatting away to each other in their various tongues or the puzzled-looking philosopher who, as if to subconsciously repress his shame and incomprehension, waves his hand and decrees them all 'the same'?
Etymologically, the word barbaric connotes 'babbling' and the sensation of hearing someone talk a language you don't understand. The truly barbaric reaction is to take this incomprehension as a sign of homogeneity - not of the inadequacy of one's comprehensive capabilities but of the uniformity of the phenomena presented.
Such is the phenomenological experience of any anthropologist at the start of their journey: they are clumsy, awkward, incompetent, thoroughly stupid when placed among their tribe. Their genius lies in correctly deducing that this is an inadequacy of theirs, not of their hosts! Such powers of intuition allow them to gradually become less clumsy, awkward, incompetent and stupid - the generic babbling becomes a flooding plurality of clearly articulated and endlessly diverse conversation. Eventually their hosts become literally familiar - family. They become beings capable of stating their own differences; their babbling disappears as they impress themselves upon their own categorisations. They become subjects, endowed with depths and agencies, possessing unique characteristics.
I'm keen to ontologise this principle.
The reason why we need a conceptual vocabulary that can articulate the qualities and relationships of all things - human and non-human - i.e. the reason why we need a metaphysics, is not because all things (human and non-human) are the same; on the contrary, it is because they are all different. Not just the human and the rock but the rock and the tree, the tree and the ... etc. etc. etc. We can't have a separate conceptual scheme for every possible relationship so we are left with only two options: have an abstract scheme that is vague enough that it can accommodate any thing or engage in the arbitrary bifurcations whereby we have one language for one side and another for the other and then sit around wondering how the two can ever be reconciled.
The reading of Plato's/Socrates' 'cutting of nature at its joints' is always that there are natural kinds that can be rationally deduced. And this has always been used to justify hard-boiled naturalisms that say we must scrub away any trace of our pitiful subjective perceptions from our definitions of objects, etc. etc. On the contrary, I understand it to mean that we should try to learn from things, open ourselves to things, risk ourselves in front of things as Stengers might say. Let them define themselves, let them cease to babble. But don't expect them to suddenly 'speak our language'! This isn't Star Trek - the aliens won't miraculously have a grasp of American English. It takes work to turn that head-spinning babbling into comprehensible conversation.
This, for me, indicates what an object-oriented epistemology would be: a theory of becoming-sensitive to things, of how we can allow things to define themselves while acknowledging that they won't just speak our language as if by some miracle. This would show us that we don't need to purge subjectivity to have objectivity. On the contrary (and my Latourianism is coming out here), becoming-sensitive is an object-loaded activity!
Anyway...
The moral of the story?
One is barbaric when one suppresses one's own ignorance and incompetence by ontologically homogenising all that which one has not gone to the effort of telling apart.
If a phenomenon's nuances are elusive this could simply mean that the phenomenon is entirely disinterested in you! The ultimate narcissism is to assume that this disinterest reflects badly upon the phenomenon! Maybe it wants you to think it's babbling!
Indeed, this is a precautionary principle for all metaphysics: beware babbling, things might be plotting against you and your ignorant ways! Ignorant in every sense of the word.
The real barbarians were the Hellenes and we are their heirs so long as we worship Kant and weep over the white man's burden (homogenising things or peoples, it matters not). Neither things nor folks have any problem differentiating themselves or going about their lives without us. We struggle to keep up - and then we blame it on them!
Carving nature at its joints doesn't indicate that nature is a neatly segmented totality just waiting for the cut and thrust of our instruments. (One surely needn't point out the phallic implications of this modern interpretation!) On the contrary, I think it means that we need to learn how to segment and how to carve.
Even a corpse won't cede so easily to the wild flailing of the butcher's apprentice - he too has to learn his trade, knife in hand, babbling to himself.
Thursday, 10 November 2011
'Out there'
Reality: 'out there' - out where? Out of the window? Sure! Plenty of real things out there! Outside of the realm of subjective perception? Don't be silly. Nothing is outside of a thing that doesn't exist. Or inside.
Meaning
Just because objects can't be meaningful on their own doesn't mean that humans can be either.
Connundrum
Connundrum:
Says the one to the other:
'Every revolution ends in murder and tyranny.'
Says the other to the one:
'You think with your memory! There are more possibilities in the world than the past has known. The next revolution will be different.'
'You bay for blood, in complete innocence. Reform is the only way.'
'You speak the system, it has no outside! You can't reform a universe from within.'
'Now who thinks while walking backwards? If reform needs reform, so be it.'
'Talk, talk, talk. Reform is always the same: more of the same. You can't change that. History needs to start again - a history for the young.'
'Cherish your youth, I cannot but fear it! Every time the same promises and yet when the dust settles we always say: never again.'
'Reform is reform: it'll never change.'
'Revolution is revolution: always the same.'
'Apologist!'
'Nutter!'
Says the one to the other:
'Every revolution ends in murder and tyranny.'
Says the other to the one:
'You think with your memory! There are more possibilities in the world than the past has known. The next revolution will be different.'
'You bay for blood, in complete innocence. Reform is the only way.'
'You speak the system, it has no outside! You can't reform a universe from within.'
'Now who thinks while walking backwards? If reform needs reform, so be it.'
'Talk, talk, talk. Reform is always the same: more of the same. You can't change that. History needs to start again - a history for the young.'
'Cherish your youth, I cannot but fear it! Every time the same promises and yet when the dust settles we always say: never again.'
'Reform is reform: it'll never change.'
'Revolution is revolution: always the same.'
'Apologist!'
'Nutter!'
Question:
Who is the conservative and who the radical here?
Wednesday, 9 November 2011
ANT, Actualism and Nuclear Latency
This post by Juan Cole just got me thinking about conceptual revisions needed for ANT (Actor-Network Theory) for studying world politics (or politics generally).
If Cole is correct and Iran are not seeking a functioning atomic bomb but simply a latent capacity to build a bomb then the bare actuality of their project misses that the goal of the process is virtual. Iran is apparently constructing not a coherent material object but rather a virtual capacity to bring into existence a coherent material object (that is dependent upon a pre-existing arrangement of many objects, knowledges, etc.).
If there is any principle that is fundamental to Latour's work (at least as Harman articulates it) it is that if something makes something else happen then it is an actor. It doesn't matter if that actor is fictitious, material - whatever. Moreover, to act is to exist; no action, no existence. (c.f. Nietzsche.)
Should it really make a difference whether the actor is actual? This is where things get complicated as actual derives from the Latin actus meaning simply 'act.' What then is the relation of the virtual to the actual if to exist is to act and virtual things apparently can act?
(Perhaps it's the opposition of actual and virtual that is the problem here.)
I'm not sure I'm in a position even to formulate this question properly.
The way you tell if a country like Iran is actively working on a nuclear bomb is that it diverts uranium to weapons purposes. Iran has not done that, as the IAEA repeatedly affirms. Almost certainly, if Iran were seriously working on a bomb, it would kick international inspectors out altogether. ... It is likely that Iran wants “nuclear latency,” or the “Japan option.” That would involve knowing how to construct a bomb in short order if the country was ever directly menaced with an invasion and regime change a la Iraq.If Latour's philosophy is as strictly actualist as Graham Harman claims in Prince of Networks then it seems that any ANT constructed on this basis cannot really understand the above. (Indeed, given that Harman embraces a rather strict actualism I'm not sure if he could adequately articulate the above in his terms.)
If Cole is correct and Iran are not seeking a functioning atomic bomb but simply a latent capacity to build a bomb then the bare actuality of their project misses that the goal of the process is virtual. Iran is apparently constructing not a coherent material object but rather a virtual capacity to bring into existence a coherent material object (that is dependent upon a pre-existing arrangement of many objects, knowledges, etc.).
If there is any principle that is fundamental to Latour's work (at least as Harman articulates it) it is that if something makes something else happen then it is an actor. It doesn't matter if that actor is fictitious, material - whatever. Moreover, to act is to exist; no action, no existence. (c.f. Nietzsche.)
Should it really make a difference whether the actor is actual? This is where things get complicated as actual derives from the Latin actus meaning simply 'act.' What then is the relation of the virtual to the actual if to exist is to act and virtual things apparently can act?
(Perhaps it's the opposition of actual and virtual that is the problem here.)
I'm not sure I'm in a position even to formulate this question properly.
Monday, 7 November 2011
Poststructuralism and the Agoraphobia of 'Thinking Space'
A "post-structuralist discourse" apparently "expands the agenda of social theory, posing questions that other discourses must refuse to ask" (Richard Ashley, Living on Borderlines). It 'opens up thinking space' (Jim George, International Relations and the Search for Thinking Space).
But poststructuralism itself is utterly incapable of asking a whole swathe of questions because of its own dogmatic ontological assumptions; its thinking space is suffocating. In fact, whatever ground it opens up is micrified by that which it forecloses; for example: the assumption that objects are reducible to the discursive conditions of their emergence eliminates the possibility of understanding what it even means to be 'critical.'
Take science (an excellent but not fundamentally privileged example):
Scientists are always engaged in criticism but they don’t criticise everything at once (‘perpetual critique’), nor could they, nor would they ever want to. This would disallow instrumentation or black boxing. No debate could ever end. Scientists don’t engage in perpetual critique because they believe that their subject matter is capable of objecting – of showing itself to differ from established knowledges.
This doesn’t mean that scientific objects can object on their own but many scientific discoveries have been made in the course of otherwise routine experiments that went awry, felix culpa; when one was looking for one thing but found another.
Simply: knowledge can become critical (i.e. unstable) without the instigating (which is not to say intentional, although it's similar) intervention of a (human) critic. Without the labour of scientists most scientific objects have no means of eliciting this surprise, it is true. But that doesn’t mean that making critical is dependent upon critique.
Making critical, in such cases, may only occur during scientific practice but that practice needn’t be critical per se; it is often or perhaps even usually routine, directed towards another end entirely.
And isn’t this how everyone saw the end of the Cold War? As an event that objected to IR theory itself? (Poststructuralists included.) Certainly it wasn’t self-interpreting but it demanded interpretation by social scientists (and everyone else for that matter). It is in no way reducible to interpretation or the sum of all human interpretations. If it was it could never demand interpretation.
(Does this mean that the demand transcends interpretation? I'd say not, it can be ignored, missed - nothing necessitates its being taken as a provocation and so its conditions of emergence remain pivotal but none of that makes its demand reducible to its interpretations. This is realism.)
Beware modesty dressed up as radicalism.
Beware radicalism generally when it runs from the typing fingers of middle-aged academics.
Poststructuralists are truly agoraphobic (and this is a nice little academic play on words). They are afraid of the outdoors, of things (at least in their work - in the rest of life they enjoy all the luxuries). Moreover, for all the talk of radical democracy and opening up debate they foreclose almost all of it by having such a limited and such a dogmatic ontology. They cannot ever genuinely stand in the agora and speak. They are doubly afraid of the outdoors and of things. Of things qua objects and things qua places of politics. They can barely stifle their grins and snorts when people talk passionately about their belief in the reality of things. This is my own ethnographic observation!
The 'thinking spaces' are not wide open spaces, they are closets.
But poststructuralism itself is utterly incapable of asking a whole swathe of questions because of its own dogmatic ontological assumptions; its thinking space is suffocating. In fact, whatever ground it opens up is micrified by that which it forecloses; for example: the assumption that objects are reducible to the discursive conditions of their emergence eliminates the possibility of understanding what it even means to be 'critical.'
Take science (an excellent but not fundamentally privileged example):
Scientists are always engaged in criticism but they don’t criticise everything at once (‘perpetual critique’), nor could they, nor would they ever want to. This would disallow instrumentation or black boxing. No debate could ever end. Scientists don’t engage in perpetual critique because they believe that their subject matter is capable of objecting – of showing itself to differ from established knowledges.
This doesn’t mean that scientific objects can object on their own but many scientific discoveries have been made in the course of otherwise routine experiments that went awry, felix culpa; when one was looking for one thing but found another.
Simply: knowledge can become critical (i.e. unstable) without the instigating (which is not to say intentional, although it's similar) intervention of a (human) critic. Without the labour of scientists most scientific objects have no means of eliciting this surprise, it is true. But that doesn’t mean that making critical is dependent upon critique.
Making critical, in such cases, may only occur during scientific practice but that practice needn’t be critical per se; it is often or perhaps even usually routine, directed towards another end entirely.
And isn’t this how everyone saw the end of the Cold War? As an event that objected to IR theory itself? (Poststructuralists included.) Certainly it wasn’t self-interpreting but it demanded interpretation by social scientists (and everyone else for that matter). It is in no way reducible to interpretation or the sum of all human interpretations. If it was it could never demand interpretation.
(Does this mean that the demand transcends interpretation? I'd say not, it can be ignored, missed - nothing necessitates its being taken as a provocation and so its conditions of emergence remain pivotal but none of that makes its demand reducible to its interpretations. This is realism.)
Beware modesty dressed up as radicalism.
Beware radicalism generally when it runs from the typing fingers of middle-aged academics.
Poststructuralists are truly agoraphobic (and this is a nice little academic play on words). They are afraid of the outdoors, of things (at least in their work - in the rest of life they enjoy all the luxuries). Moreover, for all the talk of radical democracy and opening up debate they foreclose almost all of it by having such a limited and such a dogmatic ontology. They cannot ever genuinely stand in the agora and speak. They are doubly afraid of the outdoors and of things. Of things qua objects and things qua places of politics. They can barely stifle their grins and snorts when people talk passionately about their belief in the reality of things. This is my own ethnographic observation!
The 'thinking spaces' are not wide open spaces, they are closets.
Process and Politics
An ontology in which things are always in process and nothing is ever fully achieved or closed is not in itself morally or politically superior to any other way of thinking. It simply solves some problems some of which are moral and political. In particular, one never has to draw a line between that which is achieved and henceforth settled, beyond dispute and universal and that which isn't.
It is an axiom of experience and so of common sense that not everything is settled, beyond dispute and universal (Parmenides notwithstanding) and so to say that there are some things like this means that there must be a line. The drawing of this line is one of the main problems of modern philosophy and seems irresolvable (as does the question of such resolution's desirability). Doing away with the line does away with the problem, which is both philosophical and political.
We could revive Parmenides but that doesn't seem very plausible or useful (this is dismissive but probably fair, particularly if we take experience as the spur of conceptualisation a la Whitehead). The opposite is plausible and can be shown to work, to generate greatly conceptually sophisticated schemas that are able to do justice to all sorts of aspects of reality while redefining what we mean by reality itself.
If this leads to moral and political sophistication too then this is excellent. Yet these are not the only problems that such conceptual work resolves nor the only problems that it is a response to.
If a term is valuable it must be a 'meso' term. Too general and it becomes meaningless, too global. Too specific and it is too inapplicable, too local. Politics is like this. When politics becomes the question that dominates any given consideration it becomes effectively meaningless because there ceases to be any way of distinguishing between different kinds of good, different valuations. It is valuationally hegemonic - and this is bad for all sorts of reasons, including political ones!
If politics is too easily achieved (if 'everything's political') then there is no reason to do anything in particular in order to achieve politics. If politics is too rare (only appearing in epochal fissures or 'events') then despondency sets in (what agency could anyone have in bringing about something that is by definition vast and impersonal?).
Politics must be accessible but not without effort: just like everything. Moreover, it shouldn't be the only kind of value as this both eliminates other kinds of valuation but also makes politics total, which also makes it meaningless (and so you've lost all kinds of values but also lost politics - worst of all worlds).
Above all politics must be an achievement and this makes process ontology fit it perfectly. The alternative, where elements of reality are absolute, unchanging and beyond dispute, means that the passing and contingent can be subordinated to this fundamentally ulterior realm. Those with access to that realm - which is always already achieved and need only be accessed - thereby become legislators, even dictators, for those who merely splash around in what is contingent. This is intolerable.
For the above reasons: Politics (as I would like to describe it) needs process but process must be justified for more than political reasons. Other valuations must be involved.
Pluralism must also mean that politics is only one value among others. This is what too many people forget.
It is an axiom of experience and so of common sense that not everything is settled, beyond dispute and universal (Parmenides notwithstanding) and so to say that there are some things like this means that there must be a line. The drawing of this line is one of the main problems of modern philosophy and seems irresolvable (as does the question of such resolution's desirability). Doing away with the line does away with the problem, which is both philosophical and political.
We could revive Parmenides but that doesn't seem very plausible or useful (this is dismissive but probably fair, particularly if we take experience as the spur of conceptualisation a la Whitehead). The opposite is plausible and can be shown to work, to generate greatly conceptually sophisticated schemas that are able to do justice to all sorts of aspects of reality while redefining what we mean by reality itself.
If this leads to moral and political sophistication too then this is excellent. Yet these are not the only problems that such conceptual work resolves nor the only problems that it is a response to.
If a term is valuable it must be a 'meso' term. Too general and it becomes meaningless, too global. Too specific and it is too inapplicable, too local. Politics is like this. When politics becomes the question that dominates any given consideration it becomes effectively meaningless because there ceases to be any way of distinguishing between different kinds of good, different valuations. It is valuationally hegemonic - and this is bad for all sorts of reasons, including political ones!
If politics is too easily achieved (if 'everything's political') then there is no reason to do anything in particular in order to achieve politics. If politics is too rare (only appearing in epochal fissures or 'events') then despondency sets in (what agency could anyone have in bringing about something that is by definition vast and impersonal?).
Politics must be accessible but not without effort: just like everything. Moreover, it shouldn't be the only kind of value as this both eliminates other kinds of valuation but also makes politics total, which also makes it meaningless (and so you've lost all kinds of values but also lost politics - worst of all worlds).
Above all politics must be an achievement and this makes process ontology fit it perfectly. The alternative, where elements of reality are absolute, unchanging and beyond dispute, means that the passing and contingent can be subordinated to this fundamentally ulterior realm. Those with access to that realm - which is always already achieved and need only be accessed - thereby become legislators, even dictators, for those who merely splash around in what is contingent. This is intolerable.
For the above reasons: Politics (as I would like to describe it) needs process but process must be justified for more than political reasons. Other valuations must be involved.
Pluralism must also mean that politics is only one value among others. This is what too many people forget.
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