Jane Bennett on Whitman’s Solar Judgment

A recent blog post by Peter Gratton brought the following podcast to my attention: In a talk delivered at the Birkbeck Institute on May 20, 2010 Dr. Jane Bennett discussed Walt Whitman’s notions of poetic judgement as a special ability to discern the wider life of things. Bennett argues that just such a cultivated sensibility is exactly what is needed today for us to begin to take the living material potency of the world we come from seriously. 

Jane Bennett is currently Professor of Political Theory at Johns Hopkins University, a fellow in the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, and author of Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010) among other publications.

From Backdoor Broadcasting:

Jane Bennett - Walt Whitman’s Solar Judgment

In the 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass, Whitman attributes to the poet this remarkable talent: he has learned how to judge “not as the judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing.” To judge as the sun falls: my goal is to examine the techniques — literary, grammatical, conceptual — that Whitman uses to cultivate this queer, even oxymoronic, practice. I suggest that Whitman’s “solar” judging helps to induce a special kind of auditory perception: the ability to detect the voice of “inanimate” things, a voice that announces the role that such things have played in the particular political actions or events to which one is called upon to judge. Thus Whitman’s claim that poets can take on the posture of falling sunlight is linked to his materialism, or the way he conceives of materiality as a living force.

Event Date: Monday 17th May 2010
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LISTEN TO ENTIRE PODCAST: HERE

I read Vibrant Matter last month as part of an online reading group, but failed to keep up with related posts due to severe personal time constraints. And although the reading group is over, I still plan to post thoughts on all 8 chapters before summer’s end. My notes already exist in rough, and I want to continue to use this blog as a kind of thought lab where half-baked thoughts and tentative explorations are allowed to ‘live’. The book was a great little read: beautifully written, terse and powerful in its plea for us to begin understanding and engaging the world in more encompassing and realistic ways.

If we have the courage to look at what is actually going in the universe – within matter and among all things – we might be shocked to learn just how ‘at home’ we really are. Check out my existing comments here.

Podcast Source @ Backdoor Broadcasting

A Further Response to Graham Harman

Part 2: Scoreless in Obscurity

I know Graham Harman has already agreed to agree that my approach lacks a certain degree of sensitivity and etiquette and has subsequently moved past our original disagreements, but I am still posting part two of my response with the hope that he will not take my criticisms too personally, because what I say here (and in previous posts) is really just me thinking ‘out loud’ and in no way meant as a personal attack. My only reason for posting this second part is that I have just recently come off a much needed rest/retreat deep in the Canadian Rockies I am more and more feeling the need for clarity on my own positions. And Graham’s comments offer an opportunity for just such clarification.

Graham writes:

Michael hasn’t done the work of showing the specific academic traces on my own thought. Essentially, he’s just hinting that my manner of earning a living (a fairly typical one; not exactly slave trading and gun running à la Rimbaud) somehow compromises the content of my books. But no internal connection has been shown. How does the mere fact of teaching roomfuls of 19-year-old Egyptians each semester subvert the internal logic of object-oriented philosophy and reduce its imaginative powers?

Again, being a professor does not disqualify Graham’s framework. In fact, it is probably only by virtue of his education and vocation that he is even capable of developing such a nuanced object-oriented schema. The only relevance his vocation has to his thought is that he necessarily draws upon the intellectual resources of the discipline he has been trained in and the discourses that circulate therein. Hence the word “discipline”. Not a real contentious claim in my opinion. I would think that since we are at least a generation removed from Bourdieu, and couple generations post-Wittgenstein, the sorts of claims (e.g., that academics are deeply embedded within the discourses and language games they attach themselves to) I made about “academia” would be fairly understood? There is a necessary reliance and relationship between an academic philosopher and the institutional systems and discourses of which he is a part.

Here is what I wrote in the comments section of my original post on the topic:

In theory, Harman is no more or less entangled than you or I. We are all entangled – and we are all influenced by what we personally, habitually and professionally do. As I say in my response to Harman, it’s a matter of degree. We can be more or less committed to traditional concepts and projects. I judge his ontology to be un-necessarily reliant on borrowed terms from Husserl and Heidegger and others, while also being quite innovative and productive. And, from what I understand, Harman’s “weird occasionalist” philosophy has its roots in Islamic thinking and Whitehead as well.

And, just to be sure, I do think Graham is doing work less within the purview of “established” philosophical discourse than most philosophers - but more than what I would like him to be.

So what remains is 1) my assertion that much of our thinking will always be entangled with those lived-commitments and social interactions in which we historically and continually engage, and 2) my personal judgement about Graham’s use of distinctions such as ‘objects v. qualities’ as unnecessarily constraining. Both claims are relatively harmless because #1 is a fairly wide-spread observation about human discourse and intellectual activity (discussed in detail by Foucault, Bourdieu, and others), and #2 is merely a personal evaluation based on admittedly limited investigation.

But, to synthesize both claims, I suggest that certain philosophies seem to have an internal “logic” or semantic structure grounded in implicitly assumed (a priori) understandings of the world. These logical-semantical arrangements often lead to particular arguments and certain entailed conclusions. In other words, we think through and with more or less networked conceptual systems brought together by linguistic and logical entailments. So when we accept and operationalize certain discourse-specific distinctions (in this case between objects and their qualities) we, almost by necessity, are lead to particular pathways of thinking, with more or less resultant chains of reasoning (perhaps four-fold conception of objects?) and forms of argumentation.

Here is a related quote from sociologist Loic Waquant:

If you don't know what determines you -- how you are being shaped to think in a certain way because of your professional interests, your proclivities, your membership in a certain discipline, and so forth -- if you are blinded already by all these biases, what chance do you have to produce rigorous analyses of anything? [source]

And my only point in bringing all this up is that I would like to see Graham’s talents being pushed in new ways – beyond conventional metaphysics and towards something approaching a 'post-metaphysical phenomenological ontography'. My question, for example, is what would a post-metaphysical object-oriented philosophy be like? What if, instead of “real objects” and “sensual objects” Graham investigated more closely actually existing and embodied entities (in all their glorious specificity) and their encounters with other specific entities - unmediated by a etheric realm of the “sensual”?

My main issue simply put is that OOP seems to me to be too metaphysical and not all that empirically supported. And this is why I find Gary William’s project perhaps more oriented towards praxis in the long run. [note: I hope to explore more of what a “post-metaphysical phenomenological ontography” might look like in the near future, but not here. See Habermas (here) for a quick inclination]

Again, I have no desire to attempt to dismantle Graham’s project. And I’m fairly certain that I couldn’t do such a thing even if I wanted to, since his intellectual background is probably much different than mine, and I wouldn’t have the theoretical resources to refute, one way or another, the “internal logic” of his philosophy. Graham is no dummy.

Moving along, Graham writes:

Steven Shaviro is credited with showing how I box myself into some very problematic positions, which Michael views as the inevitable result of my employment status. However, Michael neglects to mention that Shaviro is also a university professor: indeed, the holder of a named endowed professorship, perhaps the very summit of official academic recognition. Does this also compromise Shaviro’s critique of my positions in some way? Is the author of Doom Patrols just another bland cog in the university machine? Or has Shaviro found the special trick that allows him to be “in the academy but not of it”?

There are two different things going on here:

1) My mention of Steven Shaviro’s critiques of Object-Oriented Philosophy was only ever meant to provide an example of someone who has brought up some fairly significant critiques of Object-Oriented philosophies that, to my knowledge, remain unanswered. Steven’s posts on OOO and causality (here), and “actual encounters” (here), are strong arguments for including more relationality into our accounts of things. And my linking to him in the original post was meant to direct interested readers to that work and those critiques. So, again, not really about “employment status” at all.

2) On the question of whether I think Shaviro is more entangled in institutional academics than Graham, well, I really don’t have a clue about that. I have yet to read more than a handful of Steven's essays. Much of his thinking on OOP (and many other issues) does indeed seem very close to mine. But I’m sure if I read one of his books I could probably point out where I think Shaviro relies too heavily on Whitehead or Deleuze re: an issue that might be better resolved with reference to biology or neuroscience. But maybe not? Maybe Steven is more rather than less removed from such reliances? I’m not prepared to say either way at this point.

But, again, being a philosophy professor is not a deadly sin – it just means that a person’s intellectual background will be more or less institutional and guided by professional and ‘internal’ disciplinary interests. And, to be sure, we all have such linked-interests and commitments.

Graham goes on to provide some advice:

What Michael ought to do is focus on making more specific criticisms of this or that position taken by me or by others... But with the posts on Archive Fire, it often feels like Michael is simply out to score points, and can’t tell the difference between balls going through the hoop and darts thrown at faces.

I have made a few more specific criticisms in comments on particular people’s blogs and elsewhere (for example here) and they have gone largely ignored so far. Which, as far as it goes, is perfectly fine - because my criticisms, or questions, may not have been presented in the most cordial manner. Or, people just didn’t find them compelling enough to pursue. Whatever the case, I’ve been making them with little response (and with little expectations for response). Take Part 1 of this series for example, I provided a bit more specifics as to where I disagree with OOO and the only (fruitful) reaction came from Skholiast, someone not in the OOO clubhouse.

Moreover, to be quite frank, I’m not in the business of spending my hours making the kinds of detailed criticisms Graham might find appealing. Two reasons: first, I’m not invested in the outcome, as most schematic debates are endless, with little resolve, and I have no stake in being perceived as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in these cases. And so who it is I would “score points” with is unclear.

And second, following my own advice, I have little interest is becoming too wrapped up in traditional philosophical schema or immersing myself in strictly academic arguments. I want to maintain a high degree of independence in my thinking. The reason I blog at all on such topics is because I’m thinking for myself but in public, so to speak. I seek to delineate and borrow strains of thought from various places and then mutate my own thinking into something different - to be applied in more pragmatic and political contexts.

And, finally, I consider the comments I make and the issues I take up here to be truly tentative. I consider intellectual activity primarily as play. If I was to enter into an actual “debate”, which this back and forth with Graham never really was, my approach would be much different. I would provide actual arguments and formulate more or less comprehensive replies, but my original post (as I have already said here) was not intended to be a specific argument, much less a debate.

In sum, I do have serious doubts about the efficacy of object-oriented metaphysics (and metaphysics in general) as I interpret them, but will continue to investigate and learn more – and perhaps I may even offer some more specific arguments if I get the urge. Speculative realism, broadly speaking, intrigues me and OOO is simply one possible outgrowth from a more general orientation that takes things and the world intensely seriously.

And as for the anonymity of my posts and comments, well, let me just say that I have very good reasons for this. As someone who has been involved in “radical” politics for the last 15 years or so, had his home searched (twice) by federal officials, been investigated by “anti-terror” organizations and has had his CPU hacked numerous times it would be nothing less that clinically insane to go about advertising my name all over the inter-webs. Were I to be so reckless I would be asking for more trouble than I can currently handle, and would subsequently become unable to express myself freely and explore the topics I do here – which in turn would result in blogging becoming ridiculously pointless for me.

But for those of you who I trust you are invited to email me and ask questions or learn my full identity. If I refuse to disclose then I don’t know you well enough to trust you (yet). And Graham: if you truly want me to disclose who I am to you so that you can feel comfortable in discussion, please, just ask.

See Also: Part 1: Tradition and Metaphysics

Got Realism?

Over at Larval Subjects Levi Bryant has recently posted an amazingly clear and succinct statement on the importance of a full-blown realism. On this issue, and everything else in that particular post, I couldn’t agree with Levi more.

After language what? Realism, that’s what. True significance is generated from the consequences of real action.

Here are the passages that resonate with me the most:

“Rorty famously said that a number of philosophical problems are never really solved, but rather we just cease asking these questions. No philosopher has yet refuted the solipsist, nor has anyone ever refuted Berkeley. If you’re worried about how we can escape language perhaps you should just stop asking the question and move on. More importantly, you should attend to the methodological consequences that follow…”

"Lacanianism and its linguistic idealist cousins needs to be castrated. We need forms of theory and practice capable of both talking about talk, signs, the signifier, narrative, and discourse capable of indicating the non-semiotic and approaching the non-semiotic on its own terms as best we can. Absent this we are missing a massive dimension as to why our social world is as it is."

“What we need is a realist rhetoric. For me, it’s not so much Kant that is the enemy, but the linguistic and semiotic turn. I wish to retain a place for these things, but to overcome the hegemony they currently have in the world of Continental theory. Reference to the real does not a realism make. It is only when you abandon the thesis that any entity constructs another entity that your position is deserving of the title of realism.”

Read the entire post yourself @ Larval Subjects

In commenting on Bryant's post Alex Reid remarks that,

…the rhetorical (and compositional) challenge isn’t to develop a discourse that reveals the real but rather one that allows us to speak in new ways about the world, to see new possibilities, to develop new relations (with both human and non-human others), and maybe invent a way of living (which is maybe humanocentric but given our impact on the planet, maybe not).

To which Bryant adds:

A realist rhetoric would minimally be two things: First, a realist rhetoric would not focus on speech and writing alone. There would, of course, be a place for the analysis of content or the semiotic in a realist rhetoric, it just wouldn’t be the whole story.

As a langauge game OOO just got a lot more compelling. Got realism? Indeed.

Disclosure and Objects in Relation

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DR. HOWARD: Object Relations in psychology puts another layer on to the grid. The object cannot be present without the self to be aware of the object.

MICHAEL: In what sense? If you mean that objects do not exist without human selves to perceive them then I would have to disagree strongly. Everything we know (e.g., geology) indicates that objects exist ‘out there’ in the environment, ‘external’ to human perception, and even prior to us. I am a strong realist in this sense.

However, if you mean that the presence of an object within perception indicates that there must be a ‘self’ that perceives – that the presence of objects confirms the existence of a perceiver - then I totally agree. We know that we exist by virtue of our existing independent of something else (be it an object, objects or the world at large). There seems to always be a ‘background’ to our ‘foregrounded’ awareness.

DR. HOWARD: So now we have the Self and the Object. But what makes it interesting is there is also the Relationship between the Self and the Object. I may love my guitar for the experience it can give me, that has nothing to do with it's structure. The relationship is a context built upon my emotional experience with the object.

MICHAEL: I don’t agree. I think the relationship between a human and a musical instrument is more ‘intimate’ and dynamic than that, especially since that particular object is an artefactual ‘tool’. In fact, the “structure” and properties of the guitar have everything to do with how it relates to you. The guitar has “powers” or capacities inherent to its constitution (properties, structure) that come together with the capacities and ‘powers” (skills) that you embody to make sweet sweet music. Without the specific constitutions (properties and structure) of both you and the guitar there would be no music at all.

You could say that the endo-properties that you are ‘collide’ with the endo-properties of the guitar to create a resonating assemblage (or event) where music emerges. Both you and the object in this case afford each other the opportunity to make music. Your emotional experience is only one component/aspect of the assemblage/event. Your embodied skills are another. Emotions and skills might even be a major component of such an event, contributing much of the intensity internal to the event, but they are not the only components - and perhaps not even the most determining.

DR. HOWARD: The object, of course can be other people. Which leads to I and Thou by Martin Buber. My qualities and constructs cannot exist without another. This is a way of knowing via social interaction. How we humans view reality or objects is based upon learning this social interaction process.

MICHAEL: I get what you are saying, but I would suggest that you extend the I-Thou relationship even further to include non-human objects as well. There are many non-human, or non-cultural, or non-sentient aspects that contribute towards the genesis of the kinds of assemblages we are and relationships that develop. Objects are always part of the contingent interactions that flow into specific events.

Consider our bones, for example: they are mineral deposits, but they play a major role in our being what we are – especially in our ability to act in the world. Bones have an ‘agency’ all their own, affecting the world in various ways depending on where and how they exist. They contribute to our experiences of reality.

So humans don’t simply view reality or objects based on socially acquired understandings, we also encounter and must cope with the things-in-themselves - based partly on their own inherent properties, capacities and the relations they affect and enter into. In a sense, things ‘speak’ to us and demand to be heard while we are making our meanings.

DR. HOWARD: The severely autistic person does not have this social interaction, so he never learns to view objects around him. He is forever caught in some other world. I wonder how Heidegger (or other posters here) would define the world and reality of an autistic person?

MICHAEL: I think there is even more going on. It is the combination of genes, epigenetics and complex social environments that create the situation known as “autism”. Autistic persons have particular properties (a peculiar neural-capacity for instance) which are unique, and often maladaptive within certain environments. And my sense is that autistic persons do view objects, they just do so differently.
And the person does not exist in “some other world”, but rather the combination of their particular bodyself-properties and other objects and environments create a particular world-space that is uniquely experienced by them within the wider field of affordances.

We might then say that Dasein thrown into the world in the context described above is what allows “autism” to unfold. But maybe that’s just how I see it…

Shaviro on Deleuze and Whitehead

Deleuze’s Encounter With Whitehead
By Steven Shaviro

In a short chapter of The Fold (1993) that constitutes his only extended discussion of Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze praises Whitehead for asking the question, “What Is an Event?” (76). Whitehead’s Process and Reality (1929/1978) marks only the third time – after the Stoics and Leibniz – that events move to the center of philosophical thought. Deleuze wrote less about Whitehead than he did about the other figures in his philosophical counter-canon: Lucretius, the Stoics, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Foucault.

But Whitehead is arguably as important to Deleuze as any of these other thinkers. It is only today, in the wake of Isabelle Stengers’ great book Penser avec Whitehead (2002), that it has become possible, for the first time, to measure the full extent of Deleuze’s encounter with Whitehead. My work here is deeply indebted to Stengers, as well as to James Williams (2005) and to Keith Robinson (2006), both of whom have written illuminatingly about Whitehead and Deleuze.

“What is an event?” is, of course, a quintessentially Deleuzian question. And Whitehead marks an important turning-point in the history of philosophy because he affirms that, in fact, everything is an event. The world, he says, is made of events, and nothing but events: happenings rather than things, verbs rather than nouns, processes rather than substances. Becoming is the deepest dimension of Being.

Read More (PDF) @ Shiviro's Homepage

SR and OOO in Brief

Follow th links to a brief Intro to Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology by Graham Harman:

One thing I’ve noticed from a lot of the mail is that SR and OOO have started to bleed together in many people’s minds. For example, Meillassoux is sometimes being referred to as an “object-oriented philosopher,” which isn’t true. So, for those who are new to this part of the blogosphere, here is a renewed summary of what the different terms mean.

Read More @ Graham’s Blog

See Also Ian Bogost's definition here:
What is Object-Oriented Ontology?

- And from Wikipedia -

DeLanda on Deleuze and the Genesis of Form

Deleuze and the Genesis of Form

by Manuel DeLanda

One constant in the history of Western philosophy seems to be a certain conception of matter as an inert receptacle for forms that come from the outside. In other words, the genesis of form and structure seems to always involve resources that go beyond the capabilities of the material substratum of these forms and structures. In some cases, these resources are explicitly transcendental, eternal essences defining forms which are imposed on infertile materials. The clearest example of this theory of form is, of course, religious Creationism, in which form begins as an idea in God’s mind, and is then imposed by a command on an obedient and docile matter. But more serious examples also exist. In ancient philosophies Aristotle’s essences seem to fit this pattern, as do those that inhabit Platonist heavens. And although classical physics began with a clean break with Aristotelian philosophy, and did endow matter with some spontaneous behavior (e.g. inertia), it reduced the variability and richness of material expression to the concept of mass, and studied only the simplest material systems (frictionless planetary dynamics, ideal gases) where spontaneous self-generation of form does not ocurr, thus always keeping some transcendental agency hidden in the background.

Yet, as Gilles Deleuze has shown in his work on Spinoza, not every Western philosopher has taken this stance. In Spinoza, Deleuze discovers another possibility: that the resources involved in the genesis of form are not transcendental but immanent to matter itself. A simple example should suffice to illustrate this point. The simplest type of immanent resource for morphogenesis seems to be endogenously-generated stable states. Historically, the first such states to be discovered by scientists studying the behavior of matter (gases) were energy minima (or correspondingly, entropy maxima). The spherical form of a soap bubble, for instance, emerges out of the interactions among its constituent molecules as these are constrained energetically to “seek” the point at which surface tension is minimized. In this case, there is no question of an essence of “soap-bubbleness” somehow imposing itself from the outside, an ideal geometric form (a sphere) shaping an inert collection of molecules. Rather, an endogenous topological form (a point in the space of energetic possibilities for this molecular assemblage) governs the collective behavior of the individual soap molecules, and results in the emergence of a spherical shape.

Read More @ cddc.vt.edu

Object Lessons: Games as Theory and Practice

Ian Bogost has an interesting post up (here) about his latest invention Cow Clicker. Apparently Cow Clicker is a facebook game designed as “partly a satire, and partly a playable theory of today's social games, and partly an earnest example of that genre.”

Personally, I loathe meaningless and mindless facebook games. I never play them – I have better things to do with my existence. However, Cow Clicker seems to be about something more than this.

And I still find the idea that video games can become innovative learning environments if done properly intriguing. So it is interesting what Bogost seems to be implying about how technology might be used to increase reflexivity on a concrete level of action and cognition, rather than be used simply as tools deployed unconsciously.

Here is the part of his post I found most interesting:

The dialectic between theory and practice often collapses into a call and response panegyric. This in mind, I thought it might be productive to make an example [of a social game] that would act as its own theory. It's a strategy I've been calling carpentry, and which I'll be discussing in more detail in my forthcoming book Alien Phenomenology (including this example). In the case of social games, I reasoned that enacting the principles of my concerns might help me clarify them and, furthermore, to question them. So I decided to make a game that would attempt to distill the social game genre down to its essence. Cow Clicker is the result.

Thinking about how our discourses and theories translate into practice and address issues of coping and understanding in the world is important for very obvious practical reasons, so Bogost’s move towards an ‘applied’ object-oriented philosophy is welcomed. As I have continually argued, we are never going to understand 'things-in-themselves' without a full-out engagement (attentiveness and experimentation) with actual things in the world - and all their idiosyncrasies. Bogost’s carpentry may be just such an engagement?

A Response to Graham Harman

Part 1: Tradition and Metaphysics

I am very surprised by a recent post from Graham Harman responding to my comments about his four-fold structure of objects. I was surprised in two ways: first, that Harman even cares what I think or post. In terms of both learned philosophy and sophistication Harman is much more advanced than I probably will ever be. I consider my strain of thinking as “feral philosophy” - happening in relation to traditional philosophical concepts but not within it. My philosophy is untamed, rootless and often nomadic. Thus, by no means am I an expert on the kinds of issues Graham seems to be pursuing.

Secondly, I was surprised, especially upon re-reading my original awkward comments, with how much restraint Graham showed in his response. Most of his comments were fair and probably fairly accurate. I truly appreciate that. For me this shows that Graham truly is making the effort to consider me as a legitimate interlocutor. That is really generous of him. And I think Graham deserves all the credit for that.

But I also want to respond more directly to his comments:

1. As Graham notes, that post wasn’t really a critique. I advanced no arguments whatsoever. The post was merely meant to draw attention to what he was saying at this point about how we might go about interpreting his latest framework. I do plan on pulling together all my thoughts on the notion of “withdrawal” and Graham’s take on causality, but that won’t happen until things calm down a bit with my other paid projects. Graham suggests that if I have an alternative I should offer it up. He’s right. Stay tuned Graham.

2. My comments were certainly not directed at Graham, if only because it would never have occurred to me that he would read my blog. Now that I know Graham might be open to reading my posts I will certainly be more respectful of that.

3. As for not reading Tool-Being, that is a great point. I do have a copy of said book somewhere in the stacks but I won’t get to that until the end of the year at the earliest. The thing is though, I don’t feel it is necessary for me to get into that book in order to disagree with Graham about the ‘structure’ of object-encounters. My argument with Graham’s formulation revolves, for me, around empirical issues and not metaphysical issues, and because I’m not in the game of ‘proving’ anyone wrong I therefore feel no obligation at this point to track down the specifics of his argument. My only contention at this stage is that his ‘four-fold’ framework doesn’t resonate with me and is unconvincing (to me).

4. My main hang-up is the question of whether we encounter objects more or less directly or not. Do we sensually-physically encounter other things, and then go about ‘translating’ them according to our own specific receptive properties, or we don’t. And if we don’t, what is the nature of this unbridgeable gap? What properties obtain within objects and what relations exist between things that prevent the kind of creatures we are from encountering objects more or less directly?

Here was what I wrote re: my current stance on the issue of withdrawal and encounters from the original post:

If we really take seriously our deep embeddedness in the world, and what can be known about ‘objects’, we find that we do in fact encounter things ‘directly’ viz. our actual properties and the actual properties of objects, but not in their entirety. Encounters between things are direct but partial – according the onto-specificity (uniqueness) of any particular ‘object’ as a coalesced and organized assemblage (and their affective and receptive properties). And it is the interactive matrix of the processual linkages and maintenance relations of things in situ that determine what effects and affects are generated.

Again, there is a lot of work to be done to make such a position intelligible or formulate an argument, but the gist is simply this: human-objects, like all real objects, are intimately entwined with the world - from quanta to cellular activity to armed combat – and as such are never too far away from any other actual objects.

In this sense, as objects we encounter other objects through the immanent actualities that constitute what we specifically are. These “immanent actualities” are the very properties that constitute any particular entity. The endo-properties of an object are actually a plurality which coalesces (or individuates) as an emergent entity. But here’s the kicker: the plurality of properties coalesced are themselves always already emergent from the same ground of being from which all reality comes – including us. And this is why objects are never totally withdrawn. All objects are primordial relatives: we relate to each other (encounter each other) through the force and structure our shared being-ness.

Put another way, all tangible ‘objects’ are assemblages and form-ations of material-energetic properties. These assemblages ‘hang together’ insofar as the extensive and intensive properties that coalesce are maintained. And it is this relative (and relational) in situ integrity of particular things that gives them their “object-ness”. And because we only ever encounter tangible objects within the same field of material-energetic activity from which we ourselves come, all encounters can be considered direct but partial. “Direct” in that objects collide or interact via properties derived from the same source of actuality (the cosmos), but “partial” because the organization of properties particular to specific entities (their onto-specificity) only ever encounters other objects via their particular affective and receptive capacities.

Of course, this is all really abstract and I would want to give some very concrete examples that demonstrate the efficacy of my onto-story but I will leave that for another time, as I’m still not too sure Graham is interested in going down the rabbit hole with me.

5. On the issue of “simplistic” conceptions (as related to Husserl) I have two things to say:

i) Framing all the processes and causal relations that come into play between objects when they encounter each other in terms of “objects vs. qualities” is very simplistic indeed (especially when we are talking about how sentient beings perceive other objects). There are many more variables and relations that need to be understood and tracked in order for us to ‘model’ interactions between things - from quantum entanglement to neurocognitive functions to nerve signals and cell receptors to crystalline micro-particles in metal to the thermodynamics of hurricanes. The minutia of interacting assemblages and ‘objects’ need to be understood if we are going to be able to say anything relevant about real-world things. Even Graham’s four-fold structure with ten possible links doesn’t adequately map the onto-idiosyncrasies and interactions between objects.

ii) It is the ‘simplicity’ of philosophical models based on traditional lines of thought (such as Husserl’s) that is exactly the type of “strait-jacket” I wish Graham would toss out. I think Graham is a great thinker and an exceptional prose stylist but is currently working with conceptual ‘tools’ made to work within obsolete philosophical traditions. Academic philosophers have a disciplinary (and promotional) stake in perpetuating such concepts and distinctions, but with what effect? The stunting of innovations in semantic reasoning? We suffered a thousand years with Aristotle’s “science” and hundreds of years of Descartes’ dualism – so why keep digging up dead bodies? Why metaphysics? And why pre-scientific metaphysics to boot? Obviously I follow “eliminative” thinking here, but my point is that philosophy has much more to offer than ‘local’ discourses and internal argumentation. [note: I would point the interested reader to George Lakoff’s Philosophy in the Flesh for a potential way forward]

6. Which brings me to Graham’s (very fair) question about my so-called issues with academic philosophers in general. Graham writes,

Is his point that anyone accepting a philosophy-related post in a university is thereby automatically enslaved to some sort of traditional philosophical logic? In that case, both Deleuze and Derrida are “academic philosophers” as well, and I would like to see if Michael finds the same dreary academic blinders on them. Not to mention Kant, Hegel, and the like.

That is a great question. And I think I have a simple answer: no. I do not think that anyone accepting a philosophy-related post in a university is “automatically enslaved to some sort of traditional philosophical logic”. Deleuze and Derrida are great examples. They bucked convention and were conceptual innovators. Their interest was in ‘mutating’ our thinking and offering new lines of reasoning. Cool stuff.

But I do not believe it is an all-or-nothing situation. I think academic philosophers are a mixed-bag. If anything, it is the institutions of academia (with curriculums and departmental specialities) that perpetuate the ‘traditional philosophical logics’. And this is not a bad thing either. We need scholarship and pedagogy and I think the Western philosophical tradition should be retained. But, and this is my key point, it also needs to be surpassed not supplemented. Philosopher’s, in my opinion, might do well to adopt a post-metaphysical stance and rebel against (not ignore) traditional notions about how the world works.

So, my issue is not with where a person works, but what concepts they deploy and what intellectual projects they are involved with. An academic’s project can be more or less committed to conventional philosophical practices and arguments, and more or less involved in the deployment of traditional conceptual schemas. It is a matter of degree.

Take for example Graham’s OOP project. It is fantastic that he is compelling people to take ‘realist’ positions more seriously. That is an important project. That is worth doing. But why continue to deploy Husserl’s distinctions? Hasn’t cognitive science, for example, offered a more compelling and empirical account of perception? This is why I like what Gary Williams is doing. He is taking cognitive science and Heidegger and trying to advance the insights of both – but in a rigorous and methodological way.

The bottom-line for me is that Graham’s project seems more rather than less attached to traditional metaphysics than I would like to see. But that is just me. His thought and work is still very useful and fascinating - but how much more would it be if he were to take up a post-metaphysical ontography?

A Four-Fold Encounter?

Graham Harman has a great post up over at his blog Object-Oriented Philosophy that includes some meaty comments regarding what he is calling “the quadruple object”. It is a great post for me to learn more about how he ‘structures’ his arguments. Here is the meat:

As for the fourfold structure, a few quick points…

1. Heidegger is far from the first person to use one. The history of philosophy is saturated with them, from Empedocles onward.

2. All of the even remotely rigorous ones don’t reach the number four through empirical observation. Instead, they result from the intersection of two dualisms, some of them better than others.

3. If you don’t like my version of the fourfold structure, then you have to say which of the two axes you reject:

*Do you reject the Heideggerian distinction between concealment and unconcealment? If so, then I’m afraid you’re simply another underminder or overminer of objects. In the former case you’re trying to reduce or eliminate the phenomenal level, and I have found all such efforts feeble. In the latter case you’re celebrating appearance and making a cliché attack on deep and hidden realities, in a form that is already a couple of centuries old. So, I think rejecting the distinction between withdrawn objects and their sensual translations is a big mistake.

*Do you reject the distinction between objects and their qualities? If so, then you’re simply following the well-established empiricist tradition, slavishly followed even by most anti-empiricists, which holds that an object is a bundle of qualities, nothing. But then there are all sorts of problems explaining how the bundling occurs. Either it’s through some bland and unconvincing material substrate, or (more frequently) people are allowed to decide what belongs together as one object. Or at most, objects are defined functionally in terms of the effects they have on other things. But in my opinion, you don’t have to read too much of Husserl’s Logical Investigations to be convinced of the ramshackle character of the “bundle of qualities” approach to objects.

And if you reject neither of these distinctions, like me, then you have the very fourfold structure I describe. There are then a ton of difficulties in trying to account for everything that happens within it, but that is no proof against the necessity of the structure itself.

Harman’s four-fold explication of how ‘objects’ exist, become encountered and known is certainly interesting, but, I believe, not entirely convincing. For me, I think there are a variety of ways we can conceive entities outside the simplistic object v. qualities binary. If we take seriously human embodiment we find that we do in fact encounter things ‘directly’ through the physical interaction between our constituent properties (flesh, etc) and the constituent properties of other objects - but never in their entirety. Encounters between things are direct but partial – according the onto-specificity (uniqueness) of any particular ‘object’ as a coalesced and organized assemblage (and their affective and receptive properties). And it is the interactive matrix of the processual linkages and maintenance relations of things in situ that determine what effects and affects are generated.

I won’t go much more into details at this time because I’m still hoping to get some more definitive posts up about this summer about how we can align object-centered philosophies with relational ontologies. The way forward, I believe, is to let go of some very confused understandings of what human ‘knowing’ entails through an acceptance of the primal activities of perception and by paying closer attention to actual encounters in the world.

*UPDATE: About 10 minutes after I posted this I read a recent blog entry by Gary William's on Heidegger and 'truth' which resonates nicely with what I think is wrong with metaphysical notions of perception and appeals to 'withdrawn' realities in general. Although Gary's post was not directed at Harman's ontology specifically, I think it goes a long way to helping Heidegger-influenced philosophies become even more realistic. From Minds and Brains:

Structural coupling occurs whenever there is a history of recurrent interaction between two systems. More specifically, in virtue of its autopoietic (i.e. self-organizing) unity, an organism is structurally coupled with the environment insofar as it maintains its unity it respect to the environment. Accordingly, cognition can be defined as “A history of structural coupling that brings forth a world.” This definition of cognition is in stark contrast to the traditional conception of cognition as the manipulation of explicit symbol tokens by a central processing unit.

What does this have to do with Heidegger’s notion of truth? I propose that for Heidegger, Dasein is “in the truth” insofar as it is structurally coupled to a real environment. Dasein isn’t coupled to itself, nor its ideas, representations, or thoughts; it is coupled to the Umwelt, which is composed of real entities that have a structural determination independent of whether we are there to disclose it. Indeed, look at this passage:

Because the kind of being that is essential to truth is of the character of Dasein, all truth is relative to Dasein’s being. Does this relatively signify that all truth is ‘subjective’? If one interprets ‘subjective’ as ‘left to the subject’s discretion’, then it certainly does not. For uncovering, in the sense which is most its own, takes asserting out of the province of the ‘subjective discretion, and brings the uncovering Dasein face to face with the entities themselves. (SZ 227)

I have elaborated on this notion of encountering before (more recently here). Basically, the idea is that our cognition is directed towards the things themselves rather than any putative re-presentation of the things inside a mental theater. As I put it earlier,

perception is a matter of encountering or attending to what is already presenting itself to us. As long as we are alive, we have no choice but to encounter the Earth. Understood this way, sensations are irrelevant for the achievement of perception. All that matters for the act of perception is the performance of the act. And it is only dogmatism which supposes that the act of perception involves re-presenting the phenomena in terms of sense-data. For this, there is no need. We only need to respond or react to that which is there in such a way as to maintain the unity of our bodily singularity.

This direct response to what is “really there” in the environment grounds Heidegger’s notion of truth. This notion is taken from his definition of phenomena as that the totality of what shows itself. I contend that this notion of showing and encountering can be explained in terms of J.J. Gibson’s theory of direct realism.

As for Graham’s ontology specifically, I must admit I have only read Guerrilla Metaphysics and his essay on “vicarious causation” (along with numerous posts on his blog) but I continually get the sense that Graham is unnecessarily boxing himself into some very problematic positions (most of which have already been outlined by Steven Shapiro here) if only because he is still operating within the traditional boundaries of philosophical discourse (metaphysics per se). Of course, it makes sense professionally seeing as he is an academic philosopher, but now that he is becoming somewhat more established I think there could be room for Graham to stretch beyond certain established ‘logical necessities’ to think objects in new ways (cf. the distinctions he makes above re: concealment and unconcealment, qualities, and bundle theories). A mind as obviously powerful as Harman’s should be unleashed without recourse to established conceptual modes.

Goldman Sachs Earns 250m as Punishment for Fraud

As middle class and low-income families continue to struggle to keep from going bankrupt and losing their homes, the U.S bank and finance corporation Goldman Sachs made a profit by agreeing to settle their civil suits and pay a fine of $550 million U.S dollars for fraudulent activity and misleading investors. [source]

The UK's Royal Bank of Scotland, which is now 84% owned by the UK taxpayer and lost about $840m in investments as result of Goldman Sachs fraud, will receive $100m compensation. The German bank IKB Deutsche Industriebank will receive $150m, with the remaining $300m going to the US Treasury. [source]

In a statement, Goldman Sachs said the move to settle their fraud cases was "the right outcome for our firm, our shareholders and our clients". In this they were most certainly correct. As a result of the “deal” Goldman Sachs’ stock rose today by 4.5% - earning the firm $800 million dollars. The resulting net profit for those of us not inclined to math: 250 million U.S dollars. [source]

Neo-liberal pundits everywhere are hailing this a huge win for a few dozen wealthy elites who continued to make record breaking profits throughout the “financial crisis”. From BusinessWeek Magaizine: 

“You’d have to look at it as a victory for Goldman,” said Peter Sorrentino, senior portfolio manager at Huntington Asset Advisors in Cincinnati, which manages $13.3 billion including Goldman Sachs shares. “This takes a cloud off the stock.” [source]

Goldman Sachs made a profit of $3.5 billion dollars in the first three months of this year – most of which went directly to a few dozen U.S and foreign citizens. [source] Lesson for the kids: crime does pay.



Check Out Related Crazy-Making Stories:

• Big Business Getting Richer
• Capitalism: A Denial Story
• Wall Street's Top 10 Lies of 2010
• Shock, Awe and the Psychology of Economic Warfare
• Harvey on the Crisis of Capitalism
• The Money Masters

What Does a Holocaust Look Like?

Zižek on the Duty of a Philosopher

"I despise the kind of book which tells you how to live, how to make yourself happy! Philosophers have no good news for you at this level! I believe the first duty of philosophy is making you understand what deep shit you are in!”    – Slavoj Zižek [source]

More Quotes and Aphorisms: here

Gary Williams on Meillassoux, Perception and Ecological Realism

Gary Williams has a fantastic post up at Brains and Minds on his reading of Meillassoux’s After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Although Gary has some positive things to say about Meillassoux’s offerings, I agree with Gary in his critique of Meillassoux’s implicit acceptance of various metaphysical baggage - particularily with regards to human perception.

Gary goes on to use some of Heidegger's more 'realist' strains of thinking to make some very significant points about how perception actually works, and how a certain kind of “ecological realism” escapes many of the problems Meillassoux raises.

Check out the excerpt below and then go read the rest of his amazing post here.

My difficulty with Meillassoux is that he never even stops to consider if there are alternative ways to conceive of the organism-Earth perceptual relationship. He would be wise to read some of J.J. Gibson’s work on ecological optics. Indeed, for Heidegger (who I read in Gibsonian terms), sensations have nothing to do with perception. Accordingly, relation is simply the wrong term to describe the perceptual-intentional experience. For Heidegger and for Gibson, perceptual experience is not a matter of generating sensations or “having” sensations. If we examine his language, we can see that Meillassoux buys into the very object-metaphor that Heidegger critiques so vehemently in describing the sensuous process. Meillassoux always talks about “the” sensible, “the” perception, or “the” sensation, as if these things actually were things. But the sensible is precisely not something which comes into existence or is generated when a subject is alongside the Earth. To think this is to misunderstand the intentionality of perception.

Strictly speaking, the most primordial perceptual experience of an organism perceiving the Earth is not characterized by the “having” of things called “sensations”. To believe so is to fall prey to the object metaphors that Modern philosophy has corrupted the philosophy of perception with. As Heidegger says, perception is not about returning one’s “booty” of sensation back to the “cabinet” of consciousness. Instead, perception is a matter of encountering the phenomenon. And crucially, the genuine phenomenon for Heidegger is not the appearance within a consciousness, but rather, that which is known in perception, namely, the things themselves. “Phenomena are the totality of what lies in the light of day or can be brought to the light”. What lies in the light of the day? The Earth! Indeed, it is the planet Earth upon which the sun shines.

Accordingly, perception is a matter of encountering or attending to what is already presenting itself to us. As long as we are alive, we have no choice but to encounter the Earth. Understood this way, sensations are irrelevant for the achievement of perception. All that matters for the act of perception is the performance of the act. And it is only dogmatism which supposes that the act of perception involves re-presenting the phenomena. For this, there is no need. We only need to respond or react to that which is there in such a way as to maintain the unity of our bodily singularity. And of course, our entire history of responding to the Earth, from conception until death, is determinate for how we react to the phenomena. This is where circumspective interpretation and “temporalization” comes in. Every encounter with the Earth is an interpretation or “projection” based on what we bring to the phenomenon in accordance with the fundamental historicity of our factical life experience.

Gary Williams is a graduate student at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. His primary interests are at the intersection between phenomenology and cognitive science, with a special interest in the philosophy of perception. Gary describes his own project this way:

I utilize an ecological – or situated – approach to understanding the human-world interaction. By emphasizing the social and linguistic dimensions of human cognitive experience, I hope to update Heideggerian concepts in light of recent research in the 4EA paradigm (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended, affective). I am also interested in reviving Julian Jaynes’ theory of consciousness by integrating it with a Heideggerian-Gibsonian framework for thinking about externalist perception.

Learn More @ Minds and Brains

Kanehsatake - A Resistance Story

Today marks the 20th anniversary of what some called the "Oka Crisis" - but was in fact the Onkwehonwe defence of sacred Kanien’kehaka land in Québec, Canada. For the Kanien’kehaka community at Kanesatake it was the culmination of 270 years of silent war waged against them in the form colonial indifference and land theft.

"This land is ours, ours as a heritage given to us as a sacred legacy. It is the place where our fathers lie buried beneath those trees, where our mothers sang our lullaby, and you would tear it from us an leave us wonderers at the mercy of fate." – Chief Joseph Onasakenrat of Kanesatake

Triggered in the immediate sense by the threat of a golf course expansion and condominium development onto land that the community held sacred, by the time the “crisis” came to an end the Oyenko:ohntoh (warriors) of the Kanien’kehaka had held off the Sûreté du Québec (SQ), the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and finally even the Canadian Armed Forces, and they were joined in their resistance by Onkwehonwe from all over Turtle Island, from Canada, the United States and as from as far away as Mexico. Along with the Zapatista uprising in Mexico 4 years later, the resistance at Kanesatake set the scene for the last 20 years of indigenous resurgence against the colonial state.

Their Story @ The Speed of Dreams

Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance is a 1993 feature-length (1:59:21), multi-award winning documentary by Native American filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin set in the thick of the armed confrontation between Native American Mohawks and Canadian government forces during the 1990 standoff in the Mohawk village of Kanehsatake near the village of Oka in Quebec. The two-and-a-half month ordeal received brief national attention when the Mohawk warriors of Kahnawake, in support of their brothers from nearby Kanehsatake, temporarily held the busy Mercier Bridge leading to Montreal, in an effort to bring world attention to the situation.

WATCH THE ENTIRE DOCUMENTARY BELOW:

Starting with plans to construct a luxury housing development and expand a private golf course into the Pines, part of Mohawk Nation's land, tensions rose quickly and tempers flared as Mohawks were once again fighting for their sovereignty. After a police officer was killed in a raid to expel the Mohawks from the Pines, the situation spiraled out of control.

In scene after startling scene the drama escalates as the Quebec police are replaced by units from the Canadian army. With few exceptions journalists covering the crisis either evacuated or were forcibly removed. Alanis Obomsawin spent the final weeks of the standoff without a crew, shooting on video and using the slow speed on her sound recorder to stretch out her limited supply of audio tape.

Obomsawin's detailed portrayal of the Mohawk community places the Oka crisis within the larger context of Mohawk land rights dating back to 1535 when France claimed the site of present-day Montreal which had been the Mohawk village of Hochelaga. Her evocative dimension of the conflict, exploring the fierce conviction of the Mohawks and the communal spirit that enabled them to stand firm.

Zižek and the End of Capitalist Reality

Our current capitalist system is untenable. We find ourselves on the brink of massive problems that call for drastic solutions. Meanwhile whatever remains of "the left" has been hedged in by western liberal democracy and seems to lack the energy to come up any solutions at all.  Where do we look for truly radical ideas today?

In the provocative video below Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Zizek responds to a bombardment of popular media images and quotes by modern-day thinkers - and discusses economic crisis, ecological collapse, war in Afghanistan and the end of democracy. It is fascinating to watch Zizek's whirlwind-like preformance as he launches forth with characteristic polemic style to ruthlessly criticize modern capitalism and to give his view on our common future.

The Adaptive Brain in Action

Neural circuitry is constantly changing to meet the challenges of its environment. But what actually happens to our brains as we experience the outside world? Scientists have learned that the brain undergoes structural changes as it absorbs sensory data, learns and adapts, but the actual mechanism of this process is just now coming into view.

Below is a transcript of an interview with Tobias Bonhoeffer, director at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried, Germany, about how new techniques enable researchers to watch the neuronal process of adaptation as never before. The original interview was conducted on June 10, 2010.

Q: Could you start by giving us a brief preview of what you’ll be covering in your FENS lecture?

BONHOEFFER: What we’re working on in my lab is neuronal plasticity -- how the brain adapts to changes in the environment. Such adaptations can be relatively straightforward. For example, if an animal loses a limb or an eye, the brain adapts to that and partially compensates for the missing information. Other adaptations are more subtle – when, for instance, an animal hides food for the winter and remembers the place later on. Although these things may seem quite different, they have one thing in common, namely that in both cases the brain enables an animal to adapt its behavior because of challenges in its environment.

Over the last couple of years our field has made such fundamental progress that we are now able to really look into the brain and see how it works, in the living animal. We are now able to see the changes related to such adaptations and to see how nerve cells form new connections or how connections between nerve cells are broken. This is basically what I will cover in my lecture. I will talk about our studies investigating what happens when nerve cells make new connections in vitro, i.e. in cell culture. I will on the other hand also talk about our in vivo studies, in which we study the intact organism. We are now able to look into the brain of an animal and see how nerve cell connections are made or broken, and how that relates to learning or other adaptive changes.

Q: How close are you to understanding the mechanism of synaptic plasticity? Is there a particular knowledge breakthrough, a “Holy Grail,” that you're seeking?

BONHOEFFER: Like always in science, that really depends on the level of detail with which one is satisfied. You can always, once you’ve understood something, go further and say, well, we’ve still not completely understood it, so let’s go to the next step. It’s difficult to say how far we’ve gotten. I’d say we’ve understood a couple of fundamental steps. We know, for instance, quite precisely which receptors in the brain are responsible for changes in the functional connections between nerve cells, the synapses; we also know the rules, when synapses get stronger and when they get weaker. All those things are quite well understood and have been elucidated over the last 10 to 15 years or so. But that’s not to say there isn’t plenty of stuff left to be discovered. Science is a never-ending story, which is partly also the fun of it.

In reference to the “Holy Grail,” at least in my personal lifetime or my scientific lifetime, what I would really like to be able to show is that it is really the changes in connections between nerve cells that cause information to be stored in the brain. It would be great to show for instance, that an animal learns something and you see that a thousand synapses change. Then, when you disable those thousand synapses, you see that the animal has forgotten exactly what it had learned before -- but nothing else.

Read More @ ScientificBlogging.com

Harvey on the Crisis of Capitalism

I figure this video is making the rounds so why not join the party and post it here as well. Below is an animated version of a talk by radical geographer David Harvey asking if it is time to look "beyond capitalism" towards a new social order that would allow us to live within a system that really could be responsible, just, and humane? Enjoy.

Marx as Sociologist of the Real

Over at Larval Subjects, Bryant has two great posts on Marx and Marxism. The first titled, “Is Marx a Sociologist of the Social?” is about Marx's theoretical potency, and well worth the read, and the second post, more of a brief afterthought, provides a perfect summary of Marxism’s “attempts to formulate a four-dimensional topography of the present that maps attractors, bifurcation points, or tendencies within the social field through which change might be produced.”

Despite my many disagreements with Bryant personally and his philosophical vocab generally, these two posts get right to the core of why I no longer argue about Marx with people: I find that a majority of people who dismiss Marx and his work have either failed to actually read him, or gleaned their interpretations of his work from critical comments read elsewhere and then projected onto Marx’s general theoretical significance. This is not to say that Jeffery Bell and the others commenting on Bryant’s blog haven’t read Marx, only that the people I have debated Marx with tend to show a real lack of engagement with his work.

Marx’s theoretical perspectives and tools changed much over the years leading up to the publication of Capital. Far from the ‘economic determinist’ that so many portray him as, Marx had a refined sensibility for complexifying his assertions with nuanced gestures towards non-human forces at work in human affairs and inserting terse lines of qualification in among his lengthy passages economic argumentation. Marx continually reworked his most basic themes and always used whatever available evidence to ground his thinking in concrete material processes. In fact, Marx was so sophisticated and anti-dogmatic that more considerate commentators like Steven Best have argued that Marx’s political ontology is actually more dynamic and reflexive than either Foucault or Habermas.

As only one example, it was not until Foucault’s later writings (and largely influenced by Deleuze) that he began to fashion a theory of human becomings (‘cultivation of the self’) adequate to the task of explaining political agency. Earlier in his career Foucault, probably under the lingering influence of structuralism, conceived of human agency as derivative and generated through tightly woven social processes. Whereas Marx, from early in his career, attempted to incorporate a realist conception of human being and becoming (something he later called “species-being”) into his more societal-systemic diagnostics. In short, Marx attempted to establish a very sophisticated realist micro-to-macro critical synthesis of available knowledge (the first printing of Capital was dedicated to Darwin) as a way to take up the politico-practical project of addressing human suffering, “toil” and injustice.

So I think Bryant is right to try to disrupt simplistic readings of Marx and to suggest that a closer reading might bring out the otherwise underappreciated depths of Marx’s decidedly realist political ontology. Here are a few quotations taken from both posts that represent for me the most important remarks:

"In Capital Marx does not appeal to either the social or class as an explanatory force. Indeed, class only appears very late in Capital. Rather, it seems to me that Marx practices an exemplary form of actor-network analysis throughout both Capital and Grundrisse. Marx seeks to explain society in the manner of a sociologist of associations rather than appeal to society to explain the world around us. The actants that Marx appeals to in this story are wage-labor, the money form, factories, trade routes, the availability of resources, various technologies, etc. Here class does not serve an explanatory function, but rather is an emergent effect of how wage labor functions. Class is something that comes into being through a variety of different processes.” [source]

“Marxism is an open theory. It doesn’t pretend to be exhaustive, it doesn’t pretend to know everything. Like any good empiricism, it responds to new formations in the present and attempts to comprehend what these mean.”[source]

“Marxism attempts to formulate a four-dimensional topography of the present that maps attractors, bifurcation points, or tendencies within the social field through which change might be produced. By “four-dimensional” I am referring to the unfolding of time in the present. Through such a topography of tendencies it hopes to strategically intensify these tendencies through political practice.” [source]

My only issue with Bryant’s framing of Marx’s project is found in these two sentences (which I admittedly spliced together):

However, in my experience, Marxism is far less a political theory or a theory of revolution, than a way of approaching and analyzing the world around us…More than anything, Marxism is a way of analyzing the present and why it is the way that it is. Marxism is historico-material analysis. [source]

I think it’s too much to imply that Marxism, at least as expounded by Marx, was mostly analytical. Marx participated in several directly political organizations, wrote numerous articles intended as interventions into political debate, and did strongly advocate for revolution. The Communist Manifesto is a strictly political document. Therefore, we must admit that Marxism is both political theory and historical analysis (and Marx would argue ‘scientific’ endeavor). That is the raw genius of Marx: he brings together concrete analysis with practical engagement and moral sensibility. And this is why, unlike Bogost, I am a (neo)Marxist.

One other thing to note about Bryant’s post is that he briefly mentions DeLanda’s fierce critiques of Marx, which, quite frankly, have baffled me as well - since my reading of Marx understands him as a natural ally to DeLanda’s neo-materialist project. Why Manny, why reject The Karl?

*UPDATE: Also check out some of the fantastic remarks made by Jeffrey Bell and others in the comment sections of Bryant’s post here. From Jeffrey Bell: 

“Marx’s passage in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts where he describes how capitalism has transformed the work of our senses, impoverishing it to the least common denominator, still rings true in many ways and is one of my favorite passages. One can redescribe our contemporary media culture in along very similar lines. This is the Marx David Harvey is inspired by. The guiding question is how it is we can be productive in a way that is faithful to all the nuances and complexities of a life in a world of things and places.”

Nothing could be more fruitful than for speculative realists to engage the classical sociological works in order to potentially open up more practico-political discussions.